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Gulp! Deep Throat disclosure hard to swallow
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August 18, 1999 |
W. Mark Felt, a former FBI associate director long on the list of possible Deep Throat candidates, now 86 and living in California, laughed off the frisky young fellow's allegation. Bernstein denied that he ever told his kids who Deep Throat was. And speculation that Bernstein's ex-wife, writer Nora Ephron, may have planted the alleged identity -- true or false -- in her kiddies' ears fluttered and faded. (Bernstein said he never told her either.) But Culeman-Beckman paused as he packed his bags for his freshman year at Florida's Rollins College to contact Nothing Personal to plead his case and request an extension for his allotted 15 minutes of fame. And after reading excerpts from his 11th grade American history paper, in which he lays out a mighty fascinating argument to back up his Felt thesis -- and hearing the teen solemnly advise us (now that MSNBC's plan to fly him out to California to meet Felt has fizzled and the calls from the media have slowed) that "fame is fleeting" -- we decided at least five more minutes -- on the very day he zips off to become just another hard-partyin' college student -- were in order. Culeman-Beckman informs us that, as he looked for evidence to back up Jacob's claim, he found something in Bernstein and Bob Woodward's "All the President's Men" (Chapter 4) that made him, he reports, "ecstatic": Woodward referred to his secret source as "My Friend." "It certainly struck me as much more than a mere coincidence that the first letters of the words 'My Friend' contained the same initials as the name I had been given, Mark Felt," he writes. "Had I not discovered this, I probably would have dropped my investigation right there and then, but my discovery spurred me on because I doubted it was just happenstance." Disappointed to find no mention of Felt in the famed journalists' second Watergate book, "The Final Days," the persistent young researcher dug deeper. "I searched and searched through the text, doing things like writing down the first letter of every chapter, running a ruler down the left and right hand margins of every page to find the words Mark Felt, and I even took the time to hold up each page in the mirror to see if there was some kind of backwards clue, but I came up with nothing," he recalls. "Then one day as I was examining the cover of the book, 'The Final Days,' and it dawned on me that the first and last letters from each of the first two words in the title spelled out FELT." If rearranged, of course. Playing around with the leftover letters, Culeman-Beckman spelled out "SAY IN HAD." He rearranged the words to discover "FELT HAD SAY IN" and added in the book's title to find "FELT HAD SAY IN THE FINAL DAYS." And there he had his proof. "Yet another coincidence?" he asks. "It seems doubtful." His confidence that he was onto something increased when he read in Adrian Havill's "Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein" that Woodward had dabbled in cryptograms since his college days at Yale. (Havill, it turns out, was Culeman-Beckman's link to the Hartford Courant.) Amy Reiter Amy Reiter's column appears daily on the People site, Monday through Friday.
Got a hot tip? Tell Amy! Still groggy from late-night partying with friends he'll soon leave behind, the fresh frosh recently admitted to NP he's enjoyed his turn in the headlines and looks forward to the day the truth comes to light and he is -- he says he'd place money on it -- proven right. "I can just imagine Bernstein and Woodward coming on television someday, saying, 'Well, the name has been right there in front of your eyes for more than 20 years.'" The heck with those of you who, like Culeman-Beckman's 11th-grade history teacher, feel his theory is "too speculative." He's ready for history -- and word games -- to prove you all anagramatically wrong. But please, read nothing into the fact that the letters of your loyal NP scribe's name can be rearranged to yield, "MAY RETIRE." Like my man Chase, I plan to make my 15 minutes last as long as possible. - - - - - - - - - - - - Those manners won't wash in the White House "The guy never accomplished anything. Everything he got daddy took care of." -- Marilyn Quayle, claiming her hubby's coddled rep is more suited to George W. Bush. - - - - - - - - - - - - Sometimes the breast intentions ... Michelle Williams (who, you may have noted, stars with Kirsten Dunst as none other than Mark Felt -- er, I mean Deep Throat -- in the current flick "Dick") sure is a lucky gal. Not only does she have looks, chutzpah, an upwardly spiraling acting career and, as she recently pointed out in Time magazine, "great breasts," she also has the most fiercely loyal passel of fans NP has encountered in some time. (Not to mention a name whose letters can be rearranged to form the thought-provoking sentence "I'LL CHEW ME AS I MILL") Quite a few Williams-wowed readers wrote to object that NP took the "Dawson's Creek" star's breast remark out of context, seeing as she immediately clarified to Time's Joel Stein, "I don't mean, 'like, 'I- But sarcasm, as Michelle and I have both just learned the hard way, is sometimes lost on the masses.
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