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DOWN THE SYNDICATE DRAIN (or How I Became An Un-made Man)
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Did the Kid from Oakland
lack the 'common touch'?
of TheColumnists.com
After my column had been running in The New York Daily News a few months, the newspaper’s huge Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate thought of taking me on. I was making ever-rapid inroads into the Big Time, so it seemed, but the next hurdle was a little too high for me to clear cleanly.
The Syndicate’s editor, Frank Duffy, a rotund guy with thin hair and a large mouth, took me to lunch and talked for two hours, mainly of how he had discovered Erma Bombeck at a small Dayton, Ohio, paper and turned her into a household name. That was his favorite (maybe only) success story. The implication, of course, was that he might do the same for me. I didn’t react coyly. When could we start?
Duffy, it turned out, was a wonderful blowhard, but he had a lot of power and I figured he could make me a coast-to-coast star. The Syndicate put together a little packet and sent it out, entitled “Notes of an Outrageously Normal Man” (not too bad), but America’s feature editors did not come bounding to my door. Over the four-year run of the column, no more than 25 newspapers bought the column, so I never became a household name except in my own home.
(Not long after that, Duffy lost his job at the Syndicate and wound up sharing an office with me and science editor Ed Edelson. Mike O’Neill, the Daily News editor, generously let Duffy use a desk and a phone to find a new employer, so I overheard Frank on the phone trying to blab his way into a job when he wasn’t chatting up cronies or trying to grab my or Edelson’s ear. Then one day he was gone and wound up as the head of another major syndicate.)
So Art Buchwald’s and Erma Bombeck’s futures were secure. Ironically, they were the main reason my column didn’t attract more newspapers: Between Bombeck and Buchwald there was no room left in America for another humor columnist. Not me anyway, and not really until Dave Barry came along at the Miami Herald many years later. Russell Baker did well, but he was part of The New York Times wire service.
Newspapers are fearful of taking on a new column or cartoon strip until every other newspaper in the United States has already certified it. It’s gotten much worse lately, due to the incredibly shrinking news hole, but even then it was tough to crack the syndication market unless you wrote a “service” feature (how to bake a pie, sew a dress, plant a tomato, fix a door, keep your marriage together) or were already a household name (Liz Smith, Jack Anderson, Red Smith).
New, unknown humor columnists have the toughest of all rows to hoe, even rockier than new cartoonists, because readers are trained to read the comics pages and are predisposed to enjoy them (also, they’re all neatly bundled in one place), but unless a newspaper promotes the hell out of a humor column--that is, tells its reader that this is incredibly funny, funny stuff--it’s likely to die a lingering death. Editors tend not to trust their own taste, at least not in humor and satire, afraid it will go over readers’ heads or offend someone who may write the publisher; best to go with a new gardening columnist.
Or maybe it was me. My later efforts to get syndicated, with the sprawling Universal Press Syndicate when I wrote a singles column in the mid-1980s at The San Francisco Chronicle, and then with The New York Times Syndicate in the 1990s, came to similar dismal dead ends.
Maybe Mike O’Neill, the Daily News editor, put his finger on the problem when he told me one day, “Nachman, you’re a great columnist but you lack the common touch.” He said Buchwald had the common touch. It was a backhanded compliment, but perhaps true. O’Neill said that without the common touch I’d never be reprinted in The Reader’s Digest, like Buchwald (I actually was, about three times, but I took his point).
I liked Mike O’Neill, a straight-shooter who said what he meant, unlike editors who play political/bureaucratic games. He also had a terrific sense of humor. When I asked him for a raise, after the column had been running six months, he roared his big laugh and said, “Nachman, I thought you were an artist. All you damn artists ever talk about is money!” I got the raise, even so, and a good laugh besides.
Common touch be damned, The Times Syndicate jumped at my proposal to do a humor column about middle age (“New Wrinkles”) only to decide to make it part of a larger package on middle age before--two years later!--abandoning the entire idea and tossing me out with the bath water, easily my most maddening syndicate experience.
The New York Times Syndicate, mighty as it sounds, was one of the weaker links in The New York Times Corporation, overshadowed and overwhelmed by its worldwide news wire. I should have been forewarned when I met with the editor and she told me that they were trying to sign up Timothy Leary as a regular columnist for the middle-age package. I thought Leary was dead. No, he was only ailing but attempting a last gasp of self-promotion in a series of articles on dying. That sounded like an amusing feature, all right. Strange as it seems for a Times unit, they had no idea what they were doing.
If a syndicate wasn’t going to make me world famous, perhaps a lecture agency might. A couple of the bigger New York lecture bureaus contacted me after the Time and Newsweek pieces ran. I mulled it over and decided against it, for then. Enticing as it sounds to travel the country talking to groups for fun and profit, the grim reality is that you spend your time in a lot of airports flying around the country talking to Kiwanis and Lions Clubs and Hadassah groups--not my idea of fun.
