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A VIEW FROM THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE (PART ONE) ILLUSTRATED BY JIM HUMMEL  YOUNG JERRY ARRIVES IN NEW YORK CITY, READY TO TACKLE BIG CITY JOURNALISM |
In 1963, he quit his job
and headed for Manhattan
By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.com
Welcome to the rose-colored Memoir Years, when codgers
with any memory remaining begin to cogitate on their romantic
youth. While I can still claim a few ramshackle brain cells,
it seemed perhaps time to set down what I recall of perhaps the
most vivid three years of my life, when I lived in New York’s
Greenwich Village on the fringes of what turned out to be a vital
and vivid era in the city’s literary life--if you count
newspapers as a branch of literature, and I do. It was then.
For reasons I can only guess at, I felt a strong urge in the early 1960s to move to New York, probably due to five years of reading The New Yorker and The New York Times, not to mention steeping myself in the aura of a book I thumbed to tatters--an anthology of articles, humor and photographs from the old Vanity Fair magazine. I sopped up all the New York lore I could find, like James Thurber’s memoir of The New Yorker, “The Years with Ross,” and E.B. White’s “This Is New York.”
That time still casts a spell, but as a kid in my early 20s, New York in the `20s and `30s seemed a foreign land straight out of Arthurian legend, with the Algonquin Roundtable my personal spiritual source--sacred literary ground where I spent many days and nights in the years that followed my move to Manhattan in 1963 from San Jose, California. (In those pre-Silicon Valley days, it was still necessary to add “California.”)
Nobody could figure out why I wanted to move to New York, away from a plum job, for a 24-year-old, as a TV and humor columnist for The San Jose Mercury, my first job out of college three years before--about the first, best and most crucial break I ever got. Instead of having to cover school board and zoning commission meetings, I leapfrogged over years of actual hard reporting. It still stuns me that I got such a golden offer at 21, while still in my last semester of college, on the measly strength of two years of writing columns and reviews in the campus paper, The Spartan Daily.
When I announced that I was quitting the Mercury job, my family was stupefied. My mother appeared to understand, but my conservative, security-minded grandfather, who had become a surrogate dad after my father’s death in 1960, was aghast, saying again and again that one day San Jose would surpass San Francisco in population--certain that would convince me to stay.
A few years ago, he was proved right, but so was I, for leaving: San Jose has lots more people today but, with all due affection for the place, it still resides in the long glamorous shadow of San Francisco. San Jose is a nice enough city, but not in the ways that mattered to me then. As a guy with raging literary hormones, it was just a drowsy little burg famous for its prune orchards, canneries and the Winchester Mystery House, which I never set foot in during my seven years in San Jose.
Next to New York, San Jose was reduced to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. My dutiful papa (pronounced “papa,” in the French manner) could not compete with the shimmering aura of Manhattan, and so, in May of 1963, I boarded a train in downtown Oakland and set off to seek my fame and fortune in the wilds of New York City.
It strikes me now, at nearly 70, quite remarkable that I would take such a flying leap into so uncharted a future. I’ve hardly been an adventurer, and before leaving San Jose I spent six months sending out resumes and writing samples to every mid-sized paper in a radius of 50 miles from New York. In those pre-Xerox days, this meant laboriously having columns photographed and printed, a major financial outlay necessary when mailing a dozen columns to 50 newspapers in the Greater New York Area.
I got no responses--except from a wacky editor on some New Jersey paper who sang into the receiver (in the manner of Alan Sherman’s hit `60s parody of “Frere Jacques,” “Jerry Nachman, Jerry Nachman , how’s by you? How’s by you?” He broke himself up but didn’t make a job offer, or maybe he did and it was for a menial job below columnist, like reporter (ugh).
I was badly spoiled and wouldn’t consider a mere reporting job, but nobody hired feature writers on the medium-size dailies I contacted. That made me think of Rose Glavinovich, my crusty old, cigarette-puffing boss during my hapless internship in the Oakland Tribune's Berkeley bureau, which she ran with an iron fist. I had told her I wanted to be a feature writer and she snapped back: “All good reporters are feature writers!”
Yes, ma’m.
So, when I boarded the train for New York, I had no job or apartment, but I clutched a lifeline as I settled into my seat--a book my mother had brought me as a going-away gift--“The Village Voice Reader.” I was surprised she had even heard of The Village Voice, and I’m not sure I had either, but it proved a prescient farewell present.
As the train chugged eastward, I pored over the anthology with articles by people like Norman Mailer, a co-founder of the paper, and other literary lights, with cartoons by Jules Feiffer, one of the paper’s many discoveries. The Voice was then less than a decade old, but its writers, critics and cartoonists were already well on the path to posterity.
