Nora Ephron's "Lucky Guy' on Broadway

Like everyone else in New York, I too have been swept away on the wave of adulation that greets Tom Hanks every night as he steps out onto the Broadway stage to embody the newspaper columnist Mike McAlary in Lucky Guy. (His opening line "What? Me?" gets a thunderous applause.)

Given its sky-high entertainment value, I'd venture to say that it's the best show in town this season (and my use of the word "show," rather than "play," is deliberate). After all, it's the work of a dream show team: actor Tom Hanks, writer Nora Ephron, and director George C. Wolfe, each with a track record of success and popularity.

Lucky Guy was the final work by Nora Ephron, whose death last June is still mourned by the American film audiences who loved her signature works, When Harry Met Sally and Heartburn. It also represents the Broadway debut of America's most likeable screen actor, star of Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump and dozens more blockbusters. Hanks was also Ephron's close personal friend, having been directed by her in two of her films, Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail.

So Lucky Guy all adds up to one huge love-fest. The audience loves Hanks, Hanks loves Ephron, and Ephron loves journalism in general. Who would dare spoil such a party?

Strikes and scandals

Mike McAlary (1957-1998) was a legend among journalists for his unbridled ambition, unparalleled persistence, and unequaled chutzpah. Lucky Guy, narrated by a number of his colleagues in the gritty world of New York tabloids, charts his meteoric rise as he careens from Newsday to the New York Post to the Daily News and back again.

His trademarks? Slaving (and drinking) away, getting the story at any cost, exposing corrupt cops and protecting his sources, all the while surviving hirings, firings, takeovers, strikes and scandals.

"All I want is to be the highest paid columnist in history," he announces, by way of explaining his single-minded persistence.

At the apex of his climb, McAlary is offered $1 million a year. But like Icarus, McAlary (that is, Ephron's incarnation of him) has flown too high. After getting drunk at a Yankees game in 1993, McAlary is nearly killed in a car accident.

"It feels like I am punished for being an asshole," McAlary laments in the hospital, where he must regain his speech and learn to walk all over again.

Attacking a rape victim

Then came the controversial Jane Doe case of 1994, involving a rape in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. McAlary, back on the beat, wrote an article accusing the victim of perpetrating a hoax. He was denounced by dozens of his fellow journalists (who signed a petition against him) and subsequently sued. Although he was ultimately cleared, having been misinformed by his sources, McAlary was demoted to a once-a-week columnist.

In a final "phoenix-from-the-ashes" flight, McAlary won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for exposing the story of Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant brutalized by New York City police officers. A year later, McAlary died of colon cancer at age 41.

"We're knights— we right wrongs," declares one of McAlary's cohorts in a final scene. It's a romantic statement that that tells us less about journalism than about Ephron's yearning for the bygone bustling big-city newsrooms of her salad days.

"I loved the city room," Ephron wrote of her time as a journalist. "I loved the pack. I loved smoking and drinking Scotch and playing dollar poker. I loved the speed. I loved the deadlines. I loved that you wrapped the fish. You can't make this stuff up, I used to say."

A lawyer's dissent

And, to be sure, she hasn't. Thanks to George C. Wolfe's classy, big-Broadway-style direction and a spirited 17-member company, that story has been brought to life in all its nostalgic period detail: the grungy gray metal desks, the old computer monitors, the reporters crowded around the bar.

Yet the morning after Lucky Guy opened on Broadway, the New York Times published an op-ed page essay by Martin Garbus, attorney for the rape victim Jane Doe in 1994. According to Garbus, McAlary was negligent in his fact-finding and the editors who backed him were negligent in their oversight.

But what Garbus finds unforgivable was McAlary's tenacity in sticking to his story at all costs— to his newspaper, to his colleagues and, most of all, to the victimized Jane Doe. According to Garbus, McAlary flaunted his inflexibility, never acknowledging that he had received misinformation, and never apologizing to the victim.

Hanks turns heads

To Ephron's credit, she doesn't obscure this low point in McAlary's life. Nor does she conceal McAlary's other warts, from his relentless ambition to his neglect of his home life.

But in the end, it's not so much Ephron's script as Hanks's performance that downplays McAlary's dark side, sweeping us off our feet, and turning our heads the other way— to focus on a salty story in the rough-and-tumble world of big city journalism.

Ephron was indeed lucky to have scooped this story in the appropriate realm— not in the fact-driven world of journalism or the courts, but on Broadway, where myths are made.