August 1990

SPAN 2

6 8

The Deming Way

A LETTER FROM THEEDITOR

11

After five fulfilling years in India, it is with a great deal of sadness that my family and I leave to take up another assignment. We have been more fortunate

than most American

A Busy Rewarding Life The Odyssey of a Widow by Ranjana Harish Winning With Quality by Donald C. Bacon

officers in India, whose

terms were much shorter, but our time has still passed all too rapidly.

Those first few days in 1985-when I was busy discovering the delightfully strange tastes, smells, sounds and rhythms of my new home-are as yesterday, yet so distant that I could be experiencing the memory of them vicariously. Our two boys, then 17and 13, adapted to their new life effortlessly, thanks to an Indian studies class they both had at the American Embassy School that first year under the stimulating tutelage of Jeffrey Campbell, born in India, and whose grandparents had been missionaries in Mussoorie before the turn of the century.

Collin, our elder boy, led the way, learning Hindi and the sitar, and traveling, or attending concerts and lectures at every opportunity, and there were many. His brother, Neil, was never far behind.

The beginning of Neil's essay for his university application this past year indicates how deeply India has gotten under his skin: "Bright lights, bustling crowds, skyscrapers, wide roads, expensive cars. Life in the fast lane. These were my first impressions of a foreign land as I stepped out of the airplane that had carried me 30 hours across the globe. This land seemed so alien, and yet, whenever asked, I proudly claim it as my own. I am an American living in India, in a habitat that seems natural to me now-another world. These two worlds are foils that have converged on a most remarkable locale-within myself. My mind is constantly being stretched between these two poles; which one is home?"

While I was learning more about India working on the magazine, my

14 20 23 28 29

The Journalist as Teacher

by Duane Bidwell

Reporting a Human Approach

by Aruna Dasgupta

Two Lives on Hold by William Squadron Progress in Megabytes by Malini Seshadri The Regreening of Yellowstone by Richard Conniff Toxic Avenger by Michael Satchell The Mary I Remember by Jane Kramer A Talent to Surprise

33 34 36 38 41 46

by Muriel and Jehanara Wasi

On the Lighter Side Focus On...

A Date With Venus by Joyce Peterson Free but Regulated: Conflicting Traditions in Media Law A Review by A.G. Noorani Godfather Coppola by Robert Lindsey The Art of William Willis by Linda L. Johnson

Front cover: In a partially burned forest in the Yellowstone National Park, a black bear hugs a tree as if seeking reassurance. Within a year of the devastating four-month fire that destroyed almost half the park in 1988, nature set in motion the process of regeneration.

Story begins on page 23.

Back cover: A painting by William Willis whose work reveals the influence of Hindu philosophy and religion. The blue in this painting alludes to water which, in Hindu mythology, "represents the element of the deeper unconscious ...[and is] a tangible manifestation of the divine essence." Story begins on page 46.

wife, Kathleen, was taking up meditation and yoga. She has now joined the healthy ranks of vegetarians and has almost made a convert

Publisher, Leonard J. Baldyga; Editor, Warren W. McCurdy

of her husband as well!

Among us, together, alone or with friends we have reached deep into the heartland of your country to know you better, and ourselves as well. I am enchanted by the names: Ajanta and Ellora, Bhimthal, Bodhgaya, Dehra Dun, Dudhwa, Fatehpur Sikri, Jaipur, Khajuraho,

Managing Editor, Himadri Dhanda; Associate Managing Editor. Krishan Gabrani; Senior Editor, Aruna Dasgupta; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistants. Rocque Fernandes, Rashmi Goel; Photo Editor. Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand KatyaJ; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist. Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant. Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, Y.P. Pandhi; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services; American Center Library, New Delhi.

Mahabalipuram, Pushkar, Santiniketan, Sariska, Trivandrum, Varanasi. If we are unable to get back again to see the rest of the country, we shall save it for another incarnation. But there is a saying in Hawaii that if you leave the islands with sand in your shoes you will surely return. We most certainly have sand in our shoes, and it comes straight from the Ganga.

Before departing, I would like to thank all of the many writers who contributed articles to SPAN during my tenure especially: Jacquelin Singh, Gafoor Noorani, Nayantara Sahgal, Darshan Singh Maini, Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel and M.V. Kamath. I want also to thank you readers, principally those who wrote us letters-on average about 20 a week-to let us know what you liked or didn't like about each issue. And most importantly, I want to thank each one of my staff members at SPAN who made it all happen and allowed the Editor to take most of the credit. We have worked closely as a team and they have become very special to me. I will never forget them, nor my adventure in India. Good-bye and Namaste.

-W.W.M.

Photographs: Front cover-Alan and Sandy Carey. Inside front cover-NASA. 1Avinash Pasricha. 2-5-Barry Fitzgerald. 6-7-----<:ourtesy Reliance Publishing House, New Delhi. 8-Kim Newton, Woodfin Camp. Il-13-Avinash Pasricha. 14-l5-Kevin Heslin Š 1988. 19-----<:ourtesy Reliance Publishing House, New Delhi. 2Q--Avinash Pasricha.

21-----<:ourtesy WIPRO Information Technology Limited. 24-25-Alan and Sandy Carey.

28-Roswell Angier. 34 top-Ankers, Anderson & Cuts, courtesy The Mathematical Association of America. 36-37-Smithsonian News Service Photos courtesy of NASA. 38-A vinash Pasricha. 44 toj:>-:--Š1984 Orion Pictures Corporation; bottom-Movie Stills Archives. 46-----<:ourtesyof Baumgartner Galleries, Washington, D.C., and Rosa Esman Gallery, New York. 47 top left-----<:ollection of the artist; top right-----<:ollection of Sandra and James F. Fitzpatrick; bottom-'-private collection. Inside back cover topprivate collection; bottom-----<:ollectionof the artist. Back cover-----<:ollectionof John Macleod and Ann K1ee. All transparencies courtesy of William Willis.

Published by the United-States Information Service. American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Use o/SPAN articles in o~hcr publications is encouraged. except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price a/magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs. 30; single copy, Rs. 5.

"I want to live my life in both places-in the officeand at home-with my family," says Elissa Feldman (below), a 38-year-old civil servant and mother of two young daughters. She is successfully doingjust that, juggling her schedule to include professional duties as an employee of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, obligations as school board member at one daughter's elementary school, and the myriad household chores she attends to-preparing meals, helping her daughters with their homework, dropping them at their school or taking them for a walk or shopping.

The office where Feldman works commiSSIOns and studies reports by scientific research laboratories on factors relevant to the reduction of all forms of environmental pollution. As a policy analyst, she is responsible for helping to compile these scientific findings to be used as the basis for federal antipollution regulations. She feels that her university studies in organizational relationships gave her a good background for her job, which she describes as "helping translate scientific issues into political solutions." After graduation from Cornell University, she began

ABusyRewarding

working part time for the federal government and took advantage of the government's policy of granting maternity leave to its employees; her working hours allowed her time to take care of her growing family. Recently, when she was offered the full-time job she holds currently, with flexible working hours, she and her husband, Joseph Tarantolo, a practicing psychiatrist, adjusted their "household and child-raising partnership" so she could accept the position. This arrangement has worked well and both Feldman and Tarantolo find it extremely satisfying.

Life

1. After parking her car in a metered parki,!g zone in downtown Washington, D.C., Feldman walks a short distance to the office.

2. At a meeting of analysts, she summarizes reports that her office commissioned about various

scientific aspects of a proposed pollution-control program.

3. A quiet discussion at the public library helps decide which books three-year-old Sonia will borrow for her parents to read to her just before she goes to sleep.

"Sure I've got a fairly busy schedule, and sometimes it's hectic. But I would not have it any other way."

1. Both parents help Danielle and Sonia with breakfast and to get ready for school.

2. Feldman then completes her morning grooming.

3. Then it is off to school and work.

4. Feldman calls a colleague to

discuss an environmental report.

5. On weekends, the family sometimes swims at a nearby pool, for which they pay an annualfee.

6. Feldman and the children go on a shopping expedition in their neighborhood.

The Odyssey of aWidow Parvatibai Athavale's life is an inspiring saga of a woman who broke through the shackles of widowhood.

On August 5, 1918, a 48-year-old Indian widow set sail for America from Bombay, defying tradition, relatives and friends.

But Parvatibai Athavale had the courage of her convictions and the backing of D.K. Karve, the social reformer who became well known as Maharishi Karve.

Karve, who had created an uproar when he married Parvatibai's widowed sister, convinced her to come out of the permanent seclusion that society then forced on widowhood.

Under his tutelage and encouragement, Parvatibai not only educated herself, but also helped him when he established the first home for widows and, later, a university for women. Her two years in America introduced her to modern ideas and made her confident of her own ability to work for the upliftment of Indian women.

In 1928,eight years after returning home from America, Parvatibai penned her autobiography in Marathi, hoping to inspire other widows to break out of their shackles. Touched by her story, the Rev. Justin E. Abbot translated the book into English as he felt it deserved a wider audience. My Story: The Autobiography of an Indian Widow makes a social impact even today.

What perhaps most strikes the reader of

her autobiography is the determination and spirit she exhibited during her American sojourn. For a woman who knew little English and had meager funds, just being alone in America was a daunting task. But Parvatibai faced up to all the tribulations, and emerged a winner-learning English, making friends, cheerfully taking on whatever odd jobs she could get. Simultaneously she went on increasing her knowledge about the country, its institutions and especially the role women played in American society.

*

*

*

Parvatibai was born in 1870in the village of Devrukh in Ratnagiri District in southern Konkan and had ten brothers and sisters. Married at 14, she was a widow by the time she was 20. She returned to her parental home with her young son and, as was the custom in those days, shaved her head, stopped wearing any jewelry and took on the traditional dress of a Maharashtrian Brahman widow.

Though unhappy at becoming a burden on her parents, Parvatibai writes, "I always tried to be cheerful in their presence." Her concern for them was heightened by the fact that they had two other widowed daughters-Parvatibai's eldest sister, who was also living with them, and Baya, who was living with her in-laws.

When Baya was 22, Narharpant, their eldest brother, took her to Bombay so that she could get some education; she was, in

fact, the first pupil at Sharada Sadan.

When Parvatibai turned 25, as she writes in her autobiography, "an event took place that changed the whole course of my life": the marriage of Baya, to Kaive, who was a friend of Narharpant.

Ever since Parvatibai's father, Baldev Joshi, had attended a conference on widow remarriage in Pune, he was convinced that "it was right for child widows to be remarried." Baya was just nine when she was widowed. Joshi suggested to Karve, a widower, that he marry Baya. Said Karve, "If your daughter is ready to marry me, I see no difficulty in the way." Baya consented and the two got married at Pune.

But the orthodox social mores then prevailing did not permit widow remarriage; there were vocal protests and the Joshi family was socially excommunicated in Devrukh.

"We were boycotted," writes Parvatibai, "by even the barber and washerman." The boycott was lifted after her father agreed to donate Rs. 100 for the repair of three temples in the village and touched the village elders' feet.

A year-and-a-halflater, when Baya tried to convince her parents to let Parvatibai stay on in Pune and study under Karve, their mother refused, fearing that Parvatibai too might follow Baya's example and the family might again invite the wrath of their community. "No one," writes Parvatibai, "asked me what I wished." However, soon Baya and Karve

convinced her to shift to Pune so that "my son might have a better education."

Karve, a relentless social reformer, believedthat the only way to get Indian widows out of the clutches of orthodoxy was to teach them to help themselves, to give them an education that would make them selfreliant and strong enough to fight the social injusticesheaped on them. At his insistence, Parvatibai started studying. Despite opposition and ridicule from society, she persisted and finally received a scholarship for entrance in the teacher's training course.

Three years later she successfullycompleted a teacher's training certificate course.

By that time Karve had begun a Widows Home at Hingane, a suburb ofPune, and he invitedParvatibai to teach there. Education and Karve's visionary views on the upliftment of widows "awakened my mind," she writes, to work for "the betterment of my motherland by my efforts for her widows."

After a year at the Widows Home, Parvatibai took on the task of collecting funds for the institution by traveling all over India. It was a challenging, awesome responsibility as people were not willing to listen to a widow. Undaunted, she moved from town to town, spreading Karve's message and collecting donations.

During her travels, Parvatibai didn't talk only of the Home but also tried to get people to change their attitudes to widows.

She also got the opportunity to observe the pathetic conditions under which widows

lived in different parts of the country.

Parvatibai realized that if a change had to come it had to be initiated by the widows themselves. To set an example, she decided to "discard the signs of widowhood." In 1912, she stopped shaving her head and gave up her widow's garb. "I was criticized," she writes. "But I paid no attention to the slanders, suspicions and insults."

In her travels, especially in south India, Parvatibai, who knew only Marathi, realized the importance of the need to learn English. She began learning the language with the help of a primer and later by joining the Bandra Convent School. It was then that Karve suggested that she visit England or America to observe the working of institutions for women there and then put her experience to work in India. In the process she would perforce learn English also. However, Karve had one condition which she gladly accepted: She should earn her own livelihood in America.

As World War I made traveling to England difficult, Parvatibai sailed for America instead. She was, she writes, "filled with joy" at the thought of going to America, since there "the education of women has been developed to a greater extent than in other countries."

Parvatibai devotes about one-third of her book to her American experience. Her trip did not begin auspiciously. She fell sick on the steamer and fea-red that she might

have to return to India. When she finally arrived in San Francisco, she was still not fully recovered. A fellow passenger, Professor Dharmananda Kosambi, who was going to America to teach Pali at Harvard University, arranged for her stay at the YWCA. The YWCA secretary, impressed

by Parvatibai's determination and her helpful nature-she had begun helping around the YWCA as soon as she recovered-found her a job at a home for pensioned missionaries. "I had to earn my living," Parvatibai writes, "by keeping the dining room, chapel and library swept and dusted, washing the dishes of the dining room and keeping the windows clean." She was given a room to live in and, in deference to her wish to have Indian food, was allowed to cook her own food. Hearing about her resolve to learn English, an old missionary lady began to teach her to read from the Bible.

Meanwhile, Parvatibai had written to an Indian living in San Francisco, whose address had been given to her in Pune, asking him to find her a better job and a place to live in. He forwarded her letter to the New York office of Lala Lajpat Rai's Young India magazine. Through appeals sent out by the magazine to Indian students in San Francisco and Berkeley, three Marathi students-all of whom also worked part time---<:ontacted Parvatibai and invited her to share their home. They refused to let her take up a job, insisting that, poor though they were financially, they would look after her. "They honored me as if I were their aunt," she writes. She, of course, cooked for them with the same love and affection as an aunt or a mother would.

Yet, Parvatibai was restless and had pangs of guilt. She had promised Karve that she would earn her own livelihood.

Besides, she was not getting a chance to learn and speak English; the boys spoke Marathi with her and did not have time to sit and teach her. She moved on to Schenectady in New York, where she got a job as a live-in maid. To supplement her income$5 a week-and to get to know more Americans, Parvatibai became a door-todoor saleswoman for Unemployment, a book by Professor Gokhale, who had been her teacher in Indore and was now settled in New York as an electrical engineer.

Through sheer doggedness, she managed to sell 40 copies. In the process, she made numerous friends and got the opportunity to speak English.

In a chapter, titled "An Attempt to (Text continued on page 19)

Winning With Quality Management guru W. Edwards Deming (above) is finally being heard in America, the land of his birth.

In becoming the first non-Japanese company to win a Deming Prize-Japan's prestigious international award for quality-Florida Power and Light Company (FPL) has taken a giant stride toward its goal of reigning as America's best-managed publicservice business. The Miami-based company, one of the nation's fastest-growing electrical utilities, with three million customers and 13,000 employees, has pursued its vision with singular determination for nearly a decade.

While quick to admit that "we are not a perfect company," FPL officials convinced the Deming judges that the investor-owned utility has improved .dramatically since the 1970s, when it often was faulted for soaring rates, long service outages and frequent customer complaints.

The Deming judges, relying on massive documentation and onsite inspections, spent 18 months scrutinizing FPL's management processes and its delivery of services before awarding the prize to the company in November 1989.

Each year the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers gives the Deming Prize to one or more companies that meet the group's stringent criteria. The prize is named for W. Edwards Deming, an American management authority whose concepts on quality control were embraced enthusiastically by Japanese industries decades ago. Only since 1988 have non-Japanese companies been

allowed to compete for the prize; there is no rule that winners be named from any particular country.

How FPL, a regulated monopoly with little apparent pressure to excel, became a benchmark of business excellence is largely a story of a quality-management pioneer whose program was met with initial skepticism, hampered by setbacks and finally crowned by success. Its experiences in reversing its corporate culture mirror those of other U.S. companies in other industries that have sought to implement companywide quality-assurance processes.

"We made every mistake that you can make," says FPL Executive Vice-President Wayne Brunetti, who oversees the company's Quality Improvement Program, or QIP, as it is known to FPL employees. "So we try to help others not to go down the same paths that did not prove effective for us."

Today, American companies of all sizes study FPL's qualityteam concepts. Nearly 1,000 corporate representatives thus far have attended FPL's periodic how-we-do-it seminars, offered in response to a deluge of inquiries. Florida municipalities have asked so often for guidance in establishing quality-improvement programs that the company has begun sending FPL teams to work directly with local officials, charging the localities only for the company's costs.

Also, in a step important to smaller companies particularly, the utility has launched educational and incentive programs to convince its 3,000 vendors, mostly small to midsized firms, that they will have to focus harder on quality to continue doing business with FPL. Under its newly implemented Quality Vendor Process,

FPL awards bidding advantages to "vendors that adhere to quality-improvement principles and customer service." It gives additional advantages to vendors that demonstrate continued commitment to still higher standards of quality control and customer service.

All this began in 1981,when Marshall McDonald, who was then the company's chairman and is now retired, developed a strong interest in quality. His managers went along with a limited qualityimprovement program, but they balked when he sought to commit FPL to a companywide effort. Some executives, including Brunetti, initially doubted that quality principles devised essentially for manufacturing industries would work for a heavily regulated public-service company.

"None of the quality experts-and we had them all visit us here--eould tell us a success story involving a big service company," Brunetti recalls. "So McDonald went out and found a service business that had a very successful quality program."

That business was Kansai Electric, Japan's second-largest utility and the first service company to win the Deming Prize.

McDonald invited Kansai officials to Miami, and he sent FPL executivesto Japan to see firsthand what could be done. "We were amazed at what a well-run company Kansai was," says Brunetti.

"We understood what a quality program did for them, and from then on, we had a benchmark for our own company."

To create its own quality-management program, FPLborrowed from the approaches of Kansai and several quality-driven U.S. companies. Many ideas were tried. Some were made part of the company's program, others were discarded. The result is a complex but effective program that provides "internal as well as external customer satisfaction through total quality control."

Internal customers include FPL employees who need and expect a certain level of job performance from their co-workers.

Integral to the company's quality-control effort is the use of statistical methods to measure quality and to help locate, track and solve problems. Thousands of employees, serving on about 1,900 volunteer teams, have learned to work with check sheets, scatter diagrams, cause-and-effect diagrams, pareto charts, histograms and other statistical tools. "They are easy concepts to teach," says Brunetti. Employees entering teams also are instructed in making decisions, communicating effectively and working in groups.

The idea of teams of meter readers or linemen routinely pausing from their daily work to diagram and mathemat.ically analyze a particular service problem may take some getting used to. But employeesseem to like the challenge and few can argue with results such as these: â&#x20AC;˘ Power-line installation has been made faster and easier because of a simple template developed by a team oflinemen. The device holds plastic pipe in place as cable is pulled through it.

Previously, pipes would often shift, causing costly delays. â&#x20AC;˘ Meter readers' dog-bite injuries have declined since adoption of a team's suggestion that the readers' hand-held computers be programmed to beep a warning when the reader punches in the address of a house known to have a dog on the premises. Because of dog bites, meter readers had been the most injury-prone employees in the company. â&#x20AC;˘ Scores of valuable suggestions came forth when FPL asked each of its divisions to address a particularly challenging problem: How to reduce the number and duration of power outages, which throughout the company's history had been a

major source of customer vexation. FPL long had blamed its below-average performance in this area on the subtropical climate, salt spray, storms, lightning and other natural hazards that combine to make Florida a dreadful operating environment for an electrical utility.

One FPL team recommended replacing existing transmissionline components with stainless steel to reduce corrosion from salt spray. Another team pinpointed bird droppings as a source of corrosion on some lines, thus allowing FPL engineers to devise umbrellalike protectors for the pylons.

