The New York Times The Week In Review
The Nation
Sunday, December 15, 19??
A Peek Under the Tent
Of the West Palm Beach
Media Circus
By DAVID MARGOLICK
West Palm Beach, Fla. Standing atop a ladder, holding on for dear life, Steve Dunleavy of “A
Current Affair” is the master of all he surveys: the swarms of cameramen, reporters, gawkers
and groupies gathered for the first day of the William K. Smith rape trial. Assistants hand him
cups of coffee (“with milk and Sweet ’n Low, babe!”) pre-lit cigarettes (innumerable Marlboro Lights) and, periodically, the cordless telephone with which the undisputed maharajah of tabloid
television choreographs the day’s shoot.
Mr. Dunleavy has been on the scene since 6 A.M., preparing to speak his piece: the moment
the Kennedy heir appears. In reality, though, he has been awaiting this moment since late last
march, just after it was first reported that Mr. Smith had taken his accuser to his grandmother’s
beach-front house for “that Easter weekend,” as Mr. Dunleavy has put it, “when holiness took a holiday.”
Every famous trial has its chronicler. The Scopes trial had H.L. Mencken, the Eichmann trial
Hannah Arendt. And the just concluded rape trial of William Kennedy Smith had Steve
Dunleavy. From the time the accuser came forward until what Mr. Dunleavy might call Mr.
Smith’s “smashing victory” on Wednesday, some 500 press people from all over the globe, The
Globe and other tabloids flocked to southern Florida.
If this is a media circus, Mr. Dunleavy is the ringmaster who knows how to make the most of it.
As the anxious moments on opening day pass, one reporter watches another reporter interview
a third reporter as a woman from “Entertainment Tonight” asks Mr. Dunleavy whether it’s a
thrill that the long-awaited trial is finally getting under way. “I don’t know whether it’s a thrill,”
Mr. Dunleavy replies in the breathless Australian newsreel voice that as many as 25 million
viewers hear nightly. “Tragically, it’s the biggest circus since Ringling Brothers, which is a sad
commentary on all of us, but nonetheless it is gigantic news.”
Seconds later, a British photographer turns around to compliment Mr. Dunleavy for what is
arguably his most famous footage of the case: when Michele Cassone, the woman who said she
spotted a “wobbly” and trouserless Senator Edward M. Kennedy wandering around the
family’s compound on the night of the incident, grabbed, cursed, elbowed and bit Mr. Dunleavy
on camera after he brandished some compromising photographs of her that he had recently
acquired. “It was magic TV, magic TV!” the photographer gushes. “That will go down in your
biography!” (People tend to talk to Mr. Dunleavy in the same way he speaks on the air: with
exclamation points).
A technician asks Mr. Dunleavy for a sound check, and he obliges. “One, two, William
Kennedy Smith,” he declares. “William Kennedy Smith. William Kennedy Smith. William
Kennedy Smith. William Kennedy Smith.” Finally, Jean Kennedy Smith’s beat-up Mercury
Colony Park station wagon pulls up to the curb, and her famous son, in a rumpled
brown-checked sports jacket, ambles down the sidewalk.
“Eight forty-six!” declares Cynthia Fagan, who like her equally ubiquitous and kinetic sister,
Lesley, is Mr. Dunleavy’s co-producer, a job that entails everything from finding sources to
organizing stakeouts to telling him to “fix his pants” before going on camera. With 10 members,
the television show’s crew in Palm Beach - which Mr. Dunleavy described in one characteristic
report as a place “where an endless summer embraces the palms, a gentle ocean embraces the
sands, and a society embraces a life where success is excess” - is even larger than the phalanx
of relatives, lawyers and jury experts accompanying Mr. Smith.
“Eight what?” he says quickly.
“Eight forty-six.”
“O.K.”
“Go for it!” a crew member cries.
“William Kennedy Smith arrived at court today at 8:40 A.M., on the first day of his sensation
rape trial,” Mr. Dunleavy says as the cameras roll. “Outwardly, he looked calm and confident,
but now he faces some rough going as prosecution witnesses take the stand. I have spoken,
EX-CLU-SIVELY, to one of those prosecution witnesses, who told me of the state of mind of
the alleged victim and just how tough it’s going to be for Mr. Smith!”
By now, Mr. Smith is in the courthouse - and another clip is in the can. Mr. Dunleavy can
descend from his ladder.
Checkbook Journalism
Softening Up A Witness
“A Current Affair” not only brought the Smith case to millions of viewers, devoting some 40
segments to it, but affected it. Indeed, it has taken Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle - the
notion that watching something inevitably changes it - one step further. By paying $40,000 to
Anne Mercer, the woman who’s accompanied Mr. Smith’s accuser to Au Bar and fetched her
at the Kennedy compound a few hours later, it softened up one of the prosecution’s key
witnesses for Roy E. Black, Mr. Smith’s chief defense lawyer. “I have to thank Steve Dunleavy
for the great job he did with Anne Mercer,” Mr. Black said at a news conference on Thursday
after appearances on “Good Morning America” and “The Today Show.” Not that Mr. Black
had changed his mind about “A Current Affair,” which, he sneered, “would pay the lawn man if
they thought he would say something nasty about Will and his family.”
Mr. Dunleavy is unperturbed by such scorn. “As someone who puts back on the street what
some people suspect to be felons, he can faint-praise us as long as he likes, as long as he
pronounces our name right,” he said in the kind of accent that calls parties “potties.” For his
part, he is not all that impressed with Mr. Black. “Compared to Moira Lasch he looks great,
but then again a turtle going past a rock looks fast,” he said, referring to the much-maligned
prosecutor in the case. “If he were in New York, he’d be fed to the lions.”
Mr. Black is not the only critic of the brand of journalism practiced by “A Current Affair” - with
hyperbole, ambush, stakeout and, on occasion, checkbook. Frank Cerabino, a columnist for
The Palm Beach Post, called Mr. Dunleavy a “television reptile” and “a man who has probably
done more harm to the First Amendment than a handful of Reagan court appointees.”
On the Stakeout
Occupational Hazards
This kind of journalism has its drawbacks. During one stakeout, Miss Mercer’s father
accidentally ran over Mr. Dunleavy’s foot with his car. Another time, a Kennedy family retainer
sprayed water on the film crew standing on the beach below the compound.
But neither tires nor garden hose nor Judge Mary E. Lupo’s back breaking schedule deterred
Mr. Dunleavy and his indefatigable crew. The night of the verdict, they went from the Kennedy
estate to Bradley’s Saloon (where they found and interviewed a juror) to Au Bar, where Mr.
Dunleavy negotiated his way around the superannuated hipsters and plump chorines on the
dance floor. The next day, they stitched together two more segments on the case.
But on Thursday afternoon, after three nearly sleepless days and nights, Mr. Dunleavy was
clearly dragging.
“I feel like I’m on some bizarre South American drug,” he said. Still, he managed to coin some
more of his supercharged sentences. “Lilting laughter rippled across the castle of Camelot last
night, where happiness had so often been put on hold!” went one. Or “Jean Kennedy Smith
walked along the stormy waters which seemed to have been ever-present in her life!” Between
cat naps he mouthed the words into the microphone. Within seconds, they boomed all over the
hotel room. Within hours, they boomed all over the world.