G. Wayne Miller's Blog, page 15

#33Stories: Day 24, "Paper Boy," a novel

#33Stories
No. 24: “Paper Boy: A novel about media, truth and other important things.”
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!
Excerpt follows this synopsis

Since we’ve been on the topic of newspapers lately, I present “Paper Boy,” subtitled “A Novel About Media, Truth and Other Important Things.”

I wrote this unpublished book several years ago, during the first wave of turmoil that the digital revolution wrought upon the venerable print-journalism industry. Set inside the fictitious Daily Tribune, published in the real city of Boston, it chronicles the journey that popular columnist Nick and colleagues take as the once-proud and Pulitzer-winning paper’s new owners insist that the ridiculous mantra of “Good News Rules” is the key not only to survival but to restored glory.

Meaning, write “good” stuff to balance the “bad” headlines of crime, crooked politics and so forth.

Write “good” stories because that’s what readers and advertisers want, and “Good New Rules” is the key to reversing declining circulation and ad revenues.

Write it, even if that means taking certain liberties with the truth.

Fake news. Sound prescient?

The sub-narrative concerns a love story of a sort, and an exploration of the meaning of miracles and faith.

And fraud.

So that’s the synopsis.

“Paper Boy,” Table of Contents:

-- Chapter One: Market Value.
-- Chapter Two: E.B. White.
-- Chapter Three: Visions.
-- Chapter Four: Live at Six.
-- Chapter Five: Perceived Motion.
-- Chapter Six: Football.
-- Chapter Seven: Sacred Waters.
-- Chapter Eight: The Other Side.
-- Chapter Nine: A Reliable Source.
-- Chapter Ten: Conflicts of Interest.
-- Chapter Eleven: Full Disclosure.
-- Chapter Twelve: Extraordinary Things.

Excerpt from Chapter 12. This scene opens inside The Tribune’s pressroom, as the next day’s edition is about to roll:

We found press foreman Roger Adams standing by the master controls. One of his men was loading the redone page-one plates. Like me, Adams went back a long way with the executive editor.

``I'm sorry about the verdict,'' said Adams. ``What a kick in the teeth, especially on Christmas Eve. If it means anything, I was with you one hundred percent. That son of a bitch got your kid, no question. Not that it don't take balls to stand up to him like you did. I admire you, Bob. It couldn't have been easy testifying.''

``You'd do the same thing in my shoes,'' said Bob. ``Anybody would.''

``Anybody but Poop Man,'' said Adams. Even production hadn't escaped the consultants: Adams had arrived at work yesterday to find he'd lost three of his men.

``And Chamberlain,'' I said. ``Don't forget him.''

``Birds of a feather,'' said Adams. ``Well, looks like we're ready to roll. You staying for the run?''

``At least the first few thousand,'' said Bob.

``You, too, Nick?''

``Me too.''

``By the way,'' said Adams, ``I read your column. Hell of a piece of work. Said a lot of things I've been thinking since the sale. 'Course, your ass is toast the second I hit this button.''

``Actually, my ass already is toast,'' I said. ``So is Bob's. We got fired.''

``I'm sorry,'' said Adams.

``For what?'' said Bob. ``My only regret is Hill will be in surgery when this hits the streets. What I wouldn't give to see the look on his face.''

``Press time, boys,'' Adams said. ``Maybe you'd like to start 'er up, Nick. Or you, Bob.''

``All yours, Bob,'' I said.

Adams passed us ear protectors and safety glasses, then showed Bob the commands on the control panel. Bob worked them and the presses slowly began to turn.

``Sitting in an office all day, you forget the power this thing has,'' said Bob. ``I remember my first job -- Christ, it's almost fifty years ago now. They still had hot type. I'd watch them pour it, then go out in the press room and wait for the first copies. Of course, that press wasn't anywhere near this big, but it still seemed invincible. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but there's something about this that a monitor can't equal. This is real, not pixels on a screen.''

Adams and his newly-short staff pulled a few copies of the paper off the belts and gave them a quick once-over. Satisfied, they let Bob rev the press up to full speed.


The telephone woke me on Christmas morning. It was eleven o'clock on a raw and foggy day. I'd slept almost twelve hours.

``Hello?'' I said.

It was Courtney.

``I just wanted to wish you Merry Christmas,'' she said.

``Merry Christmas,'' I said.

``You probably didn't expect me to call.''

``I've given up expecting things anymore.''

``For what it's worth, I loved your column. I don't know how you got it in the paper, but congratulations.''

``You don't think I sounded like Chicken Soup for the Soul?''

``Can I be honest -- in a couple of places, yes. But you told the truth. The truth can be devastating.''

``I guess it beats socks,'' I said.

``Your words, not mine.''

``It must be a miracle.''

Courtney laughed. ``Careful,'' she said. ``It's a short trip from profound to sophomoric.''

``Tell me about it.''

``Are you going out there today?''

``I'm not sure,'' I said.

``I think you have to,'' Courtney said. ``You can't just slip quietly into the night after all this.''
She was right. It's one thing to present truths, another to be accountable.

``Will you be there?'' I said.

``Would you like me to?''

``I would.''

``Then maybe I will.''


``Strange mood here today,'' said Officer Maloney as he escorted me through the crowd outside Louise's, which numbered more than twenty thousand, according to the policeman's estimate.

``In what way?'' I said.

``I can't tell if they're happy or sad. Or angry. I seen a lot of people reading your column. I hear a lot of grumbling.''

``What did you think?'' I said.

``Pretty heavy stuff,'' said the cop, ``but you told it from the heart. It's the kind of column you don't see much of anymore.''

``You didn't think the end was silly.''

``Sentimental, maybe,'' the policeman said. ``But not silly. Silly don't make you stop and think like that.''

I could barely make out Louise's house through the fog, but I could see that the shades were drawn and there was no sign of activity except for officers on horses behind the police tape. The authorities had never called out the mounted patrol before.

``Have you seen her today?'' I asked Maloney.

``Only for a second, when I came on duty. She poked her head out and said she might come out later, but not to plan on it. Then she told me not to let anyone in -- not even you. Sorry, Nick. I don't think she liked your column.''

We moved toward the altar, where Mass was underway. The priest was just beginning Communion, and lines were forming for the deacons who assisted him.

I stood to the side, wishing the fog were thicker. I wanted to crawl back behind the First Amendment.


And yet, I was strangely calm as I ascended the altar when the Mass ended. I'd spotted Courtney in the crowd and I noticed that Ethan Cottrill was there, too. Seeing me approach, the priest guided me to the lectern. I tapped the microphone -- and felt the eyes of twenty thousand on me.

``I know many of you have already seen this,'' I said, unfolding today's paper, ``but I wanted to read it to you myself. Then I'll be happy to take questions.''

I cleared my throat and began…

#33Stories: Day 24, "Paper Boy"

#33Stories
No. 24: “Paper Boy: A novel about media, truth and other important things.”
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!
Excerpt follows this synopsis

Since we’ve been on the topic of newspapers lately, I present “Paper Boy,” subtitled “A Novel About Media, Truth and Other Important Things.”

I wrote this unpublished book several years ago, during the first wave of turmoil that the digital revolution wrought upon the venerable print-journalism industry. Set inside the fictitious Daily Tribune, published in the real city of Boston, it chronicles the journey that popular columnist Nick and colleagues take as the once-proud and Pulitzer-winning paper’s new owners insist that the ridiculous mantra of “Good News Rules” is the key not only to survival but to restored glory.

Meaning, write “good” stuff to balance the “bad” headlines of crime, crooked politics and so forth.

Write “good” stories because that’s what readers and advertisers want, and “Good New Rules” is the key to reversing declining circulation and ad revenues.

Write it, even if that means taking certain liberties with the truth.

Fake news. Sound prescient?

The sub-narrative concerns a love story of a sort, and an exploration of the meaning of miracles and faith.

And fraud.

So that’s the synopsis.

“Paper Boy,” Table of Contents:

-- Chapter One: Market Value.
-- Chapter Two: E.B. White.
-- Chapter Three: Visions.
-- Chapter Four: Live at Six.
-- Chapter Five: Perceived Motion.
-- Chapter Six: Football.
-- Chapter Seven: Sacred Waters.
-- Chapter Eight: The Other Side.
-- Chapter Nine: A Reliable Source.
-- Chapter Ten: Conflicts of Interest.
-- Chapter Eleven: Full Disclosure.
-- Chapter Twelve: Extraordinary Things.

Excerpt from Chapter 12. This scene opens inside The Tribune’s pressroom, as the next day’s edition is about to roll:

We found press foreman Roger Adams standing by the master controls. One of his men was loading the redone page-one plates. Like me, Adams went back a long way with the executive editor.

``I'm sorry about the verdict,'' said Adams. ``What a kick in the teeth, especially on Christmas Eve. If it means anything, I was with you one hundred percent. That son of a bitch got your kid, no question. Not that it don't take balls to stand up to him like you did. I admire you, Bob. It couldn't have been easy testifying.''

``You'd do the same thing in my shoes,'' said Bob. ``Anybody would.''

``Anybody but Poop Man,'' said Adams. Even production hadn't escaped the consultants: Adams had arrived at work yesterday to find he'd lost three of his men.

``And Chamberlain,'' I said. ``Don't forget him.''

``Birds of a feather,'' said Adams. ``Well, looks like we're ready to roll. You staying for the run?''

``At least the first few thousand,'' said Bob.

``You, too, Nick?''

``Me too.''

``By the way,'' said Adams, ``I read your column. Hell of a piece of work. Said a lot of things I've been thinking since the sale. 'Course, your ass is toast the second I hit this button.''

``Actually, my ass already is toast,'' I said. ``So is Bob's. We got fired.''

``I'm sorry,'' said Adams.

``For what?'' said Bob. ``My only regret is Hill will be in surgery when this hits the streets. What I wouldn't give to see the look on his face.''

``Press time, boys,'' Adams said. ``Maybe you'd like to start 'er up, Nick. Or you, Bob.''

``All yours, Bob,'' I said.

Adams passed us ear protectors and safety glasses, then showed Bob the commands on the control panel. Bob worked them and the presses slowly began to turn.

``Sitting in an office all day, you forget the power this thing has,'' said Bob. ``I remember my first job -- Christ, it's almost fifty years ago now. They still had hot type. I'd watch them pour it, then go out in the press room and wait for the first copies. Of course, that press wasn't anywhere near this big, but it still seemed invincible. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but there's something about this that a monitor can't equal. This is real, not pixels on a screen.''

Adams and his newly-short staff pulled a few copies of the paper off the belts and gave them a quick once-over. Satisfied, they let Bob rev the press up to full speed.


The telephone woke me on Christmas morning. It was eleven o'clock on a raw and foggy day. I'd slept almost twelve hours.

``Hello?'' I said.

It was Courtney.

``I just wanted to wish you Merry Christmas,'' she said.

``Merry Christmas,'' I said.

``You probably didn't expect me to call.''

``I've given up expecting things anymore.''

``For what it's worth, I loved your column. I don't know how you got it in the paper, but congratulations.''

``You don't think I sounded like Chicken Soup for the Soul?''

``Can I be honest -- in a couple of places, yes. But you told the truth. The truth can be devastating.''

``I guess it beats socks,'' I said.

``Your words, not mine.''

``It must be a miracle.''

Courtney laughed. ``Careful,'' she said. ``It's a short trip from profound to sophomoric.''

``Tell me about it.''

``Are you going out there today?''

``I'm not sure,'' I said.

``I think you have to,'' Courtney said. ``You can't just slip quietly into the night after all this.''
She was right. It's one thing to present truths, another to be accountable.

``Will you be there?'' I said.

``Would you like me to?''

``I would.''

``Then maybe I will.''


``Strange mood here today,'' said Officer Maloney as he escorted me through the crowd outside Louise's, which numbered more than twenty thousand, according to the policeman's estimate.

``In what way?'' I said.

``I can't tell if they're happy or sad. Or angry. I seen a lot of people reading your column. I hear a lot of grumbling.''

``What did you think?'' I said.

``Pretty heavy stuff,'' said the cop, ``but you told it from the heart. It's the kind of column you don't see much of anymore.''

``You didn't think the end was silly.''

``Sentimental, maybe,'' the policeman said. ``But not silly. Silly don't make you stop and think like that.''

I could barely make out Louise's house through the fog, but I could see that the shades were drawn and there was no sign of activity except for officers on horses behind the police tape. The authorities had never called out the mounted patrol before.

``Have you seen her today?'' I asked Maloney.

``Only for a second, when I came on duty. She poked her head out and said she might come out later, but not to plan on it. Then she told me not to let anyone in -- not even you. Sorry, Nick. I don't think she liked your column.''

We moved toward the altar, where Mass was underway. The priest was just beginning Communion, and lines were forming for the deacons who assisted him.

I stood to the side, wishing the fog were thicker. I wanted to crawl back behind the First Amendment.


And yet, I was strangely calm as I ascended the altar when the Mass ended. I'd spotted Courtney in the crowd and I noticed that Ethan Cottrill was there, too. Seeing me approach, the priest guided me to the lectern. I tapped the microphone -- and felt the eyes of twenty thousand on me.

``I know many of you have already seen this,'' I said, unfolding today's paper, ``but I wanted to read it to you myself. Then I'll be happy to take questions.''

I cleared my throat and began…

#33Stories, Day 23: "An Uncommon Man," a biography

#33Stories
No. 23: “An Uncommon Man: The Life & Times of Senator Claiborne Pell”
Context at the end of this excerpt.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

Published in 2011 by University Press of New England.


The opening of “An Uncommon Man”:

Prologue: A Cold Winter Day


Dawn had barely broken when the crowd began to build outside Trinity Episcopal Church. A frigid wind blew and snow frosted the Newport, Rhode Island, ground. Police had restricted vehicular traffic to allow passage of the motorcade carrying a former president, the vice president-elect, and dozens of U.S. senators, representatives and other dignitaries who would be arriving. Men in sunglasses with bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled the church grounds, where flags flew at half-mast.
It was Jan. 5, 2009, the day of Senator Claiborne deBorda Pell’s funeral.

Some of those waiting to get inside Trinity Church were members of Newport society, to which Pell and Nuala, his wife of 64 years, had belonged since birth. Some were working-class people who knew Pell as a tall, thin, bespectacled man who once regularly jogged along Bellevue Avenue, greeting strangers and friends that he passed. Some knew him only from the media, where he was sometimes portrayed, not inaccurately, as the capitol’s most eccentric character, as interested in the afterlife and the paranormal as the federal budget. Some knew him mostly from the ballot booth or from programs and policies he’d been instrumental in establishing. First elected in 1960, the year his friend John F. Kennedy captured the White House, Pell served 36 years in the U.S. Senate, 14th longest in history as of that January day. His accomplishments from those six terms touched untold millions of lives.

