Windy City: Time’s Up
“We’ve had this weird relationship,” Baim told me. She can’t recall a single conversation with McCourt between 1987 and last August, when for the second time WCT staffers abandoned McCourt and started a rival. “Since the last coup he’s called me three or four times, just kind of feeling like the old warhorses. We’d put in the time, and the new folks had not.” When she heard last week that McCourt was shutting down, she told him that he’d “had custody of our baby for 13 years” and she didn’t want to see that baby die if there was some way she could keep it going. “I think I put a whole lot of different ideas in his head,” Baim told me. “He seemed much more down at the beginning of the conversation than at the end.”
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Purchasing what? Anything besides the name, which Baim definitely intends to perpetuate?
“There might be some computer assets,” she said.
Tributes from victors often flatter the defeated. In WCT’s case, magnanimity has been squelched by litigation—the founders of the Free Press think it unwise to say anything at all, given that McCourt’s accused them of conspiring to put him out of business and taken them to court and that the Free Press’s main financial backer has sued McCourt for allegedly falsifying circulation figures. (The Free Press didn’t even cover WCT‘s demise.) Yet gay activist Rick Garcia, political director of Equality Illinois, isn’t speaking only for himself when he praises McCourt as a journalist.
McCourt was generally viewed as his own worst enemy—hyper, controlling, egomaniacal. “I like what he does,” says someone who’s known him for years, “but oh my God, how can people stand to work for him?” As last year’s coup was being plotted, a McCourt loyalist wrote himself a memo regretting that the plotters around him “fail to empathize with a man who embodies so many of the demons they themselves can’t shake. . . . I hope Jeff finds balance and happiness and hope he finds peace from the suffering of the life that he’s living.”
On the one hand, the plaintiffs were limited by the defendants as to what, where, and when they could photograph. On the other, choices as to cameras, lenses, film and shutter speeds, and the like were entirely their own.
