Former New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton will make his Broadway debut in “Lucky Guy,” the new Nora Ephron play about newspaper columnist Mike McAlary, starring Tom Hanks.
The city’s top cop will appear — on video — in a key scene that nearly led to the downfall of the city’s top columnist.
The play begins previews Friday at the Broadhurst.
Bratton filmed his scene last week under the guidance of director George C. Wolfe.
He re-created two 1994 press conferences at which he apologized to a rape victim whom McAlary smeared in the Daily News. Quoting anonymous police sources, McAlary wrote that the woman made up the rape charge to draw attention to lesbian and feminist causes.
“They weren’t able to find any video of the press conferences at any of the television stations, but they had the transcript, so they asked me to re-create them,” Bratton told me yesterday. “They’re small scenes, but they’re very critical in the play.”
The “Rape Hoax the Real Crime” incident — that was the headline of McAlary’s first incendiary column — nearly derailed his career.
One afternoon in April 1994, a 27-year-old Yale graduate walking home through Prospect Park was grabbed by a man, dragged up a hill and raped. The city was in an uproar — a young woman raped in a nice neighborhood in broad daylight.
But McAlary doubted her story. A top police source told him the woman had made it up because she hoped to “deliver a first-person speech on her own rape,” as McAlary wrote, at a gay and lesbian rally. McAlary continued to savage the woman in two more columns, comparing her to Tawana Brawley.
Bratton was furious. The evidence he’d seen — including traces of semen found inside the woman — clearly indicated she’d been raped. He was also angry that his underlings were leaking bad information to the columnist.
“I had a phrase that I used, ‘If you don’t hear it from me, don’t rely on your sources,’ ” Bratton recalls. “I was the official source of the department, and I had to rebut these stories, particularly McAlary’s. His source was misinterpreting the data.”
At the time, McAlary’s anonymous source was thought to be John Miller, Bratton’s deputy commissioner for public affairs. Bratton thought so, too, even though Miller, in a New York magazine story about the scandal, vehemently denied it.
Fifteen years later, having read Ephron’s play, Bratton is now convinced the source was someone else.
“The play brought back memories of the incident,” Bratton says. “I remembered the first time I met McAlary, at an Italian restaurant, now gone, on Second Avenue. I had just been appointed commissioner, and an introductory dinner was arranged. At the table were Tom Wolfe, John Miller, Eddie Hays [McAlary’s lawyer], Michael Daly [another newspaper columnist] and a few other people.”
Ephron, who died last year, spent nearly 10 years researching “Lucky Guy,” and in the play she suggests someone other than Miller was leaking to McAlary.
And Bratton thinks she’s right.
“That person was also at the dinner that night,” says Bratton. “Without giving away the secret, I now think that’s who it was. It all made sense to me. The mystery was solved 15 years later. I owe Miller a drink for blaming him all these years.”
The rape victim sued McAlary and the Daily News, winning a substantial settlement. In depositions, McAlary admitted he made things up in columns as a “writing device.”
His reputation never quite recovered, despite his last and greatest story — the sodomizing of Abner Louima by police officers.
McAlary died of cancer in 1998.
“He went way out on a limb in the rape case, and that limb got sawed off,” says Bratton. “That’s why the Louima case was so important to him. It was in some respects vindication for one of the worst moments of his life. The rape in Prospect Park and the rape of Abner Louima were the two bookends of his professional life.”