Pell died at a few minutes past midnight on Jan. 1, five weeks after his 90th birthday and more than a decade after the first symptoms of the Parkinson’s Disease that slowly stole all movement and speech, leaving him a prisoner in his own body. He died, his family with him, at his oceanfront home -- a shingled, single-story house that he personally designed and which stood in modest contrast to Bellevue Avenue mansions and Bailey’s Beach, the exclusive members-only club that has been synonymous with East Coast wealth since the Gilded Age. Pell, whose colonial-era ancestors established enduring wealth from tobacco and land, and Nuala, an heiress to the A&P fortune, belonged to Bailey’s. But the Pells were unflinchingly liberal and Democratic. In the old manufacturing state of Rhode Island, where the American Industrial Revolution was born, blue-collar voters embraced their aristocratic senator with the unconventional mind.

The motorcades passed the waiting crowd, which by 9 a.m. was more than a block long. Former President Bill Clinton stepped out of an SUV and went into the parish hall to await the procession to the church. Vice President-elect Joe Biden and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, whose malignant brain cancer would claim him that summer, followed Clinton. A bus that met a jet from Washington brought more senators, including Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republicans Richard Lugar and Orrin Hatch. Pell’s civility and even temper during his decades in the Senate earned him the respect of his colleagues. “I always try to let the other fellow have my way,” is how Pell liked to explain his Congressional style. It was the best means, he maintained, to “translate ideas into actions and help people,” as he described the heart of his legislative style. He had learned these philosophies from his father, a minor diplomat and one-term Congressman who had cast an inordinate influence on his only child even after his own death in the first months of John F. Kennedy’s presidency.

The doors to Trinity opened and the crowd went in, filling seats in the loft that had been reserved for the public. The overflow went into the parish hall, to watch the live-broadcast TV feed. Led by their mother, Nuala and Claiborne’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren took seats near the pulpit. The politicians settled in pews across the aisle. The organ played, the choir sang, and six Coast Guardsmen wheeled a mahogany casket draped in white to the front of the church.

 From early childhood, Pell had loved the sea, an affection he captured in sailboat drawings and grade-school essays about the joys of being on the water. When he was nine, he took an ocean journey that would influence him in ways a young boy could not have predicted: traveling by luxury liner with his mother and stepfather, he went to Cuba and on through the Panama Canal to California and Hawaii. “It was the most interesting voyage I have ever taken,’’ he wrote, when he was 12, in an essay entitled The Story of My Life. After graduating from college in 1940, more than a year before Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Coast Guard, pointedly remaining in the reserves until mandatory retirement at age 60, when he was nearing the end of his third Senate term.

In the many stories that had accompanied his retirement from the Senate, Pell had named the 1972 Seabed Arms Control treaty, which kept the Cold War nuclear arms race from spreading to the ocean floor by prohibiting the testing or storage of weapons deep undersea, as among his favorite achievements. He pointed also to his National Sea Grant College and Program Act of 1966, which provided unprecedented federal funding of university-based oceanography. And one of his deepest regrets, he said 1996, was in failing to achieve U.S. ratification of the international Law of the Sea Treaty, which establishes ocean boundaries and protects global maritime resources.
In planning his funeral, Pell requested a ceremonial honor guard from his beloved service. The Coast Guard granted his wish -- and added meaning when selecting Pell’s pallbearers. Two of the six had graduated college with the help of Pell Grants, the tuition-assistance program for lower- and middle-income students that Pell called his greatest achievement. Since their inception in 1972, the grants by 2009 had been awarded to more than 115 million recipients. Without them, many could not have earned a college degree.


Kennedy left his wife, Vicki, in their pew and walked slowly to the pulpit.

In his nearly eight-minute eulogy, the last substantial speech the final Kennedy brother would make, Ted talked of Pell’s fortitude when he and Nuala lost two of their grown children. His hands trembling but his voice strong, he spoke of his family’s long relationship with Pell, which began before the Second World War -- and of his own friendship with Pell and their 34 years together in the Senate. He spoke of Pell’s political support for his president brother and his support for his own son, Patrick Kennedy, representative from Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District, which includes Newport. He recalled the summer tradition of sailing with Vicki on his sailboat, Maya, from Long Island to Newport, enroute to their home in Hyannisport on Cape Cod. During their overnight visits with the Pells, Claiborne, who owned no yacht, relished sailing on Ted’s sailboat Mya, even after Parkinson’s Disease left him in a wheelchair and unable to speak. “The quiet joy of the wind on his face was a site to behold,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy closed with tribute.

“During his brilliant career, he amassed a treasure trove of accomplishments that few will ever match,” Kennedy said, citing the Pell Grants, Pell’s 1965 legislation that established the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Seabed Treaty. It was Claiborne Pell who advocated the power of diplomacy before resorting to the power of military might. And it was Claiborne Pell who was an environmentalist long before that was cool. Claiborne Pell was a senator of high character, great decency and fundamental honesty. And that’s why he became the longest serving senator in the history of Rhode Island. He was a senator for our time and for all time. He was an original. He was my friend and I will miss him very much.”

Kennedy returned to his pew and Clinton took the pulpit of the historic old church, which has overlooked Newport Harbor since 1726. Drawing laughter, the former president told of first seeing Pell: in 1964, when he was a freshman at Georgetown University living in a dorm that overlooked the backyard of the Pells’ Washington home.

“I was this goggle-eyed kid from Arkansas. I had never been anywhere or seen anything and here I was in Washington, D.C., and I got to be a voyeur looking down on all the dinner parties of this elegant man. So I got very interested in the Pell family. And I read up on them, you know. And I realized that they were a form of American royalty. I knew that because it took me 29 years and six moths to get in the front door of that house I’d been staring at. When I became president, Senator and Mrs. Pell, who had supported my campaign, invited me in the front door. I received one of Claiborne Pell’s courtly tours of his home, which was like getting a tour of the family history. There were all these relatives he had with wigs on. Where I came from only people who were bald wore wigs. And they weren’t white and curled. It was amazing.

“And even after all those years, I still felt as I did when I was a boy: that there was something almost magical about this man who was born to aristocracy but cared about people like the people I grew up with.”

He cared, too, Clinton said, for the citizens of the world. Clinton spoke of Pell’s belief that together, nations can solve the planet’s problems -- a belief that took root in his childhood travels and solidified in 1945 in San Francisco, where delegates of 50 countries drafted the U.N. Charter. Pell served as an assistant for the American delegation.

“Every time I saw him -- every single time -- he would pull out this dog-eared copy of the U.N.
Charter,’’ Clinton said. “It was light blue, frayed around the edges. I was so intimidated. There I was in the White House and I actually went home one night and read it all again to make sure I could pass a test in case Senator Pell asked me any questions. But I got the message and so did everybody else that ever came in contact with him: that America could not go forward in a world that had only a global economy without a sense of global politics and social responsibility.”

The ex-president ended with a reference to ancestors.

“The Pell family’s wealth began with a royal grant of land in Westchester County where Hilary and I now live,” he said. “It occurred to me that if we had met 300 years ago, he would be my lord and I would be his serf. All I can tell you is: I would have been proud to serve him. He was the right kind of aristocrat: a champion by choice, not circumstance, of the common good and our common future and our common dreams, in a long life of grace, generous spirit, kind heart, and determination, right to the very end. That life is his last true Pell Grant.”

Despite the work of transitioning from the Bush to the Obama administration, Biden had taken the morning off to eulogize the man who befriended him when he arrived in Washington in 1972 as a 29-year-old senator-elect. Biden had just lost his wife and baby daughter in a car accident. “You made your home my own,” Biden said, turning to Nuala. In the Senate, Pell became Biden’s mentor.

The vice-president-elect, who served with Pell on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, enumerated more of Pell’s accomplishments, including legislation that helped build Amtrak and a lesser-publicized campaign against drunk driving -- a cause Pell embraced when two of his staff members, including one central in the fight for Pell Grants, were killed by drunk drivers. In these efforts and in all of his Congressional dealings, Biden said -- and all of his campaigns, none of which he ever lost -- Pell brought a gentlemanly sensibility that seemed outdated in an era of hot tempers and mud.

“I’m told, Ted,” Biden said, “that your brother, President Kennedy, once said Claiborne Pell was the least electable man in America -- a view that, I suppose, was shared by at least six of his opponents when he ran for the United States Senate over the course of 36 years.”

Laughter filled Trinity Church.

“I understand how people could think that,” Biden continued. Here was a graduate of an exclusive college-preparatory school and Princeton, who later earned an advanced degree from another Ivy league School, Columbia -- a man born into wealth who married into more and had traveled the world many times over before ever seeking office.

“He didn’t have a great deal in common, I suspect, with many of his constituents in terms of background, except this: I think Claiborne realized that many of the traits he learned in his upbringing -- honesty, integrity, fair play -- they didn’t only belong to those  who could afford to embrace the sense of noblesse oblige. He understood, in my view, that nobility lives in the heart of every man and woman regardless of their situation in life. He understood that the aspirations of the mother living on Bellevue Avenue here in Newport were no more lofty, no more considerable, than the dream of a mother living in an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant.…each of those mothers wanted their children to have the opportunity to make the most of their gifts and the most of their lives.”

Biden told some favorite stories, drawing laughter with the one about Pell going for a jog on a trip to Rome dressed in an Oxford button-down shirt, Bermuda shorts, black socks and leather shoes -- an image of Pell that his friends and family knew well. Sweat suits and Nikes were not Pell’s style.
“To be honest, he was a quirky guy, Nuala,” Biden said.

The mourners laughed -- Nuala most appreciatively, for she understood best what Biden meant. For two thirds of a century, she had experienced his odd dress, his obsession with ancestors, his bad driving, his frugality, his fascination with ESP and the possibility of life after death, his manner of speaking, as if he had indeed traveled forward in time from the 1600s, when Thomas Pell was named First Lord of the Manor of Pelham. These traits were all part of his charm, which sometimes annoyed but often amused his wife. This and his handsome looks and ever-curious mind were why Nuala had fallen in love when they met in the summer of 1944, when she was 20, and why she married him four months later. Claiborne Pell was different. Unlike most other young men of her circle, he aspired to be something more than a rich guy who threw parties.

Biden’s eulogy was nearing a half hour, but he had one more story.

“One day, I was sitting in the Foreign Relations Committee room waiting for a head of state to come in.” Pell was there.

“He took his jacket off, which was rare -- I can’t remember why -- and I noticed his belt went all the way around the back and it went all the way to the back loop. I looked at him and I said, `Claiborne, that’s an interesting belt.’

“He said, `it was my father’s.’ And his father was a big man.

“I looked at him and I said, `Well, Claiborne, why don’t you just have it cut off?’

“He unleashed the whole belt and held it up and said, `Joe, this is genuine rawhide.’ I’ll never forget that: `This is genuine rawhide.’ I thought, God bless me!”….

Context:

Like some of my other books and two of my documentaries, “An Uncommon Man” grew out of a story I wrote for The Providence Journal, “A Remarkable Life.” We published it in April, 2005, as Pell was nearing the end of his life, his Parkinson’s having robbed him of speech and movement. I have reprinted it below. How fondly I remember the days I spent with Claiborne and Nuala, one of the greatest ever, in their home overlooking the open Atlantic. They came at a moment of deep discontent in my own life, and while I never mentioned that to them, Nuala could sense it. And she was, in an unspoken way, very supportive.

In writing the book after Pell passed, I spent many hours again in that house with Nuala, a tape recorder running – and not running, as we talked and lunched and reminisced. More very fond memories (not to mention such enormous help with “An Uncommon Man,” Nuala held the keys to the kingdom.

The launch party for “An Uncommon Man” was held at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center, and it was on that day that I met center director Jim Ludes. And THAT led to a conversation over coffee in early 2012 that began what became Story in the Public Square, now a weekly PBS and SiriusXM Satellite radio program.

Last note, quite literally. I wrote Nuala’s obituary after she passed in April 2014 at the age of 89. Here’s how it began:

Nuala Pell, longtime patron of the arts, humanities and education, supporter of many causes, prominent philanthropist and the widow of the late Sen. Claiborne Pell, died early Sunday morning at Newport Hospital. She was 89.

Word of her passing prompted an outpouring of tribute.

“An extraordinary woman whose grace and decency infused everything she did and everything Senator Pell did,” is how Sen. Jack Reed remembered her. “She was just a wonderful person.”

“Nuala Pell’s remarkable lifetime of public service left an indelible mark on our state,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. “Alongside her husband, Senator Claiborne Pell, she was a passionate advocate for the arts and humanities -- and, above all, for the people of our Ocean State.”


'A Remarkable Life' - Nuala and Claiborne Pell reflect on six extraordinary decades together
G. WAYNE MILLER
Publication Date: April 10, 2005  Page: E-01  Section: SUNDAY EXTRA  Edition: All

NEWPORT - Claiborne deBorda Pell sits in a wheelchair at a table in his seaside home, eating a lunch of lasagna cut into small pieces. Nuala, Pell's wife of 60 years, is seated to his left. She is telling the story of their early days together, when they lived with the first two of their four children in the chaos of postwar Europe.

It is a dreary day in late winter: the sky threatens snow, and the ocean, south of the living room, is an angry gray. To the west, the cabanas at Bailey's Beach Club are all shuttered. The waves roll onto lonely sand, playground for the old-money set on summer days.

Inside the Pell residence, a single-story house so unlike the gilded mansions on nearby Bellevue Avenue, the atmosphere is inviting.

The living room is furnished with upholstered sofas and chairs, and salmon-colored drapes frame the windows. Paintings of relatives and ancestors -- including great-grandfather Eugene deBorda, a Paris-born Basque -- cover the walls. And there is a fireplace, lit every night in cold weather, next to the reclining chair where Claiborne takes his long, daily naps. A 19th-century clock that he inherited from his father chimes on the quarter hour. Nuala winds it once a week.

In 1948, Nuala says, Claiborne was an officer in the U.S. Foreign Service. After spending many months in Prague, he had been assigned to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. The Pells were there when the Communists took control of the government. "A lot of our friends were put in prison, and a lot of our friends were tortured," Nuala says.

One was Claiborne's interpreter, Andrew Spiro. "One day they kidnapped him and put him in prison and asked him to report on us, and we assumed he would be doing that, so we were very careful. He didn't get out for three months, and he had a terrible time. Am I correct so far, Claiborne?"

Once, Pell possessed a distinctive aristocratic voice - a voice heard in Washington and many overseas capitals during the 36 years he was a U.S. senator, longer than any other Rhode Islander. For more than a decade, Pell chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

But Pell, 86, suffers from Parkinson's disease now, and while his mind remains firm, his memories clear, he can barely whisper.

"Yes," he tells his wife, who is 80.

"You stop me if I'm not," she says.

Nuala continues as Claiborne finishes his lunch assisted by an attendant; with effort, Pell can still get a fork or a glass to his mouth, but the attendant's help is appreciated. Someone is on duty 24 hours a day for the former senator, whose many legislative accomplishments include the Pell Grant college aid program, which has helped millions of needy students.

