As always, Dan Gross Michael Klein had it first last night: CBS 3 news anchor Larry Mendte’s alleged snooping in former co-anchor Alycia Lane’s Yahoo e-mail account has cost him his job.
Mendte’s sudden salary drop immediately turned our minds to our September 2007 issue and his appearance in our Receipt feature, which tracks a week’s worth of spending by a notable Philadelphian. While not the most profligate spender we’ve had, the newsman’s $6,657.37 outflow puts him pretty close to the top. As you’ll see below, a goodly chunk of that total was for contributions to various investment accounts — which we hope, for his sake, have done well. But a burning question remains: With Mendte gone, who will buy milkshakes for newsroom?
DAY ONE Toll (E-ZPass): $2, Atlantic City Expressway Toll (E-ZPass): $.70, Garden State Parkway Exit 30 Mailing documentary to film festivals: $9.60, Ocean City post office Extra-large iced nonfat latte: $5 (+ tip), Ocean City Coffee Co. Two kids’ water bottles that say “Michael” and “David”: $21.38, OC Sun Hut Extra-large iced latte and mango iced tea: $9 (+ tip), Ocean City Coffee Co. Fruit and muffin: $7.50, Bashful Banana Bakery and Cafe Salads, salmon, crabcakes: $45, Hula Grill Ride tickets: $20, Gillian’s Wonderland Pier Kiddie-size vanilla cone: $2
DAY TWO Extra-large iced latte: $5, Ocean City Coffee Co. Sunday donation: $50, St. Frances Cabrini Church Sunday Inquirer and AC Press: $6 + tip, girl outside the church Breakfast on the Boardwalk: $15 + tip, George’s 2 extra-large lattes: $9, Ocean City Coffee Co. Pizza: $8, Mack and Manco’s Fruit and muffins: $12, Bashful Banana Bakery and Cafe Seafood dinners: $55, Mike’s Seafood, Sea Isle City Gas: $65.24, Lukoil Tolls (E-ZPass): $3, Ben Franklin Bridge
The other shoes just keep dropping in the Alycia Lane saga. The Daily News’s Will Bunch reports this morning that Lane has sued the station for defamation, slander and libel. Attempting in a 40-page legal filing to show a history of callous treatment by the station, Lane highlights the circumstances around her first appearance on the Dr. Phil show in 2004, calling it “a humiliating experience … forced upon her by her CBS 3 bosses in a bid to boost ratings.”
In our February 2008 story “The Very Public Self-Destruction of Alycia Lane,” Vicki Glembocki was the first to break the details behind Lane’s appearance with Dr. Phil:
So in spring 2004, then-general manager Peter Dunn sent Lane to Los Angeles to interview Dr. Phil McGraw. To promote his new series Relationship Rescue Retreat, Dr. Phil had granted interviews to reporters in several large markets.
Lane and a cameraman sat in the Dr. Phil studio, watching as two upcoming episodes were taped. Then, with the audience gone, the interview began. It started out as a regular Q&A. But then something happened. Lane asked Dr. Phil, who knew that her divorce had been finalized in November, “Why is divorce so hard?” Her voice cracked. Her chin quivered. She wiped a tear running down her cheek. “You’re crying for the man you wish he was, not the man he was,” Dr. Phil told her. At the end, she hugged him.
Back in Philly, when people at the station watched the raw tape, they realized Lane was suffering more than anyone knew. But management was aware that other stations in Philly were having lots of success with female newscasters airing first-person stories about their own struggles. The previous fall, pregnant NBC 10 anchor Renee Chenault-Fattah brought cameras to her ultrasound. And it was May sweeps.
Lane expressed her misgivings about the footage — she hated to appear weak. “She didn’t want it to air,” says her sister Nicole. But Lane also knew that the station had spent lots of money to send her to L.A. Plus, if viewers saw her in this light, they might stop calling her an ice queen.
The station advertised Lane’s segment — titled “Demons of Divorce” — during CSI and Without a Trace, with Lane’s face filling the screen, that tear running down her cheek. Portions of her interview aired for two days. “I was bawling my eyes out just to see how much pain she was in,” Nicole remembers. Lane never watched it, though it aired while she was on-set. Instead of looking at the monitor, she turned around in her anchor’s chair and plugged her fingers in her ears. Even so, she got thousands of e-mails of support from viewers. People stopped her on the street and hugged her.
The Dr. Phil interview gave the station its highest Nielsen ratings of the month. It was CBS 3’s best May sweeps since 1995.
