Marion was my colleague, girlfriend and sometime editor – a heady and combustible mixture. Our first encounter was at a party I attended at her home with one of my college dorm mates, who bartended at Clyde’s, a Georgetown saloon where Marion worked part time while ascending the executive ladder at The Washington Post. Never an extrovert, I had literally crawled into the library in the house (it was a small house) and was sitting on the floor reading a copy of Loren Eisley’s “The Immense Journey.” Marion discovered me there and said, “You come to a party and sit on the floor reading a book? You’ve got problems!” Several months later we passed in a hallway at The Post. “Aren’t you the person who was on my floor,” she asked. “Well, it figures they would hire you.” Marion always assumed that success was a result of the foolishness of superiors. Along with our Post colleague Rudy Maxa, she wrote the book “Public Trust, Private Lust,” subtitled “Sex, Power and Corruption on Capitol Hill.” Marion, who loved language more than most writers, had wanted to call it “All the Congressmen’s Women,” an obvious yet apt play on the title of our colleagues Woodward & Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men.” But the publisher balked – as less creative mortals often do. In a copy of the book inscribed to my parents, Marion wrote, “If all these men had been Italian, none of them would have gotten in trouble! Thanks for the most important help I got in writing this book. You probably didn’t know that when I thanked Tom in the acknowledgements for being a “chef” and disciplinarian and friend, it was your great pasta I was eating straight through chapter six. Thanksgiving dinner with you got me through four more chapters and Rudy wrote the rest.” This was dated 7/21/77; Marion was dead less than two months later in a freak airplane accident in rural Michigan, where she and I were visiting her mother. The location was less than 50 miles from where my best friend, Emily Fisher, had killed herself the previous Thanksgiving, while Marion was eating her way through those four chapters. A few weeks before her death we had jointly written an obituary of Elvis the day after his demise. “He didn’t make us scream anymore,” Marion wrote in prose worthy of Fitzgerald, “but he was present in our lives like a touchstone, a subtle balm we hardly knew existed until we missed it suddenly, as the sun went down last night.” She kept on her desk a nameplate that read “Lush Places,” the title of the gardening column written by William Boot, the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s book “Scoop,” which was her journalism text as much as “The Great Gatsby” was her text of life. She also loved pigs, and once kept a pet pig in her house until it grew so large that it was donated to a kids’ petting zoo. Hence this image, a chance encounter, shot while we were out working on a piece for the magazine section she edited at The Post, about monsters lurking in the woods in Maryland.

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