That unimposing paperback, which I still own 50 years later, compelled me to find a place in the Village. I had a place to stay until I found an apartment, the pad of a friend and San Francisco State colleague, Chuck Alverson, who had edited State’s humor magazine, The Gater, when I was editing Lyke, its San Jose State counterpart. Alverson was a sardonic, aggressive guy who had sped to New York ahead of me and got a job working for the legendary Harvey Kurtzman at Help!, a new magazine Kurtzman started after quitting MAD--a much pulpier, less inspired version of MAD, wh;ich Kurtzman founded.
Chuck was a nervy, gifted guy who wound up years later writing mysteries in England, but when I knew him he was already well-connected for someone who had only been in New York a couple of years. He spoke with a swaggering confidence, full of opinions about all things cultural, and walked the strange and scary streets as if he had grown up in Manhattan. He proved to be, besides a generous host, a perfect guide for a wide-eyed, slack-jawed rube from Oakland, by way of San Jose.
Through Chuck, I actually met the great Kurtzman, an idol, and once was even invited to dinner at his apartment. Harvey turned out to be a sweet, gentle guy, not the demonic madman that had inspired his groundbreaking magazine. He died too young, maybe heartbroken after MAD’s mass-market-minded publisher, William Gaines, decided to turn MAD from into a slick national magazine and the two broke over creative control. It was still a great magazine after Harvey left, but not nearly as subversive, edgy or, well, Jewish. Harvey’s MAD took more chances and jabbed the needle in deeper.
Help! was not nearly as funny, mainly because it wasn’t cartoon-driven but, rather, a series of still photos to which Kurtzman and Co. attached a makeshift story told in funny captions, in the vein of Woody Allen’s first movie, “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” But I got to sit in on some rollicking late-night paste-up sessions (there’s an antiquarian term!) with the artists--one of whom was a guy named Terry Gilliam, who later went to London and became the animator for “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” and then a director of bizarre films in the spirit of those old wild and crazy satirical magazines. Gilliam, even then, had a crazy glint in his eye and slightly maniacal cackle.
After a few weeks, I found a place in the Village on West Tenth Street, a block from “The River,” but I wasn’t sure just which river it was, Hudson or East or, for all I knew, Mississippi. It was a simple one-bedroom space across the street from an all-night garage, whose glaring lights beamed through a window. Every 20 minutes a tow truck would pull up, at maybe 4 a.m., and noisily deposit a car in the garage.
After a month or so, I was awakened at midnight by the smell of smoke seeping under my door, the sound of people tromping down the stairs and firemen shouting instructions as they chopped through the corridor walls. I wound up on the sidewalk in my pajamas, overcoat and sock-less shoes, talking to other tenants I had never even said hello to before, like most New Yorkers.
One resident said it was the third fire there in the past year, so I made an appointment with the building’s owner to talk my way out of a year’s lease. It meant a trip to a fancy Park Avenue office, where I mentioned that I’d heard the fire was the third that year and the owner, seated behind a huge desk and wearing a three-piece suit, let me break my lease--lest I cause trouble. It wasn’t a ploy; I was too naïve for that, but it worked.
By now, I had decided that Greenwich Village was where I had to live--not only was it cheaper, more manageable and life-size (you could actually see the sky), but it did still feel like a village--an urban village, to be sure. But it suited my cultural tastes--and many of my colleagues-to-be at the New York Post lived there.
Simultaneously I was feverishly hunting for a job and found one with surprising ease when a fellow San Jose Spartan Daily man, its former star columnist Randy Poe, pushed me to try The New York Post or The Herald Tribune, both great “writer’s papers,” he claimed. This was a whole new concept to me. Like Chuck Alverson, Poe set about wising me up quickly in the ways of Gotham life.
I was an avid reader of The Times, The Trib and The Voice, but had barely looked at the tabloid Post or Daily News, squalid noisy little newspapers beneath my attention. There were no tabloids in the Bay Area, so the notion of a small square newspaper with big black screaming headlines that turned your fingers charcoal in moments was new to me. It seemed a notch above working for The Police Gazette, and, as I had no real hard reporting experience, the idea of a tabloid seemed wrong in the extreme.
Even so, I dutifully sent clips and a cover letter to The Post’s managing editor, Alvin Davis, who, astonishingly, called me in for an interview, said he found my columns funny and offered me a spot as a summer intern. I grabbed it. If I did well, they might offer a fulltime job after three months, when I would become an actual union member.
