Interviewed by Tom Mangan

Rip Rense, jaded news veteran.

Samples of his writings are here, and here.

What was your first really big story as a journalist?

Not terribly interesting, really. It involved a woman named Lillian Gobert who ran a "half-way" house for military veterans in Van Nuys.

I worked for what was then charmingly known as the Valley News and Green Sheet (later Daily News), as a police reporter. Lillian Gobert was accused of collecting disability checks from her residents, doling out a small allowance to them, and keeping the rest.

I did some hard investigative work at the um, American Legion Hall bar next door to the paper, where a number of these poor guys spent their allowance on bad booze. The story was a banner headline, back in the mid-70s. A real thrill. I did a series of articles that resulted in these guys getting their money, and I first experienced the press's power to effect good.

Another story that came later, but which I have a real fondness for, involved an old woman who phoned the city desk of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and asked for "Mr. Hearst." She meant "William Randolph, senior."

The city editor was a great guy named Paul Corkery, who was smart enough -- and amused enough---to keep this woman on the line. She carried on about having been acquainted with "The Chief," back in the ‘20s, when she allegedly was a silent film star. Somebody named "The Bishop," she raved, had made her a prisoner in her own home.

Smelling a "Hey, Martha!" story, as Corkery liked to say, he sent me out to see this lady. Turns out she really was a silent film star, Mary MacLaren, and a wacko calling himself a church bishop had turned her once-grand old L.A. two-story bungalow into a personal "church," over which he reigned.

Poor Mary had been relegated to one room, filled with an unrecognizable mish-mosh of ancient debris. She was in her late 70s, and looked worse-for-wear.

We put her on page one, with a photo that could have won a Pulitzer. All her anguish and confusion was in her face; it was a great portrait of forgotten, crumpled grace. I sought to embellish the photo with the simple lead, "Her leading men were Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks."

The story wrote itself. City agencies presently took up her cause, and she was relocated to nicer circumstances, eventually becoming something of a celebrity in her final years, when she was invited to various functions celebrating old Hollywood.

I'll always remember that she chewed me out for having written in the article that she scratched insect bites on her legs. She had her pride.

Who had the greatest influence on your early career?

Superman, or rather, Clark Kent.

I think I learned to read through Superman comic books I used to get when I was three or four years old. Newspaper reporting was the first career I knew about, except for my mom's job as a waitress, which, fortunately, I had no real interest in. Also, George Reeves' engaging portrayal of Kent in the old "Superman" series definitely affected me. What a hat!

Then there was the fact that my old man, Art Rense, had been a sports writer for the original Los Angeles Daily News (a peach-colored tabloid revered by old Angelenos to this day), and a reporter for United Press.

When I was in the fifth grade, he picked up the morning Los Angeles Times and showed me what a news story lead was, and how it contained "five w's." I was astonished. (Today, of course, you're lucky to find two or three w's in Los Angeles Times leads.)

Later, at Venice High School, I received invaluable instruction and encouragement from a very great man named Aaron H. "Bud" Rotman. I essentially lived in his classroom for three years, working on the VHS Oarsman. He gave me a measure of self-confidence, and insight into human behavior.

To get back to "Superman," though, all newspaperpeople are Superman, in a way. Being a reporter was like having a secret identity. It impresses the hell out of people, and inspires a little fear. They realize that you have the power of the pen, which is. . .faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, etc.

Fill us in on a despicable character you met in your journalistic travels who got what he/she deserved.

Gee, where do I start? In truth, there haven't been many, but there certainly have been more than enough.

I recall one Thanksgiving morning when I arrived at the L.A. Herald-Examiner about forty minutes late. This was a holiday, with a skeleton crew. A babysitting day, essentially. Given the constipated L.A. freeways, it wasn't that unusual to be thirty or forty minutes late. A woman reporter was manning the city desk (so to speak), kind of auditioning for the job. She was actually an old college classmate.

I smiled and waved a hello.

Her response: "why are you late!"

I thought she was kidding. "I was basting a turkey," I smiled.

She motioned me over to the city desk, took hold of my arm with both hands, dug her fingers into my flesh, and yanked me down to her level. She was pretty strong. Baring her teeth, bulldog-like, she snarled, "Don't you EVER speak to me like that again!"

I wrenched myself free and went to my desk. She pounded out a memo to the managing editor demanding that I be fired for "insubordination." I had to defend myself with my own lengthy memo. Well, the poor creature is dead, now. Had a stroke or something, years later. I guess that's more than she deserved.

Then there was another woman editor at the Herald-Examiner who actually did fire me, never mind that I'd been there five years and my work was generally recognized as pretty good.

