Readers who would normally sympathize at the tragic unfolding of the Baby Richard case find themselves hating the child, based solely on the endless sweaty jig Bob insists on performing on his behalf. Except of course he was funnier and cooler. But still. That sounds more apocalyptic than it is—translated, it means that the moon will appear large because it is closer to the earth than usual super , that it is the second full moon in January blue , and that there will be a lunar eclipse that will turn it red blood.
Go experience its glory for yourself. But, if you insist, here is a randomly-selected Baby Richard dispatch for you from the Tribune archives. His Tribune column was finally was taken away from him in as punishment for having had a sexual relationship 14 years earlier with a teenage girl.
It started when she wrote him a fan letter. One proposed change was to move Greene's column to the inner pages of the features section. But before the group could even meet, Greene went to management and complained, and he stayed on page one. At the Sun-Times , Greene had been part of the newsroom, where there was a lively give-and-take between reporters and editors.
At the Tribune , he moved into an office in an alcove between the features department and the main elevator. His office had a smoked glass wall, permitting him to be both part of things and yet removed.
Inside, his office was littered with the debris of his work: cases of Coke in glass bottles, a personalized Louisville Slugger bat, photos of Elvis, boxes of his books. He did not have a lot of small talk for anyone, and so he did not make many friends. In , Greene published his seventh book, American Beat , a collection of newspaper and magazine columns dating back to the mid-seventies.
The superlatives on the dust jacket indicate his standing at the time. From Tom Wolfe: "Bob Greene is a virtuoso of the things that bring journalism alive: literary talent, hard reporting, a taste for mixing it up haunch-to-paunch, shank-to-flank, and elbow-to-rib with people of all sorts, and a willingness to let out a barbaric yawp now and then.
Increasingly, Greene's columns began to include a dateline from another state, or even another country. But while his time on the road increased, the subjects of his columns narrowed. He wrote about hotel rooms, faxes or soaps in hotel rooms, airplanes, airports, the life of a chauffeur Greene gave up driving in the s.
When he crossed the ocean on the Queen Elizabeth 2 , he wrote about eating in his stateroom and watching television. Although he still produced funny columns, his writing began showing signs of nostalgia. He wrote about the enduring love of his parents, about his memories of family dinners. What he turned into at the Tribune was the exact opposite. He celebrated being out of step, out of touch. It was a shocking transformation.
Foreshadowing the Greene to come, one section of American Beat focuses on his own departing youth. The column tells the story of his visit to Lindy Lemmon, his first love. This was a relationship of a few months' duration when he was 16 and she was The book is Greene's diary of his first year as the father of a baby girl, Amanda.
Far from portraying him as a doting new dad, the Greene in the account is incapable of accepting the responsibility of fatherhood. One memorable scene depicts him demanding his dinner even though his wife is trying to comfort their crying infant. Still, the testimonials rolled in. The humorist Erma Bombeck bestowed an honorary membership in motherhood.
Phil Donahue called it "the most honest and personal account of the first year of fatherhood I have ever read. Indeed, the book appeared to be as honest and self-revealing as anything Greene had written.
Greene's wife, Susan, comes across as a lonely mother left at home to fend for herself while the star columnist traverses America, reveling in his celebrity and being perpetually on assignment. There is marital tension in the book, even bitterness. Describing Susan telling their young baby that one day they will go for ice cream, Greene writes, "She's planning some future that I'm only peripherally a part of. She knows that when the time does come to go to Baskin-Robbins, I'll undoubtedly be at work.
He was never much of a family man. In an earlier piece, he wrote of his relationship with his parents: "I have become so proficient at putting words on paper for consumption by large numbers of people that I have lost the ability to communicate privately with the two people who have meant the most to me. I am much better with strangers. Such feelings are not, of course, unique to Greene.
What is remarkable is that social awkwardness and marital discord are so familiar to a person who writes sentimentally about an idyllic American life; perhaps it is an existence he always wanted and never had, rather than a life he once had and lost.
In hindsight, another anecdote stands out in Good Morning, Merry Sunshine. Greene wrote that a year-old high school girl had visited him at the paper one day.
She admitted her romantic interest in him. The girl didn't think that mattered. She had had a fling, she told Greene, with a famous comedian-it wasn't a big deal. Greene wrote: "There must be a place where sixteen-year-old girls don't automatically turn for companionship to thirty-five-year-old men whom they've seen in the newspapers.
The one thing that scares me is that such a place may exist only in my memory. By the late eighties, Greene's impact on popular culture was solidly established. He was credited in an Esquire column with disseminating the term "yuppie. The premier issue of Spy magazine made fun of his toupees. In , Greene, at 41, was at the peak of his form. His first bar of choice was at the Executive House, now Hotel 71, but he later switched to the atrium bar at the Marriott across the street from the Tribune.
