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In PART ONE, Nachman,. right out of college, lands a job as a star columnist for a major California newspaper. But he finds the lure of big-time journalism irresistible and quits his job, heads for New York City and gets a tryout as a cub reporter for The New York Post... A VIEW FROM THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE (Part Two)
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Further adventures of a
young 'outsider' in NYC
of TheColumnists.com
My “rabbi” during my failed summer of 1963 as an intern at The New York Post, an editor named Al Davis, gave me a few opportunities, if only to vindicate hiring an otherwise inept reporter from somewhere out west he called “San Joze.”
Al, a roly-poly bald guy who kept a cigar stuck in his mouth at all times, laughed a lot and took a liking to me, or at least to my copy, a jolly fellow who never seemed displeased with my output, unlike the peg-legged city editor, Johnny Bott, or the growly managing editor Paul Sann. Al called me “funny Jerry,” based mainly on my old clips, for I was a disaster my first three months at The Post, just as I had been in my internship at the Oakland Tribune’s Berkeley bureau in the summer of 1959.
Assigned “the lobster shift” (whatever that meant) from midnight to 8 a.m., I battled fatigue from 3 a.m. on and spent most of the time foraging through the next morning’s Times for stories that could be lifted and rewritten for the afternoon Post’s first edition at 11 a.m. An assistant city editor would toss a pile of Times stories on my desk to be rewritten (i.e. disguised), with no instructions to do any original reporting--just as well, I thought.
The few times I was allowed to cobble together a feature story after midnight required calling people--often waking them up at 1 or 2 a.m. to get a reluctant quote. I fed the desk all sorts of story ideas but few got any response. One that did was about the origin of the bagel, that New York staple.
I called a few Jewish celebrities, like George Jessel and Gertrude Berg, neither of whom seemed remotely interested in talking to me. Berg was cranky and Jessel foul-mouthed. All I remember is that Berg had “no idea” how bagels came to America but said she had never seen one in Israel. That was news to me and, I hoped, to the Post readers. Anyway, it made the paper and set me shakily on my way.
Johnny Bott’s assistant was a young, dark, skinny, sharp-featured guy with horn-rimmed glasses named Ed Kosner, who had no idea what to do with me. Kosner, a star in the making, went from The News to, years later, editing Newsweek, New York and Esquire. Clearly I was not someone to send out on an actual breaking story but there was little room in the paper for features of the kind I felt competent to handle in six paragraphs.
I did get to cover a softball game between Playboy Bunnies and Broadway Show League actors, a story full of double entendres I quite liked; it ran on page 34, like a filler. I was sent on a tour to celebrate “Harbor Day,” got on the wrong boat and found myself at sea on a Circle Line tourist boat. When I sheepishly slinked back to the office and shamefully told Kosner about my gaffe, he howled, as did Al Davis, and suggested I write a feature on the Circle Line tour, which made the paper.
That helped salvage what little reputation I had remaining there but I was slowly catching on to the New York Post credo: anything went. This wasn’t a real newspaper, I came to realize. It was a boot camp for dysfunctional reporters, some young and adept, some out of their depth (hello), some at the end of the line.
The head of this madcap household was publisher Dorothy (Dolly) Schiff, who sat in “the tower” far above us and deigned to descend into the city room about once a month. The staff parted for her as she strode imperiously among the riffraff, elegantly coiffed, for a talk with Paul Sann, who suddenly turned from hard-bitten editor to deferential toady (“OK, Dolly,” “Sure, Dolly,” “Whatever you say, Dolly”).
The paper lived in constant dread of Dolly’s memos. Once, she sent a note down saying she had liked a story about a lost dog, so for months afterward there were stories about beleaguered animals. The city room, indeed the entire paper, was forever trying to second guess Dolly, and they rarely knew if they’d guessed right.
There was endless speculation about what Dolly wanted in the paper. She was a would-be Katharine Graham, but Dorothy Schiff was really a socialite playing publisher, though she was roundly feared and mocked by the staff. Jimmy Wechsler, who ran the editorial page, was the conscience and soul of The Post. Dolly was just the boss, but the paper was her toy and gave her a shabby genteel status in New York as a liberal powerbroker.
At the end of the summer, I was let go, as expected, and was delighted to escape with my life, ending an anxious three months, most of it spent waiting for an assignment, rewriting The Times and trying to keep my eyes open. The city room was semi-deserted and the only sounds I remember were whirring fans; no air conditioning.
I had been part of a fascinating 1963 freshman class that included gifted writers like Nora Ephron, Sidney Zion, and Jack Newfield. The fearless Ephron seemed utterly at ease at The Post, as I was not, bantering merrily with all the gnarled editors I shrank from. The daughter of famous screenwriters, used to walking among the powerful, Nora kowtowed to nobody and quickly asserted herself.
Nora and Sid Zion were hired by Schiff because they had written a deft parody of The Post (called The New York Pest) for a short-lived satirical magazine, Monocle, edited by Victor Navasky, later the longtime editor of The Nation. One of its prized stylists was Calvin Trillin, whom everyone (but me) called Bud; even then, Navasky and Trillin were guys to reckon with. My pal Chuck Alverson elbowed his way into their circle, brought me along and we collaborated on a piece for Monocle about how Amos & Andy would have dealt with the Civil Rights movement--my first published freelance article.
I had never worked anywhere at night, let alone all night, and I spent every night at home desperately trying to sleep from 8 to 11 p.m., but mainly I stared at the grease-stained walls of my drab little room and listened to the clangorous street sounds below--those towed cars being delivered to the garage across the street, accompanied by profane hollers from the mechanics in some dialect that was part Italian and part Brooklynese.
