R.W. Apple's wife prepares to auction the legendary reporter's wine collection(2)
Legendary spending
He had Lauren Bacall over for dinner and was summoned to Barbra Streisand's hotel suite to chat and eat. Once, at a party in England, the Queen Mother asked Apple, her new acquaintance, if he'd be nice enough to instruct her butler how to make a proper martini. Ask about the Dale Chihuly piece in the living room, and Betsey tells about the time she, Johnny and some friends visited the artist's studio in Seattle. The story begins thus: "We were with Bob Mondavi and Julia Child . . . ."
Apple's penchant for epicurean excess and profligate spending became intertwined during his 43 years at the Times: Once, after a particularly expensive meal in London with Joseph Lelyveld, a colleague who would later become the paper's executive editor, Apple grabbed the dinner bill and said, "You'd better let me pay for that; they'll never believe it came from you."
This was back when newspaper companies weren't hemorrhaging money and shrinking their budgets and no one flinched if a star reporter insisted on four-star hotels and 10-course meals and guzzled fine wine as if it were iced tea. "No doubt that Apple spent more than other people and that he was indulged to a certain degree," Lelyveld says. "Johnny Apple would be impossible today, unfortunately."
But Apple, a one-man cost center at the Times, was "absolutely" worth the expense, Lelyveld adds. "Johnny was a phenomenon for decades, not just for spending, but for filing. His work was fabulous."
Apple covered the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, the revolutions in Iran and Nigeria, U.S. presidents and electoral politics before becoming the paper's globetrotting staff forager and writing about Texas grapefruits, Andean wine, Indian peppercorns and the Chesapeake Bay's soft-shell crabs. His epicurean interests were first stirred by a German grandmother who taught him to appreciate sweetbreads and to make noodles from scratch in Akron, Ohio, where he grew up.
Raymond Walter Apple met Betsey Pinckney Brown in 1968, at a Washington dinner party they attended with their respective spouses. Apple was just back from Vietnam and soon heading off to Africa. When he and his wife, Edith, eventually returned to Washington, they ran into Betsey and her attorney husband, Preston Brown, again. "We were all great friends," Betsey says. "And then two of us were better friends."
A D.C. scandal
In a New Yorker profile published several years ago, Johnny Apple told his friend Calvin Trillin: "Within a limited social circle in Washington, I think it would be fair to say that it was a brief but fairly vivid scandal." They waited eight years to wed, Betsey says now, "because I had two young children." (One of them, Catherine Collins, edited "Far Flung and Well Fed.") They married in London on July 14, 1982 -- "which I knew he wouldn't forget, because it was Bastille Day," Betsey says.
Johnny Apple was the son of a grocery-chain executive who pooh-poohed journalism as a career choice. Betsey grew up in Richmond, where her father was a physician, though her Southern roots go much deeper, back to South Carolina and the Rutledges and the Pinckneys. "My family represented the crown and literally turned coat," she says. Several of her ancestors signed the Constitution.
She worked for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace before becoming executive director of the Foreign Student Service Council. But beginning in the 1990s, she became best known as "my wife, Betsey," as Johnny described her in most of his food and travel dispatches.
"I do exist," she says. "I've met a lot of people over the years whose mouths have dropped, and they say -- I kid you not -- 'You're "my wife, Betsey!" ' I'm a star in my own soap opera or something."
The cameo credit never quite told the whole story, though, as she became her husband's co-planner on his extensive reporting trips, as well as his schedule minder, driver and calming counterbalance.
Mellowing influence
"She had a tremendous mellowing influence on him, especially in the last third of his career," says Vanity Fair national editor Todd Purdum, a former Timesman who worked under Apple in the Washington bureau and became close with the couple.
"He put a lot of demands on Betsey, it must be said, but she was the perfect partner for him. When he was stormy, she was calm. When he was rude, she was unfailingly polite. In the same way that Julia Child could not have been Julia Child without Paul, Johnny Apple could not have been Johnny Apple without Betsey."
Says Betsey: "Being with the big guy was unbelievably fun. But the person who always had the most fun was Johnny. He really lived large."