Nuala finishes her Bratislava tale: in the fall of 1948, they and their two young children departed for a new assignment in Genoa, Italy.

"When we were leaving," Nuala says, "Spiro, who by that time had been released from prison, asked Claiborne if he would take him out of the country. Claiborne said no, he couldn't. However, Claiborne said, 'The trunk of my car will be unlocked.' " Pell succeeded in smuggling his interpreter to freedom.

Lunch ends. An attendant wipes Pell's mouth and straightens his tie, worn with a button-down shirt. Pell stares across the room, his eyes focused on a small painted altar, one of several pieces of furniture -- including the dinner table, with its exquisite inlaid Japanese figures -- that the Pells bought in postwar Europe.

"That was from Romania," Claiborne whispers. It is one of the longest sentences I will hear him say in several visits.

"Wood?" I ask.

"Yes," he says.

"Poor Claiborne," Nuala says. "He's so good about it. He never complains. But it's such a shock if you run all your life -- and he was constantly working and constantly doing things, he never stopped. And to be suddenly trapped in your body. It's horrible."

* * *

THE DINNER table occupies the corner of the living room near the wing where the children used to sleep. Claiborne sleeps in one of their bedrooms now. On the wall by the door is a painting of Claiborne and Nuala on their wedding day, Dec. 16, 1944.

The young Claiborne is dignified, dark-haired, handsome; he is wearing his Coast Guard uniform, and it lends him an air of quiet authority at age 26. Nuala, who was 20, is beautiful, with a fair complexion and red hair that is a shade darker than strawberry blond. With her necklace of diamond and pearls and her cream-colored satin wedding dress, she looks enchanting.

Although they come from the same old-money world, their families' political views were diametrical.

Claiborne is a descendant of Pierre Lorillard, who founded America's first tobacco company, in 1760. The nation's fourth-largest tobacco firm today, Lorillard sells Newport cigarettes, among other brands. Wealthy though they were, the Pells believed in civic duty: several of Claiborne's relatives served in Congress, and his father, Herbert Claiborne Pell, was not only a U.S. representative from New York (for one term, 1919-1921) but also U.S. minister to Portugal and then Hungary in the 1930s and '40s. Pells were Demo-crats.

Nuala's mother, the former Marie Josephine Hartford, Paris-educated and trained as a concert pianist, belonged to the family that founded The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., the A&P. Unlike Claiborne, Nuala grew up with no sense of noblesse oblige: her parents traveled the high-society circuit, with its Fifth Avenue townhouses, Newport summer homes and pursuit of elegant pleasures. In their world, a dinner party that set Bailey's Beach abuzz was a crowning achievement.

Even before meeting Pell, Nuala found that existence lacking.

"I didn't really agree with my parents' way of life; it seemed so superficial. That's not to say that I did not enjoy it -- I had a ball. But I thought Claiborne had it all right. I believed in what he believed in. Plus, I found him enormously attractive."

Did Claiborne find Nuala attractive, too?

"Yes," he says.

"He wouldn't have married me otherwise!"

And there was something else that Pell promised Nuala, something most other bachelors from her set could not provide.

"I thought it would be an interesting life with him. And it has been. I mean, look at what we've done."

* * *

THEY MET at a cocktail party in Newport one evening in the early summer of 1944. Nuala was a student at Bennington College, in Vermont, and Claiborne, a Coast Guard lieutenant, had been sent home from the Mediterranean Theater to recover from a bacterial infection, contracted from consuming unpasteurized cheese or milk.

"We met again at the beach the next day," says Nuala, beckoning toward Bailey's Beach Club. "And then we saw each other in July and August. We got engaged in what -- September, I think -- and married in December. It was very quick, the whole thing." Whirlwind romances abounded in wartime America.

The engagement was announced that fall, and it made all the New York and Washington papers. After rummaging through the house, Nuala finds a scrapbook chronicling the engagement and wedding, and also her wedding album. Both are bound in red leather and emblazoned in gold.

A few days later, as Claiborne sleeps under a blanket in his reclining chair, she opens them up. The fireplace clock chimes 11:15 a.m. "It's a very ornery clock," Nuala says. "It used to run fast -- and now, I haven't fixed it, it runs slow. So I have to push it forward."

The clippings are yellowed, the scrapbooks dog-eared, and some have lost their covers. But they provide details of the Pells' story that memory alone cannot.

"Most of '400' to See Nuala O'Donnell Wed," was the headline in the New York News in November 1944. "Half of Newport, most of Tuxedo Park, a large delegation from Aiken, and many of the fashionable Long Island set are expected to make tracks Manhattanward a week from next Saturday," the story read. "It's the day that the pretty A&P heiress Nuala O'Donnell has set for her marriage to the blue-blooded Lieut. Claiborne Pell of the Coast Guard."

A Journal-American society writer predicted that Dec. 16 would be "THE social star-studded wedding of the season. Nuala, who has just come down from Bennington, where she finished this semester's studies, is brightening Gotham's dark nights with the glow in her eyes, as she goes about the titillating business of completing plans down to the last orange blossom."

The Pells were married in St. James Episcopal Church on New York's Madison Avenue, with a reception at the St. Regis Hotel, built by another person tied to Newport, John Jacob Astor IV. The scrapbook contains mementos from the day: a folded wedding cake box with white bow; samples of the fabric of Nuala's satin gown, and of the pink taffeta that her bridesmaids wore; and petals from a bouquet of 36 roses sent by President and Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The clippings confirmed the society writers' predictions. "There were enough mink coats on view to envelop the globe," one noted.

Nuala thumbs through her wedding album. "There's my mother and stepfather; Claiborne's father." She speaks matter-of-factly. She seems more concerned by the condition of the albums than their content. "I'm sorry they're in such bad shape. I have to get these scrapbooks fixed."

* * *

THE PELLS honeymooned at Pellbridge, an estate that Pell's father owned in Dutchess County, N.Y. In early 1945, the Coast Guard assigned Pell to Princeton University. On Feb. 14, they exchanged their first Valentine's Day cards. Claiborne's to Nuala was hand-drawn. It showed an arrow through a heart, and a man on bended knee offering flowers to his sweetheart.

"Had you started teaching then or were they training you?" Nuala asks.

On this visit, Claiborne is awake.

"I was teaching then," he says. He taught military government.

Nuala says: "We lived in a tiny, tiny house with one room upstairs and one room downstairs. Einstein lived next door. I didn't know anything. I didn't know how to cook, I didn't know how to balance my checkbook. And guess who taught me to balance my checkbook? Einstein. Isn't that wonderful?"

* * *

PELL SPENT the late 1940s and 1950s in the Foreign Service, the State Department and in private business. He worked on voter registration for the national Democratic Party, and he was active with the Rhode Island Democratic State Committee. He gave speeches about his experiences behind the Iron Curtain and the lessons that could be drawn. The Brown Daily Herald's coverage of one of his talks, at Brown University, includes a photo of him with mustache and bow tie.

But Pell was an unlikely candidate to replace the retiring Sen. Theodore Francis Green: he had been a loyal party soldier but had never held elective office.

Pell declared his candidacy in April 1960 with newspaper ads urging voters to "Think Well. Think Pell." A full-page ad in The Providence Evening Bulletin gave his biography, noting his wartime duty -- "he started out as a ship's cook and rose through the ranks to lieutenant" -- his Foreign Service experiences, his support of Newport's Touro Synagogue, and his family's membership in Trinity Episcopal Church. The ad revealed that the Pells spoke French and Italian -- and also that Claiborne was a "forward-thinking Democrat" who had "worked closely" with the AFL/CIO and been an alternate delegate to the 1956 National Democratic Convention.

With Nuala helping on the campaign, Pell won. It was the beginning of a political career without parallel in Rhode Island history.

"The Pell Record," a pamphlet of accomplishments published in 1990, when the senator ran for reelection the final time, numbers 53 pages; a 1994 update adds 13 pages more. Legislation that he wrote or supported concerned economic development (four pages), energy (four pages), veterans (two pages), women's issues (four pages), oceans and fishing (two pages), crime and drugs (two pages), transportation (two pages), and health care (four pages).

Pell was instrumental in the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he championed the cause of high-speed rail service, especially in the Northeast (he always traveled to and from Washington by train).

His postwar experiences served him well: from his seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, he played an influential role in arms control, human rights, and protection of the global environment, among other international issues.

One of Nuala's scrapbooks from their early years in Washington has several photographs of the Pells at parties and on a yacht with President and Jacqueline Kennedy, who spent much of her childhood in Newport and was married there. Several of the Pells' Christmas cards show the family by the fireplace at Pelican Ledge, their Newport house, which Nuala labeled "the Homestead." And there are photographs of the Pells in Burma, Thailand and India.

What other countries have they visited in their 60 years together?

"Oh, God," Nuala says. She names some two dozen nations on every continent but Antarctica. But she knows she has left many out. "Where else have we been, Claiborne?" she says.

"Liechtenstein."

"Liechtenstein, yes. We spent a lot of time in Liechtenstein."

Which Senate achievement ranks highest on Pell's list?

A finger on his right hand begins to twitch, as it does when he concentrates, and he looks slowly around the room. Thirty seconds pass without him speaking.

"Banning nuclear weapons on the floor of the sea?" Nuala says. "The Pell grants?"

Claiborne clears his throat and whispers: "I think the Pell grants."

* * *

PARKINSON'S arrived with a soft touch.

"What were the first symptoms, Claiborne?" Nuala says.

He doesn't answer.

"I think a couple of people in the office noticed that he was sort of slowing down," Nuala says. And he was walking stooped. It was 1994, and Pell was 75. Perhaps it was his age.

"I remember on our wedding anniversary in 1994, which was our 50th. We had a dinner party here, and I was sitting next to [then-Gov.] Bruce Sundlun, and he said: 'Nuala, you have to do something. Claiborne's obviously got something wrong with him. He has trouble speaking, his voice is going. Get him to a doctor.' "

Soon afterward, a Georgetown University Hospital neurologist made the diagnosis of Parkinson's, an incurable disease of the central nervous system. "He has a peculiar kind," Nuala says. "He doesn't have the shaky kind; he has the kind that gets you all stiff and makes it difficult to talk and swallow."

At first, Pell refused to accept his illness. "I still resist it," he said in April 1995, in The Journal story that broke the news.

Gradually, though, the reality became inescapable.

"It was very slow," Nuala says. "At first, he couldn't tie his tie -- so Bertie, our oldest son, got all his ties and tied them for him -- looped them so he could get them over his head. It was wonderful."

With the help of staff, Pell still occasionally gets out: for doctors' visits, and to attend lectures and political and educational fundraisers. He likes the movies.

"I did take him to see Hotel Rwanda the other day -- it's a wonderful movie. And he thought it was wonderful, too. But we have to go to movies that are on the ground floor that we can get the wheelchair in."

Mostly now, though, Claiborne's world is his home.

* * *

TO REACH the Pells', you travel most of Bellevue Avenue and turn left onto a street that delivers you to a narrow, bumpy road.

One branch leads to The Waves, the mansion built by the eminent architect John Russell Pope -- and owned by Nuala's mother for a decade or so in the mid-20th century. The other branch takes you to Pelican Ledge, as the Pell residence is known in the Green Book, the private guide to the Newport elite.

Pelican Ledge is built of wood, with weathered shingle siding, white trim, and Swiss-blue shutters. Ramps have been built over the slate stairs so that Claiborne can be wheeled out to his car, a 1997 Mercury Sable, and lifted into the front seat on those occasions he leaves home. The Pells have bird feeders and birdbaths -- one with a heater to keep it ice-free.

"We have cardinals, we have ducks, we have a lady coyote who is in love with the German shepherd next door -- she thinks he's a coyote," Nuala says.

Rusted iron pelicans serve as lawn decorations. A pelican is on the Pell coat of arms, but Nuala is not particularly impressed. "There are pelicans in all our cars, there are pelicans all over the place. I've had enough of them! So has my daughter-in-law -- she won't have one in the house." Nuala laughs. She has always indulged her husband's little obsession with his English ancestry.

When Nuala's mother sold The Waves, in 1952, she divided an acre off the estate and gave it to her daughter and son-in-law. Through all their travels and all their years in Washington, the house they built 53 years ago on that acre has remained home. It is where the extended Pell family has summered, spent holidays, and celebrated the milestones in their lives.

Now, Claiborne's days begin at 7 or 8, when an attendant dresses him and helps with breakfast. He usually naps the rest of the morning, in his chair by the fireplace, while Nuala runs errands or goes to the gym. He returns to the table for lunch, and then seeks the comfort again of his chair.

"The afternoon can be boring," Nuala says. "We read the papers to him, and if we don't go out, we have dinner here, too. If there's anything interesting on television, we watch it."

Christopher T.H. Pell, N. Dallas Pell, and Julia L. Pell, three of Claiborne's and Nuala's four children, are frequent visitors to Pelican Ledge -- as are the Pells' five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. A fourth is due in June. "I'm thrilled!" Nuala says. "It's going to be a girl."

Photos of the Pells' firstborn, Herbert C. Pell III -- Bertie -- as a baby fill pages of one of Nuala's scrapbooks. One shows Nuala in the fall of 1945 with her "first lesson in diaper pinning." Others show Claiborne cradling his son. Baby Bertie's first passport photo is there, too.

In 1999, Bertie died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a type of cancer, at age 54.

Nuala remembers a letter that Jackie Onassis wrote to them after she was diagnosed with the disease. "She said: 'What is this disease that both Bertie and I have?' [Jackie] got it later than Bertie, and she died so quickly."

Diagnosed in 1993, Bertie was in remission for three years, and then the cancer returned. "He'd gone to the boat show, if you can believe this, two or three days before he died, and bought a boat. He was the optimist of all time. Then he caught a cold in his good lung, and his other lung had been radiated to pieces, so there was no way that he could survive."

* * *

WHILE NUALA was in Washington, she served on several political committees. She worked on all of her husband's campaigns. She served on the board of Roger Williams University, Newport's Redwood Library and the John A. Hartford Foundation, a family charity that champions health care. She is currently on the board of Salve Regina University. And she has other civic interests, including preservation, cancer prevention, and the Newport International Film Festival.

She also runs the household, as she has since Albert Einstein taught her the intricacies of a checkbook. Her office is in the front of the house: it's a small, cozy room, with rust-colored curtains and many photographs and paintings. Her desk is piled with papers and bills. She uses a laptop computer, although not as deftly as she'd like. "I'm going to have to take a course, I think, because it takes forever," she says.

Nuala's bedroom is past the front hall, where she's hung the only painting done of the Pells when Claiborne was a senator. Nuala's room is predominantly blue, with an exposed beam ceiling and grand views of the open Atlantic. A pillow embroidered "Happiness is being married to your best friend" lies on a chair. A life-size painting of Nuala's mother, Nuala's brother and Nuala when she was a young teenager occupies the space behind her bed.

"It's interesting because Mother is holding a portrait of the painter and I'm holding a scrapbook which is open at a photograph of the painting," she says. "Now come follow me."

