Free A Little Trouble with the Facts by Nina Siegal

better.”
    Buzz smiled. “Of course you do.”
     
    After that talking-to, I followed Buzz’s advice and kept my stories lean as a triathelete. I avoided the promo specials, made sure my sources were sober and on the level, vetted my info with people The Paper had already quoted ten times, and made no mention of any camp, save the one to which Charles Rhode’s daughter went for tennis (which happened to be in Rhinebeck). As a result, my stories were dull as dust, but, at least, I was off the Corrections page. Not a single complaining call, not a single private conference. I even got buddy-buddy with the staff fact-checkers, who didn’t brush their hair.
    As a reward for my vigilance I was appointed to a new Style beat: Society. It was what I’d always wanted, and I’d never imagined I could do it at The Paper. The opportunities before me seemed vast; maybe I’d finally find some of my father’s childhood chums or my great-grandmother’s other great-granddaughters. But I was still a newbie.
    On my first assignment, a patron’s dinner for the Met, Grand Dame Mitzy Carlisle grabbed my hand as I was scribbling her quips on my notepad under the table. She tapped me on the thigh and whispered that I should join her in the Ladies’, where she was going to powder her nose.
    “It’s fine if you quote me,” she told me as she leaned in to,in fact, powder, “and I’m sure it’s fine if you quote most everyone here. But leave that notebook in your purse. You are among people who don’t appreciate a paper trail.”
    “But I’ve got to take notes,” I said. “How else will I get their quotes right?”
    “You’ll just have to develop a colorful memory, darling. And take lots of bathroom breaks.”
    As I soon gathered, Mitzy had missed her calling to be a gal reporter for the International Herald Tribune in the 1920s when she gave up her slot in the London bureau to marry an Oxford purebred. She told me she’d followed Brenda Starr’s fortunes in the Sunday funnies through the years with the tragicomic sense of remorse.
    After dinner, she took me to a diner on Madison Avenue and tutored me on everything from the appropriate amount of frisée to leave on my plate at dinner to the proper pronunciation of sommelier. She wanted to ensure that I’d never get lost in a sea of bejeweled blue-hairs again. Working with me, she said, was her last chance to dance with the fourth estate. Mitzy didn’t care if what I printed was flattering to anyone; she was happy for a little scandal in her circle—“jazzed things up a bit,” she said. She just wanted it to be correct.
    And after a year had elapsed covering my elders without a single mismatched pantsuit, Buzz pulled me into his office for another conference.
    “Are you familiar with the term zeitgeist, Valerie?” he said.
    At first, I thought I’d spelled it wrong in a story. “Sure, zeitgeist,” I said. “It’s the general gestalt .” Just replacing one German word with another. “The cultural climate, the, I don’t know, spirit of the times. The way things shake.”
    “Zeitgeist,” he said again, without looking up. “You own it. Your new beat.”
     
    The zeitgeist, as I saw it, was the dominant paradigm, at its most Hegelian extreme. New York, Big Picture. It was math geeks building technology empires on venture capital magic dust and art moguls turning the city’s oldest museums into international franchises offering Picassos like Big Macs.
    For four months in a row, my splashy cover stories on Style came every other week. I introduced the term fashionista into the paper’s lexicon; I busted the dog-run wars open wide; I single-handedly popularized the pashmina. Love me or hate me, everyone read me. Valerie Vane was the name they flipped to after ordering their eggs Florentine.
    Suddenly, I was always in Jeremiah Golden territory. I ran into him at Thomas Kren’s businessman collector’s preview at the Guggenheim’s motorcycle show, John McEnroe’s