From This Day Forward (19 page)

 

CR: It was CBS telling me the Turks had invaded Cyprus. I cried, “Oh, my God. Steve's there.” The person on the phone said huffily, “Well, we have correspondents there as well.” He thought I was being competitive on Steve's behalf, not that I was worried about my husband. Then he asked me to file a radio spot.

 

SR: The main CBS stringer in Athens was in Cyprus with me. They didn't have anybody but Cokie.

 

CR: I had not heard from CBS since my visit in New York, but now they wanted Greek reaction to the invasion and they had my phone number, so the folks there thought it was worth trying me. I had never filed a radio spot in my life. It was very early in the morning, so there wasn't anything going on, what was I going to do? I didn't know anybody. I woke up the live-in baby-sitter, a young Canadian woman who was in Greece for the summer, and told her I was leaving to do a radio report. I drove by the Greek Pentagon—which was right near our house—no action there. Then I went to the
Reuters office, where the bureau chief, Neocosmos Tzallas, a good friend of ours, was already working. Fortunately, Neo had an old friend, an opposition politician named Averoff—he later became defense minister—and Averoff was able to find out what was happening and fill us in, so I was able to file a spot. From there on out I was filing every hour, but at times the whole country's communication system broke down and I couldn't get a phone line out of Athens. The father of one of Lee's friends was duty officer at the American embassy one night and tipped me off that they had agreed on a cease-fire in Cyprus. I had a world beat but I couldn't get the story out. Our borders were closed. Banks were closed. It was chaos. And I didn't know where Steven was. For a little while I didn't know whether he was alive or dead, until the
Times
got word to me that he was safe. Meanwhile I was filing constantly. The events in Cyprus triggered a reaction in Greece, and the civilian politicians started moving against the military junta. I'd been working twenty hours straight for days, which was fine because I was so scared about Steve, and it was all very exhilarating. But the baby-sitter was getting pretty tired. On her birthday, I promised I'd be home for dinner and we'd cook some steaks and have a nice party. I got in the cab to go back home from the Reuters office and all of a sudden it was like Mardi Gras and New Year's Eve all at once. In all the cars, people honked their horns, and on the street everyone was shouting and jumping up and down. Just then the radio in the cab announced that the junta had fallen! I hopped out right at the Presidential Palace, where the civilian leaders were meeting, and turned on my tape recorder to capture all the sound. Flower stalls line one whole side of the building. I ran into one stall and commandeered the guy's telephone. Without so much as a by-your-leave, I took the phone apart and stuck these little alligator clips into the receiver, which is the way you filed from a tape recorder in those years, and produced a spot. The flower-stall owner was screaming at me, convinced I was with the CIA, taking
his phone apart. I calmed him down and bought some flowers. It was an incredibly exciting moment.

 

SR: That night CBS called Cokie's mother and asked, “Do you have a picture of your daughter?” Lindy was alarmed. “Why? Is something wrong?” And CBS said, no, but her radio report is the only news we have out of Greece; we want to play it as the lead of the TV news and we want to run her picture along with it. So just days after Cokie started working for CBS, she led the Walter Cronkite show. Not a bad beginning.

 

CR: All of this time, which seemed forever but was in fact about a week, Steven and I hadn't been able to talk to each other, and usually, no matter where we are, we talk at least once a day. It was the longest period of our lives that we were out of touch—even now, twenty-five years later, it's still the record. It was just terrifying. I didn't know what his situation was. My own situation was pretty scary. It was hard for me to get money to buy food. The banks were closed and credit cards didn't exist. Fortunately, the kids thought it was pretty neat, with all these tanks in the street.

 

SR: I wasn't able to talk to Cokie because I went to the British base in the south of the island, hoping for better communications. But there were about twenty or thirty reporters and only one phone line we could use, so whenever it was my turn, I'd call my office in London to try to dictate a story.

 

CR: At one point the
Times
called your father to tell him you were okay, and he said, “I didn't raise my son to be a war correspondent!”