In all, FPL has implemented hundreds of team suggestions for quality improvement in the past few years. The payoff has been a dramatic, nearly across-the-board turnaround in the utility'S performance. FPL has not sought a general rate increase in five years. Service outages, which a few years ago averaged 100 minutes per customer per year, now average 43 minutes per yearwell below the national average of 90 minutes a year.

What pleases many FPL executives most is the steady decline in customer complaints to the Florida Public Service Commission about FPL billing errors, power interruptions and other service problems. The company had been the subject of more complaints than any other utility in Florida, averaging one complaint for every 1,000 customers in 1984. Now it is less than one complaint per 4,000 customers-the best record of any utility in the state.

FPL officials agree that the program has come a long way since its inauspicious beginning. At first, FPL emphasized developing training courses and setting up quality-control teams, mostly among first-line, nonsupervisory employees. It proved to be a mistake; managers voiced complaints, Brunetti says. "First-line supervisors particularly told us that they couldn't get their jobs done because we were taking their employees out to do something once a week. Supervisors said they didn't know what those employees were doing. We had an internal revolt."

The experience provided valuable lessons, among them the need to bring all levels of employees into the program and show them how all will benefit from it.

Brunetti now advises companies just getting into quality management: "Start with the top and work your way down to middle management, first-line management and finally to the firstline employees." He also says first-line supervisors should not be excluded from the team process, but instead should serve as team facilitators, a combination of coach and cheerleader.

FPL's initial foray into quality management, says Brunetti, also showed that in addition to team activity, it's equally important to have policies that stress external and internal customer satisfaction, that improve coordination within the company and that concentrate company efforts on a few priorities at a time.

Winning the Deming Prize represents the end ofa long journey. for FPL employees. Many employees put in extra hours to expand the company's quality-improvement effort, and to prepare the Deming application and the volumes of documentation.

But somewhere along the way, Brunetti says, winning the prize became less important than the challenge of trying to meet the judges' strict demands. "In some parts of the company, we accelerated the implementation of our program by three years in six months," he adds. "Just preparing for this prize became a 0 reward in itself."

About the Author: Donald C. Bacon is the Washington-based editor and project director of The Encyclopedia of the United States Congress.

The Journalist as Teacher An American journalist reports on his experience of teaching fledgling Indian journalists at the Times Centre for Media Studies "to go beyond the official truth."

Traffic noises float up to the fourth-floor classroom. Eleven students hunch over their desks, looking at the floor, at their fingers-at anything but the scholarly man in front of them.

Tom Gommen glances up from the photocopied news story he has read aloud.

"What's wrong with the first sentence?" he demands. No one answers. Oommen focuses on one man. "You wrote it," he says. "What's wrong with this sentence?"

Fifteen minutes later, the dissection is complete. The faults are gone. Students pared six words, corrected a misspelling and replaced the word "chowk" with "market." The new sentence is succinct and easier to understand than the original, but Gommen doesn't smile.

"Read the next sentence," he says.

"What's wrong with it?"

This could be a writer's purgatory, penance for the literary sins of purple prose and stilted construction. But for Oommen and his students at the Times Centre for Media Studies in New Delhi, the critique is simply routine-Indian journalism with an American twist.

Combining the tough criticism and daily deadlines of American journalism schools with lectures and assignments that stretch students' concepts of the world, the program is distinctly Western: It introduces students to a smattering of liberal-arts subjects, broadening their knowledge of the world they will write about.

"It's an attempt to emulate a good undergraduate program in the United States, where the student has the option of taking courses outside of journalism," said Gommen, the Centre's director since it opened in 1985. "But instead of students being allowed to go and take a class someplace, I bring the experts here."

Last year, those experts included a Canadian journalist who worked informally with the students. This year, Oommen wanted an American reporter for thejob. A mutual friend introduced us, and I joined the Times Centre in February this year on temporary leave from my employer, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas.

My arrival doubled the Centre's ties to American journalism.

Oommen himself spent 16 years as a journalist in the United States. He earned a master's degree in journalism in 1964 from the University of Iowa, where he enrolled after six years as a reporter in India and Ethiopia. Leaving Iowa, he worked with a series of U.S. newspapers until 1969, when he joined the Associated Press in Los Angeles. He stayed there ten years before returni ng to India to teach.

For me, joining the Times Centre made me an Indian "insider." I couldn't be Indian, but I could be more than a tourist; in particular, I could work and socialize with my professional counterparts-young Indian journalists.

I found they're a different lot from American reporters. They are better informed about politics and economics, but

Duane Bidwell (extreme right) does a layout 'critique with (from left to right) Amita Srivastava, Yashwant Raj, litendra Sivamani and Devaparna Roy. more willing to accept the "official truth" about events. My friends at home dread the office, wanting instead to get out and see the world for themselves. Indian reporters seem to lack that curiosity. They rarely visit markets, slums or exclusive colonies to see how Indians feel about "official" reality.

Instead, they write what I consider dull, dry reports about political decisions.

American media often reduce India to cliches about snake charmers and "teeming millions," but Indian newspapers distort the country just as much by ignoring human conflict and joy. There's no life in Indian newspapers, and little that helps a reader understand the nation's complexities. The reason is simple: Social custom and class separate most Indian journalists from the people they serve. Indian media cover just a thin slice ofIndian life. I see the same problem, to a lesser extent, in the United States.

Oommen saw it, too, and it dictated his attitude toward journalism education. "It's

not possible to limit this training to someone being just able to function in this profession," he said, "The approach has to be to make the student open up to the world. My approach is to help the young to mature in every possible way, but within the framework of the profession."

Times Centre students are sent to New Delhi slums, government offices and rural areas to learn about India for themselves.

They have visited bonded laborers in Faridabad and medical researchers at Lucknow's Central Drug Research Institute. One group went to Punjab to cover election violence. Such assignments make the raw hands better reporters.

"I never used to go out and talk to people. Especially, I'd never had any contact with the poor," said Delhi's Nasima Habibulla, 26, a student in the 1989-90 course. "Now I've learned you have to talk to them; it doesn't cost you anything. I've come out of myself because I've sort of been pushed to talk to people."

Habibulla and her classmates report about their experiences in the biweekly

Times Enquirer/Times Anveshak, an English and Hindi newspaper published entirely by the students. A three-week internship with The Times of India helps build confidence.

The practical aspect of the Times Centre immediately made me comfortable. Like American schools, it stressed experience over academics. But I soon learned the approach differs radically from traditional Indian education. At India's other journalism institutes, students tend to learn theory and rarely leave the classroom to explore the world outside.

"They know what a lead story is, but if they're given a lead story to edit or to write, they can't do it," said Sunil Saxena, a former reporter and copyeditor who teaches at the Times Centre. "Exposure to practical experience is nil."

That's obvious from many Indian newspapers. Reporters frequently fail to report both sides of a story, and errors are common. At best, layout is haphazard. And even the best stories suffer from weak writing.

Oommen's approach can only improve things, though I'm not sure all his students would agree. I heard more complaints than compliments from them: The program is tough-faster-paced than American schools and very different from the relaxed atmosphere at Indian universities. Most students simply aren't prepared to keep up with Oommen's demands.

"When we first came here, they kept talking about the pressures you would face on the job-and they certainly tried to simulate the pressure," said Naresh Fernandes, 20, a student from Bombay. "They definitely push you if you're not doing your best. " Patna's Yashwant Raj, for example, found himself working from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. in the first weeks of the nine-month course to learn typing, write stories to deadline and keep up with lectures; and being critiqued bruised his ego.

"The way Professor Oommen went about demolishing stories, a lot of people had the feeling that they didn't know the language at all," said the 25-year-old Raj.

Reporting a HUlnan Approach Another plane crash, another media circus. In the lobby of the hotel where survivors and the families of the dead were staying in Dallas, Texas, journalists stood around like hawks, waiting to pounce on the victims, notebooks, mikes and taperecorders in hand. They were met, not surprisingly, with anger, disgust, tears and, sometimes, violence.

Duane Bidwell tucked his notebook out of the way, into his hip pocket. As each group of survivors and the relatives walked toward their cars dragging luggage behind them, he would help them. Then, he would introduce himself: ''I'm ajournalist. I know how you're feeling and you don't have to talk to me if you don't want to. But this is my job ...."

Some of them "exploded at me in real anger and even threatened me physically," says Bidwell, "but most of them ended up talking to me."

"Maybe it was, well, mercenary," muses Bidwell about his way of getting the story. "But it was a more humane approach than running after them and demanding their reactions or shoving mikes into their faces. My helping them carry their luggage made them see me first as a human being. They already felt they had an obligation to me...God, this is sounding pretty mercenary," he exclaims, breaking off midsentence. "But you must have a human approach to doing such a story because there is really no other way of handling the people

involved with sensitivity and some care."

Bidwell, 24, a reporter with the Fort Worth (circulation: 300,000) in BedStar-Telegram ford, Texas, doesn't limit his "human approach" to disaster stories alone. "I keep telling my students," he says referring to the young journalists he recently trained at the Times Centre for Media Studies in Delhi (see accompanying story), "that the best way to get people to talk and trust you is simply to be human. If you don't understand something, tell that to the person you are interviewing. Admit that you don't know all the answers, that you don't know the subject. Be honest, be human.

I've even cancelled interviews by telling the person 'Look, I'm in a bad mood today and I don't think it would be fair to you or to my story if! were to interview you today.' It makes him or her feel, 'Hey, this guy cares.' I think that's the most sensitive way of handling any storynot to forget that you are a human being."

Not surprisingly, to Bidwell "the best advice anyone ever gave me about writing" is this homily: The type of writer you will be depends on the type of person you are; so keep working on that.

"The way I translate that for myself," says Bidwell, "is that I must keep figuring out why I respond to things the way I do, why I get an immediate reaction to some things and not to others. So I know when I am likely to color a piece.

"One tries to be objective while reporting," he continues, "but it isn't possible to be completely objective. What is important is to know your biases and opinions. That helps you write a more balanced, objective piece. Some of my editors tell me that I should learn not to let a story affect me, but my argument is that if it doesn't affect me then I ought not to be doing the story. A journalist can't shut the world out and build a wall around his heart. If you are involved you ask better, pertinent questions, you bring an extra dimension to the story that helps the reader really know what is going on."

A smile breaks the intense expression on Bidwell's face as he says, "My editors also tell me that I am too philosophical and I want to put a philosophy behind every story I do."

Little wonder that at college-he graduated from Texas Christian University (TCU), majoring in journalism and political science-his journalism professor told him he wrote too much like a social scientist and his social sciences professor told him he wrote too much like a journalist.

While at TCU, Bidwell joined the Fort Worth Star-Telegram part time as an editorial assistant. "I had to answer the phones, clip newspapers, and compile the church and school community calendars. But the incentive was that when I finished all that I could write a story." Bidwell worked 30 hours a week, "but I made my work do double duty by turning in

"But it has prepared me. I can take a lot of things. I used to think-a lot of us didthat the pressure was too much. Now, after having gone through that and worked for a newspaper-we needed that pressure to break us out of our shell and get out of a sort of laid -back a tti tude."

The Centre's students must hold undergraduate degrees, and many have a master's as well. They are chosen after an allIndia test and personal interviews with The Times of India editors. About 600 people apply each year for 30 seats, 20 in English and ten in Hindi. Next year, the Times Centre hopes to add three to five Gujarati and Marathi students as well.

Today, more than 100 Indian journalists hold Times Centre diplomas. They say the training has stood them well, providing two to thrl':e years of experience in a hectic nine months.

"You work under much more pressure than at a newspaper, so you're much better equipped to do the job," said N. Suresh, a 1986 English literature graduate now reporting on science for The Times of India's

New Delhi edition. "The program gives you the basic tools. It exposes you to a variety of things. Those stay with you.

Without them, you could never be good."

Students credit Oommen-ealled "The Boss" behind his back-with the Centre's high standards.

"When I write a story, I have Professor Oommen in mind. If I can reach this reader-he's a hard taskmaster-then I can really get through to any reader," Raj said.

Oommen credits American newspapers for those standards. "My professionalism came out of the very stringent requirements of journalism in the United States," he said. "Truth, fairness, objectivity-these were ingrained in me there."

On the other hand India ingrained a few things in me too. I'm less naive. For one thing, I see now that the United States isn't as influential here as I thought, and I have a Detter grasp of the relationship between India, Pakistan, China and Nepal. When I read Western news reports about South Asia, I see subtle distortions. And the problems ofIndia don't seem so simple any more.

I think that's what I was supposed to learn, judging from the reasons Oommen gave for inviting me to the Times Centre.

"Y ou would have a far better understanding of India than the hot-shot foreign correspondent who flies in. All he knows is the airport where he landed and the fivestar hotel where he stayed for two days," he said. "You would have a better understanding of our problems, our aspirations, everything. " He was just partially right, though. I don't understand India. But now I can sympathize, sometimes even empathize, with its social and political problems. At the very least, spending a few months in Delhi made me a better journalist.

I share that with the Times Centre students. Habibulla told me that the Times Centre had changed her, and her words described my experience: "It's taught me a lot of things, things that will come in useful not only in newspaper work, but in life," she said. "We got to know people. We got to know the world was big. And it used to seem pretty small."

0

some of my Star- Telegram stories for class assignments." He spent one semester working as an intern on the monthly magazine of the National Wildlife Federation in Washington, D.C.: "I got the opportunity to do layouts, shoot photographs, edit, write." One summer Bidwell worked with the Weatherford Democrat, "a tiny newspaper in the middle of nowhere," which gave him the experience of working under daily deadline pressure. But the most extensiveexperience he got was on TCU's magazine, where he began as a reporter and soon became editor.

After graduation and a two-month holiday in Thailand, Bidwelljoined the Fort Worth StarTelegram full time as a reporter, "with a big jump in pay and benefits like insurance and vacations." Although he loves the job, he wishes

he could get to do some editing too. "Those of us who are strong writers"-he laughs to cover the embarrassment of the implied self-praise"want everyone else to write like we do. So there is a tendency to work on other people's copy. I think that is one of my strengths."

Bidwell got an opportunity to flex his editing muscle during his stint as a teacher at the Times Centre in New Delhi. He also spent a few days training some of the younger Times of India journalists in Ahmedabad and Bangalore.

He expected India, he says, to be very much of an 'East is East and West is West and ne't:r the twain shall meet' kind of experience. "That was the way it had been in Thailand," he says.

"There the Westernization is a veneer you can peel off. But India is Westernized in a way that is much more ingrained-in attitudes, in the daily routine of life." Bidwell is quick to emphasize that his impressions are obviously based on the little he has seen of urban India-and a bit of rural India-in the two-and-a-half months he was here.

In India, he says, "the 16th century and the 21st century exist side by side." This struck him vividly when he was traveling to Jaipur in an Indian car listening to American rock 'n' roll on the stereo and seeing camel carts ambling along the way.

In terms of his profession, the stint in India 'has made Bidwell yearn to get more of a chance to teach, "but on a one-on-one basis." His first

few sessions of "lecturing to the class" were disasters, he says. The students were too inhibited to respond to any provocation-or even to jokes. "And they would insist on addressing me as 'sir.' They finally stopped doing that only when they saw I wasn't responding when they called me in that fashion."

Bidwell and the students enjoyed the sessions better when he critiqued each student's writing individually with him or her. It's an exercise he relishes also because his approach to journalism is to go deep into every subject he touches. His ambitions don't extend to working for The Washington Post or The New York Times ("One would have to live in Washington, D.C., or New York and who wants to do that?"), but to "working with, or like, John McPhee.

McPhee," Bidwell explains, "is not a journalist per se but he does these brilliantly researched IO,OOO-wordstories for The New Yorker. Reading someone like him helps me get better. Then I would like to work for The Christian Science Monitor because it is one of the greatest papers in terms of covering the world in a way that makes people understand what is going on and why it affects them."

There's one more journalist Bidwell admires tremendously: "Bob Greene of Esquire and The Chicago Tribune. He is incredibly honest."

Thorough research. The reader. People. Honesty. To Bidwell that is what journalism is all about.

D

Bidwell conducts an editing exercise on a word processor with Rita Ray.

n a sleepy summer afternoon, Dr. Beryl J. Rosenstein walked into my wife's room at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Joan had not had a good week. She sat hunched over pillows, trying to move air through lungs that cystic fibrosis had eroded. A tube shot a four-liter flow of oxygen into her nostrils. She did not have enough energy to read, talk or even watch television.

As always, Rosenstein said, "How are you feeling?" Joan did not answer, but, with effort, lifted her head and just stared at him.

The doctor pressed his stethoscope to her skeletal frame-she was down to 38.5 kilograms-and listened to her wheezing.

"I talked to the transplant people," he said. "You're highest priority on the waiting list. At the top."

Earlier that week, in June I987, Joan had been placed on the list for a heart-lung transplant. It was her only chance, because she was in the end stages of cystic fibrosis, a genetically caused disease for which there is no cure. The disease causes the body to secrete excessive amounts of abnormally thick mucus, which plagues the digestive system and clogs the lungs, choking the sufferer, and making him or her particularly vulnerable to pneumonia.

Only one successful heart-lung transplant had been performed on a patient like her in the United States. It had been done at Johns Hopkins a month earlier by a surgical team headed by Dr. Bruce Reitz and Dr. William A. Baumgartner, the same team that would operate on Joan-if a donor became available. That operation had been publicized because it had been an extraordinary three-way transplant. An accident victim's heart and lungs were transplanted into Clinton House, whose lungs had been destroyed by cystic fibrosis but whose heart was still healthy.

House's heart was simultaneously transplanted into another patient needing a good heart.

Like Clinton House's, Joan's heart-at least until the past few weeks when it began to show the strains of her ravaged physical condition-had been healthy. She only needed new lungs. But, although some lung transplants have been performed, many specialists believe that transplanting the "package" holds less risk, in part because the trachea-the air tube that connects the lungs to the mouth and allows a person to breathe-would heal better if the heart is part of the graft. (The supply of blood to the trachea is better preserved, which is crucial to its healing.) This belief probably reduced our chances for a donor, once Joan's heart was no longer viable for donation, since we now had to "compete" with the many people waiting for heart transplants.

That Rosenstein had requested highest priority status for Joan was, at once, welcome and ominous news.

"Good," she said. "I can't last much longer."

"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "You can hold out as long as it takes for a donor to come." I followed Rosenstein out of the room.

"How much time do we have?"

He looked me in the eye. "A couple of weeks, maybe a month."

I trudged back to the hospital room. Joan was hunched over her pillows. I sat down and stared at the telephone, willing it to ring

O

Copyright Š by The New York Times Company.

Reprinted by permission from The New York Times Magazine.

The happy ending to this touching account by William Squadron of the long but fruitful wait for a new heart and lungs for his wife got a tragic twist barely a month after its publication. Joan Longer (seen here with her husband) died from the consequences of organ rejection.

with the news that a donor had been found, yet knowing that with the acute shortage of donors, the chances were it would not ring in time. Clinton House had waited 12 months for a donor-which Joan could not do.

Cystic fibrosis patients expect to die young. The most common and lethal genetically transmitted disease in the United States, cystic fibrosis afflicts about 30,000 Americans. Although researchers have made substantial progress in identifying the abnormal gene, those with cystic fibrosis can only hope to squeeze out a few more years of life with antibiotics and bronchodilators, with physical therapy and oxygen. The average lifespan of someone with cystic fibrosis has increased from six years in 1960 to 27 years today.

At 31, Joan had already beaten the averages. And she had made the most of her opportunity. Against the advice of doctors and friends, despite the hours of therapy and constant fatigue, congestion and shortness of breath, Joan had attended and graduated from medical schooL She then dragged herself through an internship and residency, straining an already weakened body. It was a price Joan considered worth paying. On the day she completed her residency in psychiatry-December 31, 1986-Joan checked into Johns Hopkins yet again, exhausted and overcome by her illness.

Now, six months later, with the hope of a transplant came the possibility that, at "It is difficult to pray for a some future date, Joan could donor, knowing that those be walking in a garden, seeprayers can only be answered ing a movie, riding a bicycle. through someone else's tragedy."

It was, we knew, a slim possibility.

For Joan, the odds were even greater. A compatible heart-lung donor is very hard to find. The donor's body size, blood type and tissue compatibility must match the recipient's.

The lungs of brain-dead accident victims are frequently damaged.

And only 15 to 20 percent of usuable organs are donated.

Joan soon developed congestive heart failure. With minimal lung function, her heart could not pump blood normally. Fluids accumulated in her lungs and other parts of her body; her feet swelled to three times their normal size. The doctors loaded her up with diuretics, which eliminated most of the fluid.