I swear this is true: she actually made up stuff about me! I mean, she could have probably found actual reasons to justify a firing -- my breath was pretty bad---but she actually just . . . lied.

It was astonishing. She told me she'd had many meetings with me, pleading with me to change my evil ways. There had never been a single meeting! Not even a memo, or a passing remark.

In fact, I never had a clue that I was in hot water until just before I was canned, when a nice secretary pulled me aside, and said, "She's wanted to fire you for months. Every time she sees you, she says, 'I can't wait to get rid of him.'"

It probably had something to do with the fact that she was really not an editor, but an administrator, a poseur who tried to cover up her inadequacies by making the staff jump through lots of silly hoops -- like submitting two-page, typed "story proposals," and having lots and lots of meetings to discuss them, and crap like that.

Well, I never submitted the proposals, and never went to the meetings. I was too busy writing. Guess that sealed my fate.

Funny thing, on the night I was fired, I attended the L.A. Valley Press Club Awards Banquet, where I received an award for best feature story of the year. Anyhow, the woman was eventually fired, of course. Years later, when I heard she was running a little weekly paper in central California, I phoned her and said, "Hi, this is Rip Rense. I just wanted to congratulate you for living up to your potential as a journalist."

She said, "Oh, you always were glib, weren't you," or something. Incidentally, the editor who hired her at the Her-Ex, Jim Bellows, many years later actually apologized over lunch for having loosed this buffoon on the city room. Nice of him.

Oh, then there were the L.A.Times editors who invited me to write a regular column, then changed their minds, telling me, "We have too many white male columnists." These same editors are now mired in the Staples Center scandal. You know, where the paper split the revenue from its Sunday Magazine Staples Center issue. . . with the Staples Center! Now there's impartial journalism. If it weren't so sad for print journalism, it would be wonderful.

Share one of those newsroom stories in which the laughs get in the way of the retelling.

Well, a lot of these are "you had to be there" stories.

I mean, consider a smoke-choked San Fernando Valley suburban daily in the mid-70s that was half populated with old boys from the glory days of L.A. journalism, putting in their last boozy years toward retirement, and half populated with reporters under thirty, many of whom were also under the influence, residual or otherwise, of alcohol, marijuana, and LSD.

Recipe for comedy, you say? Just being in that environment could be fall-down funny.

Well, there was a copy editor who had been imprisoned by the Japanese in World War II, and had become a Rosicrucian. One day he walked over to my desk and said, "Can't see my legs, can you! They're invisible." I nodded and said, "nope, can't see a thing."

He used to talk about fornicating with Marilyn Monroe in the eighth-dimension, and flying to the Himalayas in his "half-pound body." Claimed to zoom around Van Nuys during the day, knocking the hats off of policemen's heads.

He was not terribly unusual in that city room.

We had a thirty-year-old copyboy who was quite eccentric. He was always hitching his pants up; for some reason, they were forever drooping. One day, he returned with sandwiches for the editors, but his hands had been so full he couldn't hitch his pants up. As a result, he had walked a couple blocks down Van Nuys Boulevard with his pants around his ankles.

Oh, the librarian was a grand, crusty old dame who used to nip Fedco bourbon at her desk, and kick the library door shut at the sight of the managing editor.

A fellow who worked for the consumer complaint column used to pound out brilliant poetry, as some acid catharsis, in between taking phone calls about old men with goiter problems.

One night a copy editor got so angry at a particularly irksome reporter that he picked him up and deposited him, head-first, into a trash can. That was fairly amusing.

One of the old copy editors routinely drank whiskey out of a thermos, and slept behind very dark glasses, his arms folded across his chest.

When they made the transition to computers, some of the old boys had trouble adjusting. I fondly recall one day when a "rim rat" stood up, kicked his chair out behind him, spat all over the computer screen, and yelled, "you dog-fucker!"

Later, at the Herald-Examiner, there were tremendous parties. Our court reporter, Milt Policzer, and I used to make movies about the newsroom.

He would shoot the editors surreptitiously, from his desk, then overdub amusing narration and screen the films at parties. Delightfully and creatively subversive. Well, I don't know how funny this is, but one day I interviewed a street musician named Bonggo Beane. Bonggo is a wonderful guy, about six-foot-eight with his full afro, and played a honking tenor sax. His favorites pieces included "Misty" and "Hava Nagila." I asked Bonggo if he would come up to the Her-Ex city room one day, as a favor, and serenade everyone.

I brought him back to my desk, waited for a quiet moment, then cued him. Out blasted "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Several female reporters shrieked. Pencils flew. I led Bonggo through the city room, right into the office of editor Jim Bellows, who promptly fled the scene.

I get the impression that newspapers were your first love, but now they're more like the annoying ex-spouse who manages to stick the knife in and twist at every opportunity. How'd this turn of events come about?