We walk to the eastern-most end of the house, the end facing The Waves, into a room filled with tools and brushes and buckets of yellow paint.

"This was Claiborne's office, which, when he was elected to the Senate, we added on. Everything was blue and white in here, and there were bookcases and everything. But obviously he can't use any of it anymore, so it's all gone to [Salve Regina's] Pell Center or URI."

The workers have added new bookcases, and Nuala plans to outfit the room with a queen-size sofa bed and an 18th-century clock and black furniture that was in their Georgetown house during the Pells' Washington days. "This is a spectacular room in the summer," she says. "I'm going to call it a garden room."

Nuala expects that her husband will spend hours in it, and also on the terrace that the workers have built outside the sliding glass doors.

"I've added this little terrace because the wind doesn't hit here the way it does the other terrace. I think it's going to be lovely for Claiborne because he'll be able to get outside with a little ramp here, and we have two wonderful chairs that he can sit in."

But Claiborne has not seen the terrace or his redone office yet, although he knows construction is under way.

"I thought I'd wait until it's done because otherwise he might be too upset with the loss of his office completely," Nuala says.

* * *

ON YET another visit to Pelican Ledge, the sky is clear but for a few high clouds. The sea is deep blue and whitecapped. Sun floods the southern windows, catching Claiborne and Nuala at their table.

Nuala remains a beautiful woman, with fair skin and chin-length white hair that she keeps straight. "I tried to streak it when it started to go gray," she says, "but I was never able to get the same colors so I gave up." But like pearls, white hair becomes her.

Claiborne's hair is thinner than a decade ago, but his face retains its patrician lines. He wears a sweater over an Oxford button-down shirt this day, though no tie. He is freshly shaved. Behind his glasses, his eyes have an unmistakable intensity. At this moment, he doesn't look radically different from when he left public office almost 10 years ago.

"It's so maddening," Nuala says. At this moment, it's easy to imagine Pell addressing a favorite issue back on the Senate floor.

"Parkinson's can sink you into deep depression," Nuala says. "But not Claiborne. He's been very accepting, which is amazing to me."

Claiborne attempts to speak, but no words come out.

"Are you trying to say something?"

Claiborne doesn't answer.

Nuala says that while her husband does not bemoan his condition, he is not reticent, either.

"Claiborne is extremely strong-minded, as all the people who look after him who've been with us for some time have found: if he doesn't want to do something, he doesn't do it. And I notice, Claiborne, that when you get mad, you can yell at somebody. Oh, yes: if he needs something and nobody's paying attention, you'll hear about it. But he's [generally] very uncomplaining."

She's accepting.

"We've had a remarkable life, really. I must say I was looking forward to even more trips after we got out of the Senate and doing a lot of things, but be that as it may; it doesn't matter. We're really lucky because all our children live around here, or basically around here, and most of our grandchildren, too. We have a lot of family around."

The sun warms Nuala's hands, and I notice her wedding ring, a thin gold band that her husband placed on her finger in a New York church so long ago. Claiborne is not wearing his: he was never big on jewelry, and for more than 60 years, Nuala has kept his ring in her jewelry box.

"He said he'd be willing to wear it now," Nuala says.

She takes her husband's hand and holds it gently.

"But I wouldn't do that to your fingers. They're all curled up."

#33Stories: "An Uncommon Man," a biography

#33Stories
No. 23: “An Uncommon Man: The Life & Times of Senator Claiborne Pell”
Context at the end of this excerpt.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

Published in 2011 by University Press of New England.


The opening of “An Uncommon Man”:

Prologue: A Cold Winter Day


Dawn had barely broken when the crowd began to build outside Trinity Episcopal Church. A frigid wind blew and snow frosted the Newport, Rhode Island, ground. Police had restricted vehicular traffic to allow passage of the motorcade carrying a former president, the vice president-elect, and dozens of U.S. senators, representatives and other dignitaries who would be arriving. Men in sunglasses with bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled the church grounds, where flags flew at half-mast.
It was Jan. 5, 2009, the day of Senator Claiborne deBorda Pell’s funeral.

Some of those waiting to get inside Trinity Church were members of Newport society, to which Pell and Nuala, his wife of 64 years, had belonged since birth. Some were working-class people who knew Pell as a tall, thin, bespectacled man who once regularly jogged along Bellevue Avenue, greeting strangers and friends that he passed. Some knew him only from the media, where he was sometimes portrayed, not inaccurately, as the capitol’s most eccentric character, as interested in the afterlife and the paranormal as the federal budget. Some knew him mostly from the ballot booth or from programs and policies he’d been instrumental in establishing. First elected in 1960, the year his friend John F. Kennedy captured the White House, Pell served 36 years in the U.S. Senate, 14th longest in history as of that January day. His accomplishments from those six terms touched untold millions of lives.

Pell died at a few minutes past midnight on Jan. 1, five weeks after his 90th birthday and more than a decade after the first symptoms of the Parkinson’s Disease that slowly stole all movement and speech, leaving him a prisoner in his own body. He died, his family with him, at his oceanfront home -- a shingled, single-story house that he personally designed and which stood in modest contrast to Bellevue Avenue mansions and Bailey’s Beach, the exclusive members-only club that has been synonymous with East Coast wealth since the Gilded Age. Pell, whose colonial-era ancestors established enduring wealth from tobacco and land, and Nuala, an heiress to the A&P fortune, belonged to Bailey’s. But the Pells were unflinchingly liberal and Democratic. In the old manufacturing state of Rhode Island, where the American Industrial Revolution was born, blue-collar voters embraced their aristocratic senator with the unconventional mind.

The motorcades passed the waiting crowd, which by 9 a.m. was more than a block long. Former President Bill Clinton stepped out of an SUV and went into the parish hall to await the procession to the church. Vice President-elect Joe Biden and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, whose malignant brain cancer would claim him that summer, followed Clinton. A bus that met a jet from Washington brought more senators, including Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republicans Richard Lugar and Orrin Hatch. Pell’s civility and even temper during his decades in the Senate earned him the respect of his colleagues. “I always try to let the other fellow have my way,” is how Pell liked to explain his Congressional style. It was the best means, he maintained, to “translate ideas into actions and help people,” as he described the heart of his legislative style. He had learned these philosophies from his father, a minor diplomat and one-term Congressman who had cast an inordinate influence on his only child even after his own death in the first months of John F. Kennedy’s presidency.

The doors to Trinity opened and the crowd went in, filling seats in the loft that had been reserved for the public. The overflow went into the parish hall, to watch the live-broadcast TV feed. Led by their mother, Nuala and Claiborne’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren took seats near the pulpit. The politicians settled in pews across the aisle. The organ played, the choir sang, and six Coast Guardsmen wheeled a mahogany casket draped in white to the front of the church.

 From early childhood, Pell had loved the sea, an affection he captured in sailboat drawings and grade-school essays about the joys of being on the water. When he was nine, he took an ocean journey that would influence him in ways a young boy could not have predicted: traveling by luxury liner with his mother and stepfather, he went to Cuba and on through the Panama Canal to California and Hawaii. “It was the most interesting voyage I have ever taken,’’ he wrote, when he was 12, in an essay entitled The Story of My Life. After graduating from college in 1940, more than a year before Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Coast Guard, pointedly remaining in the reserves until mandatory retirement at age 60, when he was nearing the end of his third Senate term.

In the many stories that had accompanied his retirement from the Senate, Pell had named the 1972 Seabed Arms Control treaty, which kept the Cold War nuclear arms race from spreading to the ocean floor by prohibiting the testing or storage of weapons deep undersea, as among his favorite achievements. He pointed also to his National Sea Grant College and Program Act of 1966, which provided unprecedented federal funding of university-based oceanography. And one of his deepest regrets, he said 1996, was in failing to achieve U.S. ratification of the international Law of the Sea Treaty, which establishes ocean boundaries and protects global maritime resources.
In planning his funeral, Pell requested a ceremonial honor guard from his beloved service. The Coast Guard granted his wish -- and added meaning when selecting Pell’s pallbearers. Two of the six had graduated college with the help of Pell Grants, the tuition-assistance program for lower- and middle-income students that Pell called his greatest achievement. Since their inception in 1972, the grants by 2009 had been awarded to more than 115 million recipients. Without them, many could not have earned a college degree.


Kennedy left his wife, Vicki, in their pew and walked slowly to the pulpit.

In his nearly eight-minute eulogy, the last substantial speech the final Kennedy brother would make, Ted talked of Pell’s fortitude when he and Nuala lost two of their grown children. His hands trembling but his voice strong, he spoke of his family’s long relationship with Pell, which began before the Second World War -- and of his own friendship with Pell and their 34 years together in the Senate. He spoke of Pell’s political support for his president brother and his support for his own son, Patrick Kennedy, representative from Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District, which includes Newport. He recalled the summer tradition of sailing with Vicki on his sailboat, Maya, from Long Island to Newport, enroute to their home in Hyannisport on Cape Cod. During their overnight visits with the Pells, Claiborne, who owned no yacht, relished sailing on Ted’s sailboat Mya, even after Parkinson’s Disease left him in a wheelchair and unable to speak. “The quiet joy of the wind on his face was a site to behold,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy closed with tribute.

“During his brilliant career, he amassed a treasure trove of accomplishments that few will ever match,” Kennedy said, citing the Pell Grants, Pell’s 1965 legislation that established the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Seabed Treaty. It was Claiborne Pell who advocated the power of diplomacy before resorting to the power of military might. And it was Claiborne Pell who was an environmentalist long before that was cool. Claiborne Pell was a senator of high character, great decency and fundamental honesty. And that’s why he became the longest serving senator in the history of Rhode Island. He was a senator for our time and for all time. He was an original. He was my friend and I will miss him very much.”

Kennedy returned to his pew and Clinton took the pulpit of the historic old church, which has overlooked Newport Harbor since 1726. Drawing laughter, the former president told of first seeing Pell: in 1964, when he was a freshman at Georgetown University living in a dorm that overlooked the backyard of the Pells’ Washington home.

“I was this goggle-eyed kid from Arkansas. I had never been anywhere or seen anything and here I was in Washington, D.C., and I got to be a voyeur looking down on all the dinner parties of this elegant man. So I got very interested in the Pell family. And I read up on them, you know. And I realized that they were a form of American royalty. I knew that because it took me 29 years and six moths to get in the front door of that house I’d been staring at. When I became president, Senator and Mrs. Pell, who had supported my campaign, invited me in the front door. I received one of Claiborne Pell’s courtly tours of his home, which was like getting a tour of the family history. There were all these relatives he had with wigs on. Where I came from only people who were bald wore wigs. And they weren’t white and curled. It was amazing.

“And even after all those years, I still felt as I did when I was a boy: that there was something almost magical about this man who was born to aristocracy but cared about people like the people I grew up with.”

He cared, too, Clinton said, for the citizens of the world. Clinton spoke of Pell’s belief that together, nations can solve the planet’s problems -- a belief that took root in his childhood travels and solidified in 1945 in San Francisco, where delegates of 50 countries drafted the U.N. Charter. Pell served as an assistant for the American delegation.

“Every time I saw him -- every single time -- he would pull out this dog-eared copy of the U.N.
Charter,’’ Clinton said. “It was light blue, frayed around the edges. I was so intimidated. There I was in the White House and I actually went home one night and read it all again to make sure I could pass a test in case Senator Pell asked me any questions. But I got the message and so did everybody else that ever came in contact with him: that America could not go forward in a world that had only a global economy without a sense of global politics and social responsibility.”

The ex-president ended with a reference to ancestors.

“The Pell family’s wealth began with a royal grant of land in Westchester County where Hilary and I now live,” he said. “It occurred to me that if we had met 300 years ago, he would be my lord and I would be his serf. All I can tell you is: I would have been proud to serve him. He was the right kind of aristocrat: a champion by choice, not circumstance, of the common good and our common future and our common dreams, in a long life of grace, generous spirit, kind heart, and determination, right to the very end. That life is his last true Pell Grant.”

Despite the work of transitioning from the Bush to the Obama administration, Biden had taken the morning off to eulogize the man who befriended him when he arrived in Washington in 1972 as a 29-year-old senator-elect. Biden had just lost his wife and baby daughter in a car accident. “You made your home my own,” Biden said, turning to Nuala. In the Senate, Pell became Biden’s mentor.

The vice-president-elect, who served with Pell on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, enumerated more of Pell’s accomplishments, including legislation that helped build Amtrak and a lesser-publicized campaign against drunk driving -- a cause Pell embraced when two of his staff members, including one central in the fight for Pell Grants, were killed by drunk drivers. In these efforts and in all of his Congressional dealings, Biden said -- and all of his campaigns, none of which he ever lost -- Pell brought a gentlemanly sensibility that seemed outdated in an era of hot tempers and mud.

“I’m told, Ted,” Biden said, “that your brother, President Kennedy, once said Claiborne Pell was the least electable man in America -- a view that, I suppose, was shared by at least six of his opponents when he ran for the United States Senate over the course of 36 years.”

Laughter filled Trinity Church.

“I understand how people could think that,” Biden continued. Here was a graduate of an exclusive college-preparatory school and Princeton, who later earned an advanced degree from another Ivy league School, Columbia -- a man born into wealth who married into more and had traveled the world many times over before ever seeking office.

“He didn’t have a great deal in common, I suspect, with many of his constituents in terms of background, except this: I think Claiborne realized that many of the traits he learned in his upbringing -- honesty, integrity, fair play -- they didn’t only belong to those  who could afford to embrace the sense of noblesse oblige. He understood, in my view, that nobility lives in the heart of every man and woman regardless of their situation in life. He understood that the aspirations of the mother living on Bellevue Avenue here in Newport were no more lofty, no more considerable, than the dream of a mother living in an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant.…each of those mothers wanted their children to have the opportunity to make the most of their gifts and the most of their lives.”

Biden told some favorite stories, drawing laughter with the one about Pell going for a jog on a trip to Rome dressed in an Oxford button-down shirt, Bermuda shorts, black socks and leather shoes -- an image of Pell that his friends and family knew well. Sweat suits and Nikes were not Pell’s style.
“To be honest, he was a quirky guy, Nuala,” Biden said.

The mourners laughed -- Nuala most appreciatively, for she understood best what Biden meant. For two thirds of a century, she had experienced his odd dress, his obsession with ancestors, his bad driving, his frugality, his fascination with ESP and the possibility of life after death, his manner of speaking, as if he had indeed traveled forward in time from the 1600s, when Thomas Pell was named First Lord of the Manor of Pelham. These traits were all part of his charm, which sometimes annoyed but often amused his wife. This and his handsome looks and ever-curious mind were why Nuala had fallen in love when they met in the summer of 1944, when she was 20, and why she married him four months later. Claiborne Pell was different. Unlike most other young men of her circle, he aspired to be something more than a rich guy who threw parties.

Biden’s eulogy was nearing a half hour, but he had one more story.

“One day, I was sitting in the Foreign Relations Committee room waiting for a head of state to come in.” Pell was there.