Even with the four-liter flow of oxygen, Joan had an insufficient oxygen supply to the brain. She could do little more than sit hunched forward over her pillows, gasping for air. No reading, no television, no telephone. She could not walk. Eating required herculean effort, and Joan had no appetite. She was fed at night through a nasogastric tube, but her weight continued to fall.

Since the age of 11, Joan had done physical therapy every day to clear her lungs of the choking mucus. For two hours every morning, she would inhale a mucolytic mist and, sitting upright or lying in different positions, hit her chest area with a cupped hand to loosen the thick secretions. Each time, she would try to cough out as much of the mucus as she could muster.

As an adult, Joan began to have to do the therapy twice a day; by early 1986, it was three times a day. At Johns Hopkins, a trained staff gave her physical therapy four times a day, but it was doing little good. Because of her general weakness and lack of oxygen, Joan often fell asleep while being ministered to; she simply did not have the energy to expel the mucus overrunning her lungs.

Infectious bacteria took to her lungs like a magnet. The treatment was intravenous antibiotics, but the bacteria had developed a resistance to most of the drugs. And Joan had virtually run

out of veins; they had been hardened and shrunk by the potent medications. Even the intravenous experts had trouble sticking her, and I could never watch.

In the meantime, we waited and watched the telephone.

We made one effort to raise donor consciousness. After Clinton House's historic operation, Joan had been interviewed for ABC-TV's "The Health Show." Following Rosenstein's grim prognosis, I called the reporter who had conducted the interview, George Strait, to say that the situation was becoming desperate; ABC's Baltimore affiliate sent a reporter to Johns Hopkins to interview Joan.

I wanted to believe that the timing of the local interview was fortuitous, because a "Required Request" law had just become effective in Maryland. Such laws, passed by many American states, require a hospital representative to ask next of kin about organ donation-unless the doctor believes it would be too traumatic for the family. When asked, the family could, of course, refuse.

Many experts in the United States believe there would be more donations iffamily members discussed the issue among themselves before a tragedy occurs. The worst time for a first contemplation of organ donation is in the midst of a terrible trauma. The number of such donations would probably increase dramatically if decisions were made beforehand, and donations were automatic in the event of an accident. Although many U.S. states provide for organ donation check-offs on drivers' licenses, the next of kin must still sign the consent form.

Waiting for a donor is a miserable, surreal experience. It is difficult to pray for a donor, knowing that those prayers can only be answered through someone else's tragedy.

On July 2, Johns Hopkins sent Joan home. She had not improved, but there was nothing further the hospital could do.

Joan did not want to go. She felt safer at Johns Hopkins, in case of an emergency. I had similar concerns. It was now three weeks since Rosenstein had said, "A couple of weeks, maybe a month."

July 4--America's Independence Day-was on a Saturday, but that night Joan was too ill to watch the fireworks from our balcony. Si)e had begun to worsen almost as soon as we got home.

The congestive heart failure had returned.

The next night we turned on the news to hear of a major accident on the Washington beltway near Rockville. There were some fatalities. I had to do something.

I dialed the Maryland Organ Procurement Center, trying to reach Dave Kappus, head of the center. Although Kappus was not in, the service got him a message and he phoned within a few minutes.

"I'm sorry to bother you," I said. "My name is Bill Squadron.

My wife, Joan, is waiting for a heart-lung donor. We've spoken a couple of times before."

"Yes, I know about your wife," he said.

"We were just watching the news and, well, you probably know about it, but we saw that there was a big accident in Rockville and just wanted to find out if there might be any possible donors as a result that would match Joan."

"We know about the accident," Kappus said. "We're in touch with the hospitals. But it appears that the people were killed instantly, were already dead when they arrived at the hospital. So I don't think there are going to be any donors from this accident."

"Oh, I see." I paused. "Well, things are not too good here," I said. "I don't think we have much time."

"I know," he said. "We're doing everything we can."

Joan returned to Johns Hopkins. Her weight teetered around 36 kilograms.

Although I was always very positive around Joan, I had lost faith. I had done the organ-transplant research. I knew the odds.

And I knew Rosenstein's prognosis.

While Joan did not know all these things, she knew the light was fading. I felt torn. I had to stay upbeat, or Joan would lose her hope, the very thing that kept her going. But I knew she was thinking about dying, and I wanted to give her some comfort.

When I tried, I finally broke down.

Joan and I had met as undergraduates at Swarthmore College, a place she loved. She often said-quite seriously-that she wanted her ashes scattered over the campus. What might give Joan some small measure of comfort? Perhaps, I thought, the knowledge that a scholarship in her name could be established at Swarthmore.

One Saturday in July, I was afraid of waiting any longer to tell her about it. But I could barely manage to get the words out. I couldn't stop the tears. "We're going to find a donor any day now," I began. I was fighting to control myself. "What do you think of a scholarship in your name at Swarthmore?" In a rush, I went on: "It could pay tuition for students with physical problems, maybe who wanted to go to medical school, and every year there would be applications for it, and it could help all these kids, and we could just set it up, and it would always be there ...."

By then, we had both lost it, and we just sat on the bed holding each other for a long time. Despite everything we had been through, this was a new source of strength. I had often discussed with Joan the inevitable--cremation, the scattering of ashes-but previously my emotions had not been engaged.

In breaking this barrier, I felt a weight disappear. It also gave Joan a boost, which she needed. As mid-July came-a month since Rosenstein's prediction-there was no donor in sight, and Joan's condition continued to decline.

The gravity of the situation was no secret, and people wanted to visit Joan. Although many came to see her one last time, Joan had no strength for visitors. Only Joan's family and a couple of our closest friends were at the hospital regularly. We took turns spending the night.

One day, Joan's parents brought her in a wheelchair to the hospital entrance where our dog, Rocky, was waiting with me.

Joan perked up, and Rocky jumped up on her lap, and she petted him. But it was too sad, and I didn't want to do it again.

We asked the doctors to try Imipenem, an antibiotic that had given Joan some temporary relief back in April. Although they believed she had probably built up resistance to the drug, they agreed to try it.

And Joan rallied. During the week of July 20, she could watch some television, have a conversation, even play cards for a few minutes. Bombarded with diuretics, the congestive heart failure temporarily departed. She still could not walk, the oxygen in her blood was terrifyingly low, and she had no appetite. But she seemed to have moved back a half step from the precipice.

On July 25, a Saturday, Joan even got out of bed for the first time in weeks and sat in a chair. Joan's mother and close friends, Robin and Amir, were visiting. Around 3:30, they left to drive back to New Jersey.

The phone rang, and I spoke for a few minutes to a friend. When I hung up, I saw one of the nurses gesturing to me from the hallway. I went to see what she wanted.

"Where's Joan's Mom?" she asked.

"She went home," I said.

"To New Jersey?"

"Yeah."

"Can you catch her?"

"I don't think so," I said, looking at my watch. "Why?" The nurse took a deep breath. "We were supposed to wait for the doctors to get here. Dr. Reitz called a little while ago. They think they have a donor."

I felt a chill shoot through me. It took me a second, but I did realize we had to stop Joan's mother. Once she was on the road, we would not be able to reach her for three hours. I poked my head into Joan's room. "Your mother forgot something. I'm going to try to catch her. Be right back." Before she could answer, I was gone. As I dashed off, I said to the nursing staff, "Don't let anyone talk to Joan until I get back."

I did not know where Amir had parked; I could only hope he had used the main garage. I took the elevator down and sprinted toward the garage, thinking, rather perversely, how lucky it was that Joan's mother had suffered a heart attack the year before, making her a slow walker.

I headed straight for the garage exit. There was no sign of them.

After a few minutes, I started back up to the hospital.

Suddenly, Amir's car rounded the far turn, heading for the exit.

He told me later they had forgotten where they had parked and had to hunt for the car.

"They think they have a donor," I said as calmly as I could, which was not very calm. "You'd better park and come back upstairs. I'll meet you up there."

I hurried back to Joan's room. She was still sitting in her chair.

"They don't know for sure yet," I said, "but they think they have a donor. Reitz called a while ago and told the nurses to keep you N.P.O." (The initials come from a Latin phrase meaning "nothing by mouth"-no food or drink before surgery.) "The doctors should be here soon. And I stopped your mother, caught her at the garage exit."

We held each other, feeling anxious and excited. "I don't think we should get our hopes up, until we know for sure," I said. That was impossible, of course, and I had to keep telling myself not to be too hopeful.

The nurse stuck her head in the room to announce that Dr. Reitz was on the phone.

I went to take the call at the nurses' station. I realized I was trembling.

"Hello, Dr. Reitz."

"Bill, we believe we have a donor for Joan. The donor is in Florida, and we are sending a team down there right now. We won't know for sure until they can actually get into the operating room and examine the organs. But it looks good."

"What time do you think you'll know?" I asked.

"Probably not until 7 o'clock at the earliest," Reitz said. "But we want to start preparing Joan for the surgery. She shouldn't have anything to eat or drink, and the chief resident will be up to talk to her in a few minutes."

"So you think there's a good chance?"

"There's no guarantee until the team gets to Florida and looks at the organs. But I think it's likely." That meant a lot from Reitz, who is conservative and understated.

"You'll let us know as soon as you hear from Florida?" I asked.

He said he would.

We began contacting relatives and our closest friends, and they arrived during the next several hours. Seven o'clock came and went without any word. I was very nervous that a problem had arisen with the donor. At 7:30, I reached Reitz on the phone. There was a delay in the team's being able to enter the operating room in Florida. They had to wait for the kidney and liver transplant teams to go first.

At 10:30, the "go" signal came from the team in Tampa. The Johns Hopkins team arrived at II to wheel Joan to the operating room. They gave us a few minutes alone first.

"Well, this is it," I said, sitting next to her on the bed.

"Uh-huh." Joan's eyes and cheeks were shining, and she was smiling. Whatever happened in the next several hours, it would be a deliverance for her.

"No more PT.," I said, referring to the endless physical therapy.

"No," Joan giggled. "That'll be great."

There was a lot to say, but we both knew what it was, and there seemed little point in saying it. I said what I say every night to her before going to sleep: "See you in the morning."

"See you in the morning," Joan said. "I love you."

"I love you."

We hugged each other very hard for a couple of minutes, and then the hospital staff lifted Joan onto a stretcher and rolled her to the operating room.

"There was a lot to say, but we We had commandeered both knew what it was, and there the visitors' lounge, and relseemed little point in saying it." , atives and friends were curled up there, trying to catch a little sleep. I sat with my friend Jonah outside the doors of the surgery wing, in the lounge by the elevator, staring out the window.

Several times, the nurses emerged with reports. The doctors had started the operation at I a.m.; Joan was doing fine. Nothing irreversible would be done until the organs arrived.

Jonah and I sat in silence. I felt mostly exhaustion, not anxiety.

Minute crept after minute in the utter quiet of the early-morning hours.

And then we heard it, the unmistakable whirring, chopping roar of an approaching helicopter. Unable to see anything out the window, I rushed to the visitors' lounge, where faces were already pressed against the glass. The helicopter landed on the roof of the building we were in.

Everyone was awake now, and most of us went back out to the elevator lounge. We were not there two minutes when a woman in a physician's jacket pushed a wheelchair through the swinging doors at one end of the lounge and hurried through the surgical unit doors at the other. On the wheelchair was a metal container.

"I bet that's it," said Jonah.

"It can't be," I said. "It looked like a half-sized keg of beer."

"I think that was it."

"In a keg?"

That was it. In a frozen solution to keep the heart and lungs viable, the keg had traveled from a Tampa hospital by private jet and helicopter and wheelchair to the operating room where Joan lay cut open. It was 4:30 a.m.

By 6:30, the nurse reported to us that everything was fine, the organs had been implanted, and the doctors were closing. Joan would probably be out of the operating room by eight. The news produced the first smiles of the morning.

Joan did not emerge at eight or at nine. As the clock neared ten, with no news, we were worried. How could it take so long just to close?

Finally, a few minutes after ten, they wheeled Joan past us into the cardiac-surgery intensive care unit. It was hard to see much through the crowd of doctors and nurses surrounding the stretcher.

The chief surgeon, Dr. Reitz, stayed with us in the hallway.

"There was a lot of bleeding," he said. "There still is a lot of bleeding. We're giving Joan coagulants and we'll wait a couple of hours to see ifit slows down. We may have to go back in to try to stop it.

"The bleeding is mostly from the inside ofthe chest wall. We had to scrape Joan's lungs off the cavity, because they were all scarred and fibrotic. When we first opened her up, I couldn't understand how she had been able to breathe at all. There was hardly any viable lung tissue left."

The doctor's words stunned even me, who knew how Joan had done things no one considered possible. Until that moment, I had not fully appreciated the degree to which she had been waiting for a donor with the needle on empty.

And now they might have to reopen her. She was putting out 600 cc of blood an hour, a quarter of her body's supply. They were recycling it through some astonishing machine, pumping it back into her body.

We seated ourselves again in the visitors' lounge and prayed for the bleeding to stop. Those were the most anxious moments of all.

Having received healthy lungs, Joan now had a real chance. But with real hope came an overwhelming fear that the bleeding would not stop.

Around II a.m., the intensive care nurse reported that the bleeding had slowed to about 350 cc. The doctors decided to wait several more hours to see if it would drop to 100 cc. That would be acceptable. At noon, we received the good news: Joan's bleeding was down to 150 cc an hour. It definitely. seemed to be stopping.

For the first time, we all relaxed.

I was allowed into the intensive care unit for a few minutes. Joan lay in a private room filled with high-tech machines. Her eyes were closed, her skin a pallid green. She had a tube in her mouth, and four more emerged from her chest. One of the chest tubes seemed the size of a garden hose, and blood coursed through it like a mountain stream.

It is more than a year later. Joan is now a practicing psychiatrist.

We have traveled much since the surgery, played tennis, taken long walks. And Joan has had some problems, including an episode of rejection that caused permanent damage to her new lungs, killing some of the new lung tissue and significantly reducing her energy level. We probably will not play tennis ever again.

But, overall, Joan has been amazingly fortunate.

Clinton House, who preceded her and gave her such crucial encouragement, we learned, died from the consequences of rejection.

We learned that Joan's donor was a teenager who checked off the organ donor box on her driver's license, just weeks before being involved in a fatal car accident. Through her generosity, and that of her family who, in the most awful of times, carried out her wishes, Joan received a future where she had had none before.

Post Script: Sadly, Joan diedfromfurther complications shortly after this article appeared in December 1988, about 18 months after her surgery.

0

The Odyssey of a Widow Force Me to Leave America," Parvatibai describes how a young Bengali student tried to persuade her to return to India by telling her that Indians were "extremely ashamed" of her because, despite having been "born into a noble Brahman family ...you work as a servant in the home of one who is outside of the Hindu castes."

Parvatibai responded that there was no shame attached to working "honestly for my livelihood .... In my spare moments," she added, "I try to fulfill the purpose for which I came here."

But the Bengali youth was so adamant in his resolve that he convinced Parvatibai's other Indian friends that returning to India was the most honorable thing for her to do. In fact, he even arranged the money for her ticket, bought her a trunk and suitcase and, writes Parvatibai, "like a son began to help me in my packing." Confused, she gave in to his pleas, realizing that he meant well, lopsided though his thinking might be.

He took her to New York, put her up at the YWCA and proudly informed his Indian friends in the city that he had "freed a Maratha woman from slavery in a nonHindu home." Two of the friends-Swami Bodhananda and Surendra Bose, both stu.dents in the Vedanta Home---came to congratulate the young do-gooder.

But when they discovered that Parvatibai was not exactly delighted at leaving America, they had a lengthy discussion and concluded: "It is not lowering for a Brahman woman to work in a non-Hindu home as a servant. If we sons of Brahmans on occasion work in the homes of a non-Hindu, what objection is there if our sister follows our example?"

"The darkness of despair that surrounded me was pierced by a ray of hope," writes Parvatibai. She stayed on in New York, taking on ajob as a live-in maid with one family or another, attending a night school to learn English and talking to people about the Widows Home in Pune.

She even started collecting funds for it.

Miss O'Reilly, an American lady she met, was so impressed by the frail Indian widow and her enthusiasm to learn new things that she suggested to Young India that Parvatibai be sent to the International Conference of Industrial Workers in Washington, D.C., as a representative of Indian working women. When O'Reilly

continued from page 7

Among the donations Parvatibai collected in America for the Widows Home in Pune was this Ford car, which was a gift from a group of women in New York.

learned that there were no funds to finance such a trip, she paid for Parvatibai's ticket and arranged for her accommodation.

After the conference, O'Reilly invited her to come and stay with her and her mother in Brooklyn, New York, and help in the housework. Parvatibai accepted her new job and home happily since O'Reilly ran a successful school to train women in various crafts, which provided her with an opportunity to fulfill one of her missions to America-to see the functioning of such institutions. Parvatibai's host also helped her learn English. More important, whenever O'Reilly, "a recognized leader of American industrial workers," was invited to any conference, she would take her Indian companion along. She would invite many American women over so that Parvatibai could meet them. Indian students in New York would often invite her to their homes.

As Parvatibai became more at home in her new environment and confident of herself, she began addressing various groups of Americans and Indians, talking about women in India and of her mission at the Widows Home in Pune. She once spoke to 500 members of a women's club at the prestigious Waldorf Astoria hotel. "In this way," she writes in her autobiography, " ...going hither and thither I secured 3,000 rupees for the Widows Home."

At one such meeting, she narrated how Karve had often to walk long distances to spread his message of the upliftment of Indian women. The ladies present were so moved that they started a collection drive

and bought a car for the Home. Parvatibai also received funds for Karve's proposed university for women.

Finally, on April 20, 1920, she set sail for India. Her American and Indian friends came to see her off, with gifts of flowers, books, candy and fruits. Touched by their generosity, goodwill and friendliness, her thoughts on leaving them were: "How will I ever repay them for their kindness?"

The journey home was via London and Paris. Parvatibai spent a few days at both places. In London she addressed a group of Indian students and collected ÂŁ20 for the Widows Home. She had intended to do the same in Paris but since the Indians there were then already on a major fund-raising drive for a reception to Rabindranath Tagore, who was to pass through Paris on his way home, she abandoned her plans. Instead, she went to visit some girls' schools.

The journey home was eventful since Tagore was on the same ship. Parvatibai and the 25 Indian students on the ship spent many evenings listening to him as he discussed his poetry. On July 15, 1920, Parvatibai touched Indian soil again, with the satisfaction of having fulfilled her mission in America.

She dedicated the rest of her life to the downtrodden women of India, supporting Karve's efforts at educating them.

D About the in English College in on Herman

Author: Ranjana Harish, a lecturer at Gujarat University's Sahajanand Ahmedabad, is the author of a book Melville.

Progress in Megabvtes WIPRO Information Technology Limited, which has collaborative agreements with a number of American companies, has become a leader in the Indian computer market in less than a decade.

It was celebration time once again at the Bangalore headquarters of WIPRO Information Technology Limited (WITL), a high-flying member organization of the WI PRO group of companies. Word had just come in that the company had bagged the Government of India's prestigious 1989 R&D award for electronics the very first time in India that the award had gone to a computer company. Coming on the heels of the National Productivity Council's export performance award the previous year, this new laurel emphasizes the premier position that the company has achieved in just a few years.

WITL has recently had much to celebrate. While the finance managers approvingly watch the healthy climb of turnover from just Rs. 63 million in 1982-83 to an estimated Rs. 1,200 million in the current year, the shareholders have seen their holdings appreciate in value by almost 600 percent. And that is good going even for a "sunrise industry," given the grueling competition in the Indian marketplace.

Ashok Soota, president of the company, is an urbane, laid-back management professional who has planned his company's moves far ahead with all the elan of a chess grandmaster. In the past few years WITL has catapulted to the number two spot in India for sheer size of operations (behind frontrunner Hindustan Computers Limited), and to the "unofficial number one spot" for its innovativeness and range of products and services, making it a "one-stop computer shop."

Soota pinpoints some of the strategies and policies that have paid off. "We decided early on that we would not be content with mere screwdriver technology," he says. "We decided that we must be true market leaders~xcellent corporate image, a wide range of products, efficient customer service and a built-in ability to absorb, adapt and market new products and applications."

That was a tall order for a company that represented a totally unrelated diversification effort by the parent group. WIPRO Limited, the flagship company of the group, was a manufacturer ofvanaspati (hydrogenated vegetable oil), which later added soaps and fluid power systems to its range. In 1981, A.H. Premji, chairman of WI PRO, decided to enter the then fledgling computer industry in India. Conventional wisdom would have condemned such a move, as being akin to leaping into the ocean to learn how to swim. But nothing could dissuade Premji, who intuitively saw a bright future for the Indian computer market. The die was cast, and the years proved that WIPRO had backed a winner.

