|
|
 |
|
PART TWENTY-ONE YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN -- AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN
|
Our hero returns to S.F.
and all-new adventures
of TheColumnists.com
I decided that maybe my New York Period was played out when I went to a publishing party in 1976 and thought to myself, “Oh, no, not Truman Capote again!” I had reached this slightly jaded state after 10 years in New York City--three years the first time in the 1960s, seven years the second time around in the `70s.
New York is great if you know you can always leave. Day to day, however, it can grind you down, especially if you have experienced the easy California life, where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day. After seven years, even writing a syndicated humor column for the biggest paper in captivity, The New York Daily News, you begin to take the place--even the glitterati parties--for granted. The magic that drew you there begins to look a little frayed around the edges, like going backstage at a Broadway show that seems so glorious from out front.
Before I went to The Chronicle, I was still writing for The Daily News but out of San Francisco, a bizarre arrangement. Mary and I decided to get back together after a year apart and return to the Bay Area, so we devised an argument for me to present to The Daily News: since I didn’t write about New York in the column, there was really no point in living there. The paper had already let me escape the horridly humid New York summers to live in the Bay Area every year, so it wasn’t such an improbable proposal.
Mary had a possible job offer, which I made sound far more definite, hinting that it would be unfair for me to stand in her way (this was in 1977, during the height of the feminist movement). I also kiddingly pointed out that it would be cheaper for The News if I lived in San Francisco (making a desk available); and lastly, I noted that, in case of a major quake in San Francisco, the paper would have a man right on the scene.
When I went in to talk to Mike O’Neill, the lumbering executive editor, he gave one of his big har-har-hars at the earthquake argument and told me I could move there if I wanted but that he thought I was “making a big mistake to leave New York now,” just as I was building a following.
Looking back 35 years later, I think he was right. Leaving New York kept me from following through on magazine possibilities, like an aborted New Yorker tryout, but the idea of moving back to San Francisco after seven years of scrambling in New York was more of a domestic matter--a way to jump-start our marriage in a more restful, even romantic setting. O’Neill gave in, reluctantly, so we pulled up our tentative New York roots and headed back west--me for the third time in about a dozen years.
In practice, it was a lousy idea logistically. In that communications dark age, I had to call in my column to The News, dictating the entire thing to a harried copy desk man, or mail it special delivery and pray it got there on time. A few times, it arrived late, so I was forced to dictate every column by phone, a frustrating business.
Usually the desk guy in New York was in a hurry and misheard words or phrases, creating maddening typos and syntactical goofs in sentences that didn’t make sense in print; puns were often garbled. Worst of all was dictating what I hoped was a funny column to a humorless desk guy who never responded, let alone laughed; I strained in vain to hear even a small chuckle at my best lines. He no doubt resented having to type up a goddamn piece from some prima donna columnist out in California whom he probably envisioned basking by a swimming pool (New Yorkers think San Francisco is about 10 miles from Los Angeles).
While it was nice to return as a minor conquering hero (in my eyes anyway), I lived a schizoid life for two years when my column was still running in The Daily News and I was living in San Francisco. Nobody in the Bay Area saw it and always asked what I was doing; in New York, people wondered where I was. The column was syndicated in The San Francisco Examiner, which had begun losing circulation rapidly; everyone I knew read The Chronicle.
So from 1977, when I moved back to San Francisco, to 1979, when I left The News, I led a ghostly existence. I didn’t enjoy working at home and talked The Examiner into letting me use a desk, so I could feel connected to a newspaper again. I shared an office with Bill Mandel, their edgy TV critic, and Kevin Starr, the city librarian who did a column there before becoming California’s state librarian. Starr was stuffy but likable; Mandel was cocky and funny in small doses. He could insult me and make me laugh.
It felt great to be home again in a newspaper among bantering eccentrics. Newspapers are seductive places, and once you’ve worked in a few you wonder how anyone can go to a regular office every day. I’ve been away from a newspaper for 15 years but still love any excuse to meet friends there for lunch, meandering through the once-dreaded city room feeling all warm and fuzzy.
I had a little visibility because my book, Playing House, had just come out and The Examiner excerpted a few chapters; it was reviewed here and there. I tapped an Examiner illustrator, Ed Renfro, to do the drawings, and he came up with a batch of funny, antic sketches that Doubleday liked. Having a book published was/is a major life moment that begins the day a big box arrives on the porch with a thud, with a dozen freshly printed new books inside. The new book feels great, looks great, it even smells great. There is nothing, sex included, like the moment you first sit on your sofa with your book in your hands. Even after five books, the thrill does not diminish one tingle.
