Nutcracker. Money, Madness, Murder: A Family Album

439 Pages·2015·3.02 MB·English

by  Shana Alexander

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Nutcracker
Money, Madness, Murder: A Family Album
Shana Alexander
For Kirk and Scott Thompson, and Joyce
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
PART ONE Overtures
PART TWO The Family
PART THREE The Boiling Up
PART FOUR The Boiling Over
PART FIVE The Closing In
PART SIX The Closing Down
AFTERWORD
Image Gallery
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FOREWORD
I HAVE BEEN ACTIVE as a writer and journalist for nearly forty years. But the
number of great reporters I have run across in that time would make, as they say,
a slim book. Without question, the top man on my list would be Tommy
Thompson.
In October 1982 I was in my Long Island kitchen when Thompson, the best
friend I then had in the world, made one of his frequent Sunday calls from his
home in Los Angeles. Since we were both professional writers, these chats
began with the ritual greeting of our trade: How’s the book going? Tommy
chided me for not yet having sent him galley proofs of the one I had just
finished. I told him a set was already in the mail. He would surely have it in a
day or two.
“Pamper me,” Tommy said. “Dig up another set, and send it to me in Texas
first thing tomorrow morning.” He was catching a plane to Houston that night,
and had just reserved “the most expensive suite I could get in the fanciest new
hotel in town.”
“I’ve decided I can use a little pampering,” he said. “The doctors here now
think they’ve found cancer cells in my liver.”
I knew that Tommy had suffered intermittent bouts of hepatitis for many
years; I remembered when he had first contracted it in New York after a
“routine” blood transfusion. His experience since then, he told me, had
suggested that doctors didn’t really know very much about the liver, and
therefore he had “made up my mind to fight” this latest diagnosis.
“But I think I can fight it better from Houston, where I know everybody,” he
said. “They’ve got all kinds of wonderful new diagnostic procedures down there,
some of them not very pleasant. So what I’ve decided to do is check into this
incredibly expensive hotel, then go to the hospital every morning and let them
give me the works. But at night I go back to my fancy suite, order myself up a
glorious dinner, put on my new silk pajamas, and climb into my king-size bed.
Then all I’ll need is a really great book to read. That’s where you come in.”
Oh, shameless Tommy!
I knew that when he mentioned “knowing everybody” in Houston, Tommy
wasn’t talking about all the rich and powerful real-life Texans he’d described in
his blockbusting book Blood and Money. Nor was he thinking of his recent, even