A Faulty Tip, a Ruined Life and Hindsight
* A journalistic lapse allowed the FBI to smear actress Jean Seberg.
April 14, 2002
FOR THE RECORD
April 23, 2002
Columnist’s death– An April 14 story in Southern California Living
referred incorrectly to the year former Times gossip columnist Joyce
Haber died. It was 1993, not 1983.
By ALLAN M. JALON, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
A
new book and documentary about maverick editor Jim Bellows show how he
featured celebrity gossip at newspapers he’s run since the 1960s and
later on TV. Neither, however, looks at what he calls "a big mistake"
of his career, an episode in which derogatory information about a
famous actress was publicized by the FBI, using a gossip column in the
Los Angeles Times. But in recent interviews, Bellows for the first time
detailed how the episode unfolded. Bellows was the associate editor for
features at the Los Angeles Times between 1967 and 1975, and during
those years, he edited the daily gossip column by Joyce Haber.
On
May 19, 1970, the lead item in Haber’s column was headlined "Miss A
Rates as Expectant Mother." Its coy language made clear that "Miss A"
was the pregnant actress Jean Seberg, who had won early fame in the
title role of Otto Preminger’s "Saint Joan" and went on to star in
Jean-Luc Godard’s "Breathless." And, the item said, she carried the
baby of a Black Panther, not of her husband, French diplomat-novelist
Romain Gary. The syndicated column appeared in about 100 papers around
the country.
Seberg, like a number of other cultural figures of
the time, had contributed money to the Panthers and believed the story
attacked her for her political views. The complex, troubled actress
took an overdose of sleeping pills several weeks after the story
appeared, and, on Aug. 23 prematurely delivered a daughter who lived
for two days. At the baby’s funeral, a traumatized Seberg–she was 31
then–opened the casket to prove the baby was white, the stories lies.
The
column triggered the actress’ downward spiral across a decade, her
husband and others close to her said. For nine years, Seberg tried to
take her life around the baby’s birthday. On Sept. 8, 1979, her body
was found naked in the back of a Renault parked on a Paris side street,
the death credited to an overdose of barbiturates.
Six days
later, the FBI, responding to Freedom of Information Act requests, and
working to distance itself from Hoover-era practices, disclosed that it
had fed information from a wiretap into Haber’s column. Through that
September, The Times published stories about Seberg’s death and the FBI
disclosure. None detailed exactly how the FBI’s damaging material had
made its way to Haber and into print.
Nor do the new Bellows
book, which he wrote with Gerald Gardner, or the documentary, which was
directed and produced by Steven Latham, a close friend of Bellows’
wife, Keven. Over the course of several recent interviews, Bellows
described how he dealt with a story whose publication has long haunted
him.
In 1970, Bellows oversaw the section in which Haber’s
column ran. In mid-March of that year, a tip passed to Haber by Bill
Thomas, who was the paper’s metropolitan editor, sparked the Seberg
item. Speaking separately, the two men–Bellows, 79, and Thomas,
77–searched their memories for details of the incident.
The Times, Jan. 6, 1980: Further revelations about the FBI and Seberg.
The note, which Bellows has kept for nearly 32 years, reads:
"Memo:
"Informant sez actress Jean Seberg is four months pregnant by Ray
Hewitt, known as ‘Masai,’ and identified as present Black Panther
minister of information. Informant adds that she has sed she plans to
have the baby."
 Across the top, Thomas wrote: "Joyce–I don’t
know if you care, but this comes from a pretty good source." The note
bears Thomas’ signature. Thomas, who later became editor of The Times
during a period of growth under former publisher Otis Chandler and
guided the paper to several Pulitzer Prizes, retired in 1989 and lives
in the San Fernando Valley. He said recently that he got the note,
typed on a half piece of copy paper, from a reporter whose identity he
said he can’t recall. He said he "probably" put it in Haber’s in-box.
