The lineup of characters ran in the left column of the Playbill, one name after another of people from my younger life in the city’s tabloid newspapers. Mike McAlary and Michael Daly, columnists. John Cotter and Hap Hairston, editors. Bob Drury, reporter.
Also, me, a member of the standing army of columnists.
Down the right side of the page was the customary list of the actors playing them — well, playing us — starting with Tom Hanks, cast in his Broadway debut as McAlary, the subject of the late Nora Ephron’s new play, “Lucky Guy.”
Curtain up.
The newsmen are standing at a bar, bellowing “The Wild Rover,” the Irish ballad.
For an instant, I wonder: Who were these people with our names and why were they singing those songs? This must have been what the von Trapp family felt when they saw “The Sound of Music.”
Then the action moved to the familiar racket of a newsroom. An editor yelling at a tardy writer that this was a daily, not a weekly paper; one reporter ducking an assignment, another one running harder, staying later and getting the best story. Icarus was cleared for take off.
On four March evenings in the tranquil New York of 2013, I sat in the Broadhurst Theater watching previews of “Lucky Guy,” a show set 25 years ago in the raucous, ragged city of 1988 about a friend who died young.
It took a couple of performances for me to lose the hazy filter of actuality — to get over myself and the people I knew, even though it is well-known that hardly anyone is more entertaining than journalists, certainly not to other journalists — and to recognize something besides the names. This was reality, sampled, with the pathos and comic folly remixed. The guts of it had stayed true, thrillingly so, to the life I had witnessed.
That was one more surprise to savor after 14 years of knowing about “Lucky Guy,” before that was its name, or it was a play, or it seemed at all likely.
IF MEMORY SERVES, sometime around March 1999 a caller to The Daily News introduced herself as Nora Ephron, and how about dinner?
She was thinking that the life and death of Mike McAlary would make a film. Ephron told me that she couldn’t remember ever meeting him, but that she had read the obituaries a few months earlier, after his death at 41 on Christmas Day 1998. Seen from a distance, the contrails of his life were the stuff of myths.
Fueled by high-octane swagger, McAlary had been a star columnist at the city tabloids for a decade, specializing in police corruption and police heroics. Near the end he fell spectacularly on his face and was written off, prematurely and in some circles, gleefully, as a sloppy, self-aggrandizing hack. Terminally ill, he bolted his own chemotherapy session one summer morning to sneak into the hospital room of Abner Louima, who had been grotesquely tortured with a plunger by police officers. A few months before he died, McAlary was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the columns that made the case a national scandal.
What Ephron needed from me, and others, were not bold-type headlines, but brush strokes. There were things I couldn’t be much help on. McAlary and I were not bar buddies — he was a night life Olympian — and for most of the decade, we worked at different papers. But we were the same age, both writing columns three times a week and we spoke almost every day to help each other feed the column furnace, swapping names, phone numbers, angles.
He began practically every conversation not with hello, but by announcing, “This is good for us.”
What was? Almost anything.
If we turned up on opposite sides of some issue — let’s say that McAlary wrote that the police commissioner was a bum, and my column crowned him a prince — he would call early.
“This is good for us!” he’d say. “If they push him out, I’ll have the new guy. You’ll get leaks from the empire in exile, which is even better.”
At our dinner in 1999, Ephron did not touch her food. She had insisted that I order the veal chop, a bit bossy considering that we’d only met 90 seconds earlier.
She kept taking notes as I passed along McAlary lore.
At closing time in bars, McAlary would do actual cartwheels. In 1980, the first time he visited Elaine’s he spotted Jerry Brown, the governor of California, a man he knew virtually nothing about except that he had recently broken up with the singer Linda Ronstadt. McAlary fed $10 in quarters into the jukebox and played the same song 40 times in a row: the governor’s ex-girlfriend wailing, “Baby, you’re no good.” He was all of 22.
Yes, McAlary had a big ego, but he was not a prisoner of self-absorption: later on, a young reporter who’d been given some minor journalism honor might find a magnum of Champagne on the desk, wrapped by McAlary in the prizewinning articles.
In the summer of 1997, the McAlarys visited my family’s vacation place in the Poconos, after Mike had already gone through four cancer surgeries. Even so, when his 12-year-old son, Ryan, was nervous about diving off the high board, McAlary climbed the ladder to show him. He took a couple of steps, bounced and did a full one and a half somersault, with a tiny flop on entry. He surfaced laughing, then lifted his index fingers. A pronouncement. The point wasn’t how you do a flip; it’s that you can’t think about what will go wrong.
“Just do the dive,” he said. “The important thing when you’re trying to do this is, don’t be afraid.”
McAlary spent his final weeks in Room 918 on the swanky floor of a hospital. Afternoon high tea. A grand piano concert at 4. He’d lurch awake five minutes before.
“Close the door,” he’d say. “That piano guy can’t play.”
Ephron shut her notebook. “If anything ever comes of this, and I use your material, I will show it to you and you can decide whether you want your real name used, or another name,” she said.
