Word: pettibone
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Even before publication, Robert Daley's satirical roman à clef about a Great New York Newspaper set off much who's-who gossip in the city room of a Great New York Newspaper. Who, for example, is Paul Pettibon, the Paris bureau chief with the ego of a De Gaulle and a sense of insecurity to rival that of Charlie Brown's pal Linus? Who is Jack L. Banglehorster, the slow-moving, ruminative foreign editor who feels that his first duty is "to report the same news the opposition papers reported...
...life, author Daley's caricature creatures seem more like conventioneering Rotarians or stodgy minor bureaucrats than journalistic giants. Bureau chiefs loll about sidewalk cafés or tool around in chauffeurdriven limousines, rewriting local newspapers, and big-name correspondents interview one another over grog. The biggest fraud is Pettibon, "The Paper's" man in Paris. Despite the Pulitzer Prize he won, the books he wrote, the generals and Prime Ministers he met and conquered, Pettibon is a cheesecloth hero. He pretends fluent French and frets over whether his latest story will be gloriously "fronted," ingloriously "shorted" or humiliatingly...
...Pettibon's ultimate downfall is accelerated by the discovery that he has been having an affair with plain Willow Plunkett, a randy secretary in his Paris office. That is too much for visiting Editor Banglehorster. A man of Pettibon's status, he feels, "should have got an actress or an ambassador's wife. Such a man did not belong in Paris. He did not belong in London. He did not belong on the foreign staff...