I couldn’t quit looking at the book,
examining it all over like a rare historical artifact, turning
it this way and that, studying my jacket photo on the back cover--the
one with the natty blue handkerchief stuck in my pocket that
the photographer had supplied--and thumbing through it. I had
seen the book in bound galleys, of course, and I’d seen
the sketches and the cover but this was different--now, it was
all together. My book!
Everything seemed to be happening at once in 1979--my book, my
divorce (the hoped-for reconciliation after returning to San
Francisco hadn’t taken, alas), a little musical revue I
got involved in producing and writing, and now, out of nowhere,
a major job possibility at The Chronicle when the paper’s
popular movie and pop music critic, John L. Wasserman, was killed
in a horrible freeway head-on collision that also killed a couple
in the oncoming car. Wasserman, who lived a wild life of wine,
women, song and drugs, had been drinking. The Bay Area journalism
and entertainment scene was stunned.
Wasserman was more than a critic, he was a celebrity who lived above The Boarding House, a major club in the 1970s, and hobnobbed with many of the performers he covered--like Joan Baez, with whom he had an affair, and Woody Allen, who became a pal, to name just two prominent friends. John mixed freely and conspicuously in the local show biz world, testified at obscenity trials for Lenny Bruce and once even became a stand-in for George C. Scott in “Petulia,” shot in San Francisco, often writing about it.
He was good looking, roguish, dressed in black and enjoyed his star power--and his journalistic power. Though I liked him OK one-on-one, I thought he was a show-off, but John was smart, witty and developed a big following for his funny reviews of dumb movies that the paper’s lead critic, Paine Knickerbocker, let him review as flamboyantly as he wished. More seriously, he reviewed pop music, played bongo drums at parties and was an authority on rock music, filling the large, revered shoes of Ralph J. Gleason.
When Wasserman died, his own shoes seemed impossible to fill. He left a big hole but everyone said I should apply for the job. I resisted at first, feeling I wanted to write humor or a biography, not cover entertainment again as I had for four years at The Oakland Tribune 10 years earlier. I thought I had left 9 a.m. screenings, dumb junkets and musical road shows behind, but, feeling it might be a lost opportunity, I dutifully went in and talked to executive editor Bill German about the job of entertainment columnist that many would have killed for.
 |
has a way with words, but somebody needs to introduce him to a little thing called rock 'n' roll." |
I was half-hearted about it but German knew my work and seemed interested, which stoked my own interest. It was the first time I’d been courted since Joe Ridder had called me into the San Jose Mercury at 22 to offer me a job as TV critic 20 years earlier. German took me to lunch at Bardelli’s, a favorite media haunt I knew all too well from my Tribune days of interviewing scores of movie and stage people. I think I told German that I was ready to leave The Daily News but didn’t think I wanted to go to another newspaper, that I wanted to write a biography of Robert Benchley, a proposal for a book of which my agent Scott Meredith was then circulating.
German--a wry, wily, soft-spoken New Yorker with a wolfish expression who was half-deaf but loved to tell long stories--told me to think about it. My old celebrity interviews from The Post and recent humor columns from The Daily News, plus the recent publication and reviews of Playing House, all must have made me seem to him a likely candidate to write funny reviews, a la Wasserman.
Even though German told me the paper wasn’t looking for another John Wasserman, plainly they were. After a few days, the thought of such a high-profile job, and its attendant perks (“Just think of all the women you’ll meet!” said a bachelor friend) plus a good steady paycheck, slowly began pulling me toward the job.
Everyone I knew said I’d be nuts to turn it down, until I finally realized they were probably right and sent German a letter saying that if he was still interested then I was; I even outlined some ideas I had about how I’d like to approach the job. A few days later I went in to meet the publisher, Dick Thieriot, whose grandfather had founded the paper, and took the job. Fifteen years earlier I had scrounged to get a mere reporting slot there.
I wrote Scott Meredith that I didn’t see how I could write a major biography and also hold down a fulltime column-writing job and thus had decided to delay the Benchley book for now. My rationale, which I talked myself into, was that the book was something I could always write whereas a job like the plum now offered to me came along rarely. Meredith thought I was crazy, said it was “the single worst decision he’d ever heard” in all his years as an agent, and was thoroughly disgusted with me. That hurt, but the Chronicle job was looking better and better every day, so I didn’t agonize long about sending back a $30,000 contract from Henry Holt, a pretty nice advance in 1979.
