Six degrees of plagiarism: The Jayson Blair affair

By JERRY TALLMER

Jayson Blair never met John Guare, but John Guare met Jayson Blair long ago. In fact he created him and called him Paul — “Paul Poitier.”

In all the 14,000 words of extraordinary mea culpa that filled four pages of the New York Times of Sun., May 11, 2003, plus all the thousands of subsequent words by outside commentators, appraisers, pundits, scoffers and (more or less) sympathizers, nowhere, astonishingly, has this member of Jayson Blair’s late profession seen any reference to “Six Degrees of Separation,” the 1989 play that ran for two years and 485 performances at Lincoln Center, and put into our heads and language the whole wonderful nutty possible truth that each of us is only six people removed from everybody else in the world.

Indeed, if you will look on page 51 of the Dramatists Play Service paperback edition of “Six Degrees of Separation,” you will, I believe, find where — under the current circumstances, with highest irony — the character who would ultimately become the Paul of “Six Degrees” first sprang into Mr. Guare’s mind. Flanders Kitteredge, one of the prime patsies of con man, thief and super-liar Paul, is speaking of an incident that had brought about the suicide of another victim:

The paper of note — the Times — ran a story on so-called smart sophisticated tough New Yorkers being boondoggled by a confidence man now wanted by the police. Who says New Yorkers don’t have a heart? They promised it would run either in the Living section or the Home section.

Actually, says another character in the play, it ran on the B (Metro) section’s front page. But not for 14,000 words.

For those who have never seen it, either on stage or screen, let me extract a few further details from “Six Degrees of Separation.”

It begins with Flan (Flanders) and Ouisa Kittredge, an enlightened, sophisticated New York couple if ever there were one, entertaining a guest in their smart East Side apartment, the outstanding feature of which is a double-sided oil painting by Wassily Kandinsky. Suddenly the doorman brings in Paul, a young black man in his early 20s — “very handsome, very preppy” — who is bleeding badly from what he says was a beating by Central Park muggers who took every penny he had, as well as a briefcase containing the only copy of, he further says, his about-to-be-submitted Harvard University thesis on “The Catcher in the Rye.”

There he was in the park, wounded and penniless and not knowing anybody — but he did know the Kittredges’ daughter Tess, who is, he tells her parents, his good friend at Harvard, and he knows the Kittredges’ son Woody.

“Your children said you were kind. All the kids were sitting around the dorm one night dishing the shit out of their parents. But your kids were silent and said No, not our parents. Not Flan and Ouisa. Not the Kittredeges. The Kittredges are kind. So after the muggers left, I looked up and saw these Fifth Avenue apartments. Mrs. Onassis lives there. I know the Babcocks live over there. The Auchinclosses live there. But you lived here. I came here.”

From there, it builds, and it builds, and it builds, lie on lie, con on con, with everybody nursing Paul along, this nice bright young black man, who in the course of things just happens — inadvertently — to let it out that he is the son, the illegitimate but favorite son, of, guess who, one of the Kitteredges’ big heroes, a gentleman named Sidney Poitier. And they go for it! Well, a lot of people went for what Jayson Blair was writing in the Times — for a while. A long while.

From the New York Times document of May 11, 2003 — amidst all those thousands of words about the duplicities of Jayson Blair, the reporter who faked datelines, interviews, quotes and much else, repeatedly said he was where he in fact was not, swiped verbatim from others’ stories in other newspapers, etc., etc.:

At the same time, though, many at The Times grew fond of the affable Mr. Blair, who seemed especially gifted at office politics. He made a point of getting to know many of the newsroom support workers, for example. His distinctive laugh became a familiar sound.

“He has charisma, enormous charisma,” David Carr, a Times media reporter said. Mr. Blair, he added, often praised articles written by colleagues, and, frequently, “it was something far down in the story, so you’d know he read it.”

From the play, a scene in which Paul, having sexually seduced one of Tess Kitteredge’s high-school classmates, a lost soul named Trent, is now stripteasing Trent into supplying Paul with names, places, addresses and the everyday vernacular of nice, white, upper-class intellectuals like Tess’s parents:

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do [says Paul, removing a shoe]. I pick a name. You tell me about them. Where they live. Secrets. And for each name you get a piece of clothing . . . ”

“This is the way you must speak [says Trent]. Hear my accent. Hear my voice. Never say you’re going horse back riding. You say you’re going riding. And don’t say couch. Say sofa. And you say Bodd-ill. It’s bottle. Say bottle of beer.”

PAUL: Bodd-ill a bee-ya.

TRENT: Bottle of beer.

Then Paul steals Trent’s address book.

People keep making excuses for Paul throughout the play — until, in each individual case, it’s too late. His color is only inherent, barely mentioned — but everywhere as omnipresent as that rotating Kandinsky overhead.

From the New York Times, May 15, in an incredible (all things considered) report on a Times post-discovery all-staff grief meeting that the reporter, a Times man, was not allowed to (and therefore did not) attend:

“Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts he [Jayson Blair] appeared to be a promising young minority reporter,” [executive editor Howell] Raines said [at the meeting]. “I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities.

“Does that mean I personally favored Jayson?” [Raines] added a moment later. “Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the [Washington, D.C., area] sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”

A full year earlier, in April 2002, metropolitan editor Jonathan Landman, who had earlier come down hard on Jayson Blair for an “extraordinarily high” correction rate — stories that subsequently required a correction note on page 2 of the paper — sent a two-sentence memo by e-mail to newsroom administrators.

It read: “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”

Nobody was listening.

There are also, among those 14,000 words of May 11, these two sentences:

“Mr. Blair’s Times supervisors and Maryland professors emphasize that he earned an internship at The Times because of glowing recommendations and a remarkable work history, not because he is black. The Times offered him a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify its newsroom.”

I do not see how you can square sentence A of that paragraph with sentence B. The more I read them, the more these two adjacent sentences seem to be saying diametrically opposite things.

At bottom, it is Paul — “Paul Poitier” — who gives us the best clue to what’s going on here.

“The imagination,” he says. “That’s our out. Our imagination teaches us our limits and then how to grow beyond those limits. The imagination says listen to me . . . If we don’t listen to that voice, it dies. It shrivels. It vanishes. The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.”

Then he stabs himself in the stomach — to set up another scam.

Only it wasn’t really Paul who said those words, and it certainly wasn’t Jayson Blair. It was an American playwright named John Guare, who in fact does know how to listen to his imagination.