The Final Chapter of Theo Wilson’s Life

One of my old boyfriends used to call my friend Theo Wilson “a rascal.” It fit. It embodied that part of Theo that was so amazing: her deep well of impishness and sense of fun, the source of the laughter that seemed to put life’s big and small events in the proper perspective of ridiculousness.

This is a eulogy. It wasn’t supposed to have been. Weeks ago, this space was reserved for one of those nice little features on an author with a new book. Theo herself was colorful, and her book is interesting because it is mostly about the many famous trials she covered in the 1950s and ‘60s as an ace reporter for the New York Daily News in its heyday. It was a different era for newspapering, one that a lot of us looked forward to reading about. And Theo had lived in Los Angeles for the last two decades of her life, so there was a local angle.

But on the very evening last week that Theo was to launch a round of book signings and book parties, she did the unthinkable. Instead of jumping into a limousine to be taken to a late-night TV interview, she was taken by ambulance to Cedars-Sinai, where she died a few hours later of a brain hemorrhage. She was 78, something most of us didn’t know until the day she died. (She always said a woman who would tell you her age would tell you anything.)

“Headline Justice: Inside the Courtroom--The Country’s Most Controversial Trials,” was published by Thunder’s Mouth Press just two days before her death.

On being told of Theo’s death, one of her sisters (she was one of 11 children), shook her head. “Theo had an impeccable sense of timing,” the sister, Marion Rose, said quietly.

She was devastated, of course, like the rest of us. But she knew that Theo would have enjoyed the irony of it. Just when she had finally finished the book everyone had been bugging her about, the book she was tired of hearing about already, she checked out. We envied her the elegance of it, knowing she would have hated a long illness or slowly declining years. “She had a sense of style,” Marion said.

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Theo was a legend, the kind of reporter who had so many avid readers that she was famous for her byline alone. She was also a reporter’s reporter, universally admired in the business for her succinct, beautifully written stories. Her readers loved her and her colleagues adored her.

I’ve done a thousand things with Theo over the last 20 years, and what was awesome about her was that whatever she and her friends or family did always improved upon her telling about it later. She knew how to shape and edit even life’s little stories so they had a lede and a punch line--and we felt carried along by them. I never tired of hearing her tell about the crazy shopping trip that six of us took to Hong Kong, or even about breakfast hour when she was growing up with a slew of sisters and brothers and animals.

I never covered a trial with Theo, but I’ve heard that if you wanted to find her at any given point--she was tiny and hard to spot in a crowd--all you had to do was look for the ring of television and print reporters who would gather around her at every break, hoping for a clue as to what had just happened. She took amazing, verbatim notes, of course. But that was the least of it. She was extremely bright and extremely compassionate, and she could discern the human story that was unfolding amid all the legalese. She never lost sight of the people involved or lost her ability to identify with what they were going through. It was what made her stories stand out.

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On a personal level, Theo was a wonderful friend who shared in your triumphs and had a refined sense of justice about your travails. She would get so angry on your behalf at a misbehaving boyfriend or unfair boss or nutsy landlord that it took some of the sting out of it for you. She also knew the exact point at which she could make you laugh about it, usually with a raunchier version of “forget them if they can’t take a joke.”

Theo’s charisma came in part from an innate sense of confidence she had about herself. Yet she seemed astonished that people--lots of people--were drawn to her. She was a touchstone for so many of us that we have been laughing about how we all feel like we have lost a best friend. Her best best friend, Associated Press’ premiere trial reporter, Linda Deutsch, had it right when she said at Theo’s funeral that Theo had so much life in her that most of us thought she was immortal.

She wasn’t.

We all know what we’ve lost. In Theo’s book, she spends a chapter talking about an especially beloved city editor who trusted his reporters and loved newspapering. When he left the Daily News, Theo said, “the gusto and the joy left with him.”

We know the feeling.