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 If He Can Make It There . . . Then maybe he'll move there. But if you read Neil Steinberg's first couple columns for the New York Daily News last week, you'd swear he already had. Half a century ago a composer and pianist named Oscar Levant also acted in movies (The Band Wagon), wrote books (Memoirs of an Amnesiac), and made wisecracks worth repeating ("I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients." "I'm a controversial figure; my friends either dislike me or hate me."). Levant was smart, funny, and talented -- and as neurotic as the day is long. When asked about Neil Steinberg -- and Steinberg's seen to it that I have been -- I've thought of Oscar Levant. But Levant grew up in New York, went to Hollywood, and is unimaginable in Chicago, where even the most outre elements root for the Cubs and posture as solid citizens. (Levant: "When I was young I looked like Al Capone, but I lacked his compassion.") Neurosis doesn't play here. Because Steinberg grew up in Ohio and worked in Chicago, and his first book explored the pleasures of tipping cows, I mindlessly thought of him as a midwesterner. But Michael Cooke was cannier. The Sun-Times's editor in chief until he left for New York this month to become editor of the Daily News, Cooke invited Steinberg to write a weekly Daily News column with the general theme of "Steinberg on America." Cooke saw Steinberg for who he was -- someone born to play Manhattan. Steinberg made it clear in his debut Daily News column, on February 13, that he sees himself that way too. He addressed a New York concern -- the scratching of Wal-Mart at that city's gates -- by calling the chain the "Red China of corporate America -- an enormous fascist beast rising to its feet and searching for new worlds to conquer." He ingeniously manipulated the death of Arthur Miller into an occasion to insult his new opposition -- the New York Times and the New York Post -- as hopelessly thick-witted. And he introduced himself. "My name is Neil Steinberg," he wrote. "I'm 44, heavy, Jewish, with a bit of a drinking problem. I say this because I believe in candor. I'm a newspaperman, and have lived in the Chicago area for the past 27 years, though in Chicago, if you weren't born in the right parish, you're still an outlander and might as well be a Maori or a Martian. I never argue, because in my heart, I suspect they may be right. I don't belong in Chicago; I belong in New York." Steinberg went on to tell his new readers about his grandfather, a Bronx sign painter, and his father, who moved to Ohio and didn't look back. "But I did. All my life. I felt restless and exiled, the only Jew in school, rising grudgingly to my feet to make the annual 'This is a dreidel, this is a menorah' speech. What I'm trying to say is that I'm glad to be here, if only in print form. Delighted at this toehold in New York City, to have finagled a few square inches of its most coveted real estate, this spot in the Daily News. No rag-wrapped immigrant kissing the ground ever felt happier to arrive in town." Unfortunately for Steinberg, if not necessarily for Chicago, he's still here writing editorials and three columns a week for the Sun-Times. "He is not writing a column exclusively about New York from his rambling beautiful mansion in Northbrook," Cooke e-mailed me. "Clearly, that would be absurd." Absurd or not, Steinberg's obscuring the fact that he's a voice from beyond the Hudson. Last Sunday he wrote his second Daily News column. He was smart about gay marriage: "The anti-gay marriage stance strongly echoes the visceral horror white Southerners felt in the 1950s at the idea of sharing swimming pools with their black neighbors. It wasn't rational -- they didn't really think black children would poison the water. But they shut their own public pools rather than let blacks in." He lifted a comment on the new nuclear sub Jimmy Carter from his Sun-Times column of a couple days earlier. And he settled further into his illusory life as a New Yorker, hailing the new Gates installation in Central Park for its transience -- "The true glory is: it's only here 16 days" -- and doing his darnedest to pick a fight with that "money-hemorrhaging rag," the Post. "Keith Kelly's piece this week in the Post was not only pure hallucination, but reveals a frightening ignorance," Steinberg said of a reporter who'd taken exception to the Wal-Mart item. "Keith, Keith, where have you been?" When we talked by phone, Cooke raved about Steinberg's "New York sensibility" and said his first two columns "give you goose bumps, they're so good." Cooke went on, "He's got the wit and the intelligence and the punch, but he's also got the scholarship." Asked what Cooke's new staff thinks about the new voice, he replied, "At least he's not being burned in effigy. They seem to like him, which I'm told is quite unusual." I asked a Daily News writer too. "The consensus is that while it's nice to have a liberal voice in the paper, he isn't breaking anything new," he replied. "Just riffing and recycling old stories. Some thought his 'I'm really a New Yorker at heart' bit from Column One sounded too desperate." If Steinberg wants to make it as a city columnist "he'll have to come here." Cooke didn't want to say what kind of a future he and Steinberg are imagining. When I asked Steinberg, he responded with the warmth I've come to expect from his column. He e-mailed, "I feel no inclination to share my thoughts or plans with a writer who has spent the past decade crapping on me." If Keith Kelly of the Post takes Steinberg's bait and engages him in a public feud he'll make him a happier man than I was ever able to. No Right to Remain Silent Last week a panel of three federal appellate judges handed Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine another stinging defeat. The panel unanimously upheld the decision of a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to hold them in contempt for refusing to honor a grand jury subpoena. If you don't like to see reporters locked up for protecting sources, that's bad news. I'll get to the good news in a moment. It was columnist Robert Novak, not Miller or Cooper, who identified Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative. Novak's July 2003 column alluded to "two senior administration officials" as his sources, and because they'd presumably violated federal law to give Novak his scoop, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed to find out who they were. Miller and Cooper wound up in Fitzgerald's net because they'd apparently heard from the same sources. |
