Photo: Bill Dickinson
Norma Nathan, March 31, 1977
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This article was originally published in the August 21, 1979 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
Norma Nathan, who looks for all the world like a naïve and guileless suburban homemaker (and knows it), was down on Long Wharf a couple of weeks back, snooping around. She was checking out a rumor that Ed King, his Cabinet, a group of political supporters and a crowd of lobbyists were about to embark on a lavish Harbor cruise.
Sure enough, there was the boat and there were the lobbyists, whom Norma proceeded to interrogate in agonizing detail, as is her wont. Most wouldn't talk, and soon Norma was approached by a King-administration official who accused her of harassing the party guests. "Who, me? Harassing?" responded Norma in her practiced, and convincing, tone of utter innocence.
Bare minutes later, the selfsame Norma was on the phone to a rewrite man at the Herald America, where she is employed as a snoop of sorts. "I'm down here at the Waterfront," she is reported to have said, "and they're all looking at me like I'm a nice little Jewish mother who should be home chopping her liver. And what I'd really like to do is kick them in the fucking balls."
Indeed, if any of them had attempted a false move, the alternately sweet and profane, charitable and mean-tempered Norma Nathan just might have done precisely that. Instead, she went home to her husband, kids, dogs, cats, rabbits, and chickens. And the next morning, obviously delighted that there was not a word in the Globe about Ed King and his special-interest cruise, Norma was flitting about the Herald's newsroom, singing for all to hear, "On the good ship, Lobby-pop&ldots;."
This little story, Godawful pun and all, says a lot about Norma (somehow I can't bring myself to call a professional gossip "Nathan"), who has emerged as an undisputed if largely anonymous journalistic phenomenon in Boston ever since the powers-that-were at the Herald brought her aboard in the spring of 1977, to author that daily gossip column called "The Eye." The column is patterned after the Washington Star's "Ear" and anchors a full page of, well, People-magazine-style (at best) reportage, a page the Herald cleverly calls "The Page." Norma's contributions are not infrequently funny and revealing, mostly innocuous, and sometimes - as her critics long ago pointed out - downright sleazy. What the critics mostly say about the column is that it is outrageous. What they may not know is that the thing is not nearly as outrageous as Norma herself. Especially when crossed.
Item: shortly after the debut of the column, the Phoenix ran an unflattering photo of Norma taken by Bill Dickinson (then a Phoenix photographer, now a Boston police officer). The next time Dickinson encountered Norma Nathan, at the opening of Lulu White's, she blithely doused him with a drink. He returned the favor - and then Norma, always one to get in the last blow, did it again.
Item: last winter, after the Eye referred to Mrs. Pia Sawyer of Norma's own North Shore home town of Middleton as "a semi-socialite," these two otherwise congenial neighbors had it out the next time they met, at a party. Sawyer chose not to discuss the incident, saying of Norma, "She's not my favorite person." But Norma, without naming names, actually volunteers the story about the woman who "assaulted me at a party. She tackled me." And what did Norma do? "I kicked her in the shins," said the Middleton housewife, mother, and late-blooming journalist. "You can't let people get away with things like that. I only assault people who assault me."
Yes, Norma Nathan's reputation most definitely precedes her now - so much so that, as this reporter was questioning folks around town about her, the one overriding reaction that emerged was fear. "I frankly admit that I'm scared stiff of her and what she can do," said an otherwise tough and hard-nosed TV political reporter, one of many not-so-disinterested observers who insisted on not being quoted by name. Indeed, Paul Guzzi, who is now chief secretary to Governor King and who employed Norma Nathan as his press secretary for a year back when he was Secretary of State, elected not to talk about her at all, sending word through an intermediary that he'd been burned by her column before and that, frankly, he feared incurring Norma Nathan's legendary wrath. And then there's Steve Kinzer, who once authored this paper's "Don't Quote Me" column. Seems that, on one occasion, he quoted an unnamed State House source as saying that Norma had been making inquiries about who was sleeping with whom under the Golden Dome, a charge Norma heatedly denies. Now Kinzer claims that she has been viciously badmouthing him all over town ever since.
Kinzer, by the way, has lately been flying into and out of Nicaragua, reporting for the Globe, the Washington Post, and sundry national magazines on that country's bloody revolution. So you might conclude that he must be totally fearless. So you would be wrong. He's scared of Norma. "Once you get on her shit list you can't get off," he said. "I don't like it. The fact that she's out there."