His standard line: "Imagine, we're sitting here in this bar and above us there are a thousand empty rooms. Even if that was what Greene was selling, Tribune readership surveys consistently reflected that the public was buying it.
He was the darling of that crowd. He wrote with a kind of Midwestern point of view, a sensible point of view. He had a good grasp for family, for children, all subjects that that group was interested in. In the s, Bob Greene was best defined by two things: using his columns to defend a series of children seemingly failed by the courts and sinking further into nostalgia.
The columns focusing on children started in with the story of Sarah, born six years earlier addicted to heroin and cocaine, then placed in the foster home of a Bridgeview couple. When Sarah was three, her biological mother, who had completed rehab, and her father decided they wanted their daughter back.
Greene disagreed and he wrote passionate columns arguing his point of view. Over the next ten years, Greene's columns about abused children became very familiar to his readers: a seven-year-old Wisconsin girl forced to live in a dog cage; a six-year-old Indiana boy chained in a broom closet; the Henry children of Nebraska, who had been tortured by their father with an electric cattle prod.
In a way, Greene was conducting old-fashioned crusades, the kind of noble and passionate journalism that gives newspapers life and purpose. He reprinted devastating courtroom transcripts.
And he got results, from intervention in cases he followed to an avalanche of gifts from readers for the victimized children. Some critics, however, thought that Greene's writing came close to exploiting the children. Because so many of the columns repeated background information and made teasing references to revelations that would appear in the next installment, many journalists came to think that the pieces had taken on an aura of shtick. The most famous of Greene's crusading columns involved Baby Richard, the centerpiece of perhaps the most dramatic parental custody battle in state history.
Over a period of three years, Greene wrote more than 60 columns about the child. His mother had been estranged from her boyfriend, the father, when their son was born.
She told him the child was dead and signed away her rights to the infant. Baby Richard was privately adopted. Later, when the father learned the truth and reconciled with the woman, they both wanted their son back. Greene argued that removing the child from his adoptive parents at this stage would be extraordinarily cruel to the boy; most of Illinois, it seemed, agreed.
The state supreme court, however, eventually ordered that Baby Richard should be returned to his biological father. In the aftermath of the Sarah case, the legislature revised the laws to make "the best interests of the child" paramount.
There was a clear line from that case, Greene's first crusade, to the new legislation and directives of the state child welfare agency following Baby Richard.
Boyer contends that the legislation was a political reaction to complicated and extreme cases that should not have been the basis for creating law. But to many people, Greene was a hero. He had accomplished what few journalists can claim: He had embarrassed bureaucrats, changed laws, stood up for children who needed a champion.
Also during this decade, Greene aligned himself with one of the most popular cultural figures in the world: Michael Jordan.
In the early nineties, Greene began writing columns about the Bulls superstar. And it was a stupid lie, told for no good reason. But it showed the contempt he had for all of us. Champion of abused children. Friend of Jordan. These were not bad comebacks from the beating he had taken in the Spy magazine article. Still, he continued to yearn in print for a simpler, happier time. In , Greene published his first novel, All Summer Long.
In it, he writes about three old friends from the imaginary town of Bristol, Ohio, who after their 25th high school reunion decide to spend one more summer together on the road. The character who most resembles Greene is a divorced network TV correspondent living in hotel rooms and scouring the country for human interest stories. He becomes involved with a graduate student prone to wearing tank tops and running shorts, and he eventually moves back to his hometown to write books.
In real life, of course, Greene never moved back to his hometown of Bexley, despite always seeming to pine for it in print. He lived in a Streeterville condominium. And he wasn't divorced; now he also had a son, and both of his children were attending the Latin School of Chicago.
Several times in the early nineties, his wife, Susan, made brief appearances at the Tribune. She also became a volunteer and then a board member for Creating Pride, a nonprofit organization that helps inner-city schoolchildren develop confidence by making art. Susan was a nice person who was married to someone who lived a public life, said an acquaintance. But she didn't; she enjoyed her privacy. By the early nineties, Greene had reinvented the way he dressed, exchanging the look of someone on the move for the look of someone who has reached his destination: nicely tailored pants, checked shirts, well-fitting jackets, and ties.
But beneath the veneer of this glossy career, when it came to women Greene still seemed to be stuck back in Bexley High School or in the swinging Chicago of the seventies. As far back as the Ms. Greene's World Pageant, colleagues had joked about his overheated interest in young women.
It's important to remember the context of the times. Some observers thought Greene was too persistent in his flirtations. A student at Columbia College, You introduced herself. I told him I was a journalism major and then he told me that he was about ready to go to his skyscraper condo and write his column.
