The Star

The Star is the Baltimore afternoon newspaper that becomes the stage for Maddie Schwartz's reinvention from a middle-aged woman trying to sell her engagement ring into a working reporter. It is a place of contradictions: filthy and loud, dominated by men yet employing women whose bylines Maddie has read, a paper that calls itself "One of the World's Newspapers" in grime written on a dirty window—a joke that only lands because The Beacon, the more sober morning paper, claims to be "One of the World's Best Newspapers." The Star is where Maddie's scoop about a kid-killer makes her a sensation, where she is rewarded with a job opening mail for the Helpline column, and where she eventually confronts the limits of what her profession—and her city—will allow her to see and say.

The Newsroom and Its Character

Maddie's first impression of the newsroom is that it is filthy and loud: newspapers piled everywhere, people shouting, typewriters clacking, a bell ringing somewhere, and so many men. Yet she reminds herself that women work here too, that she has read their bylines and seen their stories. The Sunday staff works in a corner room whose windows face south toward the water, but the view is obscured by dust and dirt caked on the glass. Someone has written in the grime: "The Star, One of the World's Newspapers." It takes Maddie a moment to get the joke—The Beacon, with its foreign bureaus and large staff in Washington, calls itself "One of the World's Best Newspapers." The Star is the scrappier, less pretentious paper, and the joke in the grime captures its self-aware place in the city's media hierarchy.

Bob Bauer, the man who helps Maddie write her scoop, has a desk in the corner of the Sunday staff room. When Maddie first met him, he seemed interested and empathetic, but now she realizes he had been playing a part—pretending whatever he needed to pretend to get what he wanted. Now he doesn't need anything from her, or so he thinks. The newsroom is a place of performance and transaction, where interest and empathy are tools rather than virtues.

Maddie's Rise Through the Ranks

Maddie's reward for her scoop is a job as an assistant to Don Heath, the man who runs the Star's "Helpline" column. Heath is highly skeptical: "I've never had an assistant, why do they think I need an assistant all of a sudden," he frets. He tells her she can open the mail, and when she gets the hang of things, he'll let her tackle some of the easier questions—the ones they don't write up for the paper. Given the mundane inquiries that do make it into the paper, Maddie wonders just how fatuous the others could be. But it doesn't matter: she has a desk, she has a job. As she slices open the envelopes that arrive daily—a Sisyphean array of petty complaints—she imagines a future self explaining to someone young and worshipful how it all began. She thinks of her journey of not even fifty steps, from the Helpline desk to the real newsroom, beginning with a thousand paper cuts. At night, Ferdie Platt rubs cream into her hands and worries over the damage she is doing to her lovely nails. Maddie tells him, with a confidence that feels different from her old confidence: "I won't be opening the mail forever."

The Helpline job is inglorious, but no more inglorious than the work she continues to do every day, even after her scoop on the Sherwood story. She types vote tallies in the city legislative districts during the 1966 Maryland Democratic gubernatorial primary, her swift fingers stopping for a second when it comes time to enter the numbers for the senate seat in the Fourth District. A newcomer, Clarence Mitchell III, is the top vote-getter, but Verda Welcome is second, and Ezekiel Taylor is a distant fourth. Maddie becomes aware of a sensation sweeping through the newsroom—a surprise, something unexpected in the results. Even jaded Edna Sperry, here to write a color story on whatever patterns emerge from the statewide races, looks caught off guard.

The Star's Blindness and Its Cost

Maddie's experience at the Star teaches her hard lessons about race and value. When she is hurt by the callousness of the men at the paper over a missing woman, Ferdie laughs at her: "Because she's a Negro, Maddie. That's why it wasn't a big deal when she went missing." Maddie insists she knows that, that she isn't naive, but she is hurt. She had thought her anger over the men's callousness was a kind of tribute to her lover. She had not fully understood that the paper's indifference was not about her marital status or his, but about race.

In hindsight, Maddie sees the world for what it is, where women belong in it. Men are entitled to have their girls on the side, as long as they are discreet. Some men feel entitled to kill the women who do not return their affections. Cleo Sherwood did not matter enough; she could not have swayed an election. She had never mattered at all. Here was Ezekiel Taylor, his reputation intact, his campaign underwritten by Shell Gordon's dirty money. Cleo's death had been more interesting as a mystery. Solved, it was dull. Her father's crazed, desperate act outside the courthouse had drawn more attention than his daughter's murder. It was one thing for a white man to kill a Negro woman, crazed with love for her. But for that woman's father to start shooting outside the courthouse, in a crowd, grazing a young police officer—he was expected to spend as long in prison as his daughter's killer, if not longer.

The Star, for all its noise and ambition, is complicit in this calculus. It is a place where a story's value is measured by the status of its subject, where a dead Negro woman is a mystery to be solved rather than a life to be mourned. Maddie's own rise is built on this blindness—she makes the story, writes the story, and becomes the story, an attractive not-quite-divorcée who tricks a kid-killer into revealing he had an accomplice. But she never loses sight of the fact that she made the story and, with Mr. Bauer's help, wrote the story. The Star gives her a desk and a job, but it also shows her the limits of what her profession will let her see.

The Star as a Mirror of the City

The Star is more than a workplace; it is a mirror of Baltimore itself, with its segregated police department, its changing neighborhoods, and its hierarchies of race and class. The newsroom is where Maddie learns that a woman is only as good as the man at her side, that a Negro woman's disappearance is not a big deal, that a white man's murder of a Negro woman is a tragedy but a Negro man's response is a crime. The paper's grimy windows, its piles of newspapers, its shouting and clacking—all of it is the sound of a city trying to tell its own story, and failing to tell the stories of those it has decided do not matter.

For Cleo Sherwood, the Star is the institution that gives her a nickname—the Lady in the Lake—and turns her death into a story. Alive, she was Cleo Sherwood. Dead, she became the Lady in the Lake, a nasty broken thing, dragged from the fountain after steeping there for months, through the cold winter, then that fitful, bratty spring, almost into summer proper. Face gone, much of her flesh gone. And no one cared until Maddie came along, gave her that stupid nickname, began rattling doorknobs and pestering people, going places she wasn't supposed to go. No one outside her family was supposed to care. Maddie came in at the end of Cleo's story and turned it into her own beginning. The Star is where that transformation happens—where a dead woman becomes a story, and a story becomes a career.