Capital Diary: Celebrating Marianne Means

How do you mark the retirement of a newswoman who has soldiered through nine presidential campaigns, filing three columns a week for almost 40 years? You take over the National Press Club, bring down the top brass from New York, and do a lavish buffet, all to hoist a glass to star Hearst journalist Marianne Means.

Down from Manhattan’s Hearst Tower came Frank A. Bennack, chief executive of the communications giant, with scores of newspapers and magazines, plus cable, TV, and Internet. (During a brief retirement, from which Hearst called him back, Bennack also became chairman of New York’s Lincoln Center.) He spoke, pointing out Marianne’s many accomplishments, as did George Irish, president of Hearst newspapers, also from New York, and Charles Lewis, Hearst’s Washington bureau chief.

By Marianne’s side was her husband, the syndicated columnist and essayist James J. Kilpatrick (Kilpo, who was a regular on 60 Minutes). Kilpo is known as an ultraconservative, she an ultraliberal. How does that work out? “We’ve both mellowed,” they chorus.

Seen in the crowd was longtime friend and tireless investigative reporter Kitty Kelley. She’s working on a bio of Oprah Winfrey. The book is the target of coast-to-coast rumors. “It won’t be a hatchet job,” says the doll-faced but tough-minded Kitty, whose other painstakingly researched bios have portrayed Frank Sinatra as a mobster’s pal and Nancy Reagan as a domineering woman. (Jackie O and Liz Taylor did not come off too well, either.)

Online magazine Slate has defined Kitty as the “colonoscopist to the stars,” so it’s amusing to speculate about what she and Frank Bennack might have had to say to each other at the party, because Hearst publishes O, The Oprah Magazine. Oops!