May I offer
you, here at the end, something on the order of those two gold
foil—wrapped, silver dollar—sized, chocolate-covered peppermint
coins the franchise hotels put on your pillow when they turn down
your bed at night?
Just for the flavor of it, come with me
back to the 1960s, to a time when the newspaper wars still raged in
New York City; to 1963, when the struggling New York Herald Tribune completely transfused its Sunday
supplement and changed its name from Today’s
Living to New York. In due course
New York had a new editor, a young man named
Clay Felker, who had come to the Trib from
Esquire magazine. As editor of New York, Clay had one full-time assistant editor, Walt
Stovall, and two part-time staff writers: Jimmy Breslin, whose main
task was turning out a column for the Trib
five days a week, a column based entirely on reporting (and
probably the greatest column in New York newspaper history), and
me. Five days a week I worked at the beck and call of the city desk
as a general assignment reporter. In our so-called spare time,
Jimmy and I were supposed to turn out a story apiece each week for
this new Sunday supplement, New York. I’d
heard of skeleton staffs before, but this one was
bones.
Nevertheless, one day Clay, Walt,
Jimmy, and I were crowded into the little bullpen of a cubicle that
served as New York’s office, when Clay said,
“Look … we’re coming out once a week, right? And The New Yorker comes out once a week. And we start out
the week the same way they do, with blank paper and a supply of
ink. Is there any reason why we can’t be as good as The New Yorker? Or better. They’re so damned
dull.”
At that moment, I must say it seemed
like nothing but talk. Dull or not, The New
Yorker was one of the two or three most eminent weekly
magazines in the country, certainly in terms of prestige. But Clay
meant business, and thanks to his Esquire
days he managed to persuade some great outside contributors to join
Jimmy and me in our brave ride on Rosinante, writers the likes of
Peter Maas, Richard Condon, Robert Benton, and David Newman, along
with the Trib’s own outstanding critics,
Walter Kerr, Judith Crist, and Walter Terry. Sure enough, by
mid-1964 our little Sunday supplement, New
York, had started making the town take notice. You know the
current expression, “the buzz”? Well, by late 1964 the Buzz buzzed
not for The New Yorker but for us, so much
so that The New Yorker began paying us the
left-handed compliment of making fun of us, first in items in their
Talk of the Town column and then in a full-blown parody that went
after Jimmy and me specifically.
It so happened that 1965 was
The New Yorker’s fortieth anniversary. The
magazine was, in fact, so eminent that the usual, predictable
tributes to its illustrious traditions and its thises and its thats
began effusing in print, like gas inflating a balloon, when the
simple truth was that Clay was right. The New
Yorker had become dull, dull, dull—dull and
self-important—under William Shawn, who had succeeded the
magazine’s founder, Harold Ross, as editor. So … what better time
to pop the balloon?
Our idea was to take a page from
The New Yorker’s early days, back when Ross
was running the show and the sheet was alive, and do a parody in
the form of a profile of Shawn. One of The New
Yorker’s greatest coups, under Ross, had been a parody of
Time magazine in 1936 in the form of a
profile by Wolcott Gibbs of Time’s founder
and editor, Henry Luce. The town, or the part of the town that
buzzes, had dined out on that one for a year. Not only was Gibbs’s
parody of Time’s famous breathless style
gorgeous stuff (“Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind”
… “Where it will all end, knows God!”), but the personal details
got under Luce’s skin … At Yale he had adopted the mucker pose of
going around unshaven and not wearing garters but was actually a
puritanical “conformist” … he talked jerkily, stuttered, and
avoided people’s eyes … wore baggy clothes … seethed secretly over
all the visiting Asians who looked him up in New York because he
had been born in China, where his parents had been missionaries …
Ross sent Luce an advance copy of Gibbs’s story, and Luce got so
angry he confronted Ross in Ross’s apartment and, the way the story
was always told, threatened to throw him out the
window.
So a parody profile of Shawn it would
be. The very form, “the profile,” the very term itself, was a
New Yorker invention. And in this case there
was a news peg that went beyond the fact that this was The New Yorker’s fortieth: there had never been a
profile of Shawn anywhere. Despite the fact that he was one of the
most prominent figures in American journalism, he never showed his
face to outside journalists. “Intensely private” was apparently
putting it mildly. There was only one known
photograph of the man, the official New
Yorker portrait, which he had commissioned, paid for, and
controlled.
The first thing I did was ring up Shawn
at his office to ask him for an interview. By and by he came to the
telephone and, in his quiet voice, said:
“Here at The New
Yorker, if we tell someone we want to do a profile and that
person doesn’t want to cooperate, we don’t do the profile. We would
expect you to extend us the same courtesy.”