“He took his jacket off, which was rare -- I can’t remember why -- and I noticed his belt went all the way around the back and it went all the way to the back loop. I looked at him and I said, `Claiborne, that’s an interesting belt.’

“He said, `it was my father’s.’ And his father was a big man.

“I looked at him and I said, `Well, Claiborne, why don’t you just have it cut off?’

“He unleashed the whole belt and held it up and said, `Joe, this is genuine rawhide.’ I’ll never forget that: `This is genuine rawhide.’ I thought, God bless me!”….

Context:

Like some of my other books and two of my documentaries, “An Uncommon Man” grew out of a story I wrote for The Providence Journal, “A Remarkable Life.” We published it in April, 2005, as Pell was nearing the end of his life, his Parkinson’s having robbed him of speech and movement. I have reprinted it below. How fondly I remember the days I spent with Claiborne and Nuala, one of the greatest ever, in their home overlooking the open Atlantic. They came at a moment of deep discontent in my own life, and while I never mentioned that to them, Nuala could sense it. And she was, in an unspoken way, very supportive.

In writing the book after Pell passed, I spent many hours again in that house with Nuala, a tape recorder running – and not running, as we talked and lunched and reminisced. More very fond memories (not to mention such enormous help with “An Uncommon Man,” Nuala held the keys to the kingdom.

The launch party for “An Uncommon Man” was held at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center, and it was on that day that I met center director Jim Ludes. And THAT led to a conversation over coffee in early 2012 that began what became Story in the Public Square, now a weekly PBS and SiriusXM Satellite radio program.

Last note, quite literally. I wrote Nuala’s obituary after she passed in April 2014 at the age of 89. Here’s how it began:

Nuala Pell, longtime patron of the arts, humanities and education, supporter of many causes, prominent philanthropist and the widow of the late Sen. Claiborne Pell, died early Sunday morning at Newport Hospital. She was 89.

Word of her passing prompted an outpouring of tribute.

“An extraordinary woman whose grace and decency infused everything she did and everything Senator Pell did,” is how Sen. Jack Reed remembered her. “She was just a wonderful person.”

“Nuala Pell’s remarkable lifetime of public service left an indelible mark on our state,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. “Alongside her husband, Senator Claiborne Pell, she was a passionate advocate for the arts and humanities -- and, above all, for the people of our Ocean State.”


'A Remarkable Life' - Nuala and Claiborne Pell reflect on six extraordinary decades together
G. WAYNE MILLER
Publication Date: April 10, 2005  Page: E-01  Section: SUNDAY EXTRA  Edition: All

NEWPORT - Claiborne deBorda Pell sits in a wheelchair at a table in his seaside home, eating a lunch of lasagna cut into small pieces. Nuala, Pell's wife of 60 years, is seated to his left. She is telling the story of their early days together, when they lived with the first two of their four children in the chaos of postwar Europe.

It is a dreary day in late winter: the sky threatens snow, and the ocean, south of the living room, is an angry gray. To the west, the cabanas at Bailey's Beach Club are all shuttered. The waves roll onto lonely sand, playground for the old-money set on summer days.

Inside the Pell residence, a single-story house so unlike the gilded mansions on nearby Bellevue Avenue, the atmosphere is inviting.

The living room is furnished with upholstered sofas and chairs, and salmon-colored drapes frame the windows. Paintings of relatives and ancestors -- including great-grandfather Eugene deBorda, a Paris-born Basque -- cover the walls. And there is a fireplace, lit every night in cold weather, next to the reclining chair where Claiborne takes his long, daily naps. A 19th-century clock that he inherited from his father chimes on the quarter hour. Nuala winds it once a week.

In 1948, Nuala says, Claiborne was an officer in the U.S. Foreign Service. After spending many months in Prague, he had been assigned to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. The Pells were there when the Communists took control of the government. "A lot of our friends were put in prison, and a lot of our friends were tortured," Nuala says.

One was Claiborne's interpreter, Andrew Spiro. "One day they kidnapped him and put him in prison and asked him to report on us, and we assumed he would be doing that, so we were very careful. He didn't get out for three months, and he had a terrible time. Am I correct so far, Claiborne?"

Once, Pell possessed a distinctive aristocratic voice - a voice heard in Washington and many overseas capitals during the 36 years he was a U.S. senator, longer than any other Rhode Islander. For more than a decade, Pell chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

But Pell, 86, suffers from Parkinson's disease now, and while his mind remains firm, his memories clear, he can barely whisper.

"Yes," he tells his wife, who is 80.

"You stop me if I'm not," she says.

Nuala continues as Claiborne finishes his lunch assisted by an attendant; with effort, Pell can still get a fork or a glass to his mouth, but the attendant's help is appreciated. Someone is on duty 24 hours a day for the former senator, whose many legislative accomplishments include the Pell Grant college aid program, which has helped millions of needy students.

Nuala finishes her Bratislava tale: in the fall of 1948, they and their two young children departed for a new assignment in Genoa, Italy.

"When we were leaving," Nuala says, "Spiro, who by that time had been released from prison, asked Claiborne if he would take him out of the country. Claiborne said no, he couldn't. However, Claiborne said, 'The trunk of my car will be unlocked.' " Pell succeeded in smuggling his interpreter to freedom.

Lunch ends. An attendant wipes Pell's mouth and straightens his tie, worn with a button-down shirt. Pell stares across the room, his eyes focused on a small painted altar, one of several pieces of furniture -- including the dinner table, with its exquisite inlaid Japanese figures -- that the Pells bought in postwar Europe.

"That was from Romania," Claiborne whispers. It is one of the longest sentences I will hear him say in several visits.

"Wood?" I ask.

"Yes," he says.

"Poor Claiborne," Nuala says. "He's so good about it. He never complains. But it's such a shock if you run all your life -- and he was constantly working and constantly doing things, he never stopped. And to be suddenly trapped in your body. It's horrible."

* * *

THE DINNER table occupies the corner of the living room near the wing where the children used to sleep. Claiborne sleeps in one of their bedrooms now. On the wall by the door is a painting of Claiborne and Nuala on their wedding day, Dec. 16, 1944.

The young Claiborne is dignified, dark-haired, handsome; he is wearing his Coast Guard uniform, and it lends him an air of quiet authority at age 26. Nuala, who was 20, is beautiful, with a fair complexion and red hair that is a shade darker than strawberry blond. With her necklace of diamond and pearls and her cream-colored satin wedding dress, she looks enchanting.

Although they come from the same old-money world, their families' political views were diametrical.

Claiborne is a descendant of Pierre Lorillard, who founded America's first tobacco company, in 1760. The nation's fourth-largest tobacco firm today, Lorillard sells Newport cigarettes, among other brands. Wealthy though they were, the Pells believed in civic duty: several of Claiborne's relatives served in Congress, and his father, Herbert Claiborne Pell, was not only a U.S. representative from New York (for one term, 1919-1921) but also U.S. minister to Portugal and then Hungary in the 1930s and '40s. Pells were Demo-crats.

Nuala's mother, the former Marie Josephine Hartford, Paris-educated and trained as a concert pianist, belonged to the family that founded The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., the A&P. Unlike Claiborne, Nuala grew up with no sense of noblesse oblige: her parents traveled the high-society circuit, with its Fifth Avenue townhouses, Newport summer homes and pursuit of elegant pleasures. In their world, a dinner party that set Bailey's Beach abuzz was a crowning achievement.

Even before meeting Pell, Nuala found that existence lacking.

"I didn't really agree with my parents' way of life; it seemed so superficial. That's not to say that I did not enjoy it -- I had a ball. But I thought Claiborne had it all right. I believed in what he believed in. Plus, I found him enormously attractive."

Did Claiborne find Nuala attractive, too?

"Yes," he says.

"He wouldn't have married me otherwise!"

And there was something else that Pell promised Nuala, something most other bachelors from her set could not provide.

"I thought it would be an interesting life with him. And it has been. I mean, look at what we've done."

* * *

THEY MET at a cocktail party in Newport one evening in the early summer of 1944. Nuala was a student at Bennington College, in Vermont, and Claiborne, a Coast Guard lieutenant, had been sent home from the Mediterranean Theater to recover from a bacterial infection, contracted from consuming unpasteurized cheese or milk.

"We met again at the beach the next day," says Nuala, beckoning toward Bailey's Beach Club. "And then we saw each other in July and August. We got engaged in what -- September, I think -- and married in December. It was very quick, the whole thing." Whirlwind romances abounded in wartime America.

The engagement was announced that fall, and it made all the New York and Washington papers. After rummaging through the house, Nuala finds a scrapbook chronicling the engagement and wedding, and also her wedding album. Both are bound in red leather and emblazoned in gold.

A few days later, as Claiborne sleeps under a blanket in his reclining chair, she opens them up. The fireplace clock chimes 11:15 a.m. "It's a very ornery clock," Nuala says. "It used to run fast -- and now, I haven't fixed it, it runs slow. So I have to push it forward."

The clippings are yellowed, the scrapbooks dog-eared, and some have lost their covers. But they provide details of the Pells' story that memory alone cannot.

"Most of '400' to See Nuala O'Donnell Wed," was the headline in the New York News in November 1944. "Half of Newport, most of Tuxedo Park, a large delegation from Aiken, and many of the fashionable Long Island set are expected to make tracks Manhattanward a week from next Saturday," the story read. "It's the day that the pretty A&P heiress Nuala O'Donnell has set for her marriage to the blue-blooded Lieut. Claiborne Pell of the Coast Guard."

A Journal-American society writer predicted that Dec. 16 would be "THE social star-studded wedding of the season. Nuala, who has just come down from Bennington, where she finished this semester's studies, is brightening Gotham's dark nights with the glow in her eyes, as she goes about the titillating business of completing plans down to the last orange blossom."

The Pells were married in St. James Episcopal Church on New York's Madison Avenue, with a reception at the St. Regis Hotel, built by another person tied to Newport, John Jacob Astor IV. The scrapbook contains mementos from the day: a folded wedding cake box with white bow; samples of the fabric of Nuala's satin gown, and of the pink taffeta that her bridesmaids wore; and petals from a bouquet of 36 roses sent by President and Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The clippings confirmed the society writers' predictions. "There were enough mink coats on view to envelop the globe," one noted.

Nuala thumbs through her wedding album. "There's my mother and stepfather; Claiborne's father." She speaks matter-of-factly. She seems more concerned by the condition of the albums than their content. "I'm sorry they're in such bad shape. I have to get these scrapbooks fixed."

* * *

THE PELLS honeymooned at Pellbridge, an estate that Pell's father owned in Dutchess County, N.Y. In early 1945, the Coast Guard assigned Pell to Princeton University. On Feb. 14, they exchanged their first Valentine's Day cards. Claiborne's to Nuala was hand-drawn. It showed an arrow through a heart, and a man on bended knee offering flowers to his sweetheart.

"Had you started teaching then or were they training you?" Nuala asks.

On this visit, Claiborne is awake.

"I was teaching then," he says. He taught military government.

Nuala says: "We lived in a tiny, tiny house with one room upstairs and one room downstairs. Einstein lived next door. I didn't know anything. I didn't know how to cook, I didn't know how to balance my checkbook. And guess who taught me to balance my checkbook? Einstein. Isn't that wonderful?"

* * *

PELL SPENT the late 1940s and 1950s in the Foreign Service, the State Department and in private business. He worked on voter registration for the national Democratic Party, and he was active with the Rhode Island Democratic State Committee. He gave speeches about his experiences behind the Iron Curtain and the lessons that could be drawn. The Brown Daily Herald's coverage of one of his talks, at Brown University, includes a photo of him with mustache and bow tie.

But Pell was an unlikely candidate to replace the retiring Sen. Theodore Francis Green: he had been a loyal party soldier but had never held elective office.

Pell declared his candidacy in April 1960 with newspaper ads urging voters to "Think Well. Think Pell." A full-page ad in The Providence Evening Bulletin gave his biography, noting his wartime duty -- "he started out as a ship's cook and rose through the ranks to lieutenant" -- his Foreign Service experiences, his support of Newport's Touro Synagogue, and his family's membership in Trinity Episcopal Church. The ad revealed that the Pells spoke French and Italian -- and also that Claiborne was a "forward-thinking Democrat" who had "worked closely" with the AFL/CIO and been an alternate delegate to the 1956 National Democratic Convention.

With Nuala helping on the campaign, Pell won. It was the beginning of a political career without parallel in Rhode Island history.

"The Pell Record," a pamphlet of accomplishments published in 1990, when the senator ran for reelection the final time, numbers 53 pages; a 1994 update adds 13 pages more. Legislation that he wrote or supported concerned economic development (four pages), energy (four pages), veterans (two pages), women's issues (four pages), oceans and fishing (two pages), crime and drugs (two pages), transportation (two pages), and health care (four pages).

Pell was instrumental in the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he championed the cause of high-speed rail service, especially in the Northeast (he always traveled to and from Washington by train).

His postwar experiences served him well: from his seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, he played an influential role in arms control, human rights, and protection of the global environment, among other international issues.

One of Nuala's scrapbooks from their early years in Washington has several photographs of the Pells at parties and on a yacht with President and Jacqueline Kennedy, who spent much of her childhood in Newport and was married there. Several of the Pells' Christmas cards show the family by the fireplace at Pelican Ledge, their Newport house, which Nuala labeled "the Homestead." And there are photographs of the Pells in Burma, Thailand and India.

What other countries have they visited in their 60 years together?

"Oh, God," Nuala says. She names some two dozen nations on every continent but Antarctica. But she knows she has left many out. "Where else have we been, Claiborne?" she says.

"Liechtenstein."

"Liechtenstein, yes. We spent a lot of time in Liechtenstein."

Which Senate achievement ranks highest on Pell's list?

A finger on his right hand begins to twitch, as it does when he concentrates, and he looks slowly around the room. Thirty seconds pass without him speaking.

"Banning nuclear weapons on the floor of the sea?" Nuala says. "The Pell grants?"

Claiborne clears his throat and whispers: "I think the Pell grants."

* * *

PARKINSON'S arrived with a soft touch.

"What were the first symptoms, Claiborne?" Nuala says.

He doesn't answer.

"I think a couple of people in the office noticed that he was sort of slowing down," Nuala says. And he was walking stooped. It was 1994, and Pell was 75. Perhaps it was his age.

"I remember on our wedding anniversary in 1994, which was our 50th. We had a dinner party here, and I was sitting next to [then-Gov.] Bruce Sundlun, and he said: 'Nuala, you have to do something. Claiborne's obviously got something wrong with him. He has trouble speaking, his voice is going. Get him to a doctor.' "

Soon afterward, a Georgetown University Hospital neurologist made the diagnosis of Parkinson's, an incurable disease of the central nervous system. "He has a peculiar kind," Nuala says. "He doesn't have the shaky kind; he has the kind that gets you all stiff and makes it difficult to talk and swallow."