I suspect what most changed my mind was the prospect of being a big fish in a medium-size pond--or bay. At both The Mercury and The Tribune I’d been pretty well read, but that was San Jose and Oakland, and while it was nice to be known in my hometown, The San Francisco Chronicle was the place to be seen. Even at The New York Daily News, giant though it was, I never felt I was read by people I knew and respected. The Chronicle was never a great paper, but it was a great showcase, a great writer’s paper
I arrived there at the tail-end of its golden age, when columnists like Charles McCabe, Art Hoppe, Terrence O’Flaherty and Stanton Delaplane were beloved figures, read by everybody. Herb Caen was in his prime and the paper’s star for half a century. While I was still writing for The Daily News, we met Caen at some event and Mary, no shrinking violet, called him later and arranged for us to have lunch with him.
I was far too much in awe of Caen even to consider suggesting anything so bold but he said sure. I was being syndicated in The Examiner then, just before I got the Chronicle job, when we met him at his favorite hangout, the Washington Square Bar & Grill (the “Washbag,” as he labeled it). All I recall from lunch is Caen asking, “Why would you ever want to come back here?”--a strange, indeed heretical remark to hear coming from Mr. San Francisco. He almost sounded bitter, as if he’d rather be a New York columnist like me, a job he had turned down many times to stay in San Francisco.
It later dawned on me that maybe Caen wasn’t eager to have me in the same town, not that I (or anyone) could ever be a threat to him, but he always guarded his turf carefully, jealously, defensively, sensitive to any encroaching young interlopers.
He enjoyed bantering, maybe even flirting, with Mary, and she was far more at ease with him than I. He seemed at lunch to be playing the smooth Herb Caen role he had so artfully crafted over the years he’d been king of the city’s seven hills. He playfully talked and joked without revealing anything of himself or his actual life. Did he even have one? Those who knew him said no, that the column was his entire life.
With Caen, you felt like a test audience for his wisecracks, and as if he expected you to come up with equally quick retorts or a bit of gossip that might be recycled as an item. You always felt that you had to be on your game, batting back whatever wisecrack he served up. Like Walter Winchell, his idol, he wasn’t interested in a story or a comment if it lacked item potential.
I had the same feeling of being an audience of one when I lunched with Charles McCabe, who was then the paper’s favorite antagonist, its outspoken Irish rebel who gleefully, unflinchingly, took on any and all unpopular causes. McCabe was politically incorrect before the term was invented. He personified PI-ness, taking on women and feminists, local heroes, the Giants and anything that the readers adored. Love him or hate him, you had to follow McCabe. Over lunch, like Caen, he was on stage while I listened in wonderment, feeding him lines or questions he would leap upon. He looked alarmed when I ordered iced tea instead of liquor, cracking, “The Irish drink and the Jews eat.”
Art Hoppe was another beloved Chronicle icon whom years later I got to know much better through Leah Garchik, a friend who had once worked as Hoppe’s assistant. Art was a far more accessible guy--not “on” like Caen and McCabe--with a big generous laugh that made you feel funny. Hoppe was a genuinely decent, open guy who had his own jester façade but you could have a real conversation with him and not have to play the awed audience awaiting the master’s every gem.
Caen and Hoppe came to work every day, unlike McCabe, who loved to boast that he almost never set foot in the office. He famously worked out of Gino & Carlo’s, a North Beach saloon where he set up his office, got his mail, made phone calls and, between swigs of ale, wrote his column taunting readers with his vitriolic, erudite views. He was very much in the spirit of an earlier Chronicle columnist and onetime New York Herald Tribune legend, Lucius Beebee, both disciples of H.L. Mencken.
My first day at The Chronicle, to my amazement, I was assigned an office right next to Caen’s. I had a cubicle but Caen had an actual office, with a door and a leather sofa and everything. It was piled high with gifts and geegaws from countless admirers, publicists and celebrities all working to curry favor with him. At Christmastime, the loot came in hourly, big packages trundled in on dollies by copyboys. He kept most of it.
Despite his bottomless expense account,
lavish salary and bagsful of goodies from near and far, whenever
there was a going-away or a birthday party for anyone at the
office, Caen would line up for a piece of cake clutching his
little paper plate--a freeloading newsman to the end. It was
either pathetic or endearing, I could never decide.
After settling into my office the first day and feeling quite
heady, I figured it was my place to go next door and say hello
to Caen, now my colleague and neighbor. I timidly tiptoed into
his assistant’s cubicle, was told the great man was in and
peeked my head through his door to ask if I could borrow a cup
of sugar. Without looking up from the copy he was editing, Caen
just muttered “Welcome aboard” and continued working.
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman
caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The cartoons are 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 July 16, 2007.
|
|
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Gerald Nachman. To send
an email, click here and don't forget to mention Gerald's name:
talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|