Rumor Had It

In the 1980s, gossip girls (and boys) held catty court at Detroit’s dailies, making scandalous tidbits required reading

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Beer, whom Burns describes as “the most charming, amoral person I ever met,” became the personification of The News’ replacement column, “Yours Truly” or simply “Y.T.,” working with a succession of female rumor writers. Kay Richards, a bubbly TV reporter from WJBK/Channel 2, was his first partner (resigning amid claims of Mafia death threats), followed by Susan Whitall, who came from the counterculture music magazine Creem and still works for The News, and Hofsess, who eventually took over the column from Beer by herself. “Matt rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, but he was a wonderful writer,” says Hofsess, who has taught English courses and served as adviser to the campus newspaper at Southfield High School the past decade. “Everybody read it if he wrote it. And, in the end, isn’t a story somebody reads worth more than something nobody picks up?”

Beer rarely missed a shot to brandish his scathing wit. For example, take Constantina, a fashion model of the era, whose age was a well-guarded secret. “I remember he wrote that the only way to really find out how old she was would be to cut off her leg and count the rings,” Whitall says. “I don’t think she ever got over being angry about that.”

Toward the late ’80s, Lapointe says, “Matt’s behavior became erratic. There was something self-destructive about him, almost sociopathic. The traits got worse as time went by.” Beer’s life at The News and beyond read like the script to a made-for-TV movie. His father, respected Oakland County Circuit Judge William Beer, was uncovered as a bigamist, fathering 12 children by two wives in metro Detroit, a bitter twist for a writer who’d built his career exposing the dalliances of others.

Upon leaving The News, Beer passed the bar, only to be disbarred over allegations of defrauding clients. He moved to the Bay Area and reinvented himself as a wildly successful tech columnist for the San Francisco Examiner at the height of the dot-com boom, and was in the process of establishing a foundation to train journalists in Cambodia when he suffered a fatal heart attack in Phnom Penh on Oct. 6, 2003. He was just 50.

Hofsess, who may have been overqualified for the job (she holds a master’s degree in journalism and a certificate in French from the Sorbonne), wrote “Yours Truly” for two and a half years. “It was my point of entry into The News, she says. “I worked there 11 years, but all anybody seems to remember is the ‘Yours Truly’ column. I had moles all over the place; The London Chop House, Oakland County courthouse, hair salons. ‘Yours Truly’ had a lot of unpaid staff out there. But then I got married, and the lifestyle of an alley cat was not compatible to my transition. So I stepped down, and Tim Kiska took over and ran it into the ground.”

That’s an allegation Kiska doesn’t necessarily dispute. “What’s her point?” says a laughing Kiska, now a Ph.D. assistant professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. “The thing that really blew me away was, when I first took the job everybody was saying, ‘Oh, thank God, a real journalist, an experienced professional.’ Then after the first few months, the same people came back and said, ‘You’re not mean enough.’ So I’d say, “OK, let’s start with you. Who are you sleeping with that you shouldn’t be?’ It was the worst three years of my life.”

Both “Carol T.” and “Yours Truly” faded away as the ’90s arrived, but nearly everyone involved with their history agrees that a revival of the Detroit gossip column wouldn’t be a bad idea. “I think [readers] would be way more interested in that than in the celebrity columns we do now, all this rewritten Britney Spears national stuff,” Whitall says. “I mean, the papers all scream ‘local, local, local.’ What could be more local than what the mayor’s wife is doing at her hair salon? That’s hyper-local.”

Adds Hofsess, “It took a big area like metro Detroit, and sometimes Michigan, and gave it a small-town feel, because you could read items about people you knew. You may have seen them at a party or you watched them on television all the time. They’re the ties that bind us and keep us as one city, even though we’re a metropolitan area.”

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