That's nicely phrased. As far as I'm concerned, newspapers have largely died. I grew up expecting to work in a profession that pretty much no longer exists.

I would have been better off in my dad's era, or earlier. Newspapers have, for the most part, become demographically designed, graphics-heavy product. Just as calculated to sell as a new pair of $150 high-tech sneakers.

Their content is largely created to satisfy demographers, not readers. Demographers, I know, are supposed to be the "scientists" who determine what the readers "want." First of all, demographers don't determine "wants," they determine what people will react to. That's a big difference. You don't need a demographer to know what people want to read.

People want to read something . . . interesting. This used to be determined by a quality, even a skill, called "news judgment." An editor would become an editor, in part, because he or she had a good sense of what made for a good story.

Now, editors become editors mostly for political reasons. Now, so much content is nothing but demographic pandering to different perceived segments of the readership: women, Latinos, blacks, lower-income, upper-income, etc.

Ultimately, it's divisive -- it divides the community, rather than providing a rallying point. Look around today. Where is there a newspaper with a stereotypical feisty, upstart spirit? With heart? Where are newspapers that recklessly crusade on behalf of the community? Where are uncompromising, crackerjack writers and columnists?

I was very lucky to have worked at what I think might very well have been the last "real" newspaper in the country, in the old, "Front Page" sense, and that was the L.A. Herald Examiner during the time that Jim Bellows ran it.

Bellows understood newspapering. The rival L.A. Times was a caricature of a newspaper, overstuffed with ads and interminably long, pretentious articles. It barely bothered to cover L.A.!

Bellows reconfigured the Her-Ex into a percolating, unpredictable, vivacious local daily, probably the best that the city ever had. Even the assholes were talented.

It was staffed by a young, heroic bunch of people who broke their backs to put out a good paper every day. Mechanical typewriters, no less! I learned a great deal there. When Bellows left, it declined a bit, but remained light years ahead of the competition, in every category (and routinely beat the hell out of the Times in press club competitions.)

Sadly, the Times had the ads locked up, and the Hearst Corporation wasn't willing to float the struggling Her-Ex indefinitely. The corporation now makes more money on the place by leasing the building out as a movie set.

I sometimes see my former place of employment showing up in Jockey underwear ads. So I moved on, long ago, to a life a freelancing, which, as they say, is a lot like working for free.

You mentioned having a three-year bout with chronic fatigue syndrome. Can you give us a rough idea of what that was like, and how you got over it?

Suffice to say that this is not a psychological problem, like they claim about Gulf War Syndrome and Agent Orange sickness. These are not psychological malaises, but real and terrible sicknesses. CFS is a devastating illness.

There are many theories about the cause, from something called microplasma incognito to escaped specimens of germ warfare to heretofore out-of-reach jungle viruses.

My guess is that it's a virus.

I was "lucky" to have the so-called "acute onset," which typically runs its course in about three years. Some people just don't seem to recover. It hit me one day, without warning, like a copy of the Sunday L.A. Times.

I was wiped out. I couldn't move for six months. For the next two years, I felt like I lived underwater. I walked like an old man. I ate double and triple my normal diet, just to have a little strength. Gained 35 pounds, which went away when I recovered.

It's a terribly long story, marked by excruciating kidney infections, blood pressure problems, crippling migraine headaches, severe muscle discomfort, hideous joint pain, relentless brain fog, inability to digest, irritable bowel syndrome (now there's a humorous euphemism), food allergies (which is to say, allergic to most food), yeast overgrowth, inability to shake off routine pathogens, lethargy, lethargy, lethargy. How I managed to function, I have no idea.

There is a mortality factor with CFS, due entirely to suicide. When you don't get better, and you don't know what's wrong with you, it's profoundly depressing.

I know of a woman who has had it for ten years, and has tried absolutely everything. I know of another woman who cured it with daily injections of kutapressin, a bovine-derived protein.

It hits different people in different ways, and the remedies depend on individual physiology, it seems. I went to several doctors -- long stories -- and finally was put on a powerful antibiotic called Ciproflaxin.

I would advise anyone against taking it, however, as it does long-term damage to cartilage, and for some reason, seems to bring about fits of temper. Fortunately, I took it for a short time, ostensibly to wipe out routine pathogens that were dragging me down.

I attribute my present good health to a daily regimen of vitamins, antioxidants, and herbal supplements, protein drink, and no-junk diet. When my strength finally returned, I was able to gradually resume exercising, which is indispensable to decent health. It was the worst three years of my life, and that's saying something.

What would you do with the rest of your life if the requirement to earn money were miraculously removed?

Write books, live abroad, and study other languages. And learn the names of the flowers and birds.

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