Fifty years ago, depending on the newspaper’s target audience, she would have been a “blonde bombshell,” or a “glamorous blonde,” or a “striking blonde,” or a woman “whose beauty was inescapable.”
Today, newspapers – the respectable ones, anyway – can’t say things like that. So they had to write around it. In the newspaper business, “writing around” means figuring out how to say something you don’t know for certain, or how to say something it is no longer politically correct to say.
They did a good job, and it was fun to read. The New York Times said: “As she talked more, her soft voice seemed to gain force, volume and velocity – a confident bearing to match her appearance.”
The reporter was describing the appearance before a Senate committee of Valerie Plame, or Valerie Wilson, her married name, the former C.I.A. agent whose cover was blown in a series of 2003 events related to Iraq, the White House, and the media.
Plainly put, Valerie Plame is a blonde knockout. And an ex-spy! At a Senate hearing, putting the finger on the White House for blowing her cover! How glamorous can it get? With a soft voice gaining force, and a confident bearing to match her appearance, Ms. Plame testified: “It was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover.” Good heavens, a 1940s film noir classic, wasted on 2007 reality and its painful political correctness.
Still, if you’ve ever had to write around something, you have to admire the professionalism. Talk about classic, read this, from The Times: “The audience sat rapt, all eyes fixed on Ms. Wilson, even when congressmen were talking, as if she could vanish at any moment.”
Said The Washington Post: “Yesterday’s hearing underscored the intense interest in Plame, who drew autograph-seekers and camera-toting congressional aides to a hearing on an otherwise quiet morning.”
The Times described “the cinematographic aura that pervaded the room. Representative Lynn Westmoreland, Republican of Georgia, declared himself nervous. ‘I’ve never questioned a spy before,’ he said, either star-struck or sarcastic but drawing laughs either way.”
Those laughs came from men, as one comes from me now, remembering some former Valerie Plame in their lives, at a high school dance or a college library, to whom it was quite impossible to speak directly, or to suggest in any way that you and she occupied equal footing, such as sticking out your hand and saying, “Hi, I’m Michael Grant.”
Yes, a movie is to be made of her story, by Warner Bros. In the 1940s, a young Janet Leigh would have played her. Now? It may be a few years too late for Cybill Shepherd, who would have been perfect. My guess is Reese Witherspoon. Plame’s book, “Fair Game,” is due out soon and you know exactly what is going to be on the dust jacket.
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