Encouraged by this success, WIPRO Systems Limited (WISYS) was established in 1985 to develop and market software, mainly

for export. And recently, two new projects were launchedWI PRO Beckman to make analytical instruments, and WIPRO GE to manufacture medical electronics at Bangalore, with knowhow from General Electric's medical electronics division.

Today, WIPRO is a top player in most segments of the computer market in India. A major reason for this achievement, says Soota, is the fact that WIPRO has tie-ups, technology transfer agreements and marketing arrangements with some of the leading computer companies in the world.

Pride of place in the list of overseas partners goes to Sun Microsystems of the United States, with whom WITL has a manufacturing agreement for producing UNIX-based graphicsintensive workstations. It also markets Sun's products in India, along with 1,400 associated application software packages.

WITL buys chips for its computers from Intel and Motorola, both American companies, and also works in close association with those two corporations to keep abreast of the latest developments in the field.

Other partners include TANDEM Computers Inc. of Cupertino, California, for on-line transaction processing mainframes, suitable for use in banking, stock exchanges and railway and airline ticket reservations. Another partner is CONVEX Corporation of Dallas, Texas, for the "mini-super"-a sort oflittle brother of the more famous "supercomputer"-for number-crunching and statistical applications.

"The United States," says Soota, "is way ahead of the rest of the world, particularly in the area of systems software, which lies at the heart of the success of any computer system."

Sridhar Mitta, executive vice-president ofWITL a~d head of its systems engineering and R&D divisions, adds, "The value of technical tie-ups is not only commercial. More importantly, these help to build expertise within the organization. We often send our young, highly motivated engineers and executives to WITL's technology partners in the United States to update and upgrade their knowledge and expertise."

Mitta says that the computer business in India has characteristics that set it apart from the U.S. computer scene. For one thing,

Facing page: President Ashok Soota proudly displays a company computer card with the INTEL 386 chip. While the chip is used in America in microprocessors, WIPRO engineers have enhanced its utility by employing it in minicomputers. Top: WIPRO personal computers rank with the best in the world.

Above, left: An operator creates intricate graphic designs at her workstation.

Above: Workers at the company printer assembly line. Left: WIPRO computers in use at the Satellite Tracking Centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation.

price is a very important determinant of a sale in India. Also, customers look for an entire range of products and services with a single company, and this calls for a "department-store approach" rather than the super-specialized, compartmentalized setup of American companies. WIPRO, says Mitta, has understood and catered to these Indian market characteristics.

For instance, when ET &T, a rival Indian company in the public sector, launched a down-scale market lanata PC in the low-lowprice range, WIPRO was quick to match it with a People's PC with extra features. And the company looks constantly for more and more market niches to fill. A good example is its AT -386 that fills the "mini-micro gap" and is designed to grow, with add-ons according to customer requirements.

Mitta also points with pride to the ingenuity of his young team.

"In the United States. the INTEL chip is used in a microprocessor.

We have used it in a minicomputer, thus enhancing its utility.

Similarly, we have used the INTEL 486 chip in a supermini configuration.

An American-made supermini with the same characteristics would cost four times as much."

WI PRO's show-case custom-built products include systems engineering support for the Indian Space Research Organisation, particularly its remote sensing satellite, and a parallel-processing system for fluid dynamics applications at the National Aeronautics Limited.

S.R. Gopalan, WITL's young vice-president for finance and planning, explains how the company has organized its marketing setup to identify and home in on presumed customer needs.

Having segmented the market, WITL has hired professionals who have experience and contacts in each of the segments, whose job it is to identify potential customers and their requirements, and work with them. The strategy has worked well. For example, the company's education and research team has marketed library software to educational institutions; the telecom team has executed a directory computerization project; the energy, defense, hospital and hotel teams have devised their own unique packages of products and services. "Given the fact that Soota is committed to introducing at least one new line every year," says Gopalan, "we are constantly on the lookout to create new markets."

WITL is a large company in the Indian context, with manufacturing facilities spread over 6,000 square meters in Mysore, installed equipment worth Rs. 110 million, a Rs. 100 million investment in R&D and 1,200 employees. Its product range reaches all the way up from the familiar desk-top PC to a sophisticated supermini. Add its unique strengths in systems engineering-fault tolerant systems, simulation, telemetry and more-and you have a company that has put itself in the superleague.

"Although we are proud of our achievements, we cannot afford to be complacent," says Soota. "The rate of obsolescence in the field of computer technology is so high that no company that wishes to survive and grow can afford to relax. The battle to update, to innovate, to improve is thus continuous."

WITL understands this only too well. A strong R&D division continues to be its motherboard, into which all the manufacturing and marketing "circuit boards" are pinned. Further, the "elapsetime" between conceptualization, development and deployment of every new system is sought to be minimized, to give the customer the latest possible quickly.

As for support software, Soota endorses the importance

of the software business as a natural extension of hardware. Data base as well as application software will continue to form a significant part of WIPRO, he says. Exports of WIPRO products have commenced in a modest way, and plans include export of PCs to the Middle East and communications' software to Europe.

WISYS has experienced more of a roller-coaster ride since its inception in 1985, with heartening ups and sickening downs. Now, however, the management has smoothed out the glitches, and the company posted a modest profit last year.

An important turning point in WISYS's fortunes came with the marketing link with Ashton-Tate of the United States, to market its entire range of software products in India. Even earlier, a moment of glory came when the company's indigenously developed project-planner software, INST APLAN, was favorably received in the U.S. market. Time magazine wrote in 1987, "Indian ingenuity in software designing really came of age last March with the U.S. launch of INSTAPLAN. It was totally developed by WIPRO Systems of Bangalore."

Among its several other custom-built software achievements are a UNIX-based material inspection system for an American company called Cimflex, and a data base file manager for Verifone Inc., U.S.A. Analyzing the reasons for earlier problems, both H.K. Katti, business manager (systems and communication) and Lakshman K. Badiga, business manager (applications) attribute the glitches to a combination of two factors. One, WISYS probably attempted to go too far too fast, producing a whole range of software products "for which at that time there was no market in India."

Two, the company had failed to take notice of the extent of software piracy in India. Says Katti, "We found that we were trying to market our indigenous data base, spreadsheet and wordprocessor programs against the pirated (and therefore virtually free) internationally recognized packages such as d-Base, Lotus and W ordstar. We were nonstarters."

Now, WIPRO Systems has pruned its software line to just a few, including the successful Easy Accounting and Demo Designer programs. It has decided now to concentrate on clients' projectscustom-buIlt software programs for hospitals, hotels and other applications. Also in the works are plans to set up a joint project with Ashton-Tate to produce software in India.

"Dedicated on-line communication channels with foreign companies and customers," says Katti, "would make our job of sophisticated software development SQ much easier." Adds Badiga, "We are also looking at ways to help software product manufacturers to market their products abroad. At present it is so expensive to market abroad directly that we have to resort to selling the rights and signing a royalty agreement."

"Our main priority at WIPRO is not merely to become number one," says Soota. "We aim for excellence in our products and technology, and aspire to give our customers the best value for their money. We are in a position to walk away from orders that do not mesh with our plans. At the same time, we are prepared to battle it out to stay ahead of the competition."

It is precisely this combination of clear purpose, commitment to quality and tenacity of endeavor that has enabled WIPRO to stay several "megabytes" ahead in the fiercely competitive environment of the Indian computer market.

0

~

AFTE~

THE

FIRE

The

One day in June last year, when purple larkspur and brilliant green Idaho fescue were racing up through the scorched soil all over Yellowstone National Park, I went for a hike to a burned patch on the west slope of Mount Washburn. It was perhaps too desolate a place for a fair look into the reported "rebirth" of Yellowstone, the "new beginning." On Mount Washburn, the snow still clung to the rocky chutes running down to the road; spring had not quite arrived.

I was traveling with a National Park Service ornithologist, Terry McEneaney, a skinny, blue-eyed fellow skeptic in a scruffy red beard.

We were talking about the likely effects of the fires that had burned almost half the parkin 1988, and it had struck both of us that it was simplistic to talk about death and rebirth, bad news in 1988, good news in 1989. Nature wasn't that quick; she could burn down a forest in a season, but growing it back was a more complicated business.

We were heading for a stand of thoroughly cooked trees on the edge of a high meadow.

A winter of wind and heavy snow had stripped off the charred bark and burnished the bare wood underneath to a silvery brown. The meadow had already grown back, but among the trees the soil looked barren, and felt like the stuff you empty out of the bottom of a charcoal grill. Most of the dead trees were white bark pine, bad news for grizzly bears, which like to fatten up on the pine seeds before going into hibernation. The fires killed as much as 20 percent of the park's whitebark pine, and the natural human impulse was to want it back, to want Yellowstone "whole" again.

"People, whether scientists or not, fail to remember that these are dynamic processes," McEneaney said. "Even the blackened forest isn't standing still. It's in motion. The human eye just doesn't see it that way." Branches would break. Trees would fall. Grasses would start to appear. Insects were already recolonizing the area. Birds would follow.

McEneaney thought flickers would come back first, and he was speculating on how soon, when we heard a sound like laughter.

"That's a flicker," he said. "Wait a minute.

There's another one. That's a mating calL" A big bird with a flash of red under the wing streaked overhead through the burn. A moment later another flicker landed on a blackened stalk of subalpine fir and disappeared into a new nest hole ten meters up. "Isn't that amazing?" McEneaney called out, already heading down the slope to the fir. "It looks

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Revisiting Yellowstone National Park a year after a devastating four-month fire burned almost half of it in 1988, the author is amazed at the pace of its natural regeneration.

like nothing's here, and then you wait around a while and things show up."

He picked up a rock and rapped on the trunk of the fir. At the top, the flicker, a male with a red mustache, cocked its head out sideways and peered down, like a peevish upstairs tenant. It was plainly at home amid the embers, and McEneaney was just as plainly gratified with the dynamic process. In time, he said, a gray-headed bird called the Clark's nutcracker would bring in fresh whitebark pinecones and cache them in the soil here, and some of them would produce seedlings. It would become a forest again.

If! was inclined to be skeptical-to wonder, for instance, how grizzlies would fare in the meantime-it was because I had last visited Yellowstone in mid-September 1988, when the fires were still smoking and emotions were on the boil. Back then, anything anybody said seemed suspect. The night I arrived, a local man in a hotel bar was angrily blaming the fires on the park service policy of letting "natural" fires (those ignited by lightning) burn, though that policy had been suspended since mid-July because of the drought. (It has always been service policy to fight fires caused by people, and those that threaten life or property.) "They ought to start a backfire in Washington," the man avowed. "See how they like the smoke."

Also in the bar that night was a lingering contingent of the press. The press, too, had generally liked the idea that the fires were a catastrophe and that the U.S. National Park Service was at fault. Television viewers could easily have missed the point that drought and wind, not human policy, were the prime culprits. I had seen the correspondents doing their wrap-ups in a burned-out wasteland on the road between Canyon Village and Norris, where only a few charred sticks remained upright. When they got the angle just right, they could make it look as if all Yellowstone had been firebombed. Hardly any of them mentioned an incidental detail: Those trees had been knocked down by a windstorm in 1984.

But sober voices of authority were also offering rich source material for skepticism back then. "Let me tell you, colleagues, the ground is sterilized," Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming was declaring on the floor of the U.S. Senate. "It is blackened to the very depths of any root system within it." This was at a time when you could stop your car next to a three-week-old burn on the road to Old Faithful and find tender shoots of grass pushing up like a new lawn amid the incinerated trees. It had been park service policy, derived from the Leopold Report of 1963, to manage

areas such as Yellowstone with a light hand, relying on natural forces like fire to create a "vignette of primitive America." Simpson argued that the Leopold Report had replaced science with "dewy-eyed" nostalgia. Fire was doubtless necessary in Yellowstone; no one wanted to return to the era when all fires were suppressed. But the way to put fire to work, he said, was through "prescribe~ burning" under systematic human controL The park service staff at Yellowstone, harried on all sides, had meanwhile become locked into a sort of reverse-Bambi worldview, in which ungulates gamboled amid the flames and everything about the fires was good. Facing unfounded but widespread rumors of terrified elk going up in flames, some park service officials discouraged staffers from pointing out that forest fires do indeed take life, as well as give it. If the press exaggerated the scale of the fire, the park service tended to minimize it. (The press liked to report the fire perimeter, which was estimated then at 440,000 hectares. The park service wishfully implored them to add that "only about half of the vegetation has burned within

many fire perimeters.") A reporter who asked if drought and fire would produce a severe winter kill among the elk and bison could get the official view: "For all we know, the animals are doing fine. If they weren't out making a living, they'd be migrating and we see no abnormal migrations." Then, in the corridors, he could overhear a researcher wondering why the collared elk in his study were coming down from the high country six weeks early: "Whether it's due to the drought or the fire, I don't know. But we're going to lose a lot of animals this winter."

The Yellowstone National Park to which I returned in June 1989 was a much different place, and not simply because grass and wildflowers softened the starkness of the burn. In the absence of vast, racing walls of flame in 1988, almost everyone seemed to have accepted the fires as a natural event.

Tourists went about their customary business of photographing elk and bison, and their conversation was studded with tidbits of natural-fire philosophy. Stretches of graphite forest, where the burned tree trunks stood naked as pencil leads, followed the road in many places, and chain saws snarled where hazardous trees, or "snags," were being

removed. But the details of the fire were known now, and that horrible twinge of uncertainty, the idea that all Yellowstone could be lost in a season, was gone. Everything suddenly seemed green.

By preliminary estimates, 395,600 hectares of the 888,000-hectare park had been burned-a figure that, in the general atmosphere of rapprochement, was reported as "less than originally thought." In about 26 percent of that area the fire had burned into the treetops; the rest consisted of ground fires from which the park was already recovering with eye-popping speed. Surveys in the park had turned up 272 fire-related deaths among the so-called "charismatic megafauna"----{:Ik, moose, black bear, mule deer and bisonthough birds and small mammals probably' died in far larger numbers. Drought and, to a lesser extent, fire damage also contributed to the heavy die-off of animals through the winter. Counting animals that wandered out of the park and were killed by hunters, the elk population was down by 40 percent, bison by about 29 percent. Two grizzlies were missing and presumed dead. In addition, of the 25,000 fire fighters who worked in the area in 1988, one died when a snag silently dropped

Above left: Swan Lake flats near Electric Peak in the northwestern corner of Yellowstone Park show the effects of burn in September 1988.

Above: In June 1989 the flats are beginning to green up. Shrubs and grasses in the foreground sproutfrom root crowns at the surface. Below: Don Dspain, a U.S. National Park Service botanist, counts lodgepole seedlings in pipelike frame set up on a burned plot.

on him during final cleanup operations in October. Secure in these statistics, a casual visitor could survey Yellowstone in June 1988 and legitimately wonder what all the fuss had been about.

One morning up on the north side of Mount Washburn, I met an independent researcher named Steve French, who established the Yellowstone Grizzly Foundation in 1985. He was looking out at Antelope Valley through a telescope mounted on the window of his pickup truck. "Your average tourists," he said, "you figure their visual acuity going 60 kilometers per hour in a Winnebago-most of them aren't going to be able to tell that this was all burned." He pointed out splotches and stripes of black in the forest, and areas where trees had died from the heat. In some spots, twisted black spikes of sagebrush were visible above the grass. But these fire signs seemed incidental in what was otherwise a pastoral landscape of green grass and pockets of trees, among which groups of elk grazed.

Then French showed me his log entry for September 7, 1988, when he and his wife, Marilynn, having studied Antelope Valley for six years, drove there at the height of the blaze: "Fire everywhere we looked. My legs were

weak ....Fire absolutely everywhere-up to the ridge, all in the upper meadows and interspersed trees, all below. The meadows were circled in fire rings. Trees were exploding, crashing, echoing constantly ... .! can't imagine anything surviving in this entire drainage. It pains me to think of 300-year-old whitebark pine stands being evaporated in less than a minute. No signal from 125 or 126...."

French assumed he was recording the deaths of the two radio-collared grizzlies. In fact, 126 simply moved out of the path of the fire; 125stayed put, and French spotted her at her usual mineral lick the next morning. Other wildlife soon followed. When I talked to him in mid-1989, the snow had been off the ground and French had been back studying Antelope Valley for less than a month. I asked what he had seen so far, and this list tumbled out: Three pairs of grizzlies courting and mating, two or three grizzlies digging biscuitroot or hunting elk calves or scavenging carcasses, a couple of males passing through, looking for females; a herd of 175 elk, with a total of about 500 elk scattered across the valley at one time; moose, bison, bighorn sheep, a lot of small mammals, all sorts of raptors, mountain bluebirds, a blue grouse in rut, sandhill

The fire debate simmered under the surface. Was nature capable of managing Yellowstone Park without meddling? Or did it require human dominion to survive in the modern world?

cranes-at which point I ran out of paper.

The park service had argued all along that the fires would increase biological diversity.

The same day that French watched Antelope Valley burn, McEneaney counted 40 ferruginous hawks, a prairie species seldom seen in Yellowstone, weaving through the heavy smoke in the Hayden Valley area. He theorized that such birds had evolved in their native fireprone landscape to associate gigantic columns of smoke with a plentiful food source-voles and pocket gophers displaced by fire. Local eagles, ospreys, falcons, hawks, herons, cranes and owls also joined in the hunt.

The wildlife show continued immediately after the fire. Many burned areas were littered with lodgepole pine seeds. (It was one of the most widely reported tidbits of natural-fire philosophy that about a third of Yellowstone's lodgepole pine have a special adaptation to fire, called serotiny. Their pinecones remain sealed up until intense heat melts the resin, scattering seeds and beginning reforestation.) Red crossbills, pine siskins and other birds, as well as a few intrepid chipmunks, quickly moved in to gorge on those seeds. It was easy to get the impression that park wildlife was better adapted to fire than were the human beings running around studying it, fighting it, deploring it.

The leading spokesman for the natural-fire policy in 1988 was John Varley, chief of research at Yellowstone. Varley, is an ardent voice for wilderness preservation.

A "fishsqueezer" (ichthyologist) by training, he helped re-establish native cutthroat trout in the park. On a wall in his cluttered office is a bumper sticker advocating "Wolves For A Greater Yellowstone." When I talked to him in September 1988, Varley seemed frustrated not so much with the fires as with the resulting public relations debacle. "There is no 'let burn' policy," he snapped at one point, dismissing a term then in general use to describe the park service's natural-fire program. "You will never hear the words 'let burn' out of the mouth of a greenblood. It connotes that we sit back with our heels up, letting things happen."

By June 1989, when I revisited Varley to talk about the park's changing diversity and the future of the natural-burn policy, he was

more relaxed. He had been out with President George Bush earlier in the week, and the President had been so incredulous that a burned meadow could have grown back so fast that, with Senator Simpson looking on, the two of them squatted down to search for ashes beneath the grass.

What had been lost in the fires of 1988 were mainly huge stands of mature lodgepole pine, a slow-growing, long-lived tree that dominates the park. Such stands have a typical density of 500 to 750 trees per hectare, and walking among the straight, branchless, tawny-gray tree trunks produces the uneasy sensation of being lost in a toothpick forest.

The canopy shades out the sun, and the vegetation in the duff of dried pine needles consists mainly of lichens, moss and low, furzy patches ofwhortleberry; in older stands, seedlings of shade-tolerant spruce and fir begin to push up. It is good habitat for deer mice, red squirrels, a relatively sparse selection of birds and not much else. According to Varley, researchers sometimes refer to it unkindly as a "subalpine biological desert."

In the 16 years since Yellowstone had introduced its natural-fire policy, lightningcaused fires had almost always established themselves in just such stands, and died out when they reached younger and less flammable vegetation. When fire opened up the biological desert, said Varley, new plants and animals moved in. Such a forest harbored more species two or three years after it had been reduced to embers than before, and it became increasingly diverse for about 25 years, until the lodgepole pine once again began to cast its shadow. The only criticism directed at the natural-fire policy before 1988 was that it didn't burn enough; advocates of prescribed burning were positive that humans could do better.

"I will freely admit that we were very cavalier going into 1988," Varley said. "We had 16 years under our belt and by anybody's standards, it was enormously successful public policy. We let 235 fires burn, which consumed a total of 13,660 hectares, with some fires ranging to 3,000 hectares. I mean, good grief, we thought we had the cat by the tail. We were building a first-class mosaic." At that rate, it would have taken 675 years for fire to renew every corner of the park.

