This is a writing sample by “nycghostwriter,” AKA Barbara Finkelstein. It is “Vulnerability is the best part of your story,” a blog post published in slightly different fashion on the IBM Researcher platform on August 26, 2019. You can get professional ghostwriting services from a published blogger. Email me or fill out the short form on my contact page.
I had been interviewing people as a corporate journalist for fifteen years when the vice president of development at a Bronx medical center told me she was going to sit in on an important interview with me. I understood the VP’s decision. Recently, I had interviewed Martin Davis, the former president of Paramount Communications, after he and Lionel Pincus of Warburg Pincus each donated $10 million to the medical center’s new children’s hospital. I asked Davis a benign question: “I read in the Times that medical centers across the country are raising money by building children’s hospitals, even while these centers already have excellent pediatric divisions. What’s your take on this?”
I had asked Pincus the same thing. He understood that my question was a foil and all I needed from him was a printable quotation. But Davis was too brittle, too humorless, to see what I was after.
“Do you think I’d be shelling out $10 million for a marketing ploy?” he yelled at me through the phone.
Too bad I couldn’t put his furious response into my article. Surely all the people he had reamed out throughout his career — Walt Disney chairman Michael Eisner, USA Networks chief Barry Diller and DreamWorks SKG partner Jeffrey Katzenberg, to name the short list — would have recognized the Martin Davis I interviewed. Cinema veritè, however, is not an acceptable approach for a fundraising magazine, and I tried to walk back my question to something bland.
Too late. Davis called the VP and complained about the idiot who had just insulted him. She called to ream me out for having angered such a significant donor. I have a vague memory of her siding with Davis, but I knew that any sane person would have answered the question diplomatically, the way Pincus had. When it came to philanthropy “journalism,” I learned to tread lightly: Big egos and money are a flammable mix.
When the new Children’s Kidney Center at the medical center came into a hefty donation, the development VP wasn’t taking any chances with me. We drove in separate cars to a big house in Yonkers where she would oversee my interview. We met in the deceased donor’s antique-filled home and the interviewee was “Werner’s” assistant. “Faithful servant” might more accurately convey the working class man who had stood by Werner as Werner rose from German immigrant to Laundromat mogul. He too had been the recipient of Werner’s largesse: He now owned Werner’s Rolls Royce. Maybe the house and antiques too. I don’t remember.
“On his deathbed, Werner asked me where his millions should go,” my interviewee told the VP and me as we sat around Werner’s gleaming cherry-wood dining table. “I said, ‘Werner, give it to the kids!’”
The man wept as he spoke about Werner, a bon vivant who once painted the town red with the likes of Babe Ruth. His wife, who sat in on the interview too, handed her husband a tissue.
I wasn’t all that cynical back then — somebody else might say my BS meter needed a tune-up — and I took my interviewee at face value.
I must have acquitted myself well enough because the VP drove off quickly in her car — so quickly that she was halfway down the block before I noticed that my unpredictable Ford Taurus had a flat tire. This was the mid or late 1990s, and the only people I knew who had mobile car phones were doctors’ wives. I had no choice but to go back into the dead donor’s house and ask the faithful servant if I could use his landline telephone.
Gone were the grieving man and supportive spouse. The couple facing me now looked at me through slitted eyes, reluctant to let me back into “their” house even though it was starting to snow. They could barely hide their irritation when they permitted me to use the phone in a front room — a room devoid of valuable silver and mahogany. Could they really think I had engineered my flat tire so I could come back inside and case the joint? Or were they simply done with their theatrical grieving? I pictured the two of them sitting together at the cherrywood table, muttering, “The damn bastard’s throwing millions away on charity!”
AAA arrived and got me back on the road before I could figure out why Mr. and Mrs. Give-It-To-The-Kids-Werner” were suddenly so dry-eyed.
Of course none of my post-interview encounter went into the medical center’s donor magazine. As for Werner’s philanthropy, it must have reached the Children’s Kidney Center because nobody ever complained that I had short-circuited the donation.
Despite what you may think by now that I enjoy publishing the Annals of Brook’s Career Humiliations, I tell these two anecdotes to encourage you — as publishers of research papers — to share some “behind-the-scenes” moments with your audience, whether they are embarrassing experiences or failures in judgment. These episodes are part and parcel of every experiment, every career endeavor, every lesson learned. Dare I say there is a crack in everything and that’s how the light gets in.
A medical center’s development mission will not accommodate the crack or the light. But as scientists, you can share the obstacles you overcame on your way to your theories, conclusions or career heights. The more vulnerability your story has, the more memorable — and humane — it will be.
You can read this post on Brook’s Blog, a project of IBM Research.