 

SR: I agreed with him. And anyway, the new civilian government in Greece was an even bigger story, so after about a week I was able to hop a British air force flight to London,
and get back to Athens the next day. I had left behind a wife who was obviously a very accomplished woman but didn't know squat about being a radio reporter. I returned home to find out that she had been filing constantly for a week and was now a veteran foreign correspondent. It was one of the more bizarre moments in our marriage. Friends in California tell tales of driving along, listening to the CBS all-news station, hearing Cokie's voice from the radio and practically driving off of the freeway. I wasn't the only one surprised.

 

CR: That week established me with CBS, and later that year the foreign editor came to Greece and said that they were interested in hiring me as their woman in Europe. There was just no way on earth I could do that. Steve was away all the time, I'd be away all the time. Talk about unfair to your children! But it was fine to say no to that. It was flattering, but it would have been wrong. We were able to spend a lot of time traveling together, often with the kids. And
The New York Times
was beginning to understand that the spouses of their correspondents were important to the whole operation. So they agreed to pay my way occasionally when I traveled with Steven, and that helped a lot.

 

SR: When Cokie traveled with me, she'd often call CBS and offer to work. At one point we went to Italy during an election campaign, and when she called New York they said, “Thank God you're there. Our radio correspondent has just been taken to the hospital.” Cokie wound up covering the whole Italian election for CBS radio. It posed a bit of a problem for me because my editor used to drive into New York listening to CBS and I would propose all these stories and more than once he'd say, “I already heard that story on CBS from Cokie.” What he probably didn't realize was that he was also paying for her to scoop me.

Even though Cokie wasn't working anywhere near full-time, having her own press card, her own identity, was very
important in those years. She had legitimacy in the international press corps and with government ministers, and had access to press conferences and briefings. She had an independent role beyond foreign correspondent's wife. Secondly, I think it meant that she could absorb and process the experience in a very different way. Everything became grist for a possible story.

 

CR: I started doing freelance pieces for little magazines, and then we wrote some travel pieces together for
The New York Times
and a big Sunday magazine piece. Like Steven, I was able to write on a variety of topics and I enjoyed putting together different stories for different publications, plus the radio and occasional TV work when news broke.

 

SR: We had both become interested in how modern archaeologists were proving that many of the ancient myths had a basis in fact. The magazine article focused on an excavation on the island of Santorini, in the middle of the Aegean. A village had been sealed in by a volcanic explosion, just like Pompeii, except this was from the Bronze Age, 1200
B.C
., more than a thousand years before Pompeii. The site had been discovered accidentally by a shepherd and it was in the early stages of excavation. So we went to the island with the kids and the baby-sitter and left them together one morning at the little villa we had rented. Cokie and I spent this absolutely fascinating morning going through the dig with the caretaker explaining it all to us, and I became convinced the explosion on Santorini had led to the myth of Atlantis.

 

CR: The caretaker's grandfather was the shepherd who had first stumbled on the find and this was the family property.

 

SR: Normally, in any ancient site the walls are at most three feet high, but here was a Bronze Age city with ruins preserved to the second story. In fact, they had discovered a bench on
the second floor with a hole in it. The archaeologists had originally proclaimed that this must be a shrine; that's what they always said when they couldn't explain something. Then they discovered the network of pipes leading from the hole and realized it was indoor second-floor plumbing more than three thousand years old. Some of the houses in the surrounding village didn't have such luxuries. Then we went to a late lunch, Greek style.

 

CR: We went to this little teeny beach which had maybe three buildings on it. We had hired a cab for the day, and we asked the driver to recommend a taverna. He said, “That one on the end, the guy who runs it is also the fisherman.” The place had at most two tables, and a little lettuce garden out back. Santorini is famous for its wine because the volcanic soil produces delicious grapes; tomatoes, too. The fisherman showed us his fresh-from-the-sea catch and we picked out a couple of fish. Then he and his wife brought our rickety little table right out to the water. While we were waiting for the fish to cook we ate the fresh-picked lettuce, with some cheese and wine. Then on came this unbelievably fresh fish, grilled perfectly, and Steve looked at me and exulted: “We're on assignment for
The New York Times
! We're getting paid to do this!” That was maybe the single best moment of our entire stay in Greece. It doesn't get any better than that.

