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 Not That There's Anything Wrong With That The publisher's wife declares--in print--that the former editor of the Sun-Times has a thing for ladies' shoes. One of life's lower points is the discovery that other people think you're weird. Not dangerously weird, not even so weird they don't enjoy your company. But a little quirkier than you want anyone to think you are. When I spoke by phone the other day with Michael Cooke, editor of the New York Daily News, he sounded uncharacteristically perturbed. A rash of e-mail from his old newspaper, the Sun-Times, was informing him that a woman he'd known for nearly 30 years had identified him in print that morning as a man with a quirk. The woman, Jennifer Hunter, is the wife of the publisher of the Sun-Times, John Cruickshank, with whom Cooke arrived from Vancouver five years ago to run the paper. "I love them both dearly," said Cooke. Yet Hunter, an editorial writer and columnist at her husband's paper who on April 27 was excoriating fashionable women's shoes, had gone off on the following tangent: "One reason I am convinced that pointy shoes are a male plot to demean women is that a former male editor at the Sun-Times had a fetish for women's footwear. He thought they were intensely sexy -- if infantalizing a woman by making her totter in heels down the hall like a toddler is really sexy -- and he kept commissioning stories about them, over the protests of women staff members. When Vicente Fox came to town last year, the main news for this editor was not the Mexican president's message, but Mrs. Fox's footwear. We ran an unconscionable number of photos of Mrs. Fox in the paper -- from the knee down." Hunter wasn't done. "My former editor," her column continued, "recently ran a week of shoe stories at his new paper, the New York Daily News, including a shoe horoscope, which he kindly passed along. Here is mine, Capricorn: 'Normally impervious to fashion slavery, this spring you're swooning for the latest footwear. [Yeah, right, patent leather Birkenstocks.] For one big office event, you even abandoned sensible shoes for the global gypsy look. [Global gypsy? They've got the wrong crystal ball.] And with painful-pointy on the way out, you're in heaven.' [That part's true. How did they know?]" "The woman's mad," said Cooke, when I called. "Let's take the paragraph that says 'When Vicente Fox came to town last year.' Well, for accuracy's sake, the main news of that visit was President Fox's message -- front page center, dictated by me. The Sun-Times did not run an unconscionable number of photographs of his wife's shoes. We ran one. She happened to be wearing a pair of remarkable shoes." Cooke went on, now referring to Hunter, "I like the woman. She's actually one of my best friends. So there you go. I think she's serious about her view of footwear. I can't imagine that she wants to be mean to me. But jeepers. There's a multibillion-dollar shoe industry, and it has nothing to do with men. I'll tell you one thing -- here you go! -- we did run some shoe stories here [at the Daily News] a couple of weeks ago, and we had a tiny contest to win $2,000 for a shoe-shopping spree at Macy's. We ran a coupon, and you had to cut it out, put it in an envelope, buy a stamp -- and we had 17,000 entries! I assume most of them were women." I asked if he intended to call Hunter. "We're having a vigorous e-mail correspondence as we speak," he said. "It's going very well. It's ended up with us saying to each other, 'I love you.'" Cooke wasn't as sure as he would have liked that the Sun-Times ran only one photo of President Fox's wife's shoes during her trip to Chicago last June. Actually the paper ran two -- not to mention the photo of the first lady's legs and the one of her decolletage. On the shoe front, the picture Cooke recalled was the one captioned "Look at those shoes: Mexico's glamorous first lady, Marta Sahagun, sports a pair of gold slingbacks Wednesday while dedicating the new Mexican Consulate office." A few days later the slingbacks reappeared to illustrate a column by Neil Steinberg, who explained, "One foreign-born colleague of mine has the ability to cheerily admit practices in crowded meetings that I would have a hard time admitting to myself in private. Take the shoes worn by Marta Sahagun. . . . Left to my own devices, I don't think I would have perceived her shoes as the ooh-baby objects of sexual fascination that they apparently are in some quarters. . . . But I have been educated, and now realize readers might appreciate one last glimpse at the lust objects that are Mrs. Fox's shoes." After doing my research I called Cooke again and read him this passage. Is that you? I asked. "I think it's very clearly a reference to me," he conceded. And weren't shoe jokes being told at your good-bye party last year? "There was one joke among a hundred jokes. Oh God," he said. "I asked my wife, 'Do I have a foot fetish?' She said no." Hunter was much harder to reach. She never returned my calls, but she briefly replied to my e-mail. "This was a column about women's shoes," she asserted. "It was meant to be tongue in cheek and the fact that [it] is being taken seriously by you, a male journalist, confirms my thesis. I have tremendous admiration and respect for my former editor; I think he is a brilliant newspaperman and he's a great friend." I called Cooke back to ask if Hunter's joshing tone had eluded him too. "I couldn't possibly comment on that," he said. "I don't want to make things any worse than they are." It's not my usual policy to clarify the behavior of a wife by talking to the husband, but Cruickshank had surely found himself in the middle. |