Advance word on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which opens today, has been epically bad. This will come as no surprise to readers of senior writer Richard Rys’s July 2006 piece “Night Vision,” which traced the arc of Shyamalan’s career right up to the release of his last highly anticipated bomb, Lady in the Water. In one incisive section, Rys highlighted the lengths to which Shyamalan goes to maintain personal control over his projects — to, it seems, their ever-increasing detriment:
In a way, the private performance is a metaphor for how Night sees himself artistically — as a storyteller who wants to tell his tales to an audience with as little outside interference as possible. For instance, after Night had spent nearly a year writing and revising his Lady script, his assistant flew to Los Angeles to hand-deliver copies to the studio, then collected them the next day. Even when shooting begins, only a handful of people are given complete scripts, and the plot remains a closely guarded secret. “On a Night movie,” says one crew member who’s worked on most of his films, “if you know the punch line, you know the movie.”
His filmmaking technique is just as carefully controlled. Night rarely uses footage from a second camera, known as “coverage,” instead relying solely on one lens to provide a lingering shot that lasts for minutes. It’s become his visual signature, and it makes it tougher for a pushy producer to ask for another version of a scene.
Even marketing his movies is, for Night, a critical step in the creative process. He’s said that when he thinks about a film, he asks himself how the studio will sell it; only when he can envision that does he sit down to write. Perhaps the best proof lies in the success of Signs, which was buoyed by a pitch-perfect campaign evoking all the suspense of The Sixth Sense and earned $228 million. “He’s really hands-on in the marketing,” says Brick Mason, Night’s longtime storyboard artist. “I think the studios know he’s the best person to market his own films.”
In honor of the 64th anniversary of D-Day, we offer this excerpt from Robyn Post’s June 2001 article “Veterans’ Day,” about two South Philadelphians, Bill Guarnere and Edward “Babe” Heffron, whose lifelong friendship was forged during World War II when they met as members of Easy Company, an elite unit of paratroopers in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division whose exploits were dramatized part of the renowned HBO series Band of Brothers. The article later led to a joint memoir, co-written with Post, called Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends (Penguin, 2007).
Two days before D-Day on Normandy — Easy’s first combat mission — Guarnere was sitting on the toilet and happened to pluck a letter out of his jacket pocket that was addressed to his friend, Sergeant Martin. He’d mistakenly grabbed Martin’s jacket, but he decided to read the letter anyway. It was from Martin’s wife. It said, “Don’t tell Bill Guarnere, but his brother was killed in Cassino, Italy.”
“I felt like the floor fell out from under me,” says Guarnere, who was one of seven sons. “I became crazed.” The trained warrior, preparing to lead four dozen men into battle, now had a personal vendetta against Hitler’s army. “I went into Normandy with one goal: to leave no German soldier alive,” he says. In his first enemy encounter, he shot everyone he encountered with his pistol. “Easy as squashing a bug,” he recalls. “No remorse. But that’s war. The war is no joke. The war is a son of a bitch.”
His fury contributed to the destruction of a German battery of guns looking down on Utah Beach (where the Americans were landing) and a unit of 50 enemy soldiers. “He was a wild man,” Heffron says, pointing to his best friend. “When the platoon would hunker down in foxholes, he would stand straight up. He’d run at bullets and yell, ‘Come on, come on, they couldn’t hit the side of a barn, let’s go!’”
“I’m lucky to be alive,” says Guarnere. He takes a puff of his cigarette and taps it against a red, white and blue-striped ashtray with an eagle on it. “The man upstairs must have had his finger on me.”
The roiling home mortgage market is apparently about to take down another victim — Philly-rooted sidekick extraordinaire Ed McMahon. The 85-year-old’s unfortunate woes — he’s apparently more than $600,000 behind on a $4.8 million loan on his six-bedroom, five-bath home in the Summit section of Los Angeles — put us in mind of a bit from our October 2005 Exit Interview with the TV great in which, in retrospect, we may have cut a little too close to the bone with one of our questions:
Exit Interview: Did you ever find any spare change in the couch?
Ed McMahon: I never did. [laughs with that unmistakable “whoaha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”] But I never looked, so there might have been some. [coughs; sounds at first like another laugh, but no, just a cough]
CBS 3 anchor Larry Mendte is under investigation by the FBI for allegedly snooping in his former co-worker Alycia Lane’s Yahoo e-mail. In this excerpt from our February 2008 story “The Very Public Self-Destruction of Alycia Lane,” we take a look back at the tone of the newsroom in the early days of their time on the air together.
On September 15, 2003, Team Mendte and Lane debuted on Eyewitness News. Lane’s main role at CBS 3 was quickly apparent: to look gorgeous and fix the troubled station brand. At first, she was flattered by being called “the hottest story in local TV.” But it didn’t take long for viewers to e-mail CBS 3 and call her snooty and impersonal. Most of the e-mails were from women — not a good sign, since TV stations vie for a coveted demographic of females ages 25 to 54. And she wasn’t exactly making friends with everyone in the newsroom. In front of several people, she screamed at a production assistant who was fresh out of college, causing the woman to cry at her desk; another time, while shooting a promo, she got so angry she hurled her earpiece, which ended up hitting a staffer in the forehead.