Thomas
said he remembers a phone call during which the reporter told him that
his source was the FBI. He said he passed the note along, assuming that
someone would verify the information before using it, which is standard
journalistic practice. "It was such a tiny blip," Thomas said. "And it
was Hollywoodland and filmland and the FBI screwing around … all I
was saying was what the reporter said," he said. "The way it was told
to me by my sources was that the FBI actually believed she was pregnant
by this Black Panther, so they believed that. I wasn’t in the business
of killing off informative tips of any kind, and it was up to others to
exercise judgment. I didn’t think about it for more than five minutes."
With
the note delivered, one part of a wide-ranging FBI project to covertly
suppress political expression moved forward. Bellows’ book draws from
other published sources to describe how J. Edgar Hoover’s
Counterintelligence Program, or Cointelpro, aimed dirty tricks at black
liberation, black nationalist and antiwar groups, starting in 1968.
 Documents
from the spring of 1970, showing communications between Hoover and
agents in Los Angeles, appear in "The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents From
the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States," by Ward
Churchill and Jim Vander Wall (South End Press, 1990).
Hoover
oversaw the Seberg smear, ordering agents in Los Angeles to wait until
Seberg’s pregnancy grew more visible. He didn’t want the wiretap–which
agents apparently misinterpreted–to be suspected. Ronald Ostrow, a
former Los Angeles Times reporter who worked in the Washington bureau,
obtained documents in 1980 showing that FBI officials in Washington and
agents in Los Angeles targeted Seberg for giving $10,500 to the
Panthers. Bellows said he’s been disturbed by his failure to at least
try to check out the story with Seberg or someone close to her.
He
said Haber had already written the column when he first saw the note,
as their 11 a.m. deadline approached on May 18. He said recently that
an alarm went off as he read it. " … According to all those really
‘in’ international sources," the item read, "Topic A is the baby Miss A
is expecting…. Papa’s said to be a rather prominent Black Panther."
"I
said to Joyce, ‘What the hell is that?’ I thought it was pretty strong.
Like: ‘Wow, where did that come from?’ Joyce went to her desk and came
back with the note from Thomas."
Haber’s first draft named
Seberg. Bellows told her to rewrite the piece without the name. "I took
it out because it made me nervous," he said. He worried, he said, about
possible libel action if he used Seberg’s name.
Joyce Haber; Noted Hollywood Columnist
July 31, 1993
By BURT A. FOLKART,
TIMES STAFF WRITER
Joyce
Haber, among the very last of the feisty breed of Hollywood columnists
who were capable of canonizing a film or destroying a star, has died.
Paula
Correia, a spokeswoman for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said the
journalist and author died Thursday of kidney and liver failure. She
had been admitted to the hospital July 14.
Miss Haber, 62, left
the Los Angeles Times in 1975 to write a highly successful roman a clef
called "The Users." It was her only novel, said her friend and
publicist, Jay Allen, and it quickly rose to the top of the bestseller
lists of both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
The
book mixed 70 of Hollywood’s chosen with fictional characters. The
account of their foibles may have been the definitive treatise of film
name-dropping, and it rankled many of her friends and sources.
In its review of the book, Time magazine called her "Hollywood’s No. 1 voyeur."
Miss
Haber, who attended Bryn Mawr and Barnard colleges, was divorced from
film producer Douglas Cramer. She moved comfortably through the ranks
of filmdom’s elite, attending premieres on the arm of such celebrities
as actor-dancer Gene Kelly. She had arrived in Los Angeles after many
years as a reporter, columnist and West Coast correspondent for
Time-Life publications.
At The Times, she worked as a feature
writer and columnist and then was given Hedda Hopper’s old job. Miss
Hopper and William Randolph Hearst’s Louella Parsons were the two most
influential members of the Hollywood gossip cabal.
Jim Bellows,
now West Coast bureau chief for TV Guide, hired Miss Haber in 1966 when
he was associate editor of The Times. He said he chose her over several
other candidates because "she wrote an extremely well-read column day
after day. She was a hot ticket for many years."
