Stars in Their Own Write

By Alessandra Stanley/ Washington

Think of it. A blond and brazen newspaper reporter makes her mark as a merciless critic of Washington's Balzacian social scene. She marries the boss, moves into a mansion and becomes more of a star than most of the characters she used to profile. After a few years, she writes her first novel, a steamy social satire and, of course, a sure best seller. It is the kind of dizzying ascent that Sally Quinn, the Washington Post's famous acid pen of the '70s, might have chronicled with flair. But she can't: the reporter-turned- hostessturned-novelist is Sally Quinn.

Regrets Only, her first novel, highlights a growing Washington phenomenon: reporters are no longer just ink-stained hacks who cover the capital's celebrities; they have become, in fiction and fact, stars in their own right. In a town where power and glory are as ephemeral as the jobs that confer them, top reporters who stay put can become the most enduring part of the celebrity elite. It is a theme of Sally Quinn's novel--and of her life.

Washington has long provided a fertile setting for satirical novels. The classic of the genre is Henry Adams' Democracy, published in 1880, which bitingly portrayed the social and political corruption of the time. This year has produced Christopher Buckley's The White House Mess, a comedy about Administration intrigue, and John Ehrlichman's The China Card, a thriller loosely based on the China policy of his former boss President Nixon. Particularly since Watergate, journalists have attained star quality, becoming part of the panoply of fictional heroes and villains. Indeed, Regrets Only hit Washington at the same time as the movie version of Heartburn, Nora Ephron's fictionalized account of the breakup of her marriage to Watergate Sleuth Carl Bernstein.

The settings of Regrets Only--a major Washington newsroom, high-powered dinner parties--are unmistakably Sally Quinn's turf. Hostesses are grasping, Senators calculating, and just about everybody randy. "It's a novel about Washington," Quinn explains. "There are so many living and breathing cliches walking around this town that you sort of have to put them in." An amorous Arab diplomat gives a blond reporter a Mercedes. Before the Shah fell, it was rumored that Iranian Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi had offered Quinn one. "It never happened, but some papers reported that it did," says Quinn, "so I put it in the book."

Besides the conflicts between a handsome but hopelessly starchy President and his smoldering wife Sadie, Quinn recounts the passions and jealousies of Allison, an ambitious reporter, and her lover and professional rival Des, a blunt newsmagazine bureau chief. "Jesus, I don't know why I'm so horny all of a sudden," Des says. "I guess nothing turns me on like a good story." To Washingtonians, the two sound suspiciously like Quinn and her husband Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post and a former Newsweek bureau chief. "Both Allison and Sadie are partly me," Quinn confesses. "Some of Des is Ben, some isn't."

Quinn had A-list sources for her research. Nancy Reagan's former social secretary, Muffie Brandon, explained the intricacies of a White House state dinner. At a party, Joan Mondale helped Quinn figure out how a sitting Vice President's wife could sneak out of her official residence for a tryst. Quinn then sauntered over to a nonplussed Walter Mondale and announced, "Your wife just told me how she could have had an affair."

The temptation to read Regrets Only as a roman a clef is only natural when the author's own well-publicized life has been as tempestuous as that of her fictional characters. Throughout the '70s, Quinn was a glamorous reporter in a town with little glitz and few female journalists. She had worked as a social secretary for the Algerian embassy before Bradlee hired her to cover parties for the Post. (When critics groused that she had no writing experience, Bradlee replied, "Nobody's perfect.") Specializing in clever, stinging personality pieces, she very quickly earned the nickname Poison Quinn.

Her stories were avidly read; her romance with Bradlee was just as closely followed. Around town, "Ben and Sally" became as identifiable a shorthand as "Charles and Di." After they were married in 1978, Quinn left the Post, won a huge contract from Simon & Schuster for a novel, had a baby boy and learned the frustrations of being a Washington wife. "People would come to me and say, 'Hi, Sally, how are things, where is Ben?' " she recalls. "All of a sudden, I didn't have an identity of my own. On the place card I was Mrs. Ben Bradlee."

Reviews of Regrets have been mixed. The Washington Post's, assigned to an outside critic, complains that Quinn's rather one-dimensional characters are as "stunningly flawless" as those of Judith Krantz and Sidney Sheldon but that her storytelling falls way short of either blockbuster writer's. In Vanity Fair, Christopher Buckley says of Quinn's sex-obsessed view of Washington, "All this doesn't much remind me of the same town I live in and love."

But Buckley, who has been both a speechwriter for Vice President George Bush and a journalist, is well acquainted with the social role reporters play in the power elite they cover. "All Sally's characters feel they are more important than the politicians," he says. "And in a way, she is right: journalists here are more important." Well, up to a point. It seemed so last month at a private Washington showing of Heartburn, where Quinn and Bradlee were the star guests. In the way that high life imitates low art, the screening resembled a party scene from Ephron's screenplay or Quinn's book. As the cream of Georgetown media elite swapped gossip and ate pasta, Quinn had the limelight, working the crowd like one of her fictional characters, or like the subject of one of her old newspaper profiles.