On “The Mind of the Married Man,” a comedy now in its second season on HBO, actor Mike Binder plays Micky Barnes, a self-obsessed newspaper columnist based loosely on the Chicago Tribune’s Bob Greene.
Binder portrays Barnes as a humane but deeply flawed populist whose sexual politics aren’t nearly as correct as those he writes about several days a week. Though morbidly conflicted over issues of marital fidelity and trust, Micky isn’t a sexual carnivore like his buddy Jake, a serial adulterer who edits the entertainment section of the Chicago daily where they both work.
Micky is simultaneously attracted and repelled by Jake’s libidinous charm, though he could never be a libertine like his friend because his conscience, such that it is, would get in the way.
Still, Jake’s tales of sexual conquest provide a vicarious kick for Micky’s fantasy-drenched imagination. He’s sticking by his story that he’s more interested in being like Doug, a fellow columnist with a conventional but loving marriage.
After a disastrous flirtation with his beautiful secretary, an aspiring reporter in her early 20s, middle-aged Micky Barnes dedicates himself to doing the right thing by his wife, Donna, who suspects he’s having an affair, doing drugs or going through a midlife crisis.
The fact that Micky doesn’t really want to be “square” like Doug provides the series with much of its comedic tension. Viewers are aware that Micky engages in a high level of self-deception. The only question is: To what extent is Chicago’s most popular columnist aware of how double-minded he really is?
On this point, Micky’s cantankerous boss, played by the brilliant M. Emmet Walsh, provides an unlikely breath of moral clarity. On Sunday’s season premiere, Walsh’s character tells his star columnist that because of his “impure thoughts,” the paper should invest in billboards with his face on them and the word “evil” plastered on top. His rebuke startles Micky back to reality, briefly.
I thought about Walsh’s scripted comment yesterday while reading about what must have been Bob Greene’s very unscripted resignation from the Chicago Tribune over the weekend. Greene, 55, is one of the biggest stars in the shifting firmament of newspaper columnists.
According to an editor’s note on the front page of the Tribune, the paper sought Greene’s resignation “after he acknowledged engaging in inappropriate sexual conduct some years ago with a girl in her late teens whom he met in connection with his newspaper column.”
As a Pulitzer finalist, syndicated columnist and best-selling author of books about back-porch American values, Greene wrote the kind of columns ordinary readers immediately related to. He was never flashy, but he was solid. Greene’s two children and three-decades-long marriage were a tremendous source of satisfaction for him. I can’t think of any other columnist who could give Dave Barry as serious a run for his money as America’s most popular columnist.
So why would a columnist who was literally sitting on top of his profession be reckless in a way that would’ve given pause to the fictional Micky Barnes? At this point in the story, with so many factors about their encounter unknown, it would be presumptuous for any of us to say. Still, M. Emmet Walsh’s challenge to Binder’s Micky Barnes hovers in the background like a ghost.
I met Bob Greene three years ago at the National Society of Newspaper Columnists convention in Louisville, Ky. Greene was the keynote speaker and said many inspirational things about using his platform as a columnist to help children abused by the system. He spoke of the “columnist’s calling” as if it were a civic priesthood, a characterization many of us found grandiose and borderline laughable.
Bob Greene is forcing us to imagine what really goes on in the mind of someone who “has everything,” but throws it all away.
Was it an aberration or is there a bit of Micky Barnes in all of us?
Tony Norman can be reached at tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412 263-1631.
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