I just binged watched “Inventing Anna” — the new Netflix show — in two nights. You do the math.
The premise (and I am not giving anything away) is a young woman, who might be German or might be Russian, takes New York by storm and travels around the world on yachts and private planes and dresses in designer clothes and hangs out with shiny people.
Except she might not be who she says she is. And a journalist digs deep. And she starts to unravel the ball of golden threads. Or maybe just brass balls.
The series is based on the real person, Anna Delvey (Sorokin), and Jessica Pressler, the actual journalist who wrote the stories, first for New York Magazine, that became the book, “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People,” which comes out March 8. Yes, I have a copy ordered.
In the wacky world of journalists, there are rules and rules made to be broken. You distance yourself from the subjects you are covering. The assailant is not your friend. The victim is not your friend. Your job is to tell a gimlet-clear story. Objectively. The messy part is being a human reporting on other humans. You start to dig. What happens when you get too close to a source? Does your story become more authentic or do you lose objectivity?
And what happens when you become the story, instead of just covering it.
I visited Park City in January of 1979 before I moved here full time that March. I had decided on a previous fall visit it would be the perfect place for me to restart with my two small children. We had been living in Lake Tahoe for all their lives. They were 5 and 7. My marriage to their father had ended because of domestic violence but we didn’t have language for that in the ’70s. I just said we had grown to be different people. Which was a truth. Leaving the marriage turned out not to fix the problem so I had to leave the state. When I came to Park City that January to find a house to rent, I also met the two men who ran the paper there. I wanted to write a column for them. I had never finished college and had never written for a paper before. And though there were two papers in town, The Record was the oldest and most respected. All eight pages of its tabloid size.
The men were interested in talking but distracted that day. There had been a shooting of a local figure of note. A repairman lots of Park City folks relied on to fix their televisions. He lived out in Marion on two and a half acres with his wife and kids. And with his second wife and her kids from another husband. Whom she was not divorced from, but had married into the John Singer family anyway. Singer had decided to pull all the kids out of public school and home school them. This angered the local law enforcement community who demanded he put his children in public school. And his second wife’s first husband wanted his wife and kids back. It is a long story that resulted in John being shot and killed by local law enforcement in broad daylight on his farm when he went to the end of the lane to get the mail. Max and David — the two men (and the entire editorial staff) were trying to figure out how to cover the story. Law enforcement had taken all the family to Salt Lake City. The children were removed from their mothers and the mothers jailed. But the men were also concerned the animals on the farm would need to be fed and those city boys were leaving the office to do just that. They had been covering the unfolding story for months.
No one would call that objective journalism. But it was a human kindness and the cornerstone of how I learned what mattered most in a small community. It wasn’t about just getting the story — it was about remembering the stories involved real humans.
I was hired in April of that year to write a column. By June, I was a reporter/photographer.
During the ensuing 10 years, Max and David left the state, the paper sold and merged with the second paper and after weeks of debate, they agreed to keep the Park Record name. A few years after the merge, I became the editor and my first hire was a young woman who just graduated from the University of Utah, Sena Taylor, whose family has owned The Times-Independent newspaper in Moab for over 100 years. After a few years of working together we covered a new Singer story together. The two Swapp brothers, who married the two Singer daughters (I attended their wedding reception with David, that former reporter, who wrote a book that became a TV movie), decided to avenge their father-in-law’s death on the 10th anniversary. So they blew up the LDS church in Marion. A 17-day stand-off with local and national law enforcement followed and resulted in one Utah lawman and his dog being killed. Most all the Singer/Swapp family went to prison. It might have been the first time a CNN truck showed up to cover anything in Utah.
(Nan Chalat Noaker, a reporter first for KPCW and then The Park Record and then its editor for 20-plus years, offered for years to gather our turkeys we were given by our publisher for Thanksgiving and take them all to Vicki Singer, who was trying to manage that farm on her own. Mostly by cleaning homes, in Park City.)
When that stand-off came, we were all covering the story from different angles, and we all knew people involved. The FBI agents they had sent in stuck out like crazy in their all-white one-piece snowsuits. When they walked into the Kamas gas station, the one with the best homemade donuts, to buy the bullets also sold there — we had to laugh.
We were too tired to cry.
To be continued…
Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the founder of the Park City Institute, which provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts. She has been a member of the TED community since 2007 and founded TEDxParkCity in 2009.