Follow LA Observed on Twitter here
Marc Cooper has an entertaining appreciation of his friend and journalism mentor, the late Marshall Frady, in The Nation. Frady died this week at 64. Cooper's obit begins:
I first met Marshall Frady in the Sinai desert during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when we shared the back seat of a Russian-made Egyptian Army jeep. Four months later we met again in Mexico City, this time as partners. We had successfully pitched Playboy magazine a long interview with Fidel Castro, and the editors sent us to the Mexican capital to negotiate with the Cuban Embassy.At 23 years old, a decade less than Marshall, I was very much the junior partner. I was just barely breaking into journalism. Marshall, however--born in Augusta, Georgia, and educated at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina--had already made his bones having turned out stirring, street-level chronicles of the civil rights movement for Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post. His 1968 biography of George Wallace had been an instant classic. And a short, stormy stint as a staff writer at Harper's Magazine had established Marshall as one of America's most gifted and mesmerizing practitioners of literary journalism.
[fast forward]
This stolen honeymoon à trois--my wife and I and Marshall in the room next door in the Hotel Geneve--stretched into an amazing fifty-seven days. By day we would sit waiting for the Cubans to give us the go-ahead to Havana. By night, the three of us would dine, drink, dance and drink some more--all on Playboy's generous tab. Marshall would regale us with his reporter's war stories and we would sit gimlet-eyed (so to speak).
I'll mention this passage, just to remind freelancers that there was a good old days: "We never made it to Cuba, by the way. Playboy ate the $17,000 expense bill without as much as a grumble."