This is where the station bosses made their first Alycia Lane mistake. They seemed to give her a pass after the incidents, worried about their star anchor’s feelings. Plus, they figured some staffers were jealous of the new girl, who was pretty much a sensation before she even walked in the door. This sent a very clear message to those around Lane: She was special; don’t mess with her. It also sent a very clear message to Lane: You can do as you please.
According to the Mighty Dan Gross, via TMZ, former Willingboro-ite and West Philadelphian Gary Dourdan was arrested yesterday in Palm Springs for allegedly possessing heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and prescription drugs. As Dan pointed out, we knew the CSI actor was a weed-head from this snippet from an interview in our May 2007 issue, but the hard stuff? Gateway drug, indeed.
Dan Gross reports that Boothwyn’s Kenneth Keith Kallenbach, a comedian and musician best known as one of Howard Stern’s longest-serving Wack Pack members, has died in a Chester County hospital. Details are still sketchy, but Kallenbach had apparently contracted pneumonia in jail while being held on attempted child-abduction charges.
Kallenbach (pictured with fellow Wack Packer Tom “Captain Janks” Cipriano) played a supporting role in a piece on Stern by then-Philadelphia staff writer Larry Platt in February 1994. Here’s a taste:
Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron was named as a 2008 Pulitzer Prize runner-up in the criticism category yesterday for her “forceful critiques that illuminate the vital interplay between architecture and the life of her city.” Back in our March issue, senior writer Richard Rys profiled Saffron in “Why Are Men Who Build Skyscrapers Afraid of This Woman?”
Surrounded by steel and glass, she stands in the lobby of the Comcast Center, gazing up and around, doing the mental calculus that comes naturally after eight years in this job. Inga Saffron takes a long look at Humanity in Motion, the installation by sculptor Jonathan Borofsky that fills this cavernous entryway. It begins on the ground, with life-size statues of a black man and a child, both looking up above, where men and women carved of fiberglass walk along beams that crisscross in all directions. “I rather like the idea of all these people on these different trajectories that never intersect,” Saffron says. “It’s like a metaphor for humanity. The sculpture reflects the crossroads quality of what this could be. You can imagine the crowd of people completing this artwork.”
Tonight at 11 p.m., MSNBC takes a new look at Philadelphia’s infamous Marie Noe case. Noe and her husband, Arthur, of West Kensington, were thought to have lost 10 infants to “crib death” between 1949 and 1968, until Stephen Fried’s April 1998 Philadelphia magazine story “Cradle to Grave” prompted police to reopen a long-dormant murder investigation. Just hours after being taken downtown for questioning, Noe confessed to smothering eight of her children.
MSNBC’s one-hour documentary, also titled Cradle to Grave, includes new interviews with Fried about the case and its aftermath. You can read the original piece and both of the updates we published in our archives. — Timothy Haas
The other shoes just keep dropping in the Alycia Lane saga. The Daily News’s Will Bunch reports this morning that 
Advance word on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which opens today, has been 
In honor of the 64th anniversary of D-Day, we offer this excerpt from Robyn Post’s June 2001 article “Veterans’ Day,” about two South Philadelphians, Bill Guarnere and Edward “Babe” Heffron, whose lifelong friendship was forged during World War II when they met as members of Easy Company, an elite unit of paratroopers in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division whose exploits were dramatized part of the renowned HBO series Band of Brothers. The article later led to a joint memoir, co-written with Post, called Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends (Penguin, 2007).
The roiling home mortgage market is apparently about to 
CBS 3 anchor Larry Mendte is under investigation by the FBI for allegedly snooping in his former co-worker Alycia Lane’s Yahoo e-mail. In this excerpt from our February 2008 story “The Very Public Self-Destruction of Alycia Lane,” we take a look back at the tone of the newsroom in the early days of their time on the air together.
According to the Mighty Dan Gross, via TMZ, former Willingboro-ite and West Philadelphian Gary Dourdan was 
Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron was named as a 2008 Pulitzer Prize runner-up in the criticism category yesterday for her “forceful critiques that illuminate the vital interplay between architecture and the life of her city.” Back in our March issue, senior writer Richard Rys profiled Saffron in “Why Are Men Who Build Skyscrapers Afraid of This Woman?”
Tonight at 11 p.m., MSNBC takes a new look at Philadelphia’s infamous Marie Noe case. Noe and her husband, Arthur, of West Kensington, were thought to have lost 10 infants to “crib death” between 1949 and 1968, until Stephen Fried’s April 1998 Philadelphia magazine story “Cradle to Grave” prompted police to reopen a long-dormant murder investigation. Just hours after being taken downtown for questioning, Noe confessed to smothering eight of her children.