The Solomon Scandals

Rebecca Kitiona-Fenton: Great-grandniece of Jonathan Stone, the narrator. Tireless student of “previrtual media,” the inky old paper kind.

Jon Stone, the narrator: A reporter whose curiosity might kill his career and maybe him. Sees Washington as a white-collar factory town. Covered the Kent State massacre while working in a blue-collar town. A Jew raised in McLean, a Waspy D.C. suburb. Not a philosopher but has put Spinoza (image) to work as a mentor.

Sy Solomon: The sleazy real estate tycoon in the title—a massive ex-bricklayer with two missing fingertips and a huge, rickety building housing IRS and CIA bureaucrats. Friends with President Eddy Bullard and the Washington Telegram’s top editor, George McWilliams. “Decency,” Solomon says of the targets of his campaign donations, “it’s the first thing I look for in a politician. Please, Jon. Do you want another Watergate?”

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For a limited period, Twilight Times Books is making available this excerpt.

The Abraham Solomon Building dominated a block on a greeny hill in northwest Washington.

It loomed over its neighbors as a castle might over peasant huts.

The windows were heavily tinted, somewhat oval, and bordered by silvery metal—the building seemed to be wearing row after row of sunglasses. In privacy its occupants could peer down at the commoners below.

Seymour Solomon Companies shared the building with a nest of lobbyists. Gazing at the luminous directory, I saw the names of everything from phony citizens groups to a gang of cigarette companies. A mélange of furriers, travel agencies, stereo stores, and stockbrokers filled the first floor. If a politician accepted a bribe upstairs, he could dispose of it before he even left the building.

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The Solomon Scandals captures the pre-Web days when news didn’t really exist unless newspapers and huge TV networks wanted it to.

Enter Jonathan Stone, a young reporter who, amid the smugness of his era, has pitted himself against one of the Washington Telegram’s major advertisers—a real estate tycoon named Seymour Solomon, an ex-bricklayer with two fingertips missing.  Along the way Stone lives through CIA skulduggery; the threatened collapse of an IRS building, with hundreds inside; D.C.-quirky sex scandals; a gossip columnist’s suicide; and the death of a sharklike editor in a car bombing. Stone’s partner in crime or anti-crime is Margo Danielson. A medieval studies grad from Oberlin, she is a reluctant bureaucrat trapped within the Augean Stables of the General Services Administration (photo).

Scandals is fiction, not history, but was inspired partly by the Skyline collapse in Northern Virginia where dozens were killed or injured.

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Hollywood mentions pop up in The Solomon Scandals, my Washington newspaper novel. L.A. and D.C. overlap, all right, and even the peons can fixate on this. In Scandals, a GS-11 bureaucrat isn’t just dreaming of making a mint as a tabloid tipster. He already knows who’ll play him in the movie.

Closer to real life, could Scandals itself be a film? Hardly a certainty, but a Hollywood insider loves the dialogue and the general outrageousness of the book. For a role model, I’ll just have to rely on an obscure but prolific scriptwriter named Arnold Belgard (1907-1967). He was a distant relative on my mother’s side and amassed such credits as Tarzan and the Slave Girl, East of Kilimanjaro and three “Bonanza” and nine “Lassie” episodes. Belgard directed “Kilimanjaro” and The Mighty Jungle.

Scandals may be the only D.C. novel that ends with Thackeray II, a talking Afghan Hound, doing a Harry Truman send-up at the Cosmos Club, and just now I noticed that The Fabulous Joe, to which Belgard contributed dialogue, features an articulate canine. This and a “Lassie” connection, too? Back to the Future?

Related: Watch Road Show for free, via the Internet Archive. Belgard was one of three writers of this screwball comedy directed by Hal Roach.

Update—a relevant link: Washington, D.C.: The New Hollywood, complete with a “power is a great aphrodisiac” quote from Sally Quinn (CBS News, dated June 10, 2009).

Jonathan Stone, the reporter in The Solomon Scandals, grilled me for this Q. & A.—uncut. – David Rothman

STONE: Why’s Scandals copyrighted in your name? It’s my newspaper memoirs.

ROTHMAN: Er, faux memoirs. Without me, you wouldn’t even have been born…or have worked for the Washington Telegram…or have struggled to avert an IRS-CIA building collapse with hundreds dead…or lived through those quirky sex scandals…or the corruption and blackmail from the Oval Office…or the gossip columnist’s suicide…or the death of the sharklike editor in a car bombing…or your Hollywood directing career or—

STONE: Thanks, but I’ve already read my book. Now what about the talking Afghan Hound at the Cosmos Club? Sure it doesn’t detract from my dignity?

ROTHMAN: But you’ve been dead for decades. Scandals is set mainly in the 1970s, but looks far beyond—via reflections from your great-grand niece at the Institute for Previrtual Studies. Besides, Afghans are dignified. I didn’t put this detail in the book, but Thackeray II speaks in a wonderful baritone with a mid-Atlantic accent. I wish he could do my radio interviews for me.

STONE: For latecomers, who’s this guy Solomon? And what’s he doing on my book cover with a building in his hand?

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A free MP3 of the start of The Solomon Scandals—one hour of a total of about eight—is now online for everyone to download for iPods or other players. You don’t have to be print-challenged to qualify. Click here to get the file, which includes an audio overview.

Big thanks to librarian Tom Peters, the narrator, who’ll be leading a discussion of this Washington suspense novel at 9 p.m. on July 21 for Online Programming for All Libraries. If you’re blind or otherwise print-challenged, you can catch up with Tom for the rest of the installments as they become available. Meanwhile you can read a text overview of Scandals as well as a list of the characters.

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The Solomon Scandals will be featured on July 21 at 9 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time in a global chatcast hosted by Tom Peters, main interviewer for Online Programming for All Libraries. You’ll be able to hear Tom (first photo) and author David Rothman (second) and ask questions. Go here for instructions for the chatcast, and get an overview of Scandals here. Descriptions of the main characters are here. Continue reading…

Update: I’ve now traced the quote to a Reagan Administration official, who, however, can’t recall where he heard it. See addendum. – D.R.

For close to a year, I’ve tried to crack a Washington mystery. What’s the origin of the famous Truman quote, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog”?

In The Solomon Scandals, I put the line in the mouth of a talking Afghan Hound doing a Truman act at the Cosmos Club. But I alerted my novel’s readers that the quote is rather iffy—in fact, probably just a variant of a 1975 play’s line that appeared without “in Washington.”

Meanwhile I’ve succeeded in tracing the Washingtonized quote back at least as far as a June 1987 statement to the New York Times from then-Senator Nancy Kassebaum.

But where did the daughter of 1936 Republican presidential nominee Alf Landon—now Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker, following her marriage to Howard Baker, Jr., the former Senate minority leader—encounter the quote?

A gracious reply from Alf Landon’s daughter

I emailed her this week via her husband’s law office and received a gracious reply by phone.

“I’m sure it was in a paper,” she said, perhaps the New York Times or the Washington Post.  Well, I’ve searched the Times as best I could through the Net. And now I’ll see if I can’t get a librarian or someone else to check the Post.

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I’m a big booster of public libraries, and The Solomon Scandals reflects that. Wendy Blevin, the gossip columnist, is a literacy volunteer at the Martin Luther King branch of the D.C. public library system—and, yes, as you’ll see, that fits her character.

As a library fan, I was tickled to be interviewed on Scandals and other topics for a podcast hosted by Sam Clay, director of the Fairfax County Public Library system in Northern Virginia.

Lesson learned: Try to avoid notes. I’d have sounded more natural at the start of the podcast if I hadn’t use them.

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