At first, Pell refused to accept his illness. "I still resist it," he said in April 1995, in The Journal story that broke the news.

Gradually, though, the reality became inescapable.

"It was very slow," Nuala says. "At first, he couldn't tie his tie -- so Bertie, our oldest son, got all his ties and tied them for him -- looped them so he could get them over his head. It was wonderful."

With the help of staff, Pell still occasionally gets out: for doctors' visits, and to attend lectures and political and educational fundraisers. He likes the movies.

"I did take him to see Hotel Rwanda the other day -- it's a wonderful movie. And he thought it was wonderful, too. But we have to go to movies that are on the ground floor that we can get the wheelchair in."

Mostly now, though, Claiborne's world is his home.

* * *

TO REACH the Pells', you travel most of Bellevue Avenue and turn left onto a street that delivers you to a narrow, bumpy road.

One branch leads to The Waves, the mansion built by the eminent architect John Russell Pope -- and owned by Nuala's mother for a decade or so in the mid-20th century. The other branch takes you to Pelican Ledge, as the Pell residence is known in the Green Book, the private guide to the Newport elite.

Pelican Ledge is built of wood, with weathered shingle siding, white trim, and Swiss-blue shutters. Ramps have been built over the slate stairs so that Claiborne can be wheeled out to his car, a 1997 Mercury Sable, and lifted into the front seat on those occasions he leaves home. The Pells have bird feeders and birdbaths -- one with a heater to keep it ice-free.

"We have cardinals, we have ducks, we have a lady coyote who is in love with the German shepherd next door -- she thinks he's a coyote," Nuala says.

Rusted iron pelicans serve as lawn decorations. A pelican is on the Pell coat of arms, but Nuala is not particularly impressed. "There are pelicans in all our cars, there are pelicans all over the place. I've had enough of them! So has my daughter-in-law -- she won't have one in the house." Nuala laughs. She has always indulged her husband's little obsession with his English ancestry.

When Nuala's mother sold The Waves, in 1952, she divided an acre off the estate and gave it to her daughter and son-in-law. Through all their travels and all their years in Washington, the house they built 53 years ago on that acre has remained home. It is where the extended Pell family has summered, spent holidays, and celebrated the milestones in their lives.

Now, Claiborne's days begin at 7 or 8, when an attendant dresses him and helps with breakfast. He usually naps the rest of the morning, in his chair by the fireplace, while Nuala runs errands or goes to the gym. He returns to the table for lunch, and then seeks the comfort again of his chair.

"The afternoon can be boring," Nuala says. "We read the papers to him, and if we don't go out, we have dinner here, too. If there's anything interesting on television, we watch it."

Christopher T.H. Pell, N. Dallas Pell, and Julia L. Pell, three of Claiborne's and Nuala's four children, are frequent visitors to Pelican Ledge -- as are the Pells' five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. A fourth is due in June. "I'm thrilled!" Nuala says. "It's going to be a girl."

Photos of the Pells' firstborn, Herbert C. Pell III -- Bertie -- as a baby fill pages of one of Nuala's scrapbooks. One shows Nuala in the fall of 1945 with her "first lesson in diaper pinning." Others show Claiborne cradling his son. Baby Bertie's first passport photo is there, too.

In 1999, Bertie died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a type of cancer, at age 54.

Nuala remembers a letter that Jackie Onassis wrote to them after she was diagnosed with the disease. "She said: 'What is this disease that both Bertie and I have?' [Jackie] got it later than Bertie, and she died so quickly."

Diagnosed in 1993, Bertie was in remission for three years, and then the cancer returned. "He'd gone to the boat show, if you can believe this, two or three days before he died, and bought a boat. He was the optimist of all time. Then he caught a cold in his good lung, and his other lung had been radiated to pieces, so there was no way that he could survive."

* * *

WHILE NUALA was in Washington, she served on several political committees. She worked on all of her husband's campaigns. She served on the board of Roger Williams University, Newport's Redwood Library and the John A. Hartford Foundation, a family charity that champions health care. She is currently on the board of Salve Regina University. And she has other civic interests, including preservation, cancer prevention, and the Newport International Film Festival.

She also runs the household, as she has since Albert Einstein taught her the intricacies of a checkbook. Her office is in the front of the house: it's a small, cozy room, with rust-colored curtains and many photographs and paintings. Her desk is piled with papers and bills. She uses a laptop computer, although not as deftly as she'd like. "I'm going to have to take a course, I think, because it takes forever," she says.

Nuala's bedroom is past the front hall, where she's hung the only painting done of the Pells when Claiborne was a senator. Nuala's room is predominantly blue, with an exposed beam ceiling and grand views of the open Atlantic. A pillow embroidered "Happiness is being married to your best friend" lies on a chair. A life-size painting of Nuala's mother, Nuala's brother and Nuala when she was a young teenager occupies the space behind her bed.

"It's interesting because Mother is holding a portrait of the painter and I'm holding a scrapbook which is open at a photograph of the painting," she says. "Now come follow me."

We walk to the eastern-most end of the house, the end facing The Waves, into a room filled with tools and brushes and buckets of yellow paint.

"This was Claiborne's office, which, when he was elected to the Senate, we added on. Everything was blue and white in here, and there were bookcases and everything. But obviously he can't use any of it anymore, so it's all gone to [Salve Regina's] Pell Center or URI."

The workers have added new bookcases, and Nuala plans to outfit the room with a queen-size sofa bed and an 18th-century clock and black furniture that was in their Georgetown house during the Pells' Washington days. "This is a spectacular room in the summer," she says. "I'm going to call it a garden room."

Nuala expects that her husband will spend hours in it, and also on the terrace that the workers have built outside the sliding glass doors.

"I've added this little terrace because the wind doesn't hit here the way it does the other terrace. I think it's going to be lovely for Claiborne because he'll be able to get outside with a little ramp here, and we have two wonderful chairs that he can sit in."

But Claiborne has not seen the terrace or his redone office yet, although he knows construction is under way.

"I thought I'd wait until it's done because otherwise he might be too upset with the loss of his office completely," Nuala says.

* * *

ON YET another visit to Pelican Ledge, the sky is clear but for a few high clouds. The sea is deep blue and whitecapped. Sun floods the southern windows, catching Claiborne and Nuala at their table.

Nuala remains a beautiful woman, with fair skin and chin-length white hair that she keeps straight. "I tried to streak it when it started to go gray," she says, "but I was never able to get the same colors so I gave up." But like pearls, white hair becomes her.

Claiborne's hair is thinner than a decade ago, but his face retains its patrician lines. He wears a sweater over an Oxford button-down shirt this day, though no tie. He is freshly shaved. Behind his glasses, his eyes have an unmistakable intensity. At this moment, he doesn't look radically different from when he left public office almost 10 years ago.

"It's so maddening," Nuala says. At this moment, it's easy to imagine Pell addressing a favorite issue back on the Senate floor.

"Parkinson's can sink you into deep depression," Nuala says. "But not Claiborne. He's been very accepting, which is amazing to me."

Claiborne attempts to speak, but no words come out.

"Are you trying to say something?"

Claiborne doesn't answer.

Nuala says that while her husband does not bemoan his condition, he is not reticent, either.

"Claiborne is extremely strong-minded, as all the people who look after him who've been with us for some time have found: if he doesn't want to do something, he doesn't do it. And I notice, Claiborne, that when you get mad, you can yell at somebody. Oh, yes: if he needs something and nobody's paying attention, you'll hear about it. But he's [generally] very uncomplaining."

She's accepting.

"We've had a remarkable life, really. I must say I was looking forward to even more trips after we got out of the Senate and doing a lot of things, but be that as it may; it doesn't matter. We're really lucky because all our children live around here, or basically around here, and most of our grandchildren, too. We have a lot of family around."

The sun warms Nuala's hands, and I notice her wedding ring, a thin gold band that her husband placed on her finger in a New York church so long ago. Claiborne is not wearing his: he was never big on jewelry, and for more than 60 years, Nuala has kept his ring in her jewelry box.

"He said he'd be willing to wear it now," Nuala says.

She takes her husband's hand and holds it gently.

"But I wouldn't do that to your fingers. They're all curled up."

#33Stories: Day 22, "The Glamour Girls," a screenplay

#33Stories
No. 22: “The Glamour Girls,” a screenplay
Context at the end of this synopsis.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

My research for The Providence Journal series “A Nearly Perfect Summer,” which became the documentary “Behind the Hedgerow,” brought me deeply into the story of Eleanor Young, a close friend and fellow debutante of Eileen Slocum in the pre-war 1930s and early ‘40s.

Eleanor Young, in her late teens.Eleanor and Eileen were part of The Glamor Girls, a generation of wealthy young women who summered in Newport, Rhode Island, mansions and became celebrities on the newspaper and magazine society pages (today they would have been featured on Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood).

To my knowledge, no one had ever written the story of Eleanor Young, nicknamed “Cookie.” I have included a more detailed synopsis in the context section below, but here’s the quick summary taken from the Journal series: “With her long black hair, dark eyes, and creamy skin, Cookie was stunning truly the most alluring Glamour Girl of all. Except for the color of her hair, she brings to mind the early Marilyn Monroe.”


Eleanor was unlucky in love, and her marriage at an early age to a drunk and womanizer, "Bunty" Bacon, ended in divorce after Eleanor miscarried their child.

Eleanor and "Bunty" Bacon.And then Eleanor one foggy day decided to take a ride in an airplane that flew over Newport’s Bailey’s Beach club, still the elite enclave for the Bellevue Avenue set. She was cradling her Yorkshire terrier and her new suitor, Nicky Embiricos, heir to a shipping fortune, was at the controls.

Eleanor and Nicky Embiricos.But Embiricos had precious little air time, and bad judgment: It was a foggy day, and his Fairchild Model 24 monoplane had only basic instrumentation.

From the series: “Eleanor and her dog were thrown from the plane. Lifeguards pulled Nicky from the wreckage; they detected a faint pulse, but he died there on the beach. Unconscious but breathing, Eleanor died an hour later at South County Hospital of a fractured skull, broken bones, and multiple internal injuries. The body of her dog was later found washed up on shore.”


An only child, Eleanors death devastated her parents, the millionaire Robert R. and Anita O’Keeffe Young. Robert never recovered: prone to depression all his life, he sat down in the billiards room of his vast Palm Beach estate on the morning of Jan. 25, 1958, put the tip of a double-barrel shotgun in his mouth, and pulled both triggers. Anita died of natural causes in 1985 at the age of 93, leaving an estate that included her $25-million, 35,000-square-foot Palm Beach residence. Eleanor, Robert and Anita lie together in a cemetery near Newport, in an underground reinforced-concrete crypt that Robert bought to shield his daughter from the elements. I ended “A Nearly Perfect Summer” with a visit, see below...

And in one of those strange ironies life delivers now and again, I am director of the Story in the Public Square program and visiting fellow at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center, which is housed in the Young Building, named for Anita and Robert, Salve benefactors.

ANYWAY, I thought that Eleanor and The Glamour Girls could be the basis for a movie, provided a bit of poetic license was employed to get beneath the surface into what Eleanor was really all about. But I was preoccupied with too many other projects, and decided to see if I could find a screenwriting collaborator – and I did, through a recommendation by a professor at the University of California Riverside’s Department of Theatre, Film and Digital Production.
He recommended a recent graduate, Jessi Sundell Cramer, who lived then in Wyoming. Jessi graciously worked with me for many months, doing most of the heavy lifting, in writing “The Glamour Girls” screenplay. Never produced, alas – do you detect a common thread here? – yes, the heartbreak of Hollywood – but it has stood the test of time, methinks.

Herewith, an excerpt:

INT. ELEANOR’S BEDROOM - NIGHT
Eleanor’s bedroom is a luxurious affair, mounds of pillows on the bed and ornate drapes on the windows.  Eleanor is curled in an overstuffed chair reading.  A KNOCK on the door, Eleanor doesn’t look up.

ELEANOR
Yes?

ANITA (O.S.)
It’s your mother.

ELEANOR
Come in.

Eleanor lays her book aside as the door opens and Anita and Robert come in.  Anita sits on the bed, moving some of the pillows aside.  Robert remains standing.

ELEANOR
What’s wrong?

ANITA
Nothing.  Your father and I have been talking about your future.

ROBERT
Because you’re obviously not interested in it
.
ANITA
(to Robert) Robert. (to Eleanor) We’re sending you to Paris.

ELEANOR
Alone?

ANITA
Jane, Aeriel and Boop are going as well.

Eleanor jumps up and hugs her father, who looks startled then hugs her back.

ELEANOR
How wonderful!

ROBERT
This isn’t a lark, Eleanor.

Eleanor sits down beside her mother, still excited.

ANITA
You can’t just go out dancing all the time.  There are museums and libraries and art galleries and all kinds of cultural--

ELEANOR
--Sure we’ll go to museums and all that.

ROBERT
You’ll be meeting young men.  Keep an eye out for prospects.

Eleanor SIGHS and looks to her mother for support.  Anita nod in agreement with Robert and Eleanor SIGHS again.

ELEANOR
Of course.  I’ll keep an eye out.

EXT. YOUNG ESTATE - MORNING
The big black car is parked in front of the house. The CHAUFFEUR loads Eleanor’s collection of matching luggage into the trunk.  He looks up as Eleanor comes out of the house in a matching traveling suit.  She waves to the chauffeur and then hurries off around the house. Anita and Robert come out of the house and look around.

ANITA
Eleanor?

EXT.  O’CALLAHAN COTTAGE - MORNING
Eleanor KNOCKS urgently on the door to the cottage, then KNOCKS again.  Mid-knock, the door opens and Patrick comes out, holding the kite.

PATRICK
I hoped you’d be back.

ELEANOR
I’ve come to say goodbye.

Patrick sets the kite down, leaning it against the house.

ELEANOR
My parents are sending me to Europe.

PATRICK
And I’m back to school in two weeks.  No more kites this summer.

A shy silence.  Eleanor studies Patrick, who won’t look directly at her.

ELEANOR
It’s the strangest thing, but I just couldn’t leave without telling you.

PATRICK
I hope you have a great time.  Just be careful of those fancy Europeans.

Patrick smiles finally, and Eleanor LAUGHS.

ELEANOR
And you be careful of those fancy college women.

Patrick LAUGHS and shakes Eleanor’s hand.

PATRICK

Send me a postcard.

EXT. SS NORMANDIE - AFTERNOON The deck of the luxurious French Line ocean liner SS Normandie.  She cuts through the waves with stately presence as PASSENGERS stroll the decks.

INT. SS NORMANDIE - EVENING A first class cabin, elegant and over-done.  Eleanor sits at a carved desk writing a postcard.  The inscription reads: “Dear Patrick, What a ship!  Unoriginal, I know but goodness what a ship!”

JANE (O.S.) Who’s Patrick?

...

Context:

From “A Nearly Perfect Summer”

I steer Boop toward Eleanor Young, fellow Glamour Girl.

"She was very beautiful," Boop says. "Long, long dark hair."

