Pickett’s Charge
Debra Pickett trembles on the cusp of stardom. She knows it; her readers know it, colleagues at the Sun-Times know it–though none have called to complain she’s a callow princess unfit to mop the floors at midnight (which is the sort of thing I heard years ago when Richard Roeper trembled on the cusp of stardom). And of course everyone knows it across the street at the Tribune, a place that doesn’t want its own writers getting swelled heads.
“I think most of the Tribune columnists are blah, with the occasional exception of Kass,” says Michael Cooke, editor in chief of the Sun-Times. “When he’s not blah he’s often wrong, but that doesn’t matter with a columnist. If you think about the New York Times, the first words that come out of my mouth are Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman. Thomas Friedman. I can’t think of the ones in the Tribune, except those two fools who write notes to each other.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Occasionally there are writers who for whatever reason remind me of one of my heroes, a Canadian reporter named E. Kaye Fulton. I happened to be in Toronto in 1974 at the time of the city’s annual air show, and the Toronto Star gave Fulton the stock assignment in which the city room’s most delicate piece of porcelain climbs into a cockpit behind a stunt pilot, spends five minutes in the air, and dutifully describes how terrifying it was. Up to a point, Fulton’s report was routine. “I arrived at Toronto Island Airport with an empty stomach and a nervous grin,” she wrote. “I was too scared to move even my facial muscles for one last smile to the ground crew clustered on the runway.”
To pull a stunt like that takes more than courage. You must be willing to risk life and limb for the absurd. It helps to be young, and Fulton was 23. I’ve always sensed that Schmich would have been capable of something as foolhardy, and though she’s paid to be a lady who lunches I told Pickett I had the same feeling about her.
“Right. If you’re five feet tall and look 15, it becomes how much talking can you do and how much working can you do to be an expert.”
Cooke and vice president for editorial John Cruickshank suggested Pickett start taking people to lunch. The idea had worked before–a Toronto writer Cooke and Cruickshank knew of named Jan Wong had turned her stories into a book–and Pickett made it work again. “I have a tolerance for silence that’s 10 or 15 seconds longer than the other person’s,” she explains. “They start talking to fill it.” Her lunches, carried in the Sunday paper, were a low-pressure chance to make a name for herself–“We don’t have that many readers on Sunday,” she’s noticed–but before long readers started to respond to her way of plucking the wings off flies. The recent Jamie-Lynn Sigler lunch was memorable: “She was a very nice person, very sincere,” says Pickett of the actress who plays Meadow Soprano, “but everybody’s had those experiences where you’re sitting with someone and you think this person is so misguided I want to take her skinny little shoulders and shake her. And when you write about the person you have an opportunity to do that.”
“I have a lot of respect for the work of most of the columnists at the Sun-Times, who are generally class acts,” Zorn E-mailed me in reply, “and I don’t feel the need to trade self-serving barbs with Michael Cooke, Debra Pickett or anyone else over there. They’re not the ones I’d consult for an objective critique of our lineup, our writing and reporting, our accomplishments or even our coloring ability.”
