Before she got a chance to do that, though, the woman says the relationship turned uncomfortable. "He used to meander over, pop his head in, say he'd just dropped in to see what I was doing," she says. Then came the computer messages. "He'd send me e-mails seeing if I wanted to have dinner with him, asking me out to lunch," she says. She remembers one two-week stretch in particular when "he invited me out to lunch every day," she claims. "And I turned him down every time. And I just thought to myself, 'This guy's either very persistent or very stupid.'"
His intense pursuit killed any interest she'd had in working for XS. "I thought, 'Thank God I didn't take a job there.'" She has since left the Tribune Co. altogether.
After a while, the attempt to construct a coherent portrait of Stephen Wissink begins to seem a fool's errand. Successive glimpses of the man through the eyes of those who know him serve only to inflate the confusion, not to dispel it. "He was a charmer," says one friend. "A bitter man," says another. "Brilliant." "Vapid." "Nurturing." "Cutting." Each new source describes Wissink in terms nearly contradicting the one before. "He was always very truthful, even if it hurt," says Colleen Dougher-Telcik. "He was always full of little white lies," says Ronnie Greenspan.
Nowhere do the various perceptions of this complex man differ so greatly as in the minds of the women he worked with. According to one commonly held view, Wissink was a man constantly on the make. A former Sun-Sentinel employee says Wissink's behavior was always a fertile source of gossip among her and her women friends on staff: "We'd go, 'Did you hear the latest about Wissink? Did you hear what he did this time?'" Ronnie Greenspan says he was still calling her even after he'd moved in with another woman. He allegedly made suggestive remarks to Somer Simpson before, during, and after his most recent marriage. "I think the man had a problem," says Schulman. "There's no way he could have actually been attracted to all the women he hit on."
Nevertheless, two women -- both of whom worked for Wissink for years -- say they saw none of this side of him and doubt it existed. "I don't always get to select my bosses, but I do select my friends," says Dougher-Telcik. "And I never could be friends with someone I didn't respect. Steve Wissink is my friend." Janine Sieja Hagerman, who was hired by Wissink to be associate editor when the paper first started up, echoes that assessment. "I can't say I ever saw anything untoward in the newsroom. The atmosphere was very collegial, relaxed, and comfortable."
And what of the number-one source? What is Wissink's opinion of himself?
The single most telling adjective according to the former editor -- the one that ties all the other loose scraps into a single understandable whole -- is "insecure." If his story has a single theme, it should be this: "A very insecure guy who was trying to cover his insecurities by being a man about town."
But the last word of this story should not be edited in by Wissink. It should be Ronnie Greenspan's. She was the one, after all, who bore the brunt of this "man about town's" attempts to work out his insecurities by dumping on someone even more vulnerable than himself.
Telling her story, however, Greenspan has almost nothing critical to say about Wissink. In fact she frequently pauses to point out the good she sees in him: his love for his daughter, his charisma.
The loyalty of some of his staff was especially impressive to her -- particularly at the time he was hospitalized for his alcoholism. "Everybody was so kind and understanding," she recalls. So was the paper, which was paying for his treatments.
These days Greenspan, too, is being treated. Her treatments are for depression. Describing them she finally displays a touch of bitterness. "Of course nobody is paying for my treatments," she says. "I've got to pay for them myself, because I don't have a job at the moment."
And now neither does Wissink.
