Whatever doubts McNally had about Miranda's contacts evaporated when she phoned him one day at Odeon. A busy dinnertime crowd was buzzing around him when an aide handed him the phone, saying it was "Miranda from New Orleans."
"So who all's there today?" she asked.
McNally craned his neck and rattled off several names, including that of Alexander Cockburn, the Anglo-Irish journalist.
"Alex!" Miranda cried. "I know him!"
"No, you don't," McNally replied.
At Miranda's insistence, McNally walked over and handed the receiver to Cockburn.
"Oh, hi, Miranda!" Cockburn said.
"How did she do it? I don't know," says Cockburn, who spoke off and on to Miranda when he lived in New York in the early 1980s. "She would just ring up and say something flattering. She probably told Brian what great spring rolls he made. She would gab away, and she was very funny. She obviously had a romantic effect. We weren't talking about Socrates."
McNally says he began to have second thoughts about Miranda only after an episode in which he heard firsthand the effect she had on men. "She had a tape of Alex, on [her] answering machine, I think, and she played it for me," says McNally. "It was very funny. Alex was begging. 'Why haven't you called? You were going to call. I have your Solidarity T-shirt for you." McNally was disconcerted to discover that Miranda might be taping her calls. Still, he kept talking to her for months after. He couldn't help himself. It was Miranda who stopped calling. "She dumped me!" he yelps today.