Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That
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?]”
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“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 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.”
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 suggested that Hunter might want to work on her repertoire of tongue-in-cheek cues.
At the Sun-Times, Mark Brown wrote a genial, entertaining column, the kind that doesn’t kick an opponent when he’s down. “We all make mistakes in the newspaper business, but this was a doozy,” he allowed. “It’s unclear what lessons the Tribune might have learned. My request for comment went unfulfilled.”
