Florida’s own ‘French Dispatch’: Adventures of foreign correspondents

Wes Anderson’s latest film, The French Dispatch, was written to be “a love letter to journalists.” Inspired by The New Yorker, the story is set in a fictional French news bureau staffed with American newspaper writers.

Landrey could speak French, and understand Spanish and German, though people said his accent carried a Kansas City twang.

She set appointments, maintained her husband’s schedule and kept a list of the best French restaurants in her pocketbook.

Wilbur Landrey jetted all over — to China, Panama, Jordan.

“He was such a wealth of knowledge about the inner workings of power structures of Europe,” remembered Neil Brown, the former Times editor.

Jack Payton, the paper’s diplomatic editor, traveled to cover the Persian Gulf War in the 1990s and South Africa during the fall of apartheid.

Finding a steady internet connection from which to send stories could be cumbersome, so writers often dictated their work to Watson over the phone.

The paper rented a flat for her in London, though her busy schedule meant she was rarely there for more than a few weeks at a time.

Landrey, then 73, took her on a tour of the capitals of Europe, where they stayed in fine hotels and visited NATO headquarters.

One night in Macedonia, Martin was dictating her story to Watson in her hotel room and noticed an enormous roach crawling up the wall.

As the years went on, Martin was able to report in places that her male colleagues couldn’t, like the women-only section of segregated shopping malls in Saudi Arabia.

She left for three-week spurts, coming back to her family in Florida between assignments.

In 2011, she returned to the Middle East to reunite with Walayat Khan Bacha, the Pakistani journalist who saved her.

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