Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

And So

Elmwood Springs, Missouri June

1979

At the age of thirty-five, Dena Nordstrom, who had thought that she could never love anything, had fallen in love with a house, a town, and a psychiatrist. It turned out that she was more surprised than anyone. Except maybe for Sookie.

When she had told her the news Sookie screamed over the phone, “You’re getting married! I knew it, I told you so. Didn’t I tell you so? Hurray and hallelujah. I have my dress picked out and ready to go. It’s peach. And we can get the girls little matching outfits; won’t they be darling coming down the aisle? Of course, you know Mother will have to come. Buck will fly us up there. Oh, Dena—why don’t you come do it here? At least let me give you a shower, you’ll get the best presents … nothing silver plated. Wait a minute. Who are you marrying?”

“Gerry O’Malley.”

“That New York psychiatrist! Oh, dear!”

Dena laughed. “Yes, he’s the one. But the good news is that his mother is from Virginia.”

“Virginia.” Sookie sounded a little bit hopeful. “Well, that is a border state but … who was she before she married?”

“What do you mean?”

“What was her maiden name?”

“Hold on. Gerry, what was your mother’s maiden name?”

“Longstreet, why?”

There was a gasp on the other end of the phone. “Dena, now, this is very important. Is he standing right there?”

“Yes.”

“Can he hear you?”

“No, not really.”

“Try not to embarrass him, but ask him if they were the cotton Longstreets or the lumber Longstreets.”

“Gerry, were they the cotton Longstreets or the lumber Longstreets?”

“Cotton. Why?”

“He said cotton.”

Sookie screamed, “Oh, my God!”

Dena said, “Is that good or bad?”

“You are marrying a direct descendant of General James P. Longstreet, that’s all.”

“Who’s that?”

“Who’s that? He’s just one of the most famous Confederate generals that ever lived. Wait till I tell Mother; don’t tell me I don’t have a personal friendship with Jesus Christ!”

In the meantime, back in New York, just as Sandy had predicted, the network had gone on without her. They had hired another beautiful blonde. Just as Wall-Cap Productions had hired another beautiful blonde to anchor their first show, and they were off and running. The ratings shot through the ceiling. Evidently, the public was ready for a tabloid “news” show. And soon other copycat shows started popping up everywhere until the usual network news seemed as dull as Sidney Capello had predicted. Syndication was turning out to be a gold mine.

Every once in a while, Dena would wonder where Capello was, and as it turned out, Capello wasn’t anywhere at the moment.

That fall, it rained in New York City for five days straight. Con Ed was having a hell of a time making sure all the sewers under the city were kept clear of debris and any blockage. Mike Mecelli was exhausted. He and his crew had been up for three days and nights. By the time the truck pulled up at Forty-eighth and Ninth Avenue, it was four in the morning. Mike pulled on his yellow slicker and left the truck and located the round iron cover on the Forty-eighth Street sewer line and he lifted it up and pushed it aside. He got out his flashlight, switched it on, and saw down inside the sewer the water rushing by like a raging river. It seemed to be moving without any obstruction but the water was high and they needed to check it to make sure. He went back briefly to get the rest of the crew, who were sitting inside the big truck’s cab, when Capello, who had been working late on a story involving a movie star’s love child, came out the door, started to cross the street, fell in the hole, and landed in the icy-cold, raging water. Before he knew what hit him, he was shooting under Manhattan at sixty miles an hour. Capello screamed but the storm and the roar of the water was so loud he was not heard. He was swept under and did not stop until he was in the Hudson River, headed to Jersey, where his body would be found three days later.

His funeral was well attended for a man hated as much as he was. But as several said, including Ira Wallace, “They came just to make sure the bastard was really dead.”

In the end, Sidney Capello’s paranoia and greed saved a lot of reputations. He had been so neurotic about someone in the office sneaking into his files, where future scandals were still cooking in the oven, ready to be brought out at the right time, he had taken them home and hidden them in between his old income tax files. After he was buried, a cleaning crew came into his apartment and threw out everything. Information and rumor, true and false, waiting to wreck careers, including Dena’s file, would never be aired, including photos of his partner Ira Wallace’s daughter, romping naked in a Chelsea hotel room with three members of the heavy metal group known as Pit Bull.

All the rest in the file were safe now. Barbara Zofko, the only other person who had known it existed, had left Sidney’s employ and had gone on to make quite a name for herself writing unauthorized biographies of the famous. But two years earlier Barbara had nearly choked to death at Rumplemeyer’s when the stem of a cherry sitting on top of the hot fudge sundae she was inhaling at the time got caught in her throat. As she lay on the white tile floor, with her large face turning blue and a woman in a pink and white uniform pounding away on her chest, her life passed before her eyes. She woke up in the hospital and discovered that she had suffered a heart attack brought on by the strain of choking. However, it was not the near-death experience that changed her. It was the fact that her doctor ordered her to lose one hundred pounds. And so several days after she was released from the hospital, she took her doctor’s advice and joined Overeaters Anonymous. Six months later in Los Angeles, California, Frank Sinatra’s secretary opened the mail:

Dear Mr. Sinatra,

I am now in a Twelve Step recovery program and as part of my program I am making amends to all that I may have harmed in the past. I am sorry if my book harmed you or your family in any way.

Please accept my apology.

Sincerely, one day at a time,

Barbara Zofko

P.S. I wonder if you would consider granting me an interview in the near future or if you could recommend me to some of your friends. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Similar letters were sent to Elizabeth Taylor, Nancy Reagan, Robert Redford, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Dolly Parton, Priscilla Presley, Cher, Marlon Brando, and Michael Jackson.

But even with Sidney Capello and Barbara Zofko out of commission, hundreds of others like them popped up.

And just as Howard Kingsley had predicted, network news anchors soon started to do stories that they would never have considered five years earlier. The business of news had gone into such a feeding frenzy that human beings began stalking other human beings in packs. Talk shows were offering money to anybody to come on and discuss all the details of their sex lives, or to come on and have a family free-for-all. This end to privacy was clearly an idea whose time had come. Spotlighting the worst in human behavior became big business, and the more shows fought one another for ratings, the closer to the bottom of the barrel they scraped.

But life in Elmwood Springs went on pretty much the same. Every once in a while someone would come to town and inquire about Dena Nordstrom, ask where she lived, but the answer they always got was, “Gee, fella, I really don’t know. Not sure she even lives here anymore.” Or they would say, “I heard she moved back up to New York.”

Years later, when Dena and Gerry went to New York to take Elizabeth Diggers to dinner and to see a few shows, Dena was walking down Fifty-eighth Street, where she used to live, when a woman stopped her and asked, “Hey, aren’t you that girl that used to be on television?”

Dena had to grin. She answered, “No, I’m afraid that wasn’t me.”

As she continued down the street, Dena realized that she barely remembered that girl at all anymore.

And she smiled all the way back to the hotel.