It seemed to me that, because they had always defended natural fire, Varley and the park service, somehow by extension, found themselves reaching for good things to say about the entire 1988 conflagration. It was as if, having declared that geysers were good for Yellowstone, they should also be obliged to

speak well of a major volcanic eruption. "We might have overstated the benefits of the fire," Varley conceded. "Hell, it was easy enough to say when there were only 6,400 hectares burned. It became less easy as it got up to 300,000 hectares."

What I wondered was, if it was possible to predict the ecological effects of the fire even now. Previous fire research at Yellowstone had concentrated on burns of no more than 2,800 hectares. Was it possible to extrapolate from there to a fire of almost 400,000 hectares? Since wildlife tends to be most diverse along the edges where differing habitats meet, could one honestly say that a more diverse mix of species would venture back into a vast, edgeless burn measuring in some places several kilometers across? If reforestation depended on a natural "seed rain" from nearby trees and pinecones that survived the blaze, would areas in the middle of the largest burns remain barren?

"You can't come out and make definitive statements," said Varley. "We haven't had fires of this scale since there was a science of ecology. Types of habitats burned that we had earlier believed were nonflammable. Swamps burned. We had crown fires through willow.

We think they'll be back. But that's a new dimension." He was confident that the park would respond as it had to smaller fires, "based on what you can go out and see today."

A few of days after talking to Varley, I went out to a heavily burned area on the south side of Bunsen Peak. I was with a park service botanist named Don Despain, who has conducted much of the research on how fire affects plant life at Yellowstone.

He is a placid, unexcitable man with an easy grin, but he became notorious when he saw one of his research plots go up in flames and remarked, in the presence of a reporter, "Burn, baby, burn." (In Gardiner, Montana, on the edge of the park, a sign soon went up, "Snow, baby, snow.") We were standing at a place I had last visited just after the fires, a knob of rocks and trees at the top of a slope, where the ash had come up around the ankles of my boots and the blackened rock was flaking off in layers from the heat. In my notes, I had written, "All darkened trees. Zero leaves. Scorched earth.

A dead zone." By June 1989, the ash was gone and a few bold forbs and blades of grass had begun to grow. A fat yellow-bellied marmot waddled on the nearby slope.

Despain bent down and lightly fingered a pin-sized green shoot in the shelter between two blackened rocks. "That's a conifer seedling," he remarked. "Maybe a Dougles fir. I wonder where it came from." Unlike

lodgepole pine, Douglas fir cones are not adapted to fire, and the local seed source seemed to have been thoroughly torched.

Despain began to nose around among the rocks, until he found an active burrow with a litter of Douglas fir pinecones scattered around the entrance. An animal, possibly the marmot, which was by now whistling at us in alarm, had apparently survived the fire underground here. "The probability," said Despain, "is that the animal brought a cone out from under the rocks, and one of the seeds got away from him and is establishing a tree. It surprises me. I hadn't thought of an animal cache as a .s~ed source in an area where the crown was completely burned." He mulled this over and then added, "The popular conception that everything is destroyed within these areas and that the seeds have to come back in from outside is a misconception."

Despain also disputed the idea that any part of the park had been burned so extensively that the mosaic edges were destroyed. "The mosaic pattern applies whether you're looking at the park from a satellite in outer space or crawling around on the ground." Flying over the park by helicopter, I had seen the mosaic-improbable green islands in the middle of huge swaths of black. I also saw the opposite-spot burns that looked as if a prankster had spattered droplets of tar across the green forest. These different areas would come back at different rates, said Despain, and the "edge effect" would be preserved.

If Despain was unflappable in the face of the fires, it may have been because he and a colleague, William Romme at Fort Lewis College in Colorado, had just completed the fieldwork for a four-year study of fire history at Yellowstone. Despain and Romme had concluded that huge conflagrations occurring centuries apart were the natural-fire pattern in Yellowstone's lodgepole pine forests-and they conveniently announced this in August 1988, as the winds were starting to kick up and drive the flames across thousands of hectares in a day. Their study turns out to be important to the future of Yellowstone and to the issue of natural fire versus prescribed burning.

Critics of the park service have argued that the only reason half of Yellowstone burned in 1988 was that a century of fire suppression had caused an unnatural buildup of fallen trees and other ready fuels. In their view, the park service should have begun prescribed burning to remove those fuels even before fire suppression ended in 1972.

Despain and Romme argued that the fuel buildup had been entirely natural because the park's lodgepole pine typically burned at 200-

to 400-year intervals. Fire suppression had been too recent-and too ineffective before the introduction of aerial equipment-to make much difference. By looking at large tree stands that had grown up together in areas once cleared by fire, Despain and Romme concluded that Yellowstone's forests had last experienced widespread fire, with individual burns of at least 16,000 hectares in size, in the early 1700s. And having lived through it before, the park would readily adapt without human help, once again. In Despain's view, the scope of the 1988 fires did not contradict the natural-fire policy but established its historical validity.

Despite Varley's fears that the fires would "give the anti wilderness people a new jumpstart on life," the natural-fire policy thus seemed to have survived all the political hubbub of the summer of 1988. Scientists in and out of government had rallied behind natural fire. With that backing, Varley argued that it was a sound decision, in practical and also political terms, to back off until the park had revised its fire-management plan.

But if the fire debate had subsided as of the spring, it continued to simmer under the surface, a conflict of two antithetical ideas. Was nature capable of managing Yellowstone Park without human meddling? Or did nature require human dominion to survive in the modern world?

Shortly after I visited with Despain, I spoke by phone to one of his critics, Tom Bonnicksen, a professor at Texas A&M University and a specialist in restoration ecology. Bonnicksen didn't dispute the park service contention that Yellowstone will experience a regeneration of plant life after the fires. But it followed logically, he said, that lodgepole pine seedlings would begin to push up and form a canopy. In time, huge areas of the park would be covered with forests of uniform age and size, a vast new biological desert.

In Bonnicksen's view, the mosaic was destroyed, in more than half the area burned.

Such a forest was likely to produce a new round of wildfires in 50 to 100 years, when the combination ofa low canopy with underlying debris left over from the 1988 fires would be "explosive," and again after 200 years, when spruce and fir formed a "ladder of fuels" up to the canopy. Bonnicksen's answer was to begin prescribed burning. And if Despain could cite a study showing that a prescribed-burning program begun in 1972 would not have had time to prevent the 1988 fires, that was merely an argument, in Bonnicksen's view, for beginning such a program now before it was again too late.

Thus the fires of 1988 produced no resolution

of the debate over wilderness management, not even a guarantee that the other half of the park won't burn this year. They merely demonstrated once again that the two constants in any wilderness are debate, generally bitter, and change, sometimes drastic and surprising.

Up in Antelope Valley, French was telling me in a roundabout way why he was not worried about grizzlies. "People don't like change," he was saying. "You want your rent to be $300 a month. You don't want it to be $25 one month and $5,000 the next. We like things to be in a steady state. But nature isn't like that." Change at Yellowstone had been drastic before. I thought of a headline from a Chicago paper: YELLOWSTONEIN SHAMBLES. The article described what was then considered one of the worst earthquakes in American history. It knocked 400 meters off a canyon wall, dropped around 35 million cubic meters of rock into the Madison River drainage and killed 28 people. That epochal event, which occurred just outside the park 30 years ago, is now largely lost to human memory.

"Grizzly bears evolved adjusting to a changing habitat," said French. "They've got claws for digging. They've got teeth for crushing. They've got the long gut so they can eat on vegetation."

Fire may have taken away some of their whitebark pine, but it also provided carcasses to scavenge, and the "nutrient pulse" from the ash helped push up a rich crop of grazing grass this spring. "The grizzly is an animal that evolutionarily and annually and seasonally can adjust to change," French added. "And what was the fire? Not good nor bad, but change."

Out on the Canyon-Norris Road, tourists were stopping by that old blowdown they had seen so often on television in 1988. A father stood his three-year-old on a burned log and the mother edged from side to side seeking the choice angle, so that Yellowstone would appear in the background as a flattened wasteland stretching clear to Mount Holmes on the western border. "Look at your mother," the father said. "Look ... at ...your ...motherl" A ranger came by and gamely explained that this landscape was not, strictly speaking, a product of the fires. People listened politely, then returned to their camera work. This was one place in Yellowstone that still smacked of a major news event. A catastrophe.

They wanted to bend down and rap their knuckles on the hardened earth. They wanted to touch it, to immortalize it before it, too, was subsumed in the rising tide of nature.

0 About the Author: Richard Conniff is a frequent contributor to Smithsonian magazine.

Reprinted

from

U.S. News & World Report,

June 26. 1989. published

at Washington.

D.C.

'OXIC AVIMGII Using guerrilla tactics, an environmental detective strikes at corporate polluters to bring the culprits to book.

It is midnight as the tiny Zodiac inflatable craft bounces north through the chop of America's most famously filthy harbor. With the downtown Boston skyline glowing about three kilometers behind and the eerie lights of the Monsanto Company plant dead ahead, Marco Kaltofen steers into a creek, cuts the 40-horsepower Nissan outboard and begins paddling toward a set of discharge pipes. The lone toxic avenger and the chemical conglomerate are old adversaries, and tonight Kaltofen is returning to sample its wastes.

Kaltofen, 30, who operates a chemicalanalysis laboratory for the Boston-based National Toxics Campaign, llegan his particular brand of environmental activism some six years ago. He slips into plants disguised as a utility worker or zips around the waterfront, staging hit-and-run forays while armed with a pH meter to measure acidity, a chemicalanalysis kit, empty bottles, plastic bags and a notebook. Boston's low-tech toxic detective samples and analyzes soil, air and liquid discharges on or near the property of suspected polluters. His newest weapon is a radio-controlled model airplane equipped to fly over smokestacks and gather air samples.

With results in hand, he often calls a press conference to publicize his findings. If the pollution is severe, he takes his evidence to local authorities, and he is credited with spurring several successful prosecutions. As an environmental guerrilla, his activism has been more creative and effective than that of other so-called monkey wrenchers. Some radicals hammer spikes into old-growth trees to thwart the chain saw, pour sand into bulldozer tanks, About the Author: Michael Satchell is a senior editor

Jor U.S. News & World Report.

switch survey stakes at oil-exploration sites and commit other potentially destructive, illegal acts of "ecotage." Others favor legally questionable, high-profile, risky stunts such as scaling bridges and tall buildings to hang banners or confronting whaling ships on the high seas.

"My strategy is simple," Kaltofen says. "I try to embarrass the companies badly enough so they are forced to deal with the situation."

Monsanto has been one of his favorite targets since he began analyzing its discharges and publicizing the results in 1984. Spokesman Michael Ferrante admits past violations of a pollution permit by the firm at the 120-yearold plant but stresses that Monsanto is working hard on remedial action. "We are moving expeditiously, but Kaltofen would like to see it done sooner," Ferrante says. "So would we, but we have to follow the law."

The Dutch-born Kaltofen began his environmental activism in 1982, plunging into the kind of direct-action showboating that garners easy headlines and television footage but has little permanent value. He chained himself to truckloads of sludge, delivered barrels of waste to corporate headquarters and annual stockholders' meetings and plugged discharge pipes at polluting companies. He has been arrested a dozen times and convicted once of trespassing. "At some point, I realized that delivering hazardous materials to a company office was in itself an act of violence," he says.

"So I switched tactics."

Recently, federal criminal enforcement efforts have bogged down in bureaucratic inertia and infighting, and Washington is encouraging local authorities to step up prosecution of major polluters. In May last year, Massachusetts launched a 33-member state strike force of scientists, lawyers and undercover

agents to crack down, though there are still some like Kaltofen who believe that civilians are more effective than government at the investigative side of enforcement.

Kaltofen's most successful thrust has been against American Cyanamid in Linden, New Jersey, where he spent two months surreptitiously gathering pollution samples at the chemical plant, interviewing employees and sifting through public records. Based on his files, the state attorney general's office launched an investigation, and in 1987 the company pleaded guilty to 37 criminal counts of polluting the Rahway River. American Cyanamid was fined $900,000, at the time the largest penalty ever assessed in a New Jersey environmental case, and agreed to make major antipollution improvements.

"Without the information from Kaltofen, we would not have targeted this company," says Robert Candido, the former chief of environmental prosecutions, who handled the case.

As with many activists, Kaltofen is driven by a sense of deep frustration. When it comes to cleanup, things never happen fast enough.

Equally infuriating is the fact that much toxic dumping violates no law, further evidence to him that the nation's environmental priorities are askew. His Boston Harbor bailiwick, where President George Bush turned environmental issues on Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis and helped sink his presidential campaign in 1988, and where flounder are still pulled from the water bearing golfball-size tumors, is a perfect example.

"There's a bill in the state legislature to close the harbor to fishing," Kaltofen says. "Why not close the harbor to toxic dumping?"

0

ary McCarthy died in October last year in New York. She had been on a respirator, and unable to talk, but friends who saw her in the hospital say that she was very clear-a furious witness to the rites of curing and dying enacted in the blinking, beeping technological reaches of the cardiac intensive care unit in which she spent the last month of her life. She was one of the best witnesses we had.

"I slipfrom wonder into bluster; you align/your lines more freely, ninety percent on target," was how Robert Lowell described her. Her intelligence was so fine, so scrupulous and candid, that it may be she could not tolerate the loss of Mary McCarthy anymore than wecould. She was 77 and did not want to die and, indeed, had no intention of dying. She fought her illnesses for years-which may be why no one who knew her well can seem to summon the appropriate platitudes about a long full life or a life achieved or a life completed.

Mary made it clear that she was not finished with her life. Her son, Reuel-he is her only child, the son of her marriage to Edmund Wilson, and a professor of Slavic Languages-says that she neverput together her papers, never made a list of instructions for her family and friends and put it in a box and left it out on the dining room table. She considered illness an intrusion into her lifein-progress and into the gallant householding of her old age. She ran three households-there was a house in Castine, Maine, where she and her husband, James West, spent their summers, a house at Bard College, where she taught English in the fall term, and a wonderful rambling apartment in Paris on the rue de Rennes-and those households were her life signs. She never closed a house. When she left for the States in 1988, she left the Cesare Paveseshe was reading open on the night table. She left her granddaughter's drawings stuck to the bedroom mirror. She even

left a last-minute letter on the mantle, waiting for a stamp.

The saddest thing in the apartment is an invitation to the party she and Jim gave every spring for their Paris friends. "James and Mary West invite you for a drink to say goodbye until autumn."

She never came back to Paris. Her friends waited for her. People in Paris made their rentree with the question, "Is Mary back?"

"Unfair" is not a word one would normally use to describe the death of a friend who was as old as Mary, or as ill as she had been over the past six years-she had cancer and then water on the brain and heart problems and then cancer again. But it is the word her friends keep using, because Mary was such a seductive woman-she had such a cajoling will, and such authoritative and relentless charm-that I think most of us expected her to stand at death's door, looking beautiful in her lace stockings and her good pearls and one of her plaid pleated skirts, and flash her famous Mary McCarthy smile and say, in that implacably gracious Vassar voice, "I'm sorry, I have other plans."

She did have other plans. Her German lessons. A trip to Rome.

A book on Gothic cathedrals. Another summer in Maine with Jim and his roses. (Jim West is a passionate gardener.) Another evening in Paris for a hundred friends. She refused to dwell on age or illness (except to say that she hated being old). She was too proud and too private and too impatient and, especially, too wellbred. She tried to dismiss illness as if it were an old marriage or a bad review. She got mad, and then she got better and fixed her face and came out smiling for her next appointment.

I remember once, in 1988, I was expecting Mary and Jim for dinner and a friend called up to say that Mary was back in the hospital, that she had just been operated on again. The next day there was a call from Mary. She wanted to tell me not to worry-

The Mary I Remember Jane Kramer's fond memories of Mary McCarthy who died recently.

she was out, and the dinner was on. She arrived that night, a little unsteady on her feet but lovely (people writing about what a dazzling mind Mary had sometimes forget how dazzling she was herself). She talked to everybody, listened to everything. You could see her reviving on talk and thought, restoring herself with applications of her own immensely satisfying company. I think she believed that as long as her mind and body met and held at a friend's table she had won the day.

Everyone who saw Mary over her last few years has a story like that-a story about Mary checking out of the hospital in time for a dinner party or for an afternoon walk with a friend in Central Park. The more precarious her life became, the more she traveled, the more she did, the more she saw. In the spring of 1988, she made what Americans call the commencement circuit--eollecting honorary degrees, giving distinguished lectures-and in the course of her trip she stopped in New York to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. There was a party for her.

She sat on a pale sofa in a new silk pleated suit, receiving friends, nodding her acknowledgments like a materfamilias of New York literary life, loving the congratulations and the compliments.

Jim watched her from across the room. He was her fourth husband-she always said her best husband. They had met in Poland-Jim was a diplomat in Poland-and had a coup de foudre. and they were married for nearly 30 years and looked after each other fiercely. I could see that Jim was worried. He said that all the traveling and the talking were wearing Mary down-that he couldn't stop her, and she wouldn't stop herself, and it made him angry-but then she caught his eye and shot him a dry, complicitous look, and he shrugged and said, "What the hell. Why not?" He was so proud of Mary. He couldn't really tell a strongminded 77-year-old woman on a high roll that, no, she wasn't allowed to go to Yale and give a great speech, or fly to Maine to see her husband's best roses. He knew as well as anyone that she needed that last high roll. It was a kind of remission for her.

It took the French a long time to discover Mary. She had lived in Paris since 1962, but she had never announced herself as a personnage-she was too correct to announce herself-and the French tend not to recognize a personnage who arrives like that, private and tactful, not even when she lives right in the middle of the sixth arrondissement. The literati of several continents had already made their pilgrimages to the rue de Rennes by the time the French caught on to the fact that the grande dame of American letters was not Susan Sontag in a black sweater or Lillian Hellman in a free mink coat, but this beautiful aging woman who lived with a diplomat husband and collected botanical prints and kept a Polish maid in a starched apron circling the dining room table with a Staffordshire platter, serving cucumber slices and poached salmon.

But once the French found Mary, they took her up as their own discovery. She forgave them for it. She enjoyed her French celebrity. She liked it when she and Jim went to La Marlotte for supper and the patronne picked up the day's Le Monde, with Mary's picture in it-it was the picture of a young woman-and took it around the room, nudging the customers and pointing and saying, "Look, it's Mary McCarthy."

Some people complained that Mary McCarthy was vain (which of course she was) but what they called her vanity was really the pleasure she gave herself by being alive, being special, being admired. It was one of the nicest things about her. She was generous with her pleasure. She conferred it, dispensed it, shared it-like flowers or a poem. It meant that if you had the good sense

Most of us expected her to stand at death's door, looking beautifuI...and flash her famous Mary McCarthy smile and say, in that implacably gracious Vassar voice, "I'm sorry, I have other plans." to care for Mary McCarthy, Mary took you in and became your friend and never forgot you. She was known in her world for her friendships, much more than for her famous literary feuds. She was exceptionally loyal. She could not stand stupid or pretentious people-the McCarthy smile could freeze you right out of the house if you were someone Mary disapproved of-but she indulged her friends. Especially her American friends. She liked her Americans. She was their most celebrated American-in-Paris, and she took it as a duty to provide them with an exemplary salon. Her interest in them was patriotic and pedagogic and kina. They came to her parties looking like they might have been convened for Sunday services at the American Cathedral and mixed with Paris publishers and visiting Italian novelists and Polish emigres. Never mind that what they had in common was mainly Mary's indulgence. She gave them Paris. She served them champagne and made them the best turkey stuffing I have ever tasted and saw to it that they were introduced-that the Nobel laureate got to meet the lawyer's wife from Cleveland.

When Mary McCarthy's friend Hannah Arendt died, Mary wrote her goodbyes in an essay in The New York Review of Books.

She talked about the tenderness of friendship, and about how hard it was to locate that tenderness-to physically locate it-in the august public person that was "Hannah Arendt." She described looking for her friend Hannah to say goodbye to-not the Hannah who already belonged to her own brilliant reputation. She wanted to kiss that Hannah for the last time-somewhere on the nape of her neck, or in the soft curve where her neck met her shoulder, somewhere true, somewhere that reputation hadn't appropriated. I clipped that essay years ago, and put it in a drawer and eventually lost it, but I keep thinking of it now that I am writing this, telling Mary McCarthy goodbye.

0 About the Author: Jane Kramer is the author of Unsettling Europe and Europeans. She writes a regular "Letter From Europe" in The New Yorker.