Like all of the Glamour Girls, Eleanor appealed to men and men desired her. And like her friends, Eleanor aspired not to college or career but to romance and marriage, so after a year in a Paris finishing school she returned to Newport for her debut, in 1936. The teenaged Eleanor dated, but failing to find the right match in Newport, New York, or Palm Beach, she embarked on a nearly year-long world cruise. And voilà in the summer of 1938, Eleanor met a wealthy Englishman in France.

"He has been so far a confirmed bachelor but I am hoping that he may weaken," Eleanor wrote to her parents. Less than three weeks later, the Englishman indeed weakened, and Eleanor accepted his proposal of marriage. Alas, he was insincere: Eleanor returned to America, planning her wedding, but the Englishman failed to join her.

"The so and so hasn't even written me," Eleanor wrote to her mother when almost a month passed without word.

But Eleanor did not lack for suitors. Twenty years old, she had become a society-page fixture regularly photographed outside Bailey's in Newport, and inside such ritzy establishments as New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Friends called her Cookie, a '30s' term for a vixen.

"She's a 'Glamour Girl' who is still surprised by it all, the only child of doting parents [whose] every wish is fulfilled in an Aladdin-like manner," one newspaper declared in November 1938. "Won't get her to take 'showers,' but when she bathes in the tub, Cleopatra in all her glory wasn't more luxurious . . . expects to be waited on and has a personal maid to attend to her comfort."

And this is when the no-good Robert Ogden Bacon Jr. arrived on scene.

Son of a steamship company executive who lived in New York's Plaza Hotel and rented a summer place in Newport, Bunty Bacon bore a passing resemblance to a later movie star, Christopher Reeve. But Bunty was more than tall, tanned, and ruggedly handsome he knew how to charm the ladies.

"Very, very sexy," Betty Boop tells me, "a very sexy and attractive man. And that's all he had."

Bunty was divorced from one of Eileen Slocum's friends when Cookie fell for him, shortly before Christmas of 1938.

Robert and Anita Young strongly disapproved of their only child's choice: Bunty had a young child from his first wife, another child he'd fathered with her had died under mysterious circumstances, and he drank to excess.

"Really bad news," says Boop.

But Eleanor wanted him.

After vacationing with Bunty in Jamaica, she secretly married him, on April 5, 1939, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Soon, she was pregnant.

One day while visiting Eileen Slocum, I ask her about Glamour Girl Eleanor Young, and Eleanor's husband, Bunty Bacon.

"The most awful man," Eileen says. "He had a lot of people fooled he was a Hector type, I can tell you, an American Hector type. He was a great big bronze fellow who used to play tennis every day."
Bunty eloped with Eleanor Young after divorcing Eileen Slocum's friend Agnes Pyne, who in turn soon married John R. "Jock" McLean, whose mother owned the fabulous 45.5-carat Hope Diamond; that marriage eventually ended, too, and Jock subsequently became Betty Boop's third husband.

"They married and intermarried so fast those days that I can hardly remember the sequence," says Eileen.

Eleanor was soon with child after she and Bunty eloped in April 1939, but the pregnancy was difficult and Eleanor's health suffered. She was supposed to be the maid of honor at Aeriel Frazer's wedding in Newport that July, but she was too ill; not knowing the underlying cause of her sickness, the society-page writers depicted her absence from the wedding of the year as a mysterious twist in an otherwise enchanting fairy tale.

"And then the story picks up dismally in the hospital in New York," says Eileen. "My friend Hildie van Royen was having a baby in one room and in the next room was Eleanor Young having a miscarriage.... And Mrs. Young was out in the hall and she was just so unhappy about her daughter."
Losing their grandchild was the last straw for Robert and Anita Young: Bunty was sent packing, and Eleanor was discharged from the hospital to the protection of her parents in Manhattan, where Eleanor and Eileen had both grown up.

"One whole summer she convalesced in the front drawing room with her mother playing backgammon she was white as a ghost," Eileen remembers. "The following winter, one day when I was having tea in New York with Eleanor . . . I said, 'Why did you marry him?' She shuffled out these photographs of Bunty skiing and so on and she said: 'I loved that man.'"

By late 1939, the most glamorous of the Glamour Girls felt well enough for a vacation in Sun Valley, Idaho, where, just before Christmas, she divorced Bunty and reclaimed her maiden name; Bunty meanwhile took up with another woman in Palm Beach and soon announced their engagement. Eleanor spent the winter at the Sun Valley Lodge skiing, shooting skeet, receiving massages, swimming, entertaining, and being entertained. Mostly she had a blast, as she informs her parents in her letters which I find at Yale University's archives in the dusty boxes that comprise the Robert Ralph Young papers.

But Eleanor had her down moments, including after a certain dinner party she hosted. "Everyone said they had fun, but I didn't really have a wonderful time," she wrote. "I seated the damn thing all wrong which made me furious and I have been in a bad humor ever since."

And for the moment, at least, Cupid had fled. "I have no interest in the men I see around," Eleanor wrote to her parents. "There is absolutely no one who appeals at all, so you poor dears will have me on your hands indefinitely, I am afraid."

Eleanor spent the summer of 1940 in Newport, returning to Sun Valley for that next winter, when the world slid toward war.

Romance continued to elude Cookie, as friends called her, and she welcomed the offer of a male acquaintance who claimed to be skilled in matchmaking. "He says that I am so attractive that I can get anyone I want," Eleanor wrote the morning of March 3, 1941. "He got me just at the right moment when I was getting ready to settle for almost anything. Now I am again holding out for something sensational."

That very evening, a young man named Nicky Embiricos arrived at Sun Valley Lodge. "He is very nice and amusing," Eleanor wrote. "He was gambling last night, and when I went up to the table he asked me what number I wanted to play. I said '31' and up it came. Not bad."

Feeling luck was with her this time, Eleanor fell for Nicky, son of a Greek shipping family who was separated from his wife and young child. Handsome and rich, Nicky owned a spiffy three-seat monoplane that became the talk of the town when he showed up in Newport with his beautiful new sweetheart in the spring of 1941. Nicky was clearly the adventurous type, but he'd logged precious few hours in the air.


A photograph of Eleanor Young walking into Bailey's appeared in the society pages of The Providence Sunday Journal of June 29, 1941, and an article trumpeted Newport's plans for the Fourth of July: "Following a series of dinners and lunches, the day will be rounded out with another dance, a subscription affair to be given in the ballroom at Bailey's Beach for which a New York orchestra is being brought to furnish the music." The orchestra was the same that played Hungarian Gypsy music at Eleanor's $75,000 debut.

War consumed the front page of The Providence Journal two days later, on the morning of July 1. Nazi tanks were advancing toward Moscow, and America was considering sending U.S. ships to aid the British in the battle of the North Atlantic. Soon, America would be engulfed in global conflict.

History does not record whether Eleanor read these headlines, or cared; she was crazy for her new beau Nicky Embiricos and believed they were destined to marry, just as soon as his divorce from the wife he'd left with his young child in Palm Beach was final. On the morning of July 1, Eleanor left her parents' summer estate and drove with Nicky, a weekend houseguest, to the Newport airport. Nicky kept his Fairchild Model 24 monoplane there.

I have seen this plane a photograph of it with Nicky, Eleanor and her beloved Yorkshire terrier posed in front is preserved in the Robert R. Young papers at the Yale University archives. Sharp-nosed and sleek, with a dark fuselage and light-colored wings, the plane sold for more than $6,000 new, a sum no ordinary person could have afforded.

I have found additional photos of Eleanor in those dusty boxes at Yale, too glossy 8-by-10 shots that surpass any newspaper microfilm. With her long black hair, dark eyes, and creamy skin, Cookie was stunning truly the most alluring Glamour Girl of all. Except for the color of her hair, she brings to mind the early Marilyn Monroe.

Heavy fog rolled in off the ocean that long-ago morning for the second day in a row.

Eleanor and her beau intended to visit friends in New York, and unlike yesterday, when they'd canceled their flight due to the weather, today they would not be deterred. With Nicky at the controls, they lifted off shortly before noon. A new pilot, Nicky had just 136 hours in the air, and his plane was equipped with only basic instrumentation.

Jane Ridgway was at Bailey's Beach when she heard the engine.

"The plane came over," she says, "and we were sitting in the cabana and it dipped its wings we gathered it must be Eleanor. He dipped his wings and off he went into the horizon."
Moments later, when the ceiling had dropped to 100 feet or less, Nicky became disoriented. They were off Matunuck now, and people on the beach below heard but could not see the plane madly circling.

Suddenly, the Fairchild burst through the fog.

It plummeted, zoomed back up, flipped, then hurtled down again, hitting the ocean with enough force to knock both wings off.

Eleanor and her dog were thrown from the plane. Lifeguards pulled Nicky from the wreckage; they detected a faint pulse, but he died there on the beach. Unconscious but breathing, Eleanor died an hour later at South County Hospital of a fractured skull, broken bones, and multiple internal injuries. The body of her dog was later found washed up on shore.

It was July 1, 1941, three days before the official start of the summer season.

Not long after, on the very last day of summer, a damp and dreary day that pulls the first leaves from the trees, I drive from Newport to Portsmouth. I turn off at St. Mary's Episcopal Church.

Eleanor Young's funeral was here, almost 60 years ago, and she is buried in the graveyard beyond.

It was the afternoon of July 3, 1941. Packards and Dusenbergs with chauffeurs discharged their grieving passengers, and then the hearse carrying Cookie's poor broken body arrived. Fourth of July festivities at Bailey's had been canceled by vote of the governors, and Newport society, Eleanor's fellow Glamour Girls included, filled every pew.

The organist played "Ave Maria" and the priest greeted the polished mahogany coffin with words from The Book of Common Prayer: "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. . . ."

From the church, I walk to the Young family plot, in a secluded corner of this quiet tree-filled graveyard. Robert R. Young is buried here: never fully recovered from the death of his only child, Young, prone to depression all his life, sat down in the billiards room of his vast Palm Beach estate on the morning of Jan. 25, 1958, put the tip of a double-barrel shotgun in his mouth, and pulled both triggers. His widow, Eleanor's mother, Anita Young, joins him here: she died, alone, of natural causes in 1985 at the age of 93, leaving an estate that included her $25-million, 35,000-square-foot Palm Beach residence.

And of course, Eleanor, the first to die, lies here with her parents in an underground reinforced-concrete crypt that Robert bought to shield his daughter from the elements. An enormous white stone guards the entrance to the crypt, and the names of the three Youngs are engraved on its border. To further protect Eleanor, Robert bought the land surrounding the graveyard, deeding it to St. Mary's with the stipulation it never be developed.

Lost in thought, I stand by the grave. Wind rustles the leaves and a boy who never knew these people existed skateboards by. I contemplate Eleanor Young's life, which passed quickly, leaving nothing more substantial than memories; I think of a Newport summer, so strikingly similar.

I reflect on my journey through Newport society, of how I sought to discern its soul.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them." For most, it creates a comfortable illusion: a world where surfaces predominate, and money buys almost everything.

I run my fingers along Eleanor's cold tombstone. Leaving, I am grateful for the warmth of my old car and my return to an imperfect world.

#33Stories: Day 21, "The War on Terror: Coming Home," a documentary movie

#33Stories
No. 21: “The War on Terror: Coming Home,” a documentary movie
Context at the end of this synopsis.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

Released in 2011 by The Providence Journal


The first and only feature-length movie The Providence Journal ever made, “The War on Terror: Coming Home” grew from an eight-part series I wrote in 2011 marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and the start of the war in Afghanistan, which was later broadened into Iraq. It chronicles the return to civilian life of Army veteran Derek Pelletier and National Guard veterans John DiRaimo, Brian Santos and Sean Judge.

I wrote the script and produced “Coming Home”; it was photographed by John Freidah and edited by Cecilia Prestamo, both formerly with The Journal; and Bob Kerr, a Vietnam veteran and former Journal columnist, narrated. The documentary won a 2012 Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association and was nominated as outstanding documentary in the 35th annual New England Emmy Awards. It was broadcast on PBS and shown at selective screenings.

WATCH “Coming Home”

IMDB listing, for full cast and crew


John DiRaimo, in Iraq.
John DiRaimo, home.Context:

From IMDB.

In the decade since the attacks on Sept. 11th, 2001, more than 6000 American lives have been lost in the War on Terror. Thousands more have returned with psychological damage - forever changed. Leading up to the ten-year anniversary of the War on Terror, The Providence Journal launched an effort to examine the war's impact on veterans and their families. The result was an eight-part series, which ran in the paper and on the web from Oct. 2, 2011, to Nov. 7, 2011, and culminated in a feature-length video documentary about four veterans.

These veterans share stories of their combat experiences and the lives they have led since returning to a civilian world, far removed from the battlefield. Their experiences and the insight of health-care professionals illustrate the human toll of a war fought by a tiny fraction of Americans serving in an all-volunteer military. On Dec.18, the last American combat troops left Iraq, but some 91,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan. The war on terror continues. So, too, do the needs of veterans -- and they are growing. Projections show that by the year 2020, nearly 1.5 million veterans of the war will be enrolled in the nationwide VA health-care system, more than double those enrolled in 2011.

In "The War on Terror: Coming Home," Army veteran Derek Pelletier and National Guard veterans John DiRaimo, Brian Santos and Sean Judge describe the difficulties of reentry into civilian life. Massachusetts native Pelletier, twice honored with the Bronze Star, continues to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. DiRaimo, of Rhode Island, has found help from the Providence VA Medical Center. And Judge and Santos, who served together, have followed two different paths.

It is their voices and personal stories that bring home the aftermath of war, to a public largely removed from the price of a nation at war.

#33Stories: Day 20, "Behind the Hedgerow," a documentary movie.

#33Stories
No. 20: “Behind the Hedgerow: Eileen Slocum and the Meaning of Newport Society,” a documentary movie
Context at the end of this synopsis.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

Released in 2010 by Eagle Peak Media

“On the Lake” was not finished when I began writing and pre-producing “Behind the Hedgerow: Eileen Slocum and the Meaning of Newport Society,” released in 2010. Except for my print journalism at The Providence Journal and research for my 2011 biography of Claiborne Pell, “An Uncommon Man” (coming on day 23), I was focused on films during this period. And with the projo expanding its video offerings, I jumped on that bandwagon, too.

With a major festival showing, a long theatrical run, a PBS broadcast, strong DVD sales and 799,442 YouTube views as of this writing, “Behind the Hedgerow” proved popular. It captured the last grand dame of Newport’s Gilded Age society, that long-gone Bellevue Avenue world of Vanderbilts and Astors -- of outsize, ornate mansions such as Eileen’s, where we shot on-location many days -- and I think that was the appeal.

The documentary grew out of my 2000 Providence Journal series, “A Nearly Perfect Society: Travels Through Old-Money Newport,” based on the months in 1999 that I was embedded on Bellevue Avenue. Honestly. How I managed to worm my way in is a story in itself…

Eileen Slocum, the last grand dame.
WATCH the trailer

WATCH the full movie 

WEB SITE

FACEBOOK PAGE

IMDB listing, for full cast and crew

WATCH one of my recent projo videos, about Michael Flynn.