He asked me if I wanted to come watch him write. I told him no. The following year, the Tribune hired You; she started out working at the phone desk in the newsroom. His gaze never went above my breast line. You says that she never saw Greene's behavior go beyond overattentiveness.
She herself left the Tribune under a cloud after freelancing for supermarket tabloids like the Globe and lending them photographs from the paper's library. She now works for the National Enquirer. But her account dovetails with other reports given to Chicago by Tribune insiders past and present. Those sources say they sometimes warned the interns and young staffers about Greene and his intentions.
After the scandal broke last September and Greene resigned, the often-told tales of his womanizing reverberated through the Tribune. There is no indication that a woman ever formally complained to Tribune management about Greene's behavior toward her.
However, several sources say that a succession of Tempo editors and their bosses had been alerted in the eighties and early nineties to Greene's overattentiveness to young women. One person who complained was told to "stop picking on Bob. Two former Tribune editors say that is simply not true. Owen Youngman, the Tribune 's vice-president of development, who was the managing editor for features from to , says, "No such complaints were ever made to me during the time that Bob worked for me.
James Warren, who was the Tempo editor from to and is now the deputy managing editor for features, refused to comment, although he recently told Newsweek that "[Greene] had a lot, a lot, a lot of younger women who kind of paid homage to him in one way or another. But we're not the morals police, and we didn't follow him out of the building if and when he left with them. Today, it is not clear whether Greene engaged merely in boorish and inappropriate flirtations-if, in fact, he was mostly acting like an overeager and unsuccessful teenager-or whether his actions frequently ended in sexual encounters.
After the scandal broke, the Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg published an account from Susan Taylor, a Milwaukee-area woman who says that she had an affair with Greene in about She had written him a fan letter about a column on breast implants and had mentioned her own; he called her and they met. According to Taylor, they had dinner on North Michigan Avenue; then he asked to see her breasts. They went to a room at the Marriott. After that, Taylor says, she saw him a few times.
But once she confessed that she was developing feelings for him, he cut her off. Taylor told Chicago that Greene said he had gone "to a therapist and he was trying to stop that behavior. Most of the stories that circulated were more like the one reported to Chicago by Barbara Crystal, a year-old corporate communications professional. Crystal first visited Greene when she was a year-old senior on an assignment for Sullivan High School, during the school year.
They met in the Sun-Times reception area and spoke for 30 minutes, and Greene was "a perfect gentleman. Four years later, in , Crystal, then 21, spotted Greene at a Rush Street bar.
She recalls that he said, "Oh, please have a drink with me. It was 2 a. Once they got there, she kept the door open and her coat on. She says that Greene then got "a little handsy with me and I realized this wasn't where I wanted the evening to go.
Megan Sheppard, now a year-old writer living in Seattle, had another kind of encounter with Greene years later. She sent him a fan letter around , mentioning that in a recent personals ad she had described herself as a Bob Greene fan; she thought he would be amused by that. About a week later, Greene called. He never suggested they meet or brought up sex.
By the mid-nineties, Greene's popularity seemed to be on the wane. The number of papers buying his column began to plummet, dropping from the peak to about last year-a decline that coincided with a falloff in demand from newspapers for syndicated general interest columns. There were rumblings again that some inside the Tribune wanted to move Greene off the front page of Tempo, although the paper's editors have always denied that.
Greene was held in particularly low regard by many other Chicago journalists. From to , the Reader ran "Bob Watch," a witty and biting weekly feature written under a pseudonym by Neil Steinberg. The column examined Greene's output under the slogan "We read him so you don't have to. Within the Tribune , Greene had fewer allies than ever.
Colleen Dishon, the powerful associate editor who had reinvented Tempo and who had always squashed features department rebellions against Greene, had retired. There were so many columns that it did require a dispassionate news story at some point, for balance.
When Kass breaks something we always do. Both DiVito and Greene say they are on cordial terms and respect each other. That respect did not keep DiVito from being blunt. That is inexcusable, especially because in the Baby Joe case, Greene, as both reporter and commentator, has been the source of all the information his readers possess concerning the case.
What has Greene told his readers? The Smiths tried to adopt Joe, but a judge in Toulon, Illinois, where they were living, placed the infant with Lutheran Social Services of Illinois instead. They just said he had to leave. Heiple—the same James D. In every column Heiple was the villain.
What seems to have failed in this case is that the investigations were not complete. It appears, based on what Greene has written, that a lot was known about the evil parents, the Smiths, that was not developed. If developed and known to the court, the tragedy might have been averted. The trial judge, he went on, might have known more about the Smiths than was introduced in court. The judge cannot base his ruling on stuff he knew. How would we ever know why a judge is ruling?
And neither were the Findleys, for that matter, related to Joe. In this case I really think he was somewhat out of line.
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