Bad Publicity: A Novel

by Jeffrey Frank

Overview

In the twilight of the Reagan era, as prospects appear brighter than ever for a Democratic restoration, the lawyers, lobbyists, advisers and socialites of Washington are looking ahead — but over their shoulders, too. With good reason.
Charlie Dingleman, a former congressman, has gotten a tantalizing job offer that could rescue him from the drudgery of lawyering. But he's being shadowed by an increasingly unsavory rumor started by Judith Grust, a young associate at Charlie's firm. Judith has a few dark secrets of her own, like one she shares with Hank Morriday, a lazy, shiftless welfare policy expert. That helps to drive Hank into the orbit of Candy Romulade, a P.R. executive paralyzed by a dwindling client list. Then Candy signs up a veteran local anchorman, who has a very peculiar view of the world.
As these men and women collide in a lusty, mad scramble, their savage ambitions and reversals of fortune test the idea that there's no such thing as bad publicity. The result, Bad Publicity, is a pitch-perfect, often poignant novel in the classic Swiftian mold.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743247801
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	03/07/2005
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jeffrey Frank was a senior editor at The New Yorker, the deputy editor of The Washington Post’s Outlook section, and is the author of Ike and Dick. He has published four novels, among them the Washington Trilogy—The Columnist, Bad Publicity, and Trudy Hopedale—and is the coauthor, with Diana Crone Frank, of a new translation of Hans Christian Andersen stories, which won the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Prize. He is a contributor to The New Yorker, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Bookforum, and Vogue, among other publications.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

By September of 1987 Charles Dingleman had become the sort of person who muttered obscenities when the supermarket line moved too slowly. He complained so often about so many little things that people in his law firm rolled their eyes and his young second wife said that he had become tiresome. Charlie, as everyone called him, had not been the same since he'd lost his seat in Congress three years before. He could still be charming, especially when he wore his wide smile and sincere stare, and he liked to tell clients that serving six years as the servant of a half-million Pennsylvanians was his proudest accomplishment. But no one quite believed him, perhaps because Charlie could not entirely conceal the loathing he felt for the tens of thousands of people who'd voted against him, and he never seemed comfortable talking about that time of his life.

The truth was that the people of Pennsylvania had turned on Charlie, and they had their reasons: a public divorce, which not only left him feeling sorry at the way everything had turned out but ashamed of himself. "I just kept stepping into it," he liked to say, but then he somehow did it again.

Just that week he'd managed to offend one of the associates, a dark-haired thirty-year-old named Judith Grust, who had been on the Law Review at Harvard and was often at the office past midnight, working much harder than Charlie ever would. On an impulse that Charlie thought was genuine (twice she'd smiled at him in the corridor), he'd invited Judith to lunch to discuss a mineral rights case that she'd helped him to prepare, producing a brief so intelligent and so detailed that he found it hard to follow. It was a lawsuit of very little interest to Charlie, and he found himself trying to change the subject whenever Judith brought it up.

They'd walked over to a K Street restaurant called Jean Valjean, where Charlie had ordered a rare strip steak and Judith a shrimp salad. During a friendly lull between courses, while Judith was describing a car she intended to buy, a Camry, and Charlie interrupted her to bring up the fate of Robert Bork, who had decided to fight on for confirmation to the Supreme Court, Judith noticed that Charlie was studying an underdressed woman at a nearby table. The woman reminded Charlie of Virginia Mayo, whom he had recently seen in a film on channel five with, he believed, Farley Granger and Broderick Crawford. They had been held hostage by mobsters in a Cleveland luncheonette.

"Every man in this place is staring," Judith said when she saw where Charlie was looking.

"With damn good reason," he replied, attempting his most winning smile, much like the one that Crawford had attempted with Mayo. "I know it's pathetic."

But as Charlie uttered these words, he saw how Judith's lips appeared to stiffen and how a sort of transparent mask altered her face. As he tried to repair the last sentence, he understood that he ought to shut up, that she was not going to be sympathetic to his somewhat rambling explication: that such sights were merely an innocent pleasure. Of course he had every right to say what he felt, and he kept talking until he noticed that Judith's expression was still changing; there was something in it now — a darkening — he could not understand. Then the atmosphere became, if anything, worse: when Charlie hurriedly returned to the subject of the lawsuit and expressed his view that the doctrine of laches applied to mineral claims on the property in question, adding only that the issues were hopelessly tiresome, he made the very bad guess that, on that topic at least, she would commiserate.

