important, knowing the cops—the players, very much including all policy-making political officeholders, all of them, plus the celebrities, particularly the minor ones who felt more comfortable in Miami than in Los Angeles and New York… and… the nationalities and their turfs… Little Havana and Big Hialeah… Little Haiti, Little Caracas, also known as Westonzuela, Mother Russia (Sunny Isles and Hallandale), the Hershey Highway, that being the cops’ nickname for the Anglo enclave of South Beach otherwise known as “gay”… There was no end to it, and a city editor had to know who hated whom and why—
“Just look at that makeup, Stan!” Ed was saying, eyes still bright as lightbulbs.
He was referring to the front page. An inky black headline ran the width of the paper—ROPE-CLIMB COP IN “MAST”-ERFUL RESCUE. On the far right was a lone column of type. The rest of the top half of the front page consisted of an enormous color picture of a white schooner with two towering masts and clouds and clouds of white sails… floating upon the aquamarine vastness of Biscayne Bay… beneath the pale-blue dome of the sky… and way, way, way up there, the equivalent of six or seven stories above the deck, no bigger than a thumbnail against such gigantic expanses, two tiny living creatures, two men whose lives depended on one man maintaining his one-hand grip on a jib sail cable… two specks popping out amid these overwhelming dimensions, two little human beasts this close to plunging to their death… all captured in a photograph by an old Herald photographer named Ludwig Davis, whose talent had spared him the axe. Down below was a two-column picture of a bare-chested young man with muscles on top of muscle, all highly defined, “cut,” “ripped” to the point of looking shrink-wrapped. That picture on page one was a veritable male nude in chiaroscuro, school of Michelangelo.
Ed Topping couldn’t hold back the sublime joy the big color picture of the schooner gave him. He thumped it with the backs of his fingers. “There you have it!” this semaphore said.
“No other medium could have come close to that image, Stan!” the suddenly animated editor in chief was saying. “Newsprint is great for color as long as you have big shapes of uniform value, such as the sky, the bay, the schooner, the hull, those huge sails—all white—and you know what? The poor resolution of the newsprint makes the color blocks more uniform. It’s like a nineteenth-century Japanese print, the uniform blocks of color. The defect turns into an advantage!”
Ed opened his eyes wide… and turned them up brighter and brighter and brighter like a rheostat, as if to say, “Now you see what I mean, right?”
City Editor Stan stretched his neck upward and twisted his mouth and lower jaw in an odd way.
“No other medium could come close to this,” Ed went on, explaining in some detail why television couldn’t, why film couldn’t, why videotape couldn’t, why the internet couldn’t… why not even a great print of the original photograph could come close. It would have “too many values in the color blocks.”
City Editor Stan once again did that odd twisted contortion with his neck, mouth, and lower jaw.
::::::What inna nameagod is that all about?:::::: But Ed was too enchanted by his learned disquisition on color imagery… nineteenth-century Japanese prints, no less!… to linger upon old Stan’s tracheal twisting. In his heart Edward T. Topping IV took credit for this fabulous front page—or page one, as real newspapermen called it. During the tremendous excitement of putting the paper to bed last night—another Real Newspaperman expression, putting the newspaper “to bed”—he had left his office and gone out into the city room and stood by the shoulder of his managing editor, a fellow Chicago Mobster named Archie Pendleton, who was in turn leaning over the shoulder of the makeup editor, a local survivor who needed to be led like a pony on a lead line—all wondering what to do with this remarkable photograph by the old guy, Lud Davis… and Ed had said to Archie, “Go all the way with it, Archie. Make it big. Make it jump out at you on page one.”
And it was done. How was one to explain the immense satisfaction it gave him? It was more than being the big man, the editor in chief, the Power. It was being creative, but aggressive, too… daring to let it all out when it was time to let it all out. It