We parted amiably. She spoke to loads of people. After a year or two, she had no more questions when we met. I assumed she had abandoned the story.
In 2005, I was speaking to Hollywood producers on something unrelated. “By the way,” one said, “what did you think of the script about the New York columnist?”
What script?
“The Nora Ephron screenplay,” the producer said.
The next time I ran into her, I reported: “These producers said it was, the best thing Nora Ephron has ever written, quote, unquote.”
She was pleased, but the project was in limbo. “I can’t get the money to do it,” she said.
Hadn’t films she worked on, like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally,” made hundreds of millions?
She sighed. “I can’t get the person I want to play the lead,” she said.
“Oh. Who’s that?”
“I can’t tell you,” she said.
We drifted into other conversations. Later, I passed the cluster surrounding Ephron. She peeled off for a quick aside.
“Tom Hanks,” she said.
“Tom Hanks what?” I asked.
“Tom Hanks really doesn’t like certain people in your profession,” she said.
SIX YEARS LATER, November 2011. An Ephron e-mail, subject line, “McAlary.”
“Believe it or not, something may actually be happening with my McAlary project,” she wrote. It was now a play.
“I hope you’ll let me use your real name, because almost everything you say in the play is from my interview with you — but not absolutely everything,” she wrote.
Real name or not, she said, I would be included in a small royalty pool for people who had given her stuff.
Money?
“If the play is a huge hit, your share of the royalty pool will be enough to send your child to college,” she wrote, “for exactly one day.”
(As it happens, the show is a huge hit; but with her agreement, I decided there were better uses for my theoretical share, and my only interest in the show now is a rooting one, not financial.)
A few days later, after her script arrived, I stood in a subway station to finish reading what I had started on the train. Her McAlary would not be doing cartwheels in bars. But so much else was in the play that I was dizzied.
“Did you get the script?” Ephron wrote at last. “Just wondering what you thought.”
“Loved it so much I can’t speak,” I answered. “Use my name.”
There was no reply.
Then one day last June, an item on the home page of The New York Times’s Web site read: “Nora Ephron Dies at 71; Writer and Filmmaker With a Genius for Humor.” Even people who only glancingly knew her, like me, felt that a huge withdrawal had been made from the cosmos’s reservoir of wit and decency.
THE END of September 2012. Nearly a year had gone by since Ephron sent me the script. Presumably, without her driving presence, the play was not happening. A text message landed from Malachy F. Cleary, professional actor. More than 40 years ago, we had been in the ninth grade together at the Loyola School.
“Jim: I have an audition for a Broadway play starring Tom Hanks called, ‘The Lucky Guy.’ I am reading for the part of Jim Dwyer. Any tips?”
Three things. One, the play was on. Two, Mr. Hanks had changed his mind. And three, I had absolutely no tips on playing Dwyer; I had been at it going on 56 years and the role still gave me headaches.
My friend didn’t get the part — one that, it should be said, is small enough that it was not commanding a movie star like Tom Hanks, or a television star, like Maura Tierney, playing McAlary’s wife, Alice. But it did bring in a fine character actor named Michael Gaston. “If you’re not too repulsed by the whole damn thing,” he wrote, graciously, “I’d love to meet over a beer or a cup of coffee.”
During a dress rehearsal, I sat next to Edward W. Hayes, a lawyer of limitless brass, who had spun up salary bidding wars for McAlary and other journalists. A character on stage, an editor named John Cotter — in real life, a rascal savant, who ordered us to “never write a story you wouldn’t read” — tells McAlary that he is jumping papers because he has gotten a $100,000 signing bonus.
“Who gives editors signing bonuses?” McAlary asks, incredulous.
Suddenly I got an elbow in the ribs from Mr. Hayes, who had represented Mr. Cotter. He proudly tapped his chest.
At dinner with Mr. Hanks, Mr. Gaston and two other actors, Courtney B. Vance and Danny Mastrogiorgio, I learned that they had mostly steered clear of real-life counterparts. A good thing: high points of the play’s truth-telling include a late-night fistfight between McAlary and Bob Drury, played by Mr. Mastrogiorgio, and, especially, emotional swordplay between Mr. Hanks, as McAlary, and Mr. Vance, as his editor, Hap Hairston. Honest as scenes like that are, to have added more messes of actual history would have blunted their power. On the other hand, Mr. Gaston, who near the end of the play delivers the story of McAlary on the diving board, said it had been a huge help to know that it had come from a real eulogy.
Journalists have swarmed to the previews and those of my era are tracking the literal differences between the actors and our memories. The most heartening response, though, came from Emily Rueb, a Times editor of a generation too young to have known the ridiculous and noble fools portrayed on stage. “This is good for newspapers,” she said at intermission.
Then she uttered a line not actually in the play, but at the heart of the story for all who lived through it, or might one day.
“This,” she declared, “is good for us.”
Jim Dwyer, now at The New York Times, wrote columns in New York Newsday and The Daily News from 1986 to 2001.