At her peak, wrote Women’s Wear Daily, she was "one of the most powerful American women in the media."
She is survived by a son, Douglas Cramer III, and a daughter, Courtney Cramer.
Services are pending.
|
Why, if he was so anxious, did he risk printing an unconfirmed tip aimed so plainly at her reputation?
Bellows
answered: "The question is whether it is true. You are trying to tell
the truth. You must have an authority for whether it is true or not,
and I took as my authority the name of Bill Thomas on that note.
Editors have a responsibility for what they have a hand in. One must
look at the note and make up one’s own mind."
Said Thomas: "Bellows is the one who made the big error. He was her editor!"
Haber’s
column, syndicated to about 100 papers, was soon picked up by Newsweek,
which printed Seberg’s name. She reacted with anguish. Her husband
wrote a piece for a French magazine expressing outrage.
Haber,
who died in 1983 [Note: 1993–lrh], was asked about the item repeatedly after Seberg’s
suicide. "The FBI was not my source," The Times quoted her as saying in
a Sept. 16, 1979, story that reported the FBI’s admission. The story
added: "Beyond that, Miss Haber refused to discuss the story, except to
say she would never reveal the source."
In 1979, a theater
critic for the Washington Star named David Richards quit his job to
write a Seberg biography. That year, he received a copy of the
unconfirmed tip in the mail with no return address. He said he had no
idea where it came from, though Bellows said recently that he "may have
sent it."
When Richards visited The Times to ask Thomas about
the note, Thomas said he could not recall where it came from and was
passing on one of many tips in the course of a day. Richards said that
after his book, "Played Out," was published in 1981, he was surprised
that none of its many reviews mentioned that Thomas had passed the tip
to Haber. Six years earlier, in 1975, Thomas had fired Haber because of
problems with the accuracy of her work. "Her stuff was perilous," he
said.
Bellows said he always felt "Joyce took a real beating on
the Seberg thing." Asked why, when Haber was put on the spot after
Seberg’s 1979 suicide, he didn’t step forward to take some of the
blame, he said: "I didn’t do that, and I should have. That’s true.
That’s why I’m going into all this now."
But Bellows’ memoir
barely hints at his role as the editor of Haber’s Seberg story. He said
a desire "to be nice" prompted him to leave Thomas out. He said he
called Thomas about a year ago and asked if he could name him and
describe his role in the memoir he was working on. Thomas, he said,
asked him not to.
Thomas said that he didn’t tell Bellows what
to write but that he rejected Bellows’ belief that they shared
responsibility for putting the story into print.
David Lawrence
Jr., former executive editor and publisher of the Detroit Free Press,
publisher of the Miami Herald and a past president of the American
Society of Newspaper Editors and the InterAmerican Press Assn., says
there is accountability on both sides. "It seems to me that if a
significant editor sends a reporter or columnist a note that says:
‘This comes from a good source,’ that indicates that the source is
someone he trusts and that he thinks has great credibility," Lawrence
says.
"You get a major editor sending the kind of note that was
sent here, and there is at least a potential signal implied that ‘I
know this to be true’ or ‘this is probably true.’ And you would hope
that this would be given to someone who was so well-educated in
journalism that this person would say, ‘I don’t care who this comes
from. I have to check this out." He adds: "I would say that the
mistakes of both these men are equally significant."
The Bellows
film, soon to run on various PBS stations, omits the Seberg saga.
Director-producer Latham said he made various "editorial choices," but
not one to spare Bellows. One problem, he said, was that "there were no
living people I could’ve talked to to make a Seberg segment work."
But
he could have asked David Halberstam, who is in the film and who wrote
about the Los Angeles Times in "The Powers That Be," his 1979 book
about media power and politics. He finished his book before the FBI
smear became public but had heard rumors.
"This is not about
gossip," Halberstam said recently. "This is really about political
reporting of a very dubious kind. The Times did not set out to destroy
her. One powerful institution manipulated another. The result was the
destruction of a fragile human being." |
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