I had never been in the Newspaper Guild, for I was hired at The Mercury as a part-time freelancer, not a staff writer, which explained why I had to work at home and only went to The Merc’s office to hand in my copy each day at 3--the major event in my hermit-like post-graduate days in the three years at the paper. I lived in a bungalow, wrote at a kitchen table surrounded by crumpled drafts of columns, stored phone books in the oven and took my meals at Original Joe’s or the Garden City Hofbrau, as I had at college.
Life in New York was light years beyond that drowsy San Jose existence. When I began at The Post it was a hallowed liberal bastion full of famous columnists - James Wechsler, Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton, food writer Gael Greene, plus critics like Richard Watts Jr. and Archer Winston, with a pungent sports section jammed with great writers, one of whom is now a cyber-colleague at thecolumnists.com: Maury Allen.
That same section included Larry Merchant, Leonard Schecter and Vic Ziegel--a virtual Hall of Fame of sports writers, none of them familiar to me then. The paper was mainly Jewish, as The Daily News’s staff was mostly Irish- and Italian-American Catholic (The Tribune was solidly WASP), and its readership was about 90 percent Jewish, black and Hispanic. The Post boasted the city’s ace black reporter, Ted Poston, a tall rumpled guy in suspenders who had a big laugh and a gold tooth and who filed most of his stories in the early `60s from Selma, Birmingham and Memphis.
The staff writers were a wonder team of tough investigative reporters, sparkling feature writers, slick rewriters and savvy critics--guys like Joe Kahn, Gene Grove, Normand Poirier, Bernie Lefkowitz (the gentlest soul on a staff of wise eggs) and Larry Nathanson--like Bernie, a soft-spoken guy who gave me an occasional much-needed hand.
There was a thick macho/intellectual air about the place, dingy and dust-cloaked as it was on West Street in lower Manhattan, right on the river (the same one that flowed a block from my door, I realized later), within walking distance of the revered Brooklyn Bridge. The editors were flinty, hard-nosed guys from another generation of cynical, wisecracking, hard-drinking reporters straight out of “The Front Page,” or at least damn good imitations of the guys enshrined by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.
The executive editor, Paul Sann, was a wiry, swarthy, mean-looking guy with a curled lip who later edited a book on legendary New York gangsters and resembled one himself. Sann was the scariest mug in the city room. He sat in a fenced-off bullpen where he had his cowboy boots shined every day in full view of the staff.
Sann regarded everything, especially me, with a sneer, but I tried to steer clear of his flinty gaze. The few times he said anything to me, it was steeped in disdain. I’m sure he regarded me as a wimpy greenhorn, which I very much was. I never saw him edit any copy; he seemed mainly a tough-guy presence with a big intimidating bark of a laugh.
The Post’s rising star was the young Pete Hamill, a hero to me then and now. Pete liked my stuff and even invited me to a party at his house with other young hot-shots, like Gay Talese, who leaned against a mantle in his sleek, snazzy Italian suit, as if modeling it. The party was for 7 o'clock and I, in my obedient, unschooled Oakland-bred ways, got there at 7:05 while Pete was finishing dinner with his family. I mumbled something, ducked out quickly and returned in an hour. Clearly I wasn’t going to cut it as a New York social butterfly. At the party, Pete introduced me to someone as, “The best entertainment writer in New York,” a line I lived on for years and still relish with some pride.
Paul Sann’s henchman, as I thought of him, was Johnny Bott, the daytime city editor who had a wooden leg. He was a Captain Ahab/Hook figure to my trembling Billy Budd. Johnny clumped menacingly across the city room when forced to take a bathroom break, growling “Boyyy!” as he waved a sheaf of copy paper for a copy boy (no girls allowed) to pluck from his impatient hand and take to the copy desk. In that ancient day, stories were written on typewriters in triplicate on copy paper, separated by carbon sheets, grandly called “books.”
The Post men’s room itself was legendary. All the time I was there, the men’s john had no door, so the scent of urine wafted through the hall as you awaited an elevator. It was all part of the grungy spirit of the place, where wadded-up copy paper, week-old coffee containers, cigarette butts and greasy wax paper from long-gone pastrami sandwiches littered the desks. There was never anywhere to sit if you were a summer replacement cub, so I kept scampering from desk to desk whenever one of the veterans came in and plopped his stuff down next to mine, the cue for me to take a hike.
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©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The illustration is ©2007 by Jim Hummel. The Nachman caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. This special extract from a work in progress is published by special arrangement with the author. All inquiries about this work should be directed to the author by use of the Talkback feature below. This excerpt first posted here Feb. 26, 2007.
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