Dark Secrets in the Parking Garage

By Richard Schickel

A mystery solved is a mystery filed and at least half forgotten. A mystery unsolved, subject to endless speculation, has the power to haunt us as long as memory persists, as long as the human animal retains its power to sip Chardonnay and contemplate life's enigmas.

They are not many, those persistently insoluble puzzles--the fates of Judge Crater and Amelia Earhart, Thomas Pynchon's unlisted phone number--but they add a dash of darkness to a world that generally appears to us in flat primary colors. Of them all, the identity of Deep Throat had been, for the past 33 years, the most tantalizing of those questions--in part because he placed himself at risk to bring down a corrupt government, in part because of the romantically noirish way he was portrayed in All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book about how they got their big Watergate story and, more significantly, in the movie retelling of their exploits.

"Weak chin," said Bernard Barker, one of the Watergate burglars, when he caught a glimpse last week of the former mystery man on TV--but only in the eye of that obviously biased beholder. There were, perhaps, more disappointing (if quite predictable) realities about W. Mark Felt when he confessed his secret identity. For one thing, he is really old (91). For another, he was visibly feeble, clinging to his walker and speaking haltingly. If he had to step out of the shadows, we would have preferred that he did so looking smart and knowing--more like a guy in a movie, wherein everyone is forever ageless, than like a senior citizen looking to supplement his Social Security.

"Follow the money," Deep Throat immortally advised Woodward, and the fact that Felt was now himself doing so, trying to parlay his Vanity Fair confession into a book deal, distressed some people. Besides retaining their looks, the spring in their stride, people who do good things are not supposed to cash in on them--however belatedly. That Felt may have had other, less than noble motives for his actions--he was angry at the Nixon Administration because he was passed over for the directorship of the FBI--also counted against him. When altruism is tainted by apparently mean--actually entirely human--spirits, people tend to become cynical in their responses to that new, more truthful reality.

But the real sin of that little old man blinking in the California sunlight was against narrative conventions. If you go back and study the movie version of All the President's Men, which retains, long after the fact, its itchy power, you see that without Deep Throat, it would be a much less absorbing film. Mostly it is about a pair of reporters wearing out shoe leather, often enough in broad daylight or under the bright lights of the Washington Post newsroom, as they pursue their frustrating leads. That is entertaining, especially because we know how high the stakes in the game are. But it is not electrifying.

It is only when Woodward descends into the darkness of a parking garage to consult with Deep Throat that the movie briefly becomes a real noirish melodrama. The filmmakers made Deep Throat a smoker, which some say he was not, to give him a Robert Mitchum air, which was surely not something we would now impute to Felt. But Hal Holbrook gives a gnomic, cranky performance as Deep Throat. (Shouldn't there be an Oscar for best performance by an actor you can barely see?) And director Alan Pakula added menacing off-camera sound effects to Holbrook's scenes--a mysterious bump, the sudden squeal of tires as a car departs. Finally, chillingly, Holbrook tells the reporter that his investigative zeal is now placing his life in danger.

He's not really a person; he's a plot device. But that's the way we want--need--these stories to be told, with frissons of black glamour and some risk factors. The emergence of distressingly ordinary W. Mark Felt returns the narrative to the quotidian. Which may not be such a bad thing. Various journalistic Pooh-Bahs are taking the occasion to remind us that journalism at its socially useful best must often rely on anonymous sources to do its job. Without them, it would be nothing but dubious celebrity interviews and reports on sewer-bond hearings. We also need reminding, at a moment when public confidence in journalism is, according to the polls, at an all-time low, that it can be an honorable craft. Deep Throat be damned; he was, it seems, more mentor than prime informant on the story. It was the hardworking boys--fueled by ambition (yes, that, speaking of low human motives), passion and fast food--who put the puzzle together. Do you think, just possibly, we could use a few more of their ilk right now in Washington?