A Talent to Surprise There are writers and novelists who make the social chronicle of their times, partly through their works, but even more by the kind of people they are. They are not necessarily writers of the first rank-a Tolstoy, a Hardy, a Faulkner-but they are the personalitiesand influences by which the period in which they live and write is remembered. Mary McCarthy, who died last October, is a good example of this sort of woman and writer.

She once said that she did not think she had influenced public behavior at all. In this she underestimated herself for, from her firstappearance on the literary scene in the 1930s, she challenged and changed public opinion. She was incorrigibly modern. She spokeout against the war in Vietnam before it was fashionable to do so.Shedefended unpopular contemporary authors and attacked those she thought were overvalued. Most of all, in her fiction and withher lifestyleshe overturned the prevalent idea of what a woman of lettersmust be like. She never lost her talent to surprise.

McCarthy invented herself as a totally new sort of woman who combinedsense with sensibility; who was both coolly intellectual and boldly passionate. She combined a lively and varied intellectual and romantic life with marriage and motherhood. (She had onechild, Reuel, a son by her second husband, Edmund Wilson.)

What do we remember Mary McCarthy for now that we can lookat her in perspective? In today's context, the main body of her work, like her life, is more mild than daring. She married four times-something unusual for the time when she was a young woman.Her first marriage was in 1933to Harold Johnsrud, whom she divorced to marry the author and literary critic Edmund Wilson in 1938. She divorced Wilson and married Bowden Broadwaterin 1946but, still uneasy and unharmonized in private life, divorced him and married former diplomat James West in 1961.With West, she finally found the happiness she had been seekingand stayed married to him until her death.

But it was certainly not her talent for changing partners that made Mary McCarthy the new American woman. Her claim to that title lay in the beliefs that underlined everything she said and wrote,everymoment that she lived. Said Newsweek, "In a cynical

All My Indian Sons Directing Arthur Miller's All My Sons for a Madras theater group, American director Anita Khanzadian is surprised to see how the play "speaks directly to the Indian situation."

Enchanting Islands Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, two islands just a few kilometers apart off the coast of Cape Cod, Ma~sachusetts, have identical enchantments-sand, surf, blue waters-that lure visitors every summer.

byMURIEL'"'JEHANARAWASI

age, she asked moral questions. She was unforgiving to those who sank below her standards for truth and impeccably reasoned discourse." This combined with her writing skills to create what has been described as "some of the most pungent criticism of her time" and "a legendary persona: moralistic, biting, satiric."

It was her painful childhood that shaped the personal and professional characteristics that made her "the queen of the American literary scene." She was born in 1912 into a prosperous, happy family but her idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end when she was six. Her parents died in the influenza epidemic of 1918and she and her three brothers were put in the charge of their great-aunt, Margaret, and her new husband, Myers Shriver. They lived a wretched life. Aunt Margaret may have been motivated by a sense of duty-the children must not be spoiled-but Uncle Myers was plainly sadistic. On one occasion, he furiously beat Mary after she had won an essay contest at school "to teach her a lesson," he said, "lest she become stuck up." It was probably from Uncle Myers's behavior that McCarthy learned of the inherent injustice of human beings.

Fortunately, the young girl was removed from this Dickensian setting by her grandparents who educated her in convent schools and then sent her to Vassar College. She emerged from Vassar in 1933 "a handsome girl with an open Irish face, natural style and gleeful grin and she entered the fierce leftist circles in New York city," wrote Time. She soon made her mark as a book reviewer and theater critic for publications such as the The Partisan Review. The literary world got its first glimpse of the savage wit and fierce criticism that was to become a McCarthy trademark. She dismissed A Streetcar Named Desire as a play about a man who can't get into the bathroom because his sister-in-law is always using it.

It was Edmund Wilson, she always acknowledged, who led her into writing fiction. At Vassar, she had been told that she was a critic, not a creator, and this had disappointed her. But Wilson, whose critical judgment was good, told her that he felt she had a talent for writing fiction. He opened the door.

McCarthy made her fiction writing debut in 1942 with The

Let's Invent Something Every year Drew Wilson plays the role of Thomas Edison before 250,000 students in American schools. After portraying the life of the man who had 1,093 patents to his name, Wilson urges students "to invent something ...to come up with a great idea." It works.

Greening America President George Bush's decision to strengthen the Clean Air Act is a big victory for environmental chief William Reilly's attempts to clean up America.

Company She Keeps and literary eyebrows rose .. Readers and critics were scandalized by her forthrightness about sex, especially since the book was somewhat autobiographical.

The more discerning critics noted that the book "skewered the heroineherself-mercilessly as she would an enemy, for her pretensions and insecurities." The legend began to be born.

In 1957 she wrote what is still among the best autobiographies by a woman, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. A collection of short pieces, the book (described as McCarthy's "most eloquent"

by Time) gets its unity not from the introduction and commentaries, but from the revelation of McCarthy's developing and consistent personality. Once begun, it is impossible to put down, as the reader gets drawn into the story of this instinctive but reasoned (if not altogether reasonable) rebel.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood has all the flavor of the times in which McCarthy was a child and then a teenager. They were not good times. From her experiences then she learned the art of social satire, writing bitingly about what she disapproved of.

Although all her work attracted critical attention, she became a public figure only with The Group (1963), a novel about eight Vassar girls. A best seller and later a hit film, The Group starts with the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and ends with the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was, McCarthy said later, conceived "as a kind of mock-chronicle novel. It's about the idea of progress seen in the feminine sphere--economics, architecture, domestic technology in the home, playpen and bed. It is really about the loss of faith in progress."

Was McCarthy one of the eight girls she chronicled? No, she insisted, and when asked later whether she approved of a roman a clef, said: "What I do is to take real plums and put them into an imaginary cake." This is what she did in The Groves of Academe, which was set in a progressive college campus in Pennsylvania during the Joseph McCarthy era. She did not write of what she had not directly experienced. Mary McCarthy was one of many writers who condemned the witch-hunting of the communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee. She had taught at Bard and Sarah Lawrence; liked the first, disliked the second.

Everyone knew that the boorish intellectual in A Charmed Life (1955) was based on Edmund Wilson and that one of the less

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admirable characters in The Oasis was her former lover, Philip Rahv, founder of The Partisan Review.

But McCarthy didn't need to take refuge behind the smokescreen of fiction to air her views about people, places and events. She spoke her mind plainly and often acerbically, but always with an authentic voice. "Her wit, like a swift breeze, blew the hats off countless swelled heads, and most of the pedestals she set askew supported men," said Time in its tribute to her.

But her most famous feud was with a woman-Lillian Hellman, whose autobiography made claims that could not be factually substantiated.

Accusing Hellman of being a "dishonest writer," McCarthy declared in a television interview that every word Hellman wrote "is a lie, including and and the."

McCarthy was as famous for her friendships as she was for her feuds. When Hannah Arendt died, she wrote of her with a tenderness that surprised some of her friends, but not the poet James Merrill who said that "Mary always maintained the high quality of friendship." To her Paris home she invited young and unknown American writers whom she helped to become known.

Even as she continued to write herself, she never grudged a potential rival a helping hand.

McCarthy did not allow age and illness t~ change her. She continued to maintain her good looks and her power to surprise.

She was excellent company, a good cook, intellectually liberal, domestically conservative. Her Paris apartment contained nothing made after World War II. She refused to use an electric typewriter, hated modern appliances in the kitchen and ground her coffee beans and beat her mayonnaise by hand.

If her obituary tributes in various magazines mentioned these mundane facts along with comment on her literary output, it was because all this together combined to make Mary McCarthy a woman and a writer who will be long remembered. Brilliant, witty, biting, satiric, a fighter, a friend ... .!t is possible that she will quarrel even with the angels when she meets them, but she will give them their due when they record a point against her.

D

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I

"And yet another example of inflation.

Those used to be pennies from heaven."

Reprinted with permission

from The Saturday Evening Post Society.

a division ofBFL and MS, Inc. Š 1988.

FOCUS Over the past few months, a number of Indian Americans have won laurels in fields ranging from medicine to films. Early June.

President George Bush nominated Dr. Gopal Sivaraj Pal, a renowned dentist in the Washington metropolitan area, as a member of the Board of Regents of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences for a five-year term.

The university was established by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1972 under the Department of Defense to educate men and women for careers as medical officers in the uniformed services of the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force, and the Public Health Service.

The only military medical school in the United States, the university is governed by a nine-member board of regents who have excelled in the fields of health and health education. They are appointed from civilian life by the President with the consent of the U.S. Senate.

Pal, who hails from Trivandrum, already has the distinction of being the first Indian American to be given a presidential appointment; in 1985 President Ronald Reagan made him a member of the presidential committee of the National Medal of Science.

President Bush also honored two other Indian Americans recently-Dr. Virendra Bisla of Chicago and Dr. Ramesh Japra of San Francisco, both renowned cardiologists. They were appointed as members of the Presidential Meritorious Award Board.

The task of the three-member board is to review nominations and make recommendations to the President for the Meritorious Rank Award, one of the highest honors the American Chief Executive bestows on a career member of the Senior Executive Service. The award carries a cash prize of $10,000 and a citation signed by the President.

Bisla is also the chairman of the Chicago-based Indo-U.S. Business Forum and is very active on Capitol Hill. lobbying for the Indian community in America and for better relations between the United States and India. In an interview with India Abroad, a newsweekly published from New York, Bisla said. "I hope that my appointment will be the beginning of many more appointments of Indian Americans to important boards and commissions as a recognition of our qualifications and experience and also our contributions to the progress of this country in all spheres of life."

In his remarks, Japra, who is president of the North California Federation of Indian Associations, said, "This is not an honor to an individual but to the Indian community in America."

Another Indian American who was in the news recently is Meera Cheriyan of KNBC-TV. Los Angeles. In May, she won an Emmy Award, American TV's equivalent of Hollywood's Oscar, as producer of an 11-part series, Red Dawn, on the Soviet Union. Sharing honors with her was Jess Marlow as reporter and co-producer of the series. "Winning the award was a very, very exciting moment for me," Cheriyan says, "not only because this was my first Emmy but also because the whole project was my baby."

The project involved an exchange with Soviet television. While Cheriyan was in the Soviet Union with her crew making the documentary, her place at KNBC-TV was taken by Svetlana Starodomyskaya of Soviet TV. who produced live stories for the American TV station. The venture was particularly fulfilling. says Cheriyan, since both parts of the project "helped to break down stereotypes of the Soviets that exist in the minds of Americans."

Cheriyan, who was born in Kerala and raised in Bangalore, has been associated with KNBC for more than a decade. Her duties include producing news series, specials and minidocumentaries and researching news stories. She also produces a weekly show, "News Conference," which deals with both national and international political issues.

"As an Indian living in the United States," Cheriyan says, "I am always on the lookout for story ideas that involve the Indian community in this country and also reflect the growing links between our two countries."

Two young Indians who have been the focus of some media attention are Keerthana Sadananda, a junior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, and Kiran Kedlaya of Georgetown Day School.

Sadananda, along with three of her schoolmates. recently won the first place in the nationwide competition, Superquest 90. As part of the prize, their school received computer hardware worth $250,000 and the four-member team won all-expense paid intensive training on a supercomputer at Cornell University.

The contest, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, IBM and Cornell University, is designed to foster interest in the mathematical and computer sciences among American high school s,tudents.

For her research project, titled "Chaotic Cardiac Arrhythmias," Sadananda developed a computer model of a heart. treating it as a coupled biological oscillator and then determining the conditions under which the heartbeat becomes chaotic.

Sadananda's project had earlier won the first prize at science fairs at the school, county and state level. In addition to her academic achievements, Sadananda is an accomplished Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam dancer.

Kiran Kedlaya, who was a member of the American team to the recent Mathematical Olympiad in Beijing, won a gold medal and

Facing page: Kiran Kedlaya (second from left), seen here with other winnersof the u.s. Math Olympiad, represented America at the Beijing Math Olympiad. Above. Or. Gopal Sivaraj Pal (left), who was honored by PresidentBush, and Keerthana Sadananda, winner of Superquest 90.

placed ninth among students from 54 countries in the international competition. For his achievement, the Association of Indiansin America honored him with the Ramanujan Award as the outstanding Indian American student of the year.

Kiran is a child prodigy. At age three, he was reading medical journals,at four he was playing the violin and writing messages in a codelanguage developed by him and at six he was working on a computer.Seeing his unusual gifts, his parents realized that "we had a nightmare on our hands," says his father, Herg Sridhara Kedlaya,who came to America in 1969 as a cook of a World Bank officialand is now a printer with the International Monetary Fund.

Publicpreschools wouldn't take the child since he was far ahead of the other children of his age. The family, which couldn't afford a privateschool, got in touch with Jean Symmes, a psychiatrist with the U.S National Institutes of Health who was studying gifted childrenfrom Asia in the United States. She guided them to Green AcresSchool outside Washington. Symmes, who describes Kiran as "probably the most gifted person I've worked with," has been the family's counselor since Kiran was four and has also guided teachersand others on his education.

It was important not to push him into higher classes. Explains Symmes,"The age peer group would be really important for his growth."So the school arranged for separate classes in advanced math, English and science.

Inthe fifth grade, Kiran finished first in Maryland's statewide math competition,a title he held for four years. In the seventh grade, he took the nationwide university entrance examination "out of curiosity" and scored second highest in the country. Impressed, Baltimore'sJohns Hopkins University sent him to a summer camp for gifted children, where he underwent rigorous math and science training, covering one-year curricula in three weeks.

Kiran had to enroll in a new school for grade nine-Georgetown Day School. On his first day there, he was named captain of the school's academic team.

"This kid is no freak," says teacher Paul Levy. "He's very bright and has friends and does all the things normal teenagers do." An avid photographer, Kiran has finished first in several state contests.He also plays the violin, a hobby Symmes encouraged him to take up to channel his extra energy.

"Kiran is constantly occupied," says his father. "If no one else is occupying him, his sister [Kishori, two years younger than him and with an IQ of 160] will. The two are close."

For the future Kiran plans to return to school in September; he will also take a class in differential equations at the University of Maryland. As for career, he says, "Whatever I end up in, it will probably use math in some way."

Frank Bennett was a master's student in musical arts at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, when he heard the strains of "some soothing and peaceful music" emanating from a room down the corridor of his college. That accidental encou nter with the veena in 1970 changed the course of his life. He began learning how to play the stringed Indian instrument from vocalist-musicologist S. Ramanathan who was then a visiting professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Ramanathan was so impressed with the young American that he hailed him as a "musician's musician." The admiration was mutual not just between guru and disciple but also between the guru's daughter, Geeta-a veena player herself-and Bennett.

The two were married in 1975.

By then Bennett had been to India and taken mridangam classes under Palghat Mani Iyer since he felt that "the veena is incomplete without the mridangam." After completing his doctorate at Yale, Bennett received a grant from the Smithsonian Institution to compose jazz compositions in Indian ragas.

Bennett has received plaudits for his string quartet compositions on the veena and his violin concerto which L. Subra-

maniam played. A professional jazz musician, Bennett teaches music at the University of California at Los Angeles and also composes music for several jazz orchestras (the Catskill Orchestra recently played his music at Carnegie Hall), television and films (Nightmare on Elm Street, for instance). In fact, the couple moved from Connecticut to Los Angeles five years ago so that Bennett could accept the offers of film and TV producers. They also run a music school from their home. Geeta gave up her job as a systems analyst at Bell Laboratories two years ago-when her father died-to concentrate on her music. She visits India every year to participate in the Madras Music Academy's prestigious festival in December.

Although Bennett's specialty is jazz, veena continues to be a passion. He and Geeta have performed all over the United States and at prestigious music festivals. At their joint concerts and lecture demonstrations, Geeta usually plays the veena and Bennett accompanies her on the mridangam. Their success has encouraged them in their determination to make the sounds of the veena familiar to Americans whose knowledge of Indian music usually stops at the sitar and tabla.

-Lekha

J. Shankar

A DateWilh

This month, Magellan, a small, inexpensive spacecraft built from spare parts from other U.S. space missions, will complete its IS-month journey from Earth and enter the orbi t of Venus. There, it will collect data about that most familiar and most mysterious of planets.

From Earth, Venus appears in the morning or evening sky as the single brightest natural object after the sun and moon. Earth's closest planetary neighbor by distance, Venus also bears a close resemblance to our planet in size and composition. Yet it is the last of the "terrestrial" planets to be revealed in detail.

Venus's glow is caused by the sun's reflection off the planet's ghastly clouds of sulfuric acid. This, combined with an atmosphere 90 times thicker than the Earth's, makes it impossible to

view the surface by Earth-based optical telescopes. Radar from Earth has produced some images, but of limited areas, as Venus always manages to turn the same "face" whenever its orbit brings it near enough to study.

The only solution seemed to be to send spacecraft to orbi t Venus. Between the United States and the Soviet Union, 20 spacecraft have been sent there since the early 1960s. The U.S. Pioneer Venus and Soviet Venera missions of the late 1970s and early 1980s studied the surface of Venus with radar, helping scientists answer many questions about the planet's atmosphere, continents and other large-scale surface features.

But it is the "small" features, such as volcanoes, mountains and impact craters, that would reveal the geologic evolution of Venus

Venus

and allow comparisons with Earth. Planetary scientists hope Magellan will provide these elusive details.

"Venus is the planet to look at if you want to understand anything about the Earth," says R. Stephen Saunders of National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and a project scientist on the Magellan mission. "Ironically, we're studying the most important planet last in greatest detail. We understand a lot about Mars, and we've mapped at least half of Mercury. Our task now is fo create a nearly complete map of Venus."

The idea of a high-resolution, radar-mapping mission to Venus was first proposed in the late 1960~. By 1982, the Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar project had reached what, in NASA parlance, is known as the "development project phase." But the proposed spacecraft was cancelled for being too costly.

Saunders, who has byen with the project since 1970, recalls, "We simply went back and redesigned it. We stripped off all the instruments but the radar and worked in every cost-cutting measure we could think of. Finally, the budget for the spacecraft in its present form was approved."

Magellan's Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) antenna was "inherited" from JPL's Voyager project, the triumphant twinspacecraft mission launched in 1976 that visited the outer planets of the solar system, ending with Neptune in August 1989 (see SPAN November 1989). Though the round shape of the antenna was not ideal, according to Saunders, the instrument was available, had already been flight-qualified and allowed the project team to save about $15 million in antenna development.

In their drive to keep costs down for Magellan, NASA engineers evenwent to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., to recover a part they needed for testing. The full-scale Voyager spacecraft model in the museum's Exploring the Planets Gallery had a flight-qualified equipment bus, the "platform" that holds the various components together.

Says Allan Needell, a curator in the museum's space history department, "If our Voyager model had been a pristine, backup spacecraft with all original parts, we probably would not have allowed the component to be borrowed. As it was a combination of original and fabricated parts, we felt that lending out this portion of the spacecraft would actually make our collection more interesting for having participated in the Magellan mission."

Magellan was launched on May 4, 1989, from the space shuttle Atlantis (the first planetary probe to be deployed from a shuttle) and was boosted by an inertial upper-stage rocket toward Venus.

On August 10, 1990, when Magellan arrives at its destination, it will be pushed into orbit by a solid-rocket motor.

After about three months of testing, the primary radar-mapping mission will begin. Magellan carries only one scientific instrument, the Synthetic Aperture Radar, but it will both collect data from the surface of Venus and transmit it'back to Earth.

How is SAR different from conventional radar? "All radar is basically a ranging device," Saunders explains. "You send out a signal from a transmitter; you receive back an echo as it bounces off something in its path. Most uses of radar, such as aircraft tracking, don't require an image of the object itself, just a blip on the screen. If, on the other hand, you want to make an image," he continues, "you would need a giant antenna to focus on the object and collect all the details. We are now able to enhance a very small

antenna with electronics to make it simulate a large one. As the spacecraft orbits the planet in overlapping passes, the SAR collects radar data and matches it with previous views of the same area, filling in more detail each time."

In addition to the SAR imaging, adds Thomas Thompson, the Magellan project science manager, "a separate portion of the antenna is sending down a simple radar beam to measure how high the spacecraft is above the surface. These data will be combined with the imaging data to give a third dimension to the mapping."

"In a real sense," says Tom Watters, acting chairman of the National Air and Space Museum's Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, "Magellan will be giving us a brand-new planet to study.

By the end of the mission, we will actually have a more complete surface map of Venus than of the Earth, because the Earth's ocean bottom has not yet been mapped entirely."