When I went to work at midnight, I was exhausted from trying to sleep, exacerbated by the pressures of a new job at a strange place during a graveyard shift, one of a handful of scraggly reporters. I was a rewrite guy, something I’d never been, let alone on a New York tabloid filled with fast, skilled rewrite aces.
After three months of treading water, Al Davis let me know that my summer trial was up and that they wouldn’t be keeping me on. I was neither surprised nor especially disappointed, since it was clear my days at The Post were numbered. By now it was September, and I had enough money saved so that I could afford to last out the year looking for something else before I might be forced to skulk back to California.
After being dumped by The New York Post after three months of general ineptitude, I cheekily applied for all sorts of jobs for which I was clearly unqualified. The first was at a cheesy fan magazine in search of an editor, another was a job planting items with gossip columnists for a press agent holed up in a shoebox office off Times Square.
I didn’t get the fan magazine job because, when the publisher gave me some old issues to take home to study and suggest snappier cover lines for, I came in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the next day with great ways to upgrade the magazine with incisive articles --just what he wasn’t looking for. If anything, he wanted to make the magazine even sleazier.
The press agent, right out of “Broadway Danny Rose,” gave me a list of his clients--third-rate comedians and fourth-rate restaurants--and asked me to give him a few one-liners that he could put in the mouths of clients that had supposedly been uttered while dining at one of the eateries. This is how Woody Allen and many another whiz kid-to-be started, but I was far too idealistic to think of taking such a lowly job.
So shocked was I to learn that this was how column items in New York papers were generated, I never called the flack back. Instead, I applied for a job editing a Brooklyn Heights weekly, yet another bad idea, journeying to a lovely corner of Brooklyn I’d never seen, trudging through an early snowfall in an autumnal twilight for the job interview that never came to anything--a vivid memory still.
I was, however, hooked by the charm of Brooklyn Heights and eventually moved there a few years later, not far from The Candlelight, a romantic restaurant where I courted my wife-to-be. The Candlelight served warm popovers and apple butter. This was a pre-Woody Allen version of New York, with cute tree-lined streets named for fruits (Pineapple, Cranberry) and gorgeous old brownstones. It had the warmth of a turn-of-the-century village, except that Norman Mailer lived there; I even once saw him walking his dog.
After the fire incident, I had found a studio apartment in Greenwich Village with a Russian landlady--an ex-actress (she said) who made it clear that she did not permit either hot plates or “ladies of the evening”--both foreign to me. Likewise, my bathroom was equipped with a peculiar appliance that turned out to be a bidet, which a preppy from Princeton down the hall explained to me. Our building had once housed a bordello.
My one-room place had a huge fan, no air-conditioning, with gold brocade curtains and a chandelier. It didn’t strike me as forlorn or poetic, just exotically different from my snug tile-roofed bungalow in San Jose. Here, I cooled food on the window sill in winter and learned the native folkways and lingo (a “reg’lah” coffee was with milk and sugar) and got used to New York City life: its fevered pace, casual brutishness and the overriding angst that could make any simple transaction, like going to the dry cleaners, a three-act drama. “Seinfeld” captured all of that free-floating craziness beautifully.
I was equally struck by the intense nonstop politics of New York City. I’d scarcely had a political thought in my life, but in New York one is expected to--forced to--have an opinion on everything social, political and cultural. I avidly read The Village Voice, with its angry articles about Carmine DeSapio and the Village Independent Democrats (led by Edwin Koch, who, in his pre-mayoral days, took his laundry to the launderette across the street from me), The Living Theater and Jonas Mekas’ excrutiatingly arcane reports on experimental filmmakers--all of it news to me, along with the burgeoning Andy Warhol/Max’s Kansas City scene.
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hung out with Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams and Sen. Eugene McCarthy. I am certainly making lots of new friends here in New York City." |
 Drawing by Gerald Nachman |
I once went to Max’s Kansas City, but for the wrong reasons--for the food, not the rock bands or the campy happening “scene” made famous by Warhol, a guru whose alleged fascination eluded me, then as now. At a party, I actually saw Warhol seated on the floor in a corner, legs crossed, the great `60s guru of something, looking as bored as I was.
Another time, I was taken to a party by an art maven with the only-in-New York name of Barbaralee Diamonstein. It began at 10 p.m., like all chic New York dinner parties, and I wound up sitting next to an odd little guy with a mustache staring into space, both of us juggling paper plates on our laps. Suddenly I recognized the odd duck. It was Tennessee Williams. (The actress Lois Chiles was there, also Richard Chamberlain, close friends of Tennessee’s, I later learned.)
I mumbled something to Williams about having seen him interviewed on “The Dick Cavett Show,” to which he whispered, “Chahmin’ boah, Dick.” That was it. A very New York moment--at once exciting and empty, like the Warhol sighting, the sort of moment that could happen to you in New York at any time, without warning.
Another night, I found myself at a party where Eugene McCarthy, then at the height of his fame, was holding court in a back bedroom with rapt acolytes gathered at his feet, nodding and cooing over his every pearl of wisdom, however indecipherable. I realized how far removed I was from accepted, indeed inbred liberal New York dogma--the political rectitude, the constant sharp, shrill debates--which only added to my sense of being an outsider, a naive tourist among restless, intense natives.
So, where was that glittering Algonquin Round Table crowd that had enticed me here in the first place? I seem to have arrived too late for the party and felt like a wallflower at another mid-`60s bash already in progress. What sort of bait and switch was this? In New York, I realized what an unrepentant California lad I was. I loved New York, still do, and go there often, but it remains a vastly different country, one where, at 26, I was a barefoot boy in a manic, spinning, bewildering metropolis. In any case, clearly I wasn’t in San Jose anymore.
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©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The color illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. The black and white drawing is by the author and is used with his permission. 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 March 5, 2007.
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