As Steve says, working was important for my identity and sanity, but it also helped to keep my hand in professionally so that when I did come home, I had clips to show, and broadcasts to bolster my résumé. But I also wanted time to be a mother and volunteer in the community. I was PTA president one year and very involved with the school. I remember setting up a spook house for the elementary school at Halloween, and it wasn't easy. This wasn't a country where I could run down to the local hardware store and buy fluorescent
paint. After I finally found the paint through some theater group, I prevailed upon an appliance store to give me a huge refrigerator box. I got inside the box and painted all these spiders and eyes. I am the world's worst artist, but I was the only one willing to do it. Turns out the rest of the mothers were wise to steer clear because that fluorescent paint is poison!

Becca was in a ballet class run by a Frenchwoman who missed her calling as a marine drill instructor. We American mothers were considered the renegades, we were not nearly strict enough with our five-year-olds, but I was the only one daring enough to drive into Athens. It was ten minutes away, but traffic was so terrifying that a lot of foreigners wouldn't go near the city. I remember risking my life to buy the little ballet outfits, but I ended up with the wrong shade of blue and that was a huge deal to the teacher. So our little American girls all wore a paler shade of blue. How humiliating!

 

SR: We knew why we were there—we were there for my job. Cokie never said, it's my turn, or my career is being thwarted. But she did establish herself as a journalist apart from me. Once we attended a press reception in honor of Constantine Caramanlis, who had been in exile in France during the military government and now was back as the country's newly elected premier. He was a very courtly, very patrician man with a great eye for a pretty lady. When he made his entrance, he took one look at Cokie from across the room and made a beeline for her.

 

CR: I was avoiding him because the paparazzi surrounding him scared me to death. I had been hit in the head more than once by one of those cameras. But Caramanlis was what you'd call single-minded if there was one woman in the room.

 

SR: Cokie's Greek was pretty good but it wasn't perfect, and she was trying desperately to think of the Greek word for “congratulations.”

 

CR: Which is
synharitiria
.

 

SR: But the only word that stuck in her mind was
synagrida
, which actually means “red snapper”! As Caramanlis was bearing down on her, she was about to say, “Red snapper, Mr. Premier.”

 

CR: It was one of those moments where the Holy Spirit came upon me, because just as I was about to say “red snapper” the right word popped into my head and I didn't disgrace myself. But I also learned a lot about myself in those years. Steve was traveling much of the time and often I resented that. I can remember one night in California taking the garbage down the driveway and thinking, “This is a pain. I would like to live with someone who is here and takes the garbage out.” Then I thought if we weren't married I'd have to take it out every night. But still, like most people, I think, I would occasionally gripe—maybe I can find somebody else who will take the garbage out. When we got to Greece I was alone a lot. And it was a difficult country to live in because it was neither first world nor third world. There weren't modern conveniences, but there wasn't easily hired help either. And because we weren't with the government or the military, I was living much more on the local economy than most of my American friends. The
Times
was very generous; it paid for half the school and gave us a housing allowance, so we weren't impoverished by any means. It was simply a question of coping. I remember, for instance, my search for charcoal to use in a little grill I had bought. I knew there had to be charcoal someplace; tavernas with grills dotted the countryside. Finally, I discovered that charcoal was sold at lumber
yards, since it was burned wood. I bought the equivalent of a hundred-pound bag of huge pieces of charred wood and brought it home. Then I drove the car over it about twenty times to break it up enough to use for cooking. Accomplishments like that, as minor as they were, gave me a wonderful sense of competence. I didn't need Steven to do those things; in fact, he would have told me I was nuts to drive over the charcoal, but it worked. I realized that I missed Steven enormously, but what I missed was his company, the companionship, the conversation, the laughs. I could take out the garbage by myself, even if I didn't like it.