On a close-by aspect desk was a framed {photograph} of Mr. Levine with Elaine Kaufman, who died in 2010. Ms. Kaufman’s restaurant, Elaine’s, lay only a few blocks from Mr. Levine’s residence on the Higher East Aspect, and he was a daily there, together with media luminaries comparable to David Halberstam, Pete Hamill, Homosexual Talese and Tom Wolfe.
In Mr. Levine’s bed room, the partitions have been lined with framed articles about him and The Enquirer — a lot of them glowing — from mainstream information shops together with New York, Discuss and The New York Instances.
“Two in a single yr,” he mentioned.
A number of instances throughout our 90-minute dialog, he talked about that The Enquirer’s articles on Mr. Edwards had earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination. And simply in case I had missed it, there was a framed drawing on yellow building paper by his daughter that mentioned in huge black letters: “Pulitzer Prize Finalist.”
By no means thoughts that Mr. Levine was stretching the reality, which was that the Pulitzer board had decided in 2010 that The Enquirer was merely eligible to submit its articles for consideration. The publication obtained no nominations in the long run.
Ah, nicely. Who can blame a tabloid journalist for just a little embellishment?
Mr. Levine, who grew up in Levittown, Penn., turned besotted with journalism as a toddler when he would gaze on the well-known faces — Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, John Lennon — on the covers of the magazines scattered throughout his mother and father’ espresso desk.
At Temple College, he edited the coed paper, The Temple Information, and mimicked guys just like the street-tough columnist Jimmy Breslin by puffing on cigars and sneaking into bars whereas nonetheless underneath the authorized ingesting age. He figured that if he was courageous sufficient to enter, bartenders would serve him.