“But, Mr. Shawn,” I said, “we’re a
newspaper, and we consider you and your magazine’s fortieth
anniversary news.”
That argument got me exactly nowhere.
Obviously I would have to get my material from present and former
New Yorker employees and others who knew
Shawn and the magazine. That very night, or soon after, I was
having dinner with a group of people down in Greenwich Village, and
at the table was a young woman named Renata Adler. It was she, not
I—I had no idea who she was—who brought up the fact that she was a
staff writer for The New Yorker. I will
admit I encouraged her to dilate upon the subject, however. I can’t
remember anything particularly riveting or revealing that she
divulged, but she never forgot the conversation, as it would turn
out. Anyway, it must have been shortly after my telephone call to
Shawn, because soon the word was out at The New
Yorker that nobody was to talk to anybody from the
Herald Tribune.
Nevertheless, I found my sources, and I
managed to observe, from the wings, as it were, The
New Yorker’s fortieth birthday celebration at the St. Regis
Hotel. Then I started writing the parody, and I ran into something
I hadn’t counted on. Wolcott Gibbs’s parody of Time back in 1936 had been hilarious precisely because
it was a caricature of an original, lively, radical departure in
journalistic writing, the already famous Timestyle. But a parody of a style as dull as
The New Yorker’s could be funny for about
half a page, which is to say, only until you got the joke. After
that, due to parody’s law of hypertrophy, it would become literally
duller than dull. The New Yorker style was
one of leisurely meandering understatement, droll when in the
humorous mode, tautological and litotical when in the serious mode,
constantly amplified, qualified, adumbrated upon, nuanced and
renuanced, until the magazine’s palegray pages became High Baroque
triumphs of the relative clause and the appository modifier. The
only solution, it seemed to me, was to turn all that upside down,
shake it out, get rid of the dust, and come up with a
counter-parody, a style that was everything The New
Yorker wasn’t: urgent, insistent, exclamatory,
overstated—and fun.
By the time I had finished it, it was
so long it would have to run in two parts. Clay showed them to the
Herald Tribune’s editor, Jim Bellows.
Bellows read them, rubbed his palms together, and smacked his lips.
Jim Bellows, although young, was a newspaperman of the old school.
A month that went by without a good brawl was a pretty dull month.
It so happened that the Sunday supplement, New
York, was printed each Wednesday for insertion in the Sunday
Trib four days later. So on Wednesday, as
soon as my first installment was off the presses, Bellows had two
copies delivered to Shawn at The New Yorker,
whose offices were on West Forty-third Street, about four blocks
from the Trib’s. The piece was entitled
“Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead.” With the
two copies Bellows included a card on which he had written, “With
my compliments.”
Shawn’s reaction was too good to be
true. In his own minimomaniacal way—Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote
that the world was full of megalomaniacs but that William Shawn was
the only minimomaniac he had ever met—in his own way Shawn outdid
Henry Luce of three decades earlier when it came to overreacting to
a profile. Bango! He had a letter hand-delivered those same four
blocks to the Trib.
The letter was not addressed to
Bellows, however, much less to Clay Felker or to me. It was
addressed to the Trib’s owner and publisher,
Jock Whitney, who was not only a very rich man but also a very
distinguished gentleman, lately, in fact, United States Ambassador
to the Court of St. James’s. It was at the distinguished gentleman
in Jock Whitney that Shawn’s letter seemed to be aimed. He called
“Tiny Mummies” libelous, to be sure, but also worse than libelous.
It was “murderous.” Not only that, this single reckless, heedless,
needless collapse of judgment—the publication of this pointless
article—would forever consign the Herald
Tribune and its long and honorable heritage, dating back to
the great Horace Greeley, to “the gutter” along with the worst
yellow journalism of the 1920s. He beseeched Whitney to withhold it
from publication, to keep the magazine out of the Herald Tribune on Sunday.
A stunned Jock Whitney brought the
letter in to Bellows, whose office was right next door, and said,
“What do we do, Jim?”
Bellows read the letter and chuckled
and said, “I’ll show you what we do, Jock.”
With that, while Whitney stared,
Bellows got on the telephone and called up Time and read them the letter. Then he called up
Newsweek and read them the letter. “Tiny
Mummies” was published, as scheduled, on Sunday. On Monday accounts
of the article and Shawn’s letter were all over the Press sections
of Time and Newsweek,
and a perfect storm broke. It reached all the way into Lyndon
Johnson’s White House.