From its stationary, north-south orbit, Magellan will complete one mapping cycle in 243 Earth days. A variety of "holes" will occur during this mapping cycle, so it will take several cycles to obtain a complete set of surface data.

The Magellan spacecraft (facing page), which enters the orbit of Venus (right) on August 10, will in time completely map the mysterious planet, Earth's closest neighbor.

Once the mapping is complete, the Magellan scientists anticipate that the spacecraft will continue to operate for several years, allowing more detailed images of selected regions to be developed.

"We're beginning to view this mission as a long-range Venus observatory," Saunders says. "If Venus is really like the Earthlike I've been claiming for all these years-then there should be active volcanism. So we should be able to go back over an area and observe some change such as a lava flow, formation of a new volcano or a landslide."

Magellan promises to return more data than all other planetary missions combined. Saunders says, "In the sense of opening up a new world, this is akin to the 16th-century voyage of Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, who carried out the first circumnavigation of the Earth. But his task didn't take nearly so long to achieve."

0 About the Author: Joyce Peterson is a writer with the Smithsonian Service in Washington, D.C.

News

There is a strange, symbiotic relationship between the media and the law. Neither can do without the other. Yet both feel uneasy when circumstances force them to meet. They often part in acrimony. It is not a hopeless situation, however. It can be improved. The fast pace of modern technology has added to the strains. But it is only realistic to recognize that tension is inherent in the relationship.

Beyond a point they. cannot and, indeed, must not collaborate. Not only their interests but even their duties conflict. A democratic society cannot flourish without the law and the media. It assigns each a legitimate role to play and decrees a conflict as inescapable as it is healthy provided the norms of democratic government are kept in mind.

Mass media law has not reached the state of precise definition, let alone perfection. It is still "Work In Progress." Many issues are yet unresolved while new ones keep arising because of new developments in technology, particularly media technology.

Barely had the law dealt with radio and television than other electronic systems emerged to demand attention--eable television, home computer terminals, video disks and, most consequential of all, direct broadcast satellites.

Neither legislators nor judges have fully reckoned with these developments. Academic lawyers have not been particularly active either.

Already controversies

abound. They are certain to multiply; for, the trends conflict. They do so too in other branches of the law, undoubtedly. As compared to media law, the law of property or of companies or sale of goods, seems static.

The contours are clear and familiar. But in media law one principle is barely formulated when it gets chiseled away by qualifications. An outstanding instance, as will be discussed presently, is the law of libel in the United States.

The sheer range of topics in media law ensures a feast for the interested intellectual. The old ones, such as the law of libel, the law of contempt of court, obscenity, movies, plays, radio and TV, have acquired some new formulations.

New topics are yet to be developed fully-protection of sources; advertising; the right to publicity as well as the right to privacy; deceptive speech; the right to information; and access to the media.

The past 40 years have witnessed longer strides in the progress of technology and in the growth of awareness which are, unfortunately, not matched by comparable growth in the law. The law does not meet what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called the felt necessities of the times. Journalists and lawyers are equally baffled. So are judges. As ever, legislators are complacent and busy with other themes.

If prodding is what is required, the volume under review* provides it in ample * Free but Regulated: Conflicting Traditions in Media Law; edited by Daniel L. Brenner and William L. Rivers; Macmillan, 1989; pp. 276 + index; Rs. 85.

measure. It is a collection of incisive essays on a host of topics in media law. The editors provide their own commentary in each case.

The citations are adequate enough to make the volume a work of reference.

The editors formulate the issues. The contributing essayists answer them. The volume will be useful to journalists as well as lawyers. Journalists must know the law.

Lawyers must understand the problems that the press has to face. The writers look the dilemmas of the law squarely in the face. Not once do they ignore the economic conditions in which the law and the concept of freedom have grown.

The media must be free but they cannot altogether escape regulation.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does say without any qualification whatever that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press .... " But only two judges of the U.S. Supreme Court, Hugo Black and William Douglas, have interpreted the prohibition in absolute terms. All others have agreed with the classic Holmesian dictum that the "most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater, and causing a panic."

Certain restrictions are inherent and implied in the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech even if it be couched in unqualified terms.

The Constitution of India makes them explicit. It confers on every citizen the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression through Article 19( 1)(a) but proceeds to permit the state to make laws imposing "reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right" on certain specified grounds such as "public order, decency or morality." The reasonableness ofa restriction is entirely for the courts to decide. The Supreme Court of India and the High Courts have drawn extensively on the rulings of the Supreme Court of the United States on the First Amendment in interpreting Article 19(1)( a) of the Indian Constitution. It is only fair to acknowledge that the scope of the First Amendment is far wider than that of Article 19(1)(a), though both reflect a liberal outlook.

What Professor Melville B. Nimmer has said of the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings on the First Amendment is important: "What emerges is an array of First Amendment 'values' that exist independently of the First Amendment itself." They protect the freedom of the media but regulate the exercise of the freedom. As the editors note,

"in practice every society restricts free expression." It has to. The challenge lies in devising rules that ensure that the media are free but regulated to protect others' rights and freedoms. Hence the law of libel and the law of contempt of court.

As the U.S. Supreme Court has pointed out, each method of expression, be it on the radio or in a movie, "tends to present its own peculiar problems." In the United States the press is not licensed; radio and TV stations are. The values of the First Amendment apply to all alike. Despite recent entrants such as TV, it is the print media-the press, proper-that have claimed the larger share of the credit for exposing wrongdoing. Justice Potter Stewart served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1958 to 1981. In an address delivered in 1974at the height of the Watergate crisis he remarked, "And only in the two short summers that culminated last summer in the resignation of a President did we fully realize the enormous power that an investigative and adversary press can exert."

Significantly, the judge implicitly accepted the adversarial role of the press.

This role is rooted in its history and is reflected in its name-the Fourth Estateas the judge recalls. It was Edmund Burke who said that while there were Three Estates in the British parliament, in the reporters' gallery above there sat a Fourth Estate, more important than all the other three. Justice Stewart, therefore, rightly held that "the primary purpose of a free press was ... to create a fourth institution outside the government as an additional check on the three official branches." He noted the criticism in the wake of the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate crisis that the press was wielding "illegitimate power" and proceeded to refute it.

"On the contrary, the established American press in the past ten years, and particularly in the past two years, has performed precisely the function it was intended to perform by those who wrote the First Amendment of our Constitution."

The more recent arrivals-radio, TV, the movies and video-are entitled to the same constitutional protection as the press. It may be noted that the First Amendment not only guarantees freedom of speech but explicitly "of the press"as an institution as well. In recent cases the U.S. Supreme Court has acknowledged the privileges to which the press is entitled as an institution as distinct from the rights that belong to the newsman as an individual citizen like

any other. But progress in this direction h~s been rather slow for two reasons. One is the intrinsic complexity of the issues involved; the other is the result of a "backlash," a reaction against the press based on the notion that it is arrogantly claiming special rights that are denied to ordinary citizens.

No citizen may claim immunity from testifying to a crime he has witnessed or of which he has come to know. Why does a pressman claim immunity from disclosure of his sources? The answer, of course, is obvious. The journalist claims that immunity for the very same reason for which a lawyer claims immunity in respect of confidential communications with his client. It is for the performance of his duties and there is a clear public interest involved in his being able to do so.

However, in 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled five to four that the First Amendment confers no right to withhold confidential information obtained during legitimate news-gathering activities or the source of that information.

Fortunately, the court accepted the fundamental principle that news gathering does "qualify for First Amendment protection; without some protection for seeking out the news, freedom of the press could be eviscerated."

How, then, is such protection to be accorded? Fred P. Graham, who practiced as lawyer and later served with distinction on The New York Times and during the Watergate crisis on the CBS News, and Jack C. Landau, also both a lawyer and a journalist, tackle the question in an essay entitled "The Federal Shield Law We Need." They face the problems involved and try to provide solutions. For instance, should all types of information be protected? "Should there be any specific exceptions to the privilege to refuse to reveal confidential and nonconfidential information or sources? (Libel suits? Eyewitness to a murder? Conspiracy to commit treason?)."

On the first question, they propose the attorney-client model.

Attorneys may refuse to disclose the content of confidential communications from their clients and in some cases even the identity of their clients. However, attorneys have only a limited privilege to refuse to turn over nonconfidential "work product" evidence, such as an interview with a witness to a crime who is now unavailable. They answer the second question on the basis of the same model and urge that any exemptions for confidential information be drawn as narrowly as possible and that there be a

heavy burden of proof for forced disclosure of nonconfidential information.

Several U.S. states have enacted shield laws that vary in the protection from disclosure that they confer. One of the editors, Daniel L. Brenner, provides a corrective in his comments on the GrahamLandau thesis. A proper balance must be struck between the claims of confidentiality and those of society in the extreme case where the information is indispensable to a fair trial. "Unfortunately the atmosphere for striking that proper balance between the competing claims of press and government, whether strictly on First Amendment grounds or in the context of a shield statute, has been clouded in the recent past by controversies surrounding government attempts to learn what the press knows."

There are those, however, who believe that the privilege must be absolute.

The issue arose in an aggravated form in 1978, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a police raid on a newspaper's premises.

Armed with a search warrant, police entered the office of the Stanford Daily, Stanford University's student newspaper, searching for photos to identify suspects connected with a hospital sit-in. The issue was whether the police ought to hav.e proceeded with a warrant or should have obtained the documents with a subpoena.

With the subpoena approach, a hearing is required before surrender of the documents. A person served with the subpoena can argue why the documents should not be released. The court ruled that the state's interest in enforcing the criminal law and recovering evidence of a crime outweighs the interests of a third party in a hearing preceding surrender of evidence.

This was decided in 1978. Two years later, the U.S. Congress enacted the Privacy Protection Act which restricted searches directed at the press. Under the act, the type of material determines the scope of permissible searches. "Work product materials" (notes, for instance) are more tightly protected against searches, while such "documentary material" as the photos in the Stanford Daily case receive less protection. A search is permissible if imminent destruction of such documents is likely, but not for the destruction of a reporter's notes.

In 1978 the Court denied the right of access to the media to a jail in order to expose abuses there. The press had no right "superior to that of the public generally."

One of the judges in the slender five-to-four

majority held out hope of reversal in the future. Justice Potter Stewart moved halfway toward the dissentingjudges by saying that "terms of access that are reasonably imposed on ... members of the public may, if they impede effective reporting without sufficient justification, be unreasonable as applied to journalists who are there to convey to the general public what the visitors see."

In 1980, in the famous Richmond Newspapers case, a near-unanimous Supreme Court upheld Justice Stewart's view. Chief Justice Burger said, "Instead of acquiring information about trials by firsthand observation or by word of mouth from those who attended, people now acquire it chiefly through the print and electronic media. In a sense, this validates the media claim of functioning as surrogates for the public."

That was no small gain for the press.

On the law of libel, the press registered a victory as far back as 1964 in the famous case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.

The court ruled that a public official cannot recover damages even for a defamatory falsehood "relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with 'actual malice'-that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not."

In later cases the court first extended and then qualified the proposition. It extended the rule to private persons who were involved in matters of public interest. But it qualified the rule in 1974. Victor A. Kovner accurately sums up the qualifications and proceeds to criticize the uncertainty they have injected into the law. In brief, the U.S. Supreme Court (a) excluded from the Times rule statements about private persons involved in matters of public interest, leaving the states to define the standards of liability in such defamation claims so long as liability is not imposed without fault; (b) limited recovery for defamation claims to actual damages (including pain and suffering, but not presumed or punitive damages) in the absence of a showing of "actual malice"; and (c) reviewed the "public figure" characterization, placing emphasis upon voluntary activities of the plaintiff, but recognizing the concept of an involuntary public figure for limited purpose.

The latitude given to each American state has led to a wide disparity in the standards they have adopted. Eight of them have adopted the test of negligence.

One court ruling accepted the test of "gross irresponsibility."

Another awarded dam-

ages though the error was clearly an inadvertent one. Time magazine was ordered to pay heavy damages to a member of the Firestone family for alleging a judicial finding of adultery against her though the statement was substantially true. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld this. All in all, the law of libel is in a none too happy state.

Manya plaintiff has availed of it largely to secure disclosure of sources ostensibly in order to prove malice.

In 1979 the Supreme Court went dangerously far in upholding these proceedings.

Anthony Herbert, a retired army officer, sued Barry Lando, reporter Mike Wallace, CBS and the Atlantic Monthly over a CBS news program produced by Lando and a subsequent magazine article by him that allegedly portrayed Herbert as a liar who had made war crimes charges to explain his relief from the Vietnam war command. The Court held that Herbert had the right to inspect Lando's preparatory notes and material in view of the substantial burden under the malice test in proving conscious or reckless misstatement.

The law in regard to protection of sources, searches and libel applies to the electronic media as well. However, while the U.S. Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional legislation that imposed on the press the duty to print a reply, similar duty is enforced on radio and TV under the Fairness Doctrine. The First Amendment applies to them, of course, as it does to the print media, to movies and plays.

But in the famous Red Lion case the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the Fairness Doctrine on the groun'd that it violated the First Amendment. The doctrine imposes on licensees of TV stations the duty to devote time to discussion of public affairs, to present contrasting viewpoints and to give opportunity to reply to personal attacks. A candidate has, likewise, a right to equal time if his opponent has been allowed use of the station. The doctrine is criticized by one of the editors, Daniel L. Brenner, but it has stood the test of time and proved its worth (see "Deregulation," SPAN, March 1988).

The Fairness Doctrine applies also to ordinary product advertisements as David L. Sinak points out in his essay. So does the First Amendment. In Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc., the Supreme Court held that speech does not lose its First Amendment protection merely because it is in the form of a paid advertisement, or because the

advertiser's interest is purely economic.

However, it is subject to regulation as to time, place and manner. "The First Amendment, as we construe it today, does not prohibit the state from insuring that the stream of commercial information flows cleanly as well as freely."

It is surely ironical that the valued right to privacy should have as its offspring its very opposite, the right to publicity; rather, to publicize one's self exclusively for valuable gain. There is a whole chapter on this relatively new-fangled right whose implications, somewhat unknown in India as yet, are yet to unfold themselves.

In legal theory it is a corollary of the right to privacy. If a person has the right to be let alone he has also the right to exhibit himself.

If intrusion on privacy is forbidden, so is interference with exhibition. A celebrity can model for a soap or a shirt. Another may not exploit his name and fame. In a fascinating essay, "What's in a Name and Who Owns It," the writer discusses the cases that have developed this branch of the law. Its potentialities are enormous.

The right to publicity is also a right to property. It is inheritable.

One case decided in 1953 will suffice to illustrate this right. That was when Judge Jerome Frank judicially coined the expression "right to publicity." Haelan Labs had acquired, from over 500 leading baseball players of the day, the exclusive right to use their photos to produce chewing gum trading cards. Some players had later granted the same right to Topps Chewing Gum which contended that there was no legal interest in publication of the players' pictures that was separate and distinct from their nonassignable right of privacy.

The court ruled against Topps.

In 1971 Cary Grant successfully sued Esquire magazine for republishing his picture from a 1946 fashion spread that superimposed, over everything below his collar, another model clothed in the dress that the magazine wished to publicize. Cary Grant was held entitled to recover the monetary benefits of this publicity.

The first Amendment governs all these activities but its adaptation poses the great and ever-present challenge in a democratic society-to regulate and yet not curb freedom.

0 About the Reviewer: A.G. Noorani, a frequent contributor to SPAN, is a Bombay-based constitutional expert, lawyer, writer and bibliophile.

utside, New York City is sweltering in a heat wave. In an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, an ll-year-old girl mixes a strawberry daiquiri in a blender, pours a glass for her mother, then sips from her own glass of foamy pink fluid.

Just a small distance away, in a highbacked canvas chair, a large, middle-aged man with receding black hair watches the scene on a television monitor that's perched on his right knee like an affectionate pet. With his high forehead, a thick body bordering on plumpness, a heavy dark beard streaked with gray and thoughtful eyes behind thick eyeglasses, he has the look of a kind and learned rabbi.

"This is going to be as bad as the horse's head," Francis Ford Coppola says.

"I know it; people are going to be outraged that I show a little girl who knows how to drink." Then, as if he feels it necessary to defend himself to his cast, he adds: "I think kids who learn about booze are more likely to respect it."

"All I heard after The Godfather was 'cruelty to animals,''' he says a few moments later, referring to the 1972 movie that elevated him to stardom as a film director. He is talking about the scene in which a movie executive discovers a bloody horse's head in his bed, left by Mafiosi pressing him to give an acting job to a singer who is friendly with the Mafia.

"Thirty people were shot in the movie," Coppola says, seemingly confounded by human nature, "but people only talked about 'cruelty to animals.'"

On that morning in June 1988, however, Coppola did not seem deeply concerned about the public's reaction to the scene he was filming. (It was included in his segment of New York Stories, three short films by New Yorkers-Coppola, Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese-released in 1989.)

He was thinking instead about his imminent liberation from Hollywood and what he considered his final Hollywood movie, Tucker: The Man and His Dream.

On the eve of its release in 1988, he said he was ready to embark on a period of "amateurism and experimentation" as a Hollywood dropout.

Coppola had traveled this road before.

Once part of the Hollywood establishment, he broke ranks to create his own studio, but failed. There are those who wonder if he is destined, like Orson Welles, to be remembered as a cinematic prodigy who never fulfilled his youthful promise, a director

O

Copyright Š 1988 by The New York Times Company.

Reprinted by permissi~n from The New York Times Magazine.

41

who burst onto the scene with originality and a willingness to take risks, snubbed the establishment, and was ultimately de.- stroyed by it, or perhaps by himself.

Coppola prefers to consider his best work still ahead of him. "Two weeks from now," he said, "I'll be done here. I'll be free to do what I want. I'll be able to focus on things I want to do, not what other people want. I've been 'promising' all my life: First, I was a 'promising writer'; then Twas a 'promising director.' Well, maybe at 50 [in 1988], I'll fulfill the promise."

Few film directors have left a greater mark than Coppola on the American motion picture industry in the past two decades. The first of a generation of celebrity directors whose talents were nurtured not on Hollywood's sound stages but in film schools, he co-authored Patton, which in 1970 brought him the first of his five Oscars. Also in the early 1970s, he directed two of the most honored and profitable movies of all time, The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II. In Hollywood, where so few are able to divine the capricious tastes of a fickle public, the ability to make financially successful movies translates into power, independence and, ultimately, fear. Coppola's early blockbusters made him a force to be reckoned with in the motion picture business, and he used them to assert his independence from the seven Hollywood studios that finance and distribute most movies.

Like a Mafia godfather flexing his muscle on behalf of the members of his extended family, Coppola also used his clout to advance the careers of a coterie of young filmmakers, including the writer-director George Lucas, who created the Star Wars trilogy, and the directors John Milius and Carroll Ballard.

Movies directed by Coppola or produced by American Zoetrope Studios, the company he founded in 1969, helped establish a galaxy of new' stars: AI Pacino, Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, Richard Dreyfuss, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Harrison Ford, among others.

Coppola also helped scores of film edi tors, art directors and other behind-the-camera specialists crack the Hollywood scene.

His influence swept through the movie business at a critical time. He had arrived in Hollywood to find an industry operating in a partial vacuum left by the postwar collapse of the studio system-where the major film companies kept legions of actors

and directors under contract, and strong producers and studio executives, for better or for worse, controlled the content and budgets of movies. Coppola helped make American moviemaking a director's medium, championing the new Wunderkinder and looking on as these disciples delivered high-grossing blockbusters that allowed them to operate, however profligately, without interference from producers. Often swimming upstream against convention and established power, Coppola seemed to be reinventing the rules. hough on the surface Coppola's fortunes were rising, his vision of filmmaking was changing, and the seeds of future troubles were being sown.

The Godfather was, by Hollywood standards, a conventional movie: A vividly told story about the Mafia that had a beginning, a middle and an end and was photographed largely as Mario Puzo had written the novel on which it was based. In short, it was a movie that the industry could both marvel at and understand. But inside the director who made the brilliant gangster movie was a visionary aching to get out, aching to make movies that were different.

Coppola does not like his movies to be bound by restrictions that he deplores with the generic epithet "naturalism."

He wants, he says, to exploit the power of film to create works, as do artists in other media, that may deviate from apparent reality but that "explore what we are as a people and a nation and a world."

In 1974, the same year The Godfather, Part II was released, his audiences got a taste of this vision in The Conversation, a haunting story of a surveillance expert, played by Gene Hackman. In the movie, reality seemed to blend into fantasy.

As Coppola translated his visions into celluloid during the mid-1970s, some critics began to accuse him of self-indulgence.