A waiter came by to fill their water glasses, and by the time he'd left with his icy pitcher, Judith Grust's brown eyes looked opaque and small. "I don't know why you're telling me this," she said. "If you're burned out and bored by our work, that's a problem between you and the partners. I don't know why you thought I'd be interested in what turns a middle-aged man on. The truth is I find that kind of staring at women deeply offensive." She paused and added softly, "I'm sorry if I sound as if I'm lecturing you."

Charlie looked at his luncheon companion, and although his appetite had fled, he nibbled on a warm roll he'd already broken into two, then three and four pieces. Was she kidding? He searched her expression, hoping to find a trace of self-mockery. He found nothing of the sort. He tried to remember something witty that Broderick Crawford had said to Virginia Mayo: that if he were a dog and she were a steak, he wouldn't care, or something to that effect; and Virginia Mayo had said that he was a dog, mangy and dumb and flea-bitten, and then Crawford and Mayo had laughed together in the way that friends in mortal danger laugh.

"All I can say in my defense," Charlie said, as if he were seeking her vote, "is that I meant no harm in what I said. I was just being a guy. I mean, what are we coming to if we can't be honest about that?"

His apology, like heavy food, sank in his stomach.

"I just like women," he went on, producing what he believed was his most charming expression, far better than Broderick Crawford's best.

"It's been my experience," Judith Grust replied, her voice a little gentler, "that many men who talk about liking women are those most prone to committing violence against women. I hope you don't take this personally; I'm not suggesting that you're a violent person. But it's what I believe."

Their food arrived, and Judith seemed to stare with disapproval at Charlie's steaming plate of steak with béarnaise sauce and potatoes. Charlie forced out a new smile, as if to add a dash of gaiety to their table. "Got to lose some weight," he said, patting his stomach, and in the silence that followed, he glanced once more at the woman nearby who had set the whole thing off. A thin film of perspiration was visible, a dewy coating on pale cleavage. Charlie widened his eyes and, in a jumpy gesture, looked at his watch.

"My gosh!" he said. "I have an appointment back at the office in ten minutes. How could I possibly have allowed such a scheduling botch? Forgive me!" Overcome with regret, he waved for the check, brandishing his amber American Express card. Moments later he stood and bowed slightly, in almost military fashion.

That should have been enough, Charlie thought later, but he felt rattled by Judith Grust's contemptuous look, and as he completed his bow, he felt a powerful urge to try to heal the mysterious wound that he'd inflicted. As he bent his head to apologize again, he sniffed strong perfume and noticed pale fuzz on her cheeks. He felt foolish just standing there and deployed his absolutely vintage grin.

"You know," he whispered, "I worry that if I were a mangy dog and you were roast beef, I wouldn't care," realizing even as the words came out that perhaps he had gotten something terribly wrong, that the joke had been mangled irreparably. Virginia Mayo would not have enjoyed this repartee — not at all — and Broderick Crawford would never have said such a thing. What on earth was he thinking? "I was trying to make a stupid joke, and it came out all wrong," Charlie said hurriedly, but Judith Grust's brown eyes had become black ice, as if she were another hostile Pennsylvania voter ready to do him in.

Copyright © 2004 by Jeffrey Frank

Editorial Reviews

"A quick-witted satire about what it takes to succeed, and survive, in Washington...Frank's [Tom] Wolfe-ish wit will keep you wanting more."
— USA Today

"Frank has painted an entertaining and very knowing portrait of Washington."
— The New York Times

"Frank's prose is spare and vivid, with scarcely a wasted syllable; every sentence has a pop to it."
— The Washington Post

"Frank's prose is as clear and cold as a well-iced martini, and lets the characters skewer themselves....The satire slyly exposes a Beltway world of has-beens and never-wases, where hopefuls scrabble for attention at cocktail parties and an unreturned phone call is a death knell."
— The New Yorker

From the Publisher

Publicity is a nefarious look at the barbaric underworld of D.C. politics and the egos that are forever clashing. And although not every plot point is wrapped up, Frank's Wolfe-ish wit will keep you wanting more. — Nicholas Thomas

USA Today

To describe this novel as darkly comic would be inadequate; it's funny, all right, but its vision isn't merely dark -- it is so bleak as to be almost Hobbesian. Satirists traditionally take a dim view of humanity, and Frank is gleefully, unapologetically in that mordant tradition. His characters aren't much more than the sum of their basest motives and their worst behavior … Frank has painted an entertaining and very knowing portrait of Washington. — Erik Tarloff

