Break Some Goddamned News!

As a former editor of the Los Angeles Times, I’m sure my experience with Nikki Finke, the acerbic Hollywood columnist who just died in Florida at age 68, wouldn’t set a record for vitriol. Yet, I’ll bet my dealings could qualify in the strange encounter category with Finke, who had a reputation for reclusiveness that rivaled Howard Hughes. I saw her in the flesh when we had a long, rare, rambunctious dinner in 2007.

For most readers who probably didn’t know her, Nikki Finke struck fear in the hearts of movie stars and the Hollywood hoity-toity for years. In Deadline Hollywood, her column initially published in LA Weekly, she eviscerated her subjects. At times, it seemed as if she had blood dripping from her fingers. “I can’t help it,” she once told a writer from The New Yorker, It’s like meanness just pours out of my fingers.” She spared no one, particularly high-powered studio heads, producers, and agents. She once called Jeff Zucker, then the head of NBC Universal, “one of the most kiss-ass incompetents to run an entertainment company.” She even targeted newspaper editors.

Nikki Finke in an undated photo from the New York Times.

I met Nikki shortly after the Tribune Company, the Chicago media company that owned the Times, announced my appointment as editor of the paper in 2006. Nikki called for an interview. She knew I’d make a juicy column – the newly minted editor from Chicago facing a staff revolt directed at my employer, which had forced out the paper’s last two editors, both highly regarded journalists. She’d published rumors that I would be greeted with high-level executive resignations. The atmosphere in the newsroom made Los Angeles’ LeBrea Tar Pits seem like Disneyland.

In normal circumstances, I’d just been promoted to one of journalism’s dream jobs. But the challenges I faced at the Los Angeles Times were anything but normal, and the prospect of interview with Nikki was fraught with peril. I could have simply declined her request. But I knew she’d write a column anyway with her legendary disregard for facts. If I talked to her, I’d at least get a chance to limit the damage. So, I cut a deal. I promised her an exclusive interview if she would wait until I got into my new job in LA. After some give and take, she agreed. At the time, I had no idea that Nikki, who’d grown up as a product of New York’s high society, had become obsessed with avoiding public view. I soon found out, though.

After arriving at the paper, I honored my promise. I called Nikki and suggested we talk over dinner. She balked but eventually agreed, only after she exacted a promise from me. She knew we shared a friend, Charles M. Madigan, an ace Chicago Tribune writer and good pal with whom I had written a book. Nikki agreed to have dinner only if I promised I wouldn’t tell Madigan what she looked like. Nikki picked out the restaurant, a dimly lit place near downtown LA. I could barely see her when I arrived.

In her prime, when she worked with Madigan as a foreign correspondent in Moscow, Nikki was a beauty. In my eyes, her beauty had not diminished, no matter her age. She had not exactly defied evolution, but I didn’t think she looked as bad as she feared. She simply wasn’t 26 anymore. She reminded me several times of my promise regarding Charles Madigan.

Her apparent self-consciousness didn’t extend to her journalistic style. Over the next hour or two, she grilled me as thoroughly as the snapper I’d ordered. On several occasions, she slammed her first on the table and demanded, “C’mon: break some goddamned news!” Three decades of journalism experience taught me how to deflect her questions. She finally left, clearly irritated at my evasive responses. I figured she’d roast me in a column. When I walked into my office the next day, John Arthur, one of my top editors laughed and said, “I see Nikki Finke finally got you.” When I told him we’d had dinner, his jaw dropped. “Nobody’s seen her in years,” he said.

Her column on me wasn’t that bad. She portrayed me as a 63-year-old Midwestern implant shuffling towards retirement as I tooled around LA in my Lexus with crooked teeth wearing an ill-fitted suit. In her column in print and online, Nikki blazed a trail as one of those Internet journalists who would print anything she liked with a callous disregard for facts. I didn’t really have crooked teeth. When you assume jobs with a high public profile, though, you learn to take your lumps and move on. She also predicted I wouldn’t be around long.

A few months later, Nikki wrote about me again, this time with a different slant that revealed something about her true nature. The publisher of the Times was about to make a huge mistake by publishing a special section, and I convinced him to kill it, causing a brouhaha that involved a big-time Hollywood producer and the resignation of the paper’s opinion editor. I won’t bore you with details, but Nikki had great sources and wrote a column about the whole mess. When the publisher decided not to run it, she said he did the right thing because he listened to “the only guy over there (meaning me) who knows what he’s doing.” I was stunned.

I wrote Nikki an email saying I couldn’t believe she’d said something nice about me. I told her I’d tacked a copy of the column to my bathroom wall so I could read it every morning as I looked in the mirror and brushed my crooked teeth before I put on my ill-fitted suit. She fired back a note saying I’d given her a good laugh. “That’s what I like about you,” she wrote, ”you have a sense of humor.”

In the end, Nikki was right about some things. I didn’t last that long at the LA Times. But I didn’t shuffle off into retirement in my Lexus. The owners of the paper and I had deep disagreements about the future of the LA Times. I wanted the company to invest in the paper, its content, and its staff, and they wanted to slash the budget. I suffered the same fate as my highly regarded predecessors. That wasn’t the way my critics predicted it would play out. Nikki was wrong about some things, too, but so were many journalists who wrote about me. Of the dozens of stories about my tenure at the Times, only a few reporters ever called to check the facts. Unfortunately, Nikki wasn’t that unusual.

Nikki had been a strong, respected, competent competitor as a foreign correspondent recalled Madigan. By the time she started her column in 2002, she, like many journalists, had succumbed to the pressures of the Internet, which made being first on a story more important than being right. She really wasn’t the bad person that many made her out to be. In later years she quit writing due to her failing health. I hope she’s now in the afterlife telling the angels: “C’mon: break some goddamned news!”

—James O’Shea