A Star Reporter Had AIDS. He Wanted to Make It His Beat.

I was reading the raves for the devastating new movie “Elsinore,” a play-within-a-play in which Andrew Scott portrays the Scottish actor Ian Charleson — most famous for “Chariots of Fire.” Charleson unexpectedly gets to take on Hamlet at the National Theater in London in 1989 after Daniel Day-Lewis walks off the stage in the middle of a performance and drops out. Charleson takes on the most daunting role in Shakespeare as he is dying of AIDS.

I thought of Jeffrey Schmalz, the New York Times editor and reporter who took on the role of chronicling the AIDS epidemic for the paper in 1992 — even as the disease was ruining his own health. Before he died in 1993 at 39, Jeff wrote poignantly — yet unsparingly — about why the political and medical cavalry would not arrive in time for him.

The Scottish actor and the American journalist were about the same age when they died, as AIDS was raging in London and New York and in most large cities around the world. These talented souls were made of sterner stuff than I. The last thing I would do is take a job dwelling on mortality while I was being consumed by a monster. That took enormous courage.

To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub. Jeff wrote that he had nightmares of waking up in a coffin, even as he held onto a sliver of hope that he would live long enough to see the magic treatment.

I met Jeff when I came to work on the Metro section of The Times in 1983. He was healthy and on top of the world then, and I was intimidated. Everyone could see he was smart, cultured, dapper, acidly funny, brisk and sometimes brusque. His friend and Times colleague David Dunlap captured Jeff’s jaunty, naughty side beautifully in a eulogy.