The New York Times

His prose is spare and vivid, with scarcely a wasted syllable; every sentence has a pop to it. ("Although no one could remember what she'd ever said," he writes of one TV talk show regular "no one could remember her ever being without something to say.") The gears of his plot engage with a well-honed click. And he's quite good at atmospherics, especially in evoking the Washington of Late Reaganism: the buzz in the streets when Mikhail Gorbachev made his state visit in Dec. '87, the long-forgotten flutters provoked by Iran-contra and especially, the bloom of young love that greeted Michael Dukakis in Democratic circles in those carefree months when it looked as if he might at last restore the White House to its rightful owners. — Andrew Ferguson

The Washington Post

Frank's second Beltway novel (after The Columnist) pokes fun at power seekers on both sides of the aisle, political insiders for whom a sentence of "obscurity without parole" is the worst possible fate. It's the eve of the 1988 presidential election, and everyone in Washington is angling for a role in the administration to come. Hank Morriday is a welfare expert in low-level orbit at a Democratic think tank, hoping that a Dukakis victory will bring him a White House job. Charlie Dingleman, on the other hand, has already had his time in the sun; he's a former three-term congressman bumped from office after a bad-and public-divorce. There's hope for Charlie, in the form of an adviser's role during Reagan's final few months in office, but first he's got to avoid any negative publicity-something he has an extraordinarily difficult time doing. He makes a crude pass at a fellow lawyer, hard-nosed Judith Grust; then some lewd, disorderly behavior outside his house compounds the problem. Judith, who is meant to be the kind of woman who cries "sexual harassment" rather than "wolf," decides to sabotage Charlie's White House chances. She turns to Hank, who has some tentative media connections, and Hank, desperate to be included in anything important, plays along, setting off a spiral of bad press that no one anticipated. Once again, Frank portrays Washington as a handful of power brokers circled by an enormous population of opportunistic has-beens and never-will-bes. That rings true, but none of the main characters are strong enough-or bad enough-to give the picture real bite. Agent, Tina Bennett. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Having tested his satiric mettle with The Columnist, Frank now successfully skewers the Washington milieu in which the denizens of think tanks, law firms, PR agencies, and other putative movers and shakers compete for a leg up, or at least a kind smile. Among them is Charlie Dingleman, an ex-Congressman angling for a job in the 1987 White House. Charlie's raucous nightmare begins after a lame joke told to a young lawyer goes awry. He enlists Big Tooth-a PR firm whose logo is two teeth gripping the planet Earth-to help counter the rumors arising from his gaffe. But once an unfortunate episode of public urination compounds his original misstep, poor Charlie is history. All along, Frank (who has writerly credentials at The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Washington Star) makes frightening points about the toxic side effects of political life in the nation's capital. Released in an election year, this satiric tour de force should enliven collections of political fiction in large public libraries.-Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Just in time for Election Year, a wickedly funny account of the aimless lives of Beltway losers caught up in the events leading up to the 1988 Dukakis-Bush slugfest. Charlie Dingleman, who still dreams of his six years as a Pennsylvania Congressman, has been put out to pasture at Thingeld, Pine & Sconce. His second wife, Eve DeFole, is a law student obviously on her way up and out. His brainy, prickly junior associate at TP&S, Judith Grust, seems headed in the same direction. And suddenly so does Charlie, his name nosed about for a White House job-until he allows himself an unfortunate glance and an ill-advised jest at a lunch with Judith, who promptly sets out to bury him deep. It won't do Charlie any good to consult the image consultants at the Big Tooth PR firm, because they're just as feckless as he is. Account executive Candy Romulade dithers over her "action plan" for Charlie while Rome burns, and her friend Teresa Maracopulous is too completely trapped in a dead-end assistant's job and a dead-end marriage to a husband who actually loves her to bestir herself to any useful task. Meanwhile, exiled liberal Hank Morriday, Judith's sometime lover, struggles with his book on welfare reform while he enviously eyes his opposite number, a rising star in the Dukakis campaign. What brings this ship of fools to unforgettable life is Frank's heartlessly deadpan way of deflating their most cherished desires, from their petty scrabbling for 15 minutes of fame to their hilariously untitillating couplings (as when Judith reflects tolerantly of an unappealing suitor that "she expended fewer calories on him than she would merely climbing onto her exercise machine"). Though his tale runs out of steamas completely as the Dukakis campaign toward the end, the delight Frank (The Columnist, 2001) takes in skewering his crafty nincompoops is infectious, evergreen. Agent: Tina Bennett/Janklow & Nesbit

Kirkus Reviews