If it is your idea of fun, you can earn a handsome second salary, as Art Buchwald did, but he was a born entertainer; I’m not. He loved being adored by smitten ladies who hung on his every joke. I admit that the adoring ladies part holds a certain appeal, but not the travel, the wine and cheese receptions and having to first sit through 30 minutes of a chairwoman’s report on how much money the bake sale made before you’re introduced.
One local Kiwanis Club lunch cured me of any latent lecture bug--the part where members introduce their guests, who stand and say "Hi," and of course the food is inedible, brought to you by the same folks who manufacture airplane meals. I don’t mean to sound like a snippy ingrate, especially after I’d labored so long to become a wanted writer, because the invitations are flattering--but the invitations, I found, are really the best part.
If syndication and lectures were not the answer, I still hoped to make a secondary name as a magazine freelancer. Midway in my five years as a News columnist, I got a second crack at an assignment from Esquire. My first major freelance magazine assignment--to write about the much-degraded Algonquin Round Table membership--was thwarted when I left New York for San Francisco before I could get beyond interviews with fabled aging Round Tablers Dorothy Parker and Marc Connelly.
This time, Harold Hayes assigned me to interview Fred Astaire, who was making what would be about his last movie--his last musical anyway: “Finian’s Rainbow,” directed by a young red-hot guy named Francis Ford Coppola. I learned all I could about Astaire before arranging for an interview with him at his Beverly Hills home.
He was, and remains to everyone, a golden American iconic figure, “his whirling form emblazoned on all our memories,” as I wrote in my lead. His screen legend was/is totally untarnished. There was never a negative, or scandalous, thing said or even implied about Astaire. And that was just the trouble--his perfection is what did me in, in the end.
When I got to Astaire’s estate, a butler let me in and escorted me into his study (I’d never been met at anybody’s door by an actual butler before), where the great man stood and, with that shy little smile I’d seen a million times on screen, crooning a Gershwin song to Ginger Rogers, asked me to sit down and if I’d like something to drink.
He looked, as on screen, casually elegant, in slacks and loafers, as un-mussed as what I could glimpse of his house, which resembled one of those unlived-in homes in Architectural Digest. Several shelves in the study were filled with horse-breeding journals. Astaire was a race track habitue, owned horses and was very much part of the horsey set. However nonchalantly he moved, even in his 70s, he still had a certain regal bearing; indeed, his sister Adele split up their stage act to marry a Scottish baron or earl.
I had heard he was a difficult interview--nice enough but pretty dull. His autobiography, “Steps in Time,” was a well-meant bore, less a memoir than a thank-you note to everyone he’d ever worked with or met at a party. His innate modesty kept Astaire from being articulate about his talent, to reveal how this or that number was put together. “We just did it, you know?” he told me with that little apologetic chuckle. I had interviewed plenty of stars but Astaire was a challenge, a master of the unrevealing quote.
After a couple of hours, it was lunchtime
and, as Astaire had promised to give me the whole day because
this was to be a major Esquire piece, maybe for the cover, he
had his driver take me to lunch at Nate `n’ Al’s deli
in Beverly Hills, wait for me and bring me back. Fred lunched
alone at home, almost as if imprisoned by his own fame. At Nate
`an’ Al’s he would have been mobbed. It seemed oddly,
awkwardly formal to be driven to lunch by his chauffeur, but
in retrospect it was definitively Astaire--formal to a fault.
The afternoon was equally unrewarding, conversation-wise. I threw
everything I could at Astaire but was probably too polite myself
to challenge him on anything or find a way to get him to spill
the beans about Ginger or Cyd or Gene or, well, anybody. The
few usable quotes turned out to be well-traveled lines he’d
used in other interviews and tossed off as if they were extemporaneous--the
bane of all celebrity profilers.
I decided to go with that angle--his implacable, invincible façade, which at least gave me a flimsy platform to build a profile on. I fleshed it out with quotes from Coppola and Pandro Berman, the producer of many of his famous films, and Hermes Pan, his choreographer partner. For some reason, puzzling to me now, I didn’t talk to any of his dance partners. But everyone said the same thing: Fred was the nicest, hardest working man, who reciprocated that he was just delighted to be working with Coppola, who had never directed a musical--one reason “Finian’s Rainbow” later flopped loudly, even with Tommy Steele, Petula Clark, etc. supporting Astaire.
I suspect if I’d been older myself I might have put it all into a richer context--the great old hoofer’s final screen encore--and given it some depth, but I was too dazzled by Astaire’s legend to probe beyond it, or get behind it. I wrote myself silly to re-create Astaire’s legacy in fancy word pictures, but it wasn’t enough and Esquire didn’t take it. “He can’t be that nice,” said Hayes in his rejection letter with my $500 kill fee enclosed.
I hung onto the piece, which I had put so much blood, sweat and tears into writing, and when Astaire died about 10 years later, most of it ran in The San Francisco Chronicle as a long appreciation. My editor was terribly impressed that I had been able to knock out such a lengthy, detailed elegy overnight. It only took me 10 years.
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman
caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The image of Fred Astaire
is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd.
E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. 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 May 21, 2007.
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