Studio executives began to close their checkbooks to his more innovative projects. And part of his audience-those moviegoers who wanted literal story-telling from the creator of The Godfatherbegan to desert him.

When Hollywood refused to finish bankrolling Apocalypse Now, a surrealistic story that wedded the horrors of the Vietnam war to some of the themes in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Coppola decided to complete the financing himself. It went wildly over budget, costing more than $30 million in the end, $16 million of which

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Coppola put up himself. The movie eventually took in more than $110 million, but that took years.

Wealthy from his early successes, Coppola embarked on a daring enterprise that had tantalized Hollywood's hired hands since Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith formed United Artists in 1919. He bought his own Hollywood studio, one whose gates he had passed daily as a dreamy and ambitious junior high school student during a time his family lived in Los Angeles. Announcing his intention to employ high-tech electronic editing and processing techniques that would revolutionize filmmaking, he set out to make movies on his own terms.

The enterprise, to understate the case, was not a success. His vision, as exemplified in One From the Hearl and other costly movie projects that failed, left him $50 million in debt. In 1984, the fourhectare Hollywood General Studios was sold at auction. Agreements were made that allowed Coppola to repay some debts at roughly 30 cents on the dollar and to keep his homes and his production company, which he renamed Zoetrope Studios.

Then he went looking for work.

For the past eight years,' Coppola has played the role of a cinematic hired gun, directing, at a rate of one a year, other people's movies for about $2.5 million apiece, plus ten percent of the profits. Of these, only one-Peggy Sue Got Married, for which Coppola shows little paternalistic pride-was a major hit at the box office.

He recalls the making of The Cotton Club, a troubled and critically panned movie set in Harlem that he took over from another director in preproduction, as an "unbelievably unpleasant experience."

But, he says, he had to take on the job to help meet his debts and is resigned to the fact that most moviegoers will remember him as its creator.

"The description you heard most often," Coppola remembers of his attempt to run his own studio, "was that the inmates had taken over the asylum." He was sitting in the dining room of his apartment, purchased 14 years ago at the height of his success, eating penne with bolognese sauce and sipping a glass of red wine from his 680-hectare estate in the Napa Valley, California. This corner apartment in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel was one of Coppola's five homes. He considered the Victorian house in the Napa Valley his principal home; the others are in San Fran-

cisco, Los Angeles and Belize.

With him at dinner were his wife, Eleanor, their then 17-year-old daughter, Sofia [who has a role in The Godfather, Part III, which Coppola is currently filming],and severalfriends, including Nastassja Kinski.

I had first met the German-born actress in 1981,a year after Coppola brought her to theUnited States to co-star in One From the Heart, his ill-fated, off-center story about loveand life in America that cost more than $23 million to make but produced less than $2.5 million in revenues.

"Directors remind me of little boys," Kinski had said then about Coppola.

"They say, 'I want this or I want that.' It reminds me of a child who says, 'I want a castlebuilt for me,' and they get it. Money doesnot seem to matter." We were speaking in her dressing room. A few meters away, Coppola had built one of the most expensive movie sets in the history of Hollywood for One From the Heart. The lot was a landscape of gray hangars, each -'" containing its own magnificently detailed -}-world. His surreal re-creation of neon Las â&#x20AC;˘ Vegasalone cost more than $6 million.

That was the way things went in those days, Coppola observed as he savored a taste of his own wine. "The success of The Godfather went to my head like a rush of perfume," he says. "I thought I couldn't do anything wrong."

Born in Detroit on April 7, 1939, Coppola attended 22 schools in different parts of the United States, a result of his father's travels as a musician. (He was born while his father was playing flute on the Ford Sunday Evening Hour radio showthus his middle name.) But he spent most of his childhood in Queens and considers his roots to be in New York. His ItalianAmerican family, Coppola recalls, was close and warm: "It was kind of like a dream family." In addition to his father, Carmine, he idolized his older brother, August, now the dean of the School of Creative Arts at San Francisco State University, who introduced him to literature and awakened an interest in science and technology that is still a major element in his life. The actress Talia Shire, who plays the mother in Coppola's segment of New York Stories, is his sister.

In 1947, Coppola contracted polio and spent almost a year in bed, his legs paralyzed."When you had polio then, nobody brought their friends around; I was kept in a room by myself with puppets and mechanical things and gadgets; we had a tape

recorder, a TV set and things like that."

Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and other inventors became his heroes. "I became interested in the concept of remote control, I think because I had polio. I'm good with gadgets, and I became a tinkerer.

I think what I really am is an inventor."

He decided to invent stories. Alone in his room, after reading works by James Joyce and other authors recommended by his brother, he played with his puppets, listened to "Let's Pretend" on the radio and began to fantasize stories that he might tell.

Later, at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, Coppola was determined to become a playwright and plunged into the theater arts program. But after seeing Ten Days That Shook the World, the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein's epic movie about the Bolshevik Revolution, he decided motion pictures were the more powerful story-telling medium. He abandoned thoughts of studying at the Yale School of Drama and enrolled in the graduate film department at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

UCLA, Coppola demonstrated a precocious flair for screen writing that caught the eye of Roger Corman, a maverick producer who operated a filmmaking factory for lowbudget, nonunion, mostly forgettable movies. Corman hired Coppola, first as a writer and general-purpose set roustabout, then as a director. The first movie he directed for Corman, Dementia 13, brought him critical notice in 1962. Five years later, Coppola made You're a Big Boy Now for Seven Arts studios and was once again noted as a rising young director.

"Not since Welles was a boy wonder or Kubrick a kid has any young American made a film as original, spunky or just plain funny as this one," wrote a critic for Newsweek in 1967. Then came Patlon, his phenomenal success with The Godfather, the years of independence and experimentation that produced his mountain of debt and finally his descent into the role of a kind of artistic streetwalker.

During the summer of 1987, some distance from his home in the Napa Valley, Coppola reflected on his varied career during a break in shooting Tucker. Life, he said, had demonstrated a curious capacity for paralleling the stories in some of his films. During production on Apocalypse Now, a movie about a man's journey into madness, he experienced a period of emo-

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tional turbulence some of his friends considered a nervous breakdown. In 1986, two weeks into the filming of Gardens of Stone, a . movie depicting the relationship between an old soldier and a surrogate son destined to die in Vietnam, one of Coppola's two sons, 22-year-old Gian-Carlo, was killed in a boating accident. It is plain that Coppola still grieves painfully for hjs son, whom he was tutoring as a filmmaker and whom he recalls as "my best friend and collaborator; he was perfect, like Pinocchjo."

Tucker, which opened in August 1988, reflects a common theme in Coppola's work, a reverence for the binding strength of the family unit.

The movie depicts the life of Preston Tucker (played by Jeff Bridges), an industrialist who challenged Detroit [America's automobile capital] by designing an innovative car. Although he built Slof his automobiles, best remembered for aCyclops-like third headlight that turned when the front wheels of the car turned, Tucker's company went bankrupt, and he was accused of being a con man who had taken millions of dollars from prospective car dealers under false pretenses.

Just how much Detroit and its political allies contributed to Tucker's undoing has long been debated. Coppola's movie implies that the industry's "Big Three"-Ford, General Motors and Chrysler-smothered Tucker out of the same arrogance and smugness that later led them to underestimate so gravely the threat of Japanese automakers.

The parallels between the plot of Tucker and Coppola's own life are plain: A creative, if perhaps impractical, dreamer comes forth with a better idea that is quashed by a powerful establishment in order to maintain the status quo. But what also comes through is the isolation the creator must endure as his vision is slowly stripped from him.

Coppola's interest in Preston Tucker began as an eight-year-old boy fascinated with machinery and inventors. As he grew older, he never forgot the story of the David-and-Goliath struggle. In 1976, he acquired the rights to film Tucker's life story from the industrialist's family (he also owns two of the 46 surviving Tucker automobiles), and conceived an ambitious motion-picture musical based on his life and the process of innovation in America.

"It was a dark kind of piece...a sort of Brechtian musical in which Tucker would be the main story, but it would also involve

Edison and Henry Ford and Firestone and Carnegie," Coppola says.

Leonard Bernstein agreed to write the music, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green were approached about writing the lyrics. They all spent a week planning the musical at Coppola's home in the Napa Valley. But before the project could get off the ground, the economic tailspin at Zoetrope began.

"People no longer felt what I had to offer was of value," Coppola says. "They thought my projects were too grandiose.

With the collapse of my studio, everything fellinto a black hole-Tucker, plus a lot of other things I wanted to do." He says he never called Bernstein or Comden and Green to inform them that the project was dead. "I was too embarrassed."

Then, in 1986, George Lucas, one of Coppola's original Wunderkinder, encouraged him to revive his dream of filming the life of Preston Tucker.

"I thought it was the best project Coppola had ever been involved with," Lucas recalls. In a poignant role reversal, Lucas offered to produce Tucker for the father figure who had helped finance American Graffiti, the movie that made Lucas famous. But when they sought financing for the $24 million movie, Lucas says, "No studio in town would touch it; they all said it was too expensive. They all wanted $15 million Three Men and a Baby movies or Crocodile Dundee, Part 73 sequels." Lucas decided to finance Tucker himself, although midway through production Paramount Pictures agreed to cover much of the investment.

Lucas, Coppola learned, had his own ideas about Tucker. Instead of a philosophical inquiry into the nature of invention in America, Lucas wanted an upbeat "Capra-esqe" approach.

"Coppola can get so esoteric it can be hard for an audience to relate to him," Lucas says. "He needs someone to hold him back. With Godfather, it was Mario Puzo; with Tucker, it was me."

The result is a picture with a whimsical, upbeat air in which Jeff Bridges smiles a

Left: Dennis Hopper, Martin Sheen and Frederic Forrest in Apocalypse Now, a surrealistic story about the horrors of the Vietnam war. Left, above: A scene from Coppola's The Cotton Club, a portrait of the legendary 1930s Harlem nightclub where the finest talent of the Jazz Age entertained the era's most notorious gangsters.

lot. Some critics may look on Tucker as moviemaking by committee, but both producer and director say they are pleased with the product of their collaboration.

"I wanted to make it an uplifting experience that showed some of the problems in corporate America, and Coppola didn't resist," says Lucas. ''I'd lost some of my confidence," Coppola explains. "I knew Lucas has a marketing sense of what the people might want. He wanted to candy-apple it up a bit, make it like a Disney film. He was at the height of his success, and I was at the height of my failure, and I was a little insecure. I'd made a lot of films, a lot of experiments, but the only one a lot of people seemed to like was Peggy Sue Got Married. I decided, if that's what they want from me, I'll give it to them. I'll do Tucker in the style of Peggy Sue. I think it's a good movie-it's eccentric, a little wacky, like the Tucker car-but it's not the movie I would have made at the height of my power."

Coppola's segment of New York Stories focuses on a wealthy child who is sophisticated beyond her years-a kind of latterday Eloise-who grows up in the SherryNetherland Hotel. Patterned loosely upon his daughter, Sofia, who helped write the script, the character, Coppola explains, "is like one of the rich kids you see in New York who have their own credit cards and have lunch at the Russian Tea Room."

[On that June morning in 1988] Coppola entered a shiny, aluminum-skinned motor home parked outside the Apthorp apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where part of the picture was filmed, passing two residents who were complaining about the film crew's ubiquitous cable and lighting equipment. The trailer was crammed with television monitors, video recorders and other electronic equipment.

Sitting on a sofa, watching the filming of a minor scene on a television screen and occasionally directing it via a telephone link to the set, Coppola talked about filmmaking and his future. Softspoken, at once pensive and candid, he is a man, like Tucker, convinced that he knows a better way of doing things, but frustrated by his inability to convince others to accept it.

"My feeling is that cinema is an art form that can have a tremendous amount of variety," he said. "You can do all kinds of styles, like literature, painting or music.

But today they want only one type. There used to be room for innovation, but there isn't anymore; I find it hard to work in a regulated industry."

He was reminded that the average production cost on a Hollywood feature film had passed $15 million, plus $9 million to advertise and market it. How could a studio be expected to finance a filmmaker's expensive experiment without confidence that audiences would be large enough to recoup the investment?

Unruffled by the question, he replied that studio overhead and distribution fees accounted for much of the cost. "It's to their benefit to have big budgets," Coppola said. With Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart, he proved he was willing to back his dreams with his own money. Reminded that his own studio failed, producing an economic nightmare it took six years to extricate himself from, Coppola said, "That was a kamikaze attack-I went down in flames by myself."

He pointed to his string of "hired-gun" movies as evidence that he could, if necessary, give Hollywood what it wanted. But it was not what Coppola wanted.

He discussed the specifics of his future projects reluctantly. One prospect was a screenplay he had been working on for four years, a story set in contemporary New York that drew parallels with the decadence and decline of ancient Rome and would be "much more ambitious than Apocalypse Now. I think there is a whole other way we can do cinema. It will be like a big, dramatic novel."

To reduce production costs, Coppola planned on future films to employ the electronic systems he had been working on for a decade; some were already being used by his then 24-year-old-son, Roman, to make low-budget features.

"Although they're shot on film, everything else is done electronically; it's as different from the old way as night and day. We can make a million dollars look like $50 million."

Coppola expected his second exit from Hollywood to be permanent, and he insisted he wouldn't look back. "The industry needed guys who were willing to make pictures like 'Rambo 7' or 'Rambo 8:" he said. "I need to be a solo guy, like I was when I had polio. I don't say that with bitterness. I'm just not going to participate anymore. I'm going to experiment with my own ideas--experiment without the fear that failure will finish me off."

0 About the Author: Robert Lindsey, a former correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of The Falcon & the Snowman and A

Gathering of Saints.

The Art of Willialll Willis The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., recently honored artist William Willis by organizing the first extensive solo exhibition of his works.

He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows.

For in this context, to know is not to know. And not to know is to know.

-SANSKRIT

VERSE

Painting becomes a tug of war between what you know and what you don't knowbetween the moment and the pull of memory.

-PHILIP GUSTON

William Willis sees his paintings as vehicles for an immaterial force, a universal, creative source of energy that manifests itself in the material world in a variety offorms, by its very nature evading definition. As Willis has said, "When you categorize art, you don't deal with it. The beauty of art is that it's indefinable and the beauty of this whole thing about approaching that 'source' is its elusiveness."

Paintings like Willis's are difficult to dissect and analyze, knowing how strongly he believes that art should be experienced on a sensory, intuitive, gut level and that categorizing art can strip it of meaning.

In response to Heinrich Zimmer, who has described Hindu myths as stories that are "never explained [because] such treatment would sterilize them of their magic," Willis has said, "To explain a picture is worse than to destroy it."

The images in Willis's paintings are born out of a melding of many influences and personal interests. He has been influenced by a number of artists, including Charles Burchfield, Giorgio Morandi, Philip Guston, Georges Braque and Horace Pippin. His work refers to the symbols and myths ofIndia and Egypt, the traditional arts of Japan and the American Indians, and the philosophies of Zen Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity. Willis gathers, assimilates and transforms elements from these diverse sources to create his own evocative pictorial language.

Willis has described 1979 as a pivotal year in his work, a time in which he was taking in and trying out different images; reading about and becoming more involved with yoga, mythology and religion. He has been interested in Eastern philosophy and religion since he was introduced to Zen concepts through the art of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg as a student in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1979, a friend took him to a meditation center, introducing him to what would become a constant involvement in yoga and meditation, and he began to practice the concepts that had always intrigued him on an intellectual level.

During the early 1980s, Willis's painting was closely connected to his involvement in yoga and the philosophies and teachings of Swami Muktananda, whom he first met in 1980 at an ashram in the Catskills, New York. Referring back to this period, Willis recently said, "I remember writing in my notebook one day that all I wanted to do was do paintings for God, Shiva, whatever you want to call it, and do them in that traditional sense of these classic symbols of the lingam and the yantra."

But he later realized that painting these literal symbols was not enough, that he is an American artist painting in the 20th century, and he could only admire, not emulate, the traditional Indian craftsmen ofthe past who created religious works of art for meditation and worship.

Willis's paintings are not about Eastern symbols and religions. The images he employs do not have specific meanings attached. But Hindu symbols are the focus of many of his works of the mid- to late 1980s, such as the Untitled (Black Lingam) and Fish with Sri- Yantra (see page 47). He also inscribes a mantra on all of his works, sometimes on the front, but usually on the back: "Om Tat Sat," or "I pay homage to that source from which I come." In Untitled (Flyby), reprinted on the facing page, is an inscription on the book in the background "Om Namah Shivaya," which About the Author: Linda L. Johnson is the assistant curator of The Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C. This article is excerptedfrom her essay "William Willis: Between Moment and Memory "from the exhibition catalog William Willis: Contemporary Painting.

loosely translates as "I bow to the inner Self." Although this source is much too elusive to be completely captured in material form, the painting can act as the jumping-off point, the impetus that will get oneto something beyond the physical picture. The Hindu term for this source is shakti, the cosmic energy that is the creative force behind everything.

In his recent works, such as Ham Sa (The Gander )-see page 46-the Eastern sources and spiri tual references are more metaphoric than literal.

The meanings are harder to get at, but the paintings are more powerful and lasting because of their ambiguity and hidden content. Ham Sa (The Gander) is composed of two elementary images-a bird and a folding screen. Like Braque's birds, the bird is an emblematic, iconic image, rather than a depiction of a specific bird. .

The painting can be read on multiple levels, alluding to a variety of sources. The image ofthe bird refers to the wild geese that Willis sees on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where he lives and to Braque's abstracted birds. It also relates to the Hindu myth ofthe wild gander, Ham Sa, one of themany forms in which Vishnu appears. The gander symbolizes both the universal source of energy and the duality of all beings; everything is of both worlds, spiritual and material, dark and light, good and evil. Ham Sa, says Willis, "swims on the surface of the water, but is not bound to it.

Withdrawing from the watery realm, it wings into the pure and stainless air, where it is as much at home as in the world below .... This is the boundless free wanderer, between the upper celestial and the lower earthly spheres, at ease in both, not bound to either."

Willis, a voracious reader, has also been influenced by Kakuzo Okakura's The Book of Tea, which was first published in 1906 and uses the tea ceremony as a metaphor for Japanese culture and tradition.

References to Okakura in Willis's recent work can be seen most literally in Tea Vessel (see page 47), a small, vibrant green, black and brown painting.

About art, Okakura writes, "In leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up to the full measure of your aesthetic emotion." The power of Willis's art lies in suggesting instead of exposing.

Deliberately choosing to work outside the American mainstream, Willis lives in Preston, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore ofthe Chesapeake Bay. He commutes to Washington, D.C., several times a week to teach and frequently goes to New York, buthe finds that he works better outside the city, where he can have a simple lifestyle and a closeness to nature.

In his conscious choice to live in a rural area, Willis resembles the American transcendentalist writers, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, and the American modernist artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Charles Burchfield, all of whom sought refuge and inspiration in nature.

Willis does not paint directly from the observed landscape, but he is inspired by nature, and his restrained palette consists ofthe muted colors and tones of his rural environment. Of his choice of colors, he has said, "If I want to look for examples of color to learn from or inspire me, I go to nature. And that's where I think I get accused of using 'muddy' colors. I see the beauty inherent in the earth banks of a riverbed. I love it out on the Eastern Shore because of the somberness of the grays and the dead blackish greens-to me it is just so beautiful. Then when you do see something bright, like the bright red on the wing of a red-winged blackbird, when nature uses a bright color", it's so effective. It's used with just the right amount, the right accent, the right proportion-I guess that's the way I try to approach it."

The one exception to this restrained palette, the one "seductive" color that does consistently appear in Willis's work, is blue. In Lotus Pond I and example, the Untitled (Blue Screen)-reprinted on the back cover-for

Edge of Influence, 1978-85, oil on canvas, 56 x 56 em.

content lies in the color more than in the image. These are extremely beautiful, serene, seductive, evocative paintings. The blue, and the forms it takes in many of his paintings, alludes to water, which in Hindu mythology, Willis says, "represents the element of the deeper unconscious" and "has been regarded in India as a tangible manifestation of the divine essence."

We live in a world where we have severed our connections to myth and symbolism, lost our rituals to live by, and removed the mystery from our lives. Reinfusing art with myth, ritual, symbolism and mystery, the archetypical images of Willis's evocative and elusive paintings return us to our primal roots, to the universal, transtheological sources of life and creativity that give meaning to our lives. As Willis has said, "In painting, as in life, completeness is essentially a process of removal, of carving away nonessentials, of eventually arriving at the source. This is what my work is about. I bow to that Source. Om Namah Shivaya."

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