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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The Chicago columnist crusaded on behalf of abused kids. Then he got fired for having sex with a teenage subject.
Sep 19, 2002 | There is no shorthand to explain Bob Greene, no code. Unlike columnists such as George Will (bow-tied Washington elitist) or Jimmy Breslin (rumpled New York tough guy) or the late Mike Royko (ethnic Chicago wiseass), there is no simple way to describe the deeply weird Midwestern world that Bob Greene built through his column in the Chicago Tribune. That world shattered like a glass Christmas tree ornament hit by a brick last Sunday, after news of his forced resignation was tucked in the lower left-hand corner of the Trib's front page, in a narrow box headlined, cryptically, "To our readers." After nearly 25 years in the newspaper, and more than 30 as a Chicago columnist, he was gone, cashiered.
Bob (calling him "Greene" somehow feels wrong, like calling Elvis "Presley") was the bard of Middle America, the defender of abused children, the relentless nostalgist who seldom paused from keening for the lost world of pre-1964 Columbus, Ohio, to notice anything positive in life today. It was all loss and decay, and a sense of sadness over what was and outrage over what is. In Bob's world, children were routinely tortured and murdered while the legal system yawned, cherished institutions crumbled, the niceties of life were abandoned, and nobody cared.
When Bob did find something that met his approval, it was inevitably presented as a freakish anomaly, an unexpected flower growing out of our blasted and ruined landscape. When he found a high school string quartet that played diligently at a dinner he attended in South Bend, Ind., he presented the students as one of the rare "signs of hope" in a nation where otherwise "a lot of things" are "destined to go badly, to decline."
Bob's world was filled with odd contradictions. He liked baseball but not baseball players, Woody Hayes but not football, airports but not travel. He hated cities but lived in Chicago, lauded the wide-open roads of the Midwest but did not drive. He was the master of the unexplained dateline, filing from some city that had little or nothing to do with that day's topic. His column might, say, carry a Tokyo dateline, but describe, not anything in Japan, but the hotel room, or the little soaps, or something on the cable TV.
Perhaps the most distinctive Bob characteristic was repetition. A columnist is supposed to provide a counterpoint to the steady drumbeat of the news. When the front page is chanting Iraq! Iraq! Iraq!, the columnist can cut across field, write something entirely different -- hit some small curiosity one day, and the fate of the universe the next.
Not Bob. He would latch onto a subject -- particularly the tales of tortured children he gleaned from trailer park America -- and worry them like a dog with a beefsteak. Four columns in a row were unexceptional for Bob. Eight columns. A heart-wrenching child custody case, the Baby Richard saga, prompted more than 100 columns from Bob, each day repeating large blocks of background, lines like "the only family he has ever known" burning into the memory of his readers as certainly as Homer's "wine-dark sea" and "rosy-fingered dawn."
That this world could come crashing down in a sex scandal -- with a high school girl, no less -- was a shock to his fans and a delightful surprise to his detractors.
For the past 20 years, there have been two ways to view Bob: You could take him at face value -- and a lot of people did. They viewed his concern for children as sincere, and made his books bestsellers. His column was syndicated. For a time, in the mid-1980s, he wrote the "American Beat" column for Esquire and filed reports for "Nightline." He was pals with Michael Jordan, and his two hagiographies on the star swept away Jordan's complex character in a blast of adoration.
Or you could mock him -- and a lot of people did. They viewed his detailed descriptions of child abuse cases as an unsettling kind of pornography, and his take on America sentimental and sappy. The very first issue of the satiric monthly Spy, its October 1986 debut devoted to "JERKS," featured five little square photos of Bob Greene, in a row, under the headline "The Illustrated History of Hair, Part I." In the first, 1971 photo, he was seen on the phone, his bald pate barely covered by a pathetic tuft of hair. In the next four, he is shown in a series of patently fake toupees, lush helmets that would look ridiculous on Madame Pompadour.
The toupee seemed to symbolize Bob and his writing -- a simulacrum of nature, an obvious falseness that he seemed to believe was accepted as real. He bared his soul, supposedly, but never a word about the wig. The ridicule swelled -- Chicago radio stations aired sketches and running gags about Bob. The Chicago Reader ran my monthly column, BobWatch, for two years, cruelly dissecting the columnist's passions and failings. The BobWatch philosophy was that Bob was so woefully bad, so frightened and out-of-touch and tone deaf, that he could be savored as a guilty pleasure, the way lousy 1950s sci-fi thrillers are enjoyed as camp.