SUBSCRIBE to my YouTube channel.

Context: 

BEHIND THE HEDGEROW takes viewers inside the private world of aristocratic Newport, Rhode Island –– a world of privilege that began with the Gilded Age, when Vanderbilts and Astors reigned. The story is told through the focus of Eileen Gillespie Slocum, descendant of Browns (as in Brown University) and friend to all of the 20th century Newport (and New York and Philadelphia) elite. When Slocum died on July 27, 2008, at the age of 92, a storied period of American history ended, as The New York Times noted in her obituary. Slocum was the last of the Newport grand dames –– and one of the last grand dames anywhere. She left no successor. America had changed, and so had the world; a new moneyed class now ruled, though the descendants of the Gilded Age elite (many of them on-camera in this film, the first time ever) continue to live on and near Bellevue Avenue, Newport, still one of America's most exclusive addresses...

This is an exclusive, inside look at a vanishing society, placed in historical context and providing a deeper understanding of what F. Scott Fitzgerald meant when he observed: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”

Because of Eileen Slocum’s stature, her relationships with virtually everyone in the world of old money, her long life, and her intelligence and candor, BEHIND THE HEDEGEROW is uniquely positioned to entertain, inform and, in certain passages, amuse audiences.

 The audience filled Providence's Veterans Memorial Auditorium on Aug. 10, 2010, at the film's world premiere, the opening-night featured presentation of the 2010 Rhode Island International Film Festival, and people were turned away Aug. 14 at the sellout Newport premiere of HEDGEROW. A month-long run at Newport's historic Jane Pickens Theater followed.

And Hedgerow has earned rave reviews from critics, including four stars from The Providence Journal.

Slocum inherited her wealth from a banker father and a mother who was descended from Nicholas Brown, whose philanthropy led officials in 1804 to change the name of the College of Rhode Island to Brown University. Slocum was opinionated. She was kind and generous to family and friends -- and could be a harsh employer. She belonged to all of the exclusive clubs. She was a friend of royalty, presidents, senators, governors, billionaires, bankers, America’s Cup sailors, writers, musicians, artists, curators, debutantes, fellow heirs and heiresses, Doris Duke, and Sunny and Claus von Bulow. She was known for her elegance, wit, teasing ways and conservative politics, especially her anti-abortion views –– and the lavish dinner parties, receptions and balls that she hosted for more than half a century at her 459 Bellevue Avenue estate, whose interiors were designed by Ogden Codman Jr., with landscaping by Frederick Law Olmstead. An invitation to an Eileen Slocum party was coveted, and could not be refused (or bought).

Director David Bettencourt and producer/writer G. Wayne Miller bring this story to the screen through the use of rare footage and still photographs from a multitude of sources, through filming of key Newport Society events during the summer of 2009 (such as Coaching Weekend) and through the on-camera interviews of people in Eileen Slocum’s set and Slocum’s family. The filmmakers utilize Slocum’s extensive personal archive of photographs, books, belongings and papers –– notably the diaries she began keeping at the age of nine as she was growing up in an eight-story mansion at the corner of New York’s 89TH Street and Fifth Avenue. She continued to write these diaries into the 1990s. They are an intimate and never-before-seen account of life behind the hedgerow.

The filmmakers enjoyed exclusive access to Slocum’s archives -- and to her Bellevue Avenue mansion, where much of the film was shot -- through an agreement they reached with Slocum’s children: Jerry Slocum, Margy Slocum Quinn and Beryl Slocum Powell. Under this same agreement, Miller and Bettencourt also enjoyed access to the archives of Slocum’s late husband, John Jermain Slocum. A diplomat, Harvard classmate and friend of David Rockefeller, and bibliophile, John Slocum gathered the world’s foremost James Joyce collection, which now resides in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. A noted patron of the arts until his death in 1997, Slocum and his wife counted Henry Miller, Eudora Welty and Gertude Stein among his friends.

While Eileen Slocum is the protagonist of the story, BEHIND THE HEDGEROW has an intriguing supporting cast, including such prominent Newporters as Hugh D. Auchincloss III, known as Yusha, and Betty "Boop" Blake, a noted art collector who winters in Texas. Both Yusha and Boop were lifelong friends of Eileen. Both appear for the first time ever in a film.

The narrator of the film was Eileen Slocum herself. Through a newspaper series he wrote about Newport society, Miller, a longtime staff writer at The Providence Journal, became a confidante of Slocum. During their long relationship, he spent hours recording Slocum as she discussed her life, her world, and her beliefs. These tapes, donated to Newport’s historic Redwood Library and Athenaeum, were digitized and the sound quality was enhanced for the documentary.

The movie is completed with an original score composed and conducted by Ben Mesiti and Lonnie Montaquila, the same talented musicians of ON THE LAKE: Life and Love in a Distant Place, which premiered in February 2009, has been shown on PBS affiliates coast to coast, and was nominated for a New England Emmy. Talented editor Harry Cawthorn was also back to help make BEHIND THE HEDGEROW.

BEHIND THE HEDGEROW had its Providence, Rhode Island, premiere on August 10, 2010, at Veterans Memorial Auditorium, as the opening-night feature presentation of the Rhode Island International Film festival. The Newport premiere was August 14, 2010. Gala parties followed both screenings. PBS broadcast followed.

#33Stories, Day 19, "On the Lake," a documentary movie

#33Stories
No. 19: “On the Lake: Life and Love in a Distant Place,” a documentary movie
Context at the end of this excerpt.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

Released in 2009 by Eagle Peak Media


From scripts written but not produced to one I wrote that actually was: that is the backstory to “On the Lake: Life and Love in a Distant Place,” the first documentary I wrote and co-produced.

The film grew out of my long friendship with the late Frank Beazley, a patient for decades after a devastating accident at the state-run Zambarano Hospital in rural Rhode Island. My 12-part 2006 Providence Journal series about Frank, “The Growing Season,” remains my favorite newspaper series (it has competition!). You can read that HERE.

"On the Lake" movie premiered on February 13, 2009, to a sellout crowd at the Stadium art theater in Woonsocket, R.I., and was subsequently shown at festivals and broadcast on PBS. It was nominated for a New England Emmy.




A DVD was sold and “On the Lake” earned my first listing on IMDB. Full cast and crew there.

WATCH “On the Lake” on YouTube

Context:

ON THE LAKE: Life and Love in a Distant Place, a film by David Bettencourt and G. Wayne Miller, tells the true story of the tuberculosis epidemic in 1900s America and globally today through the lives of those that were infected and who died –– but also of those who survived. More than scientific facts and figures, ON THE LAKE touches that rare emotional cord of what life was like for millions of people infected with TB, while providing a glimpse into human nature when faced with a large-scale epidemic.

Through powerful storytelling, ON THE LAKE shines new light on a major period in our collective history that has been forgotten –– and a disease that many today think is “dead,” but is in fact the number-two infectious killer globally (after HIV/AIDS).

The feature documentary opens with America in the early 1900s –– the free-spirited era of Marconi, Edison and the Wright Brothers. But there is a dark side to the dawn of the American Century: A disease that no one understands is the number-one killer of the time. People are suspicious of strangers and even family members. Victims of the White Plague, as TB is known, are shipped off to remote sanatoriums, where doctors hope fresh air, months or years of bed rest, and good food will prove curative. Many die –– but many survive, and even meet and fall in love.

ON THE LAKE tells this story with rare footage and stills, interviews with TB experts, and interviews with TB survivors and their relatives. Production began in November 2007 at state-run Zambarano Hospital on remote Wallum Lake in northern Rhode Island –– a hospital that began life in 1905 as a tuberculosis sanatorium. Granted access to the hospital’s entire photographic archives and records, the filmmakers began to depict the desperation Americans felt with this disease that can be spread by a simple cough or sneeze. They captured harsh conditions endured by patients –– sleeping outdoors year-round (even in snowy winters), for example.

From Rhode Island, production moved to Saranac Lake, New York, the largest treatment center for TB patients east of the Mississippi; Denver, Colorado, the largest center in the West; Massachusetts; Baltimore, Maryland; and North Carolina.

The emotional heart of the movie is the many accounts of people, some now in their 80s, who survived TB and years in what was essentially exile –– miles from home, in a strange environment, cut off from family and friends except for occasional visits and letters. One account is of a man, now in his 60s, who contracted the disease only a few years ago –– most likely after exposure to the germ when he was a child.

Some of the reviews:

–– “Spell-binding,” “heart-wrenching,” and “unforgettable,” said NBC-10, WJAR-TV, which gave the movie five stars.
–– “An intelligent, well-researched and heartfelt film that’s consistently entertaining,” said The Providence Journal, which gave move four stars.
–– “An emotionally powerful true-life tale of friendship and love in tragic circumstances,” said WPRI-TV, CBS-12.
–– “Tugs gently at the heart strings,” said Motif Magazine.

#33Stories, Day 19" On the Lake," a documentary movie

#33Stories
No. 19: “On the Lake: Life and Love in a Distant Place,” a documentary movie
Context at the end of this excerpt.
Other entries in #33Stories at the Table of Contents. See you tomorrow!

Released in 2009 by Eagle Peak Media


From scripts written but not produced to one I wrote that actually was: that is the backstory to “On the Lake: Life and Love in a Distant Place,” the first documentary I wrote and co-produced.

The film grew out of my long friendship with the late Frank Beazley, a patient for decades after a devastating accident at the state-run Zambarano Hospital in rural Rhode Island. My 12-part 2006 Providence Journal series about Frank, “The Growing Season,” remains my favorite newspaper series (it has competition!). You can read that HERE.

"On the Lake" movie premiered on February 13, 2009, to a sellout crowd at the Stadium art theater in Woonsocket, R.I., and was subsequently shown at festivals and broadcast on PBS. It was nominated for a New England Emmy.




A DVD was sold and “On the Lake” earned my first listing on IMDB.

WATCH “On the Lake” on YouTube

Context:

ON THE LAKE: Life and Love in a Distant Place, a film by David Bettencourt and G. Wayne Miller, tells the true story of the tuberculosis epidemic in 1900s America and globally today through the lives of those that were infected and who died –– but also of those who survived. More than scientific facts and figures, ON THE LAKE touches that rare emotional cord of what life was like for millions of people infected with TB, while providing a glimpse into human nature when faced with a large-scale epidemic.

Through powerful storytelling, ON THE LAKE shines new light on a major period in our collective history that has been forgotten –– and a disease that many today think is “dead,” but is in fact the number-two infectious killer globally (after HIV/AIDS).

The feature documentary opens with America in the early 1900s –– the free-spirited era of Marconi, Edison and the Wright Brothers. But there is a dark side to the dawn of the American Century: A disease that no one understands is the number-one killer of the time. People are suspicious of strangers and even family members. Victims of the White Plague, as TB is known, are shipped off to remote sanatoriums, where doctors hope fresh air, months or years of bed rest, and good food will prove curative. Many die –– but many survive, and even meet and fall in love.

ON THE LAKE tells this story with rare footage and stills, interviews with TB experts, and interviews with TB survivors and their relatives. Production began in November 2007 at state-run Zambarano Hospital on remote Wallum Lake in northern Rhode Island –– a hospital that began life in 1905 as a tuberculosis sanatorium. Granted access to the hospital’s entire photographic archives and records, the filmmakers began to depict the desperation Americans felt with this disease that can be spread by a simple cough or sneeze. They captured harsh conditions endured by patients –– sleeping outdoors year-round (even in snowy winters), for example.

From Rhode Island, production moved to Saranac Lake, New York, the largest treatment center for TB patients east of the Mississippi; Denver, Colorado, the largest center in the West; Massachusetts; Baltimore, Maryland; and North Carolina.

The emotional heart of the movie is the many accounts of people, some now in their 80s, who survived TB and years in what was essentially exile –– miles from home, in a strange environment, cut off from family and friends except for occasional visits and letters. One account is of a man, now in his 60s, who contracted the disease only a few years ago –– most likely after exposure to the germ when he was a child.

Some of the reviews:

–– “Spell-binding,” “heart-wrenching,” and “unforgettable,” said NBC-10, WJAR-TV, which gave the movie five stars.
–– “An intelligent, well-researched and heartfelt film that’s consistently entertaining,” said The Providence Journal, which gave move four stars.
–– “An emotionally powerful true-life tale of friendship and love in tragic circumstances,” said WPRI-TV, CBS-12.
–– “Tugs gently at the heart strings,” said Motif Magazine.

Lifetime achievement award

On Wednesday, May 16, 2018, I was honored to receive a second Michael P. Metcalf Media Award from the social-justice and education group Rhode Island for Community and Justice. Presented for “diversity journalism that inspires, engages and empowers,” this one was for lifetime achievement. Thanks again, RICJ. I was humbled. I did not expect this.

Me, fifth from left, with fellow winners. Photo: www.indepic.comThe award recognized my decades of writing about social-justice issues including mental health for The Providence Journal. I still do. In my remarks, I discussed how stigma surrounding mental illness has lessened since the 1980s, when I started this journey. Much remains, but things have changed since the days when countless people living with mental illness were sent to human warehouses known as state psychiatric hospitals, where they were stripped of dignity, abused, and forgotten. Many ended their lives there, abandoned by family and friends, powerless to leave or get proper treatment, their only voices the anguish one might hear in Rhode Island passing by the now-closed Institute of Mental Health.

I covered that institution’s dying days – even lived there for a week on a closed ward to write a story. So I knew what happened when many patients breathed their last.

They were buried in a potter’s field, their cheap concrete tombstones containing only a number -- no name, or dates of birth or death. Nothing to identify or affirm that a human life that began as all do, at birth and with promise, had ever existed. No story ever told.

The afternoon after receiving my Metcalf award, I drove to one of those potter’s fields. I visit periodically, to remember and pay respects. And wonder.

-- A soft rain was falling and I was alone, just me and hundreds of numbered concrete tombstones and the people beneath. I strolled through them, as I have before, my thoughts wandering.


-- Who was 1276? A woman? Man? Wife? Mother? Father? Husband? A once-favorite nephew or niece? The "odd" cousin no one ever understood? Does a baby picture exist in some attic somewhere? Why does the moss grow on this stone more thickly than others?


-- This one, with the flag, only stone with one in the entire potter’s field. Was it randomly placed? Does a relative or friend still visit? Was the person a veteran, perhaps returned from war with PTSD?


-- And this, with the Christmas wreath?


My respects paid, I got back in my car and drove past the adjacent landfill – it towers over the potter’s field, another indignity – and past a couple of red-brick buildings that remain from the Institute of Mental Health. Then, onto Route 10, toward home.

Hundreds of others lie buried under that road. Another potter’s field lay there when Route 10 was built, but the crews building the road simply buried it with foundational fill, then paved over it. Not even numbered tombstones can be seen today.