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TAKE ME BACK TO MANHATTAN!
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Mission: Find a humorless Gotham rag and liven it up
of TheColumnists.com
Four years into
my hitch as theater and movie critic/columnist at The Oakland
Tribune, I realized I hadn’t truly shaken the New York
stardust from my shoes.
Largely due to my joyous stint at the Trib, and some freelance
pieces I’d sold to the Los Angeles Times Calendar
and New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure sections,
I decided to give New York a second chance to make me a major
star.
While at the Trib, I’d gone to New York once or twice a year to review the shows and stay at the Algonquin (fulfilling a lifelong fantasy). Yet as much as I loved the job, I didn’t plan to stay in Oakland forever. At 33, I was still young and restless (and feckless), still star-struck on New York City. Three years there hadn’t got the bug out of my ear. I always felt that I had left town a little prematurely, distracted by my marriage, and hadn’t really cashed in what few chips I accumulated there.
I’ve always had to quit good jobs--at The San Jose Mercury, The New York Post, The Oakland Tribune--to advance to better ones. Also, I’d watched greenly as some of my old New York Post colleagues surged onward and upward--Nora Ephron mainly, but also Jack Newfield, a major voice at The Village Voice exposing corruption left and right; Sid Zion, who moved to The New York Times as an ace legal writer; and Leonard Schecter, who stayed at The Post but wrote best-sellers and was among the first of the new noisy “chipmunk” school of outspoken sportswriters who told it like it was (to echo Howard Cosell) rather than create myths like the old school “jock-sniffers.”
Meanwhile, Lou Cannon, an old pal from my San Jose Mercury days--really my only pal there--had somehow leaped to The Washington Post and become their foremost authority on Ronald Reagan, whom he covered at The Post and on whom he wrote several best-selling books--all of which was astonishing to me.
When I’d known Lou at The Mercury, where he became an older mentor to me, carefully critiquing my columns, he was but a humble wire editor, and I figured he would remain a wire editor for life. But people sometimes surprise you, and Lou Cannon was one who really did surprise me--and I suspect many who knew him then.
A bright but unassuming little guy with a toothbrush moustache, Lou looked like a classic put-upon Thurber man, with a little heh-heh chuckle. He meandered endlessly about anything political until you had to jam a sock in him, but he was incredibly informed, often quoting his idol David Broder, and had wider horizons in mind beyond E. San Antonio Road in downtown San Jose.
All of which helped to dislodge me from Oakland and propel me eastward again in 1971. Unlike my first foray into New York in 1963, I didn’t send out any resumes ahead and this time I drove across country, leaving my wife Mary at home in Oakland until I could find an apartment for us and maybe even a job.
I didn’t want to return to The New York Post a third time, but my clips from there and The Tribune got me an interview at The Daily News after The Times decided against me--and I them. While in Oakland, I had written to a guy whose writing I liked at The Times, Richard Shepard, who, because of my Sunday humor pieces in Arts & Leisure, arranged for me to meet Arthur Gelb, the much-revered Times cultural editor--“If you ever get to New York,” Shepard said, “stop by.”
I got to New York--indeed, flew there on purpose a few weeks later just to meet Gelb for what turned out to be the shortest job interview on record. Gelb--a tall guy with prominent features: Bulging eyes, beaky nose, large lips--gave me about five minutes, begrudgingly, and he stood up the whole time we talked.
The Times city room itself was a vast expanse, the biggest office of any kind I’d ever been in, rows of desks as far as the eye could see, with people rushing madly about holding what looked to be intense conversations. It was a frantic, intimidating place unlike the cozy, shabby environs of The New York Post, which suddenly seemed incredibly homey compared to the monster room--hall really--in which I felt lost.
Shepard had escorted me over to introduce me, then politely left. Gelb seemed distracted, with a mildly annoyed, even pained, expression, as if on his way somewhere. Instead of inviting me into an office to sit down, he simply stood there and asked how I thought I might be of use to The Times, no doubt thinking, “I can get rid of this schnook in two minutes.” I mumbled something, and he asked if I’d be interested in a job on the rewrite bank--a phrase that struck terror in my heart.
OK, I hadn’t expected Gelb to offer me a job as second-string theater critic to Walter Kerr, but rewrite? Still? He clearly hadn’t read the clips I’d sent to Shepard: columns, reviews, interviews, features, humorous pieces for the Sunday Times and the one news story I had done for The Times as their so-called Northern California cultural stringer (Shepard’s title) on the closing of the hungry i in 1968.
I can’t recall what I told Gelb after his halfhearted offer to try me out as a rewrite man, but my face must have registered massive dismay, because I could only mutter something vaguely positive, thank him and shuffle away so he could head wherever he had been going before I’d blocked his path. So much for the damn New York Times.
I’d make it without them, I decided, after I got to New York again and found a room at the charming old Prince George Hotel on E. 28th Street off a barren stretch of Fifth Avenue dominated by fabric dealers. I lived at the Prince George, with a lobby full of grandfather clocks, and in time sent for Mary. We wound up living there six months after I snuck her into my room (as if to prove two can live as cheaply and sneakily as one), and dragged her luggage up the backstairs, which gave me a 30-year hernia.
So I lowered my sights and tried The Daily News, which, like The Post before I worked there, I’d never read except when it was on a subway seat next to me, screaming about New Jersey ax murders, Mets debacles and lotto winners.
I got in to see the Sunday magazine editor there, a genial fresh-faced guy named Richard Lemon who had been a Newsweek editor, part of an effort by The News’ new editor-in-chief, Mike O’Neill, to upgrade the staff by hiring away a lot of Newsweek people--feature writers and editors, one of whom was a new features editor named Sheward Hagerty.
Hagerty was recruiting new, hip young writers from the city room and beyond to spice up a staff that was heavy on hard-nosed reporters with Irish and Italian names. The Newsweekers would, it was hoped, give the old News a shot of badly needed sophistication in an effort to compete with The Times.
Shew Hagerty turned out to be one of my luckiest breaks in New York. Totally out of his element at The News (despite his name), Shew was a Yale graduate who had been Newsweek’s London correspondent and lived in Wilton, Conn., a WASP bastion where nobody read The Daily News and his sons played ice hockey. He once invited me to dinner there and I felt like a Jew in a Protestant china shop.
Clearly a man of breeding, Hagerty wore wingtips and broadcloth shirts, a little frayed, as if to show he was a regular guy, not an elite Newsweek snob from Westchester County. Hagerty sent me to see Lemon, who assigned me a cover story on Mike Wallace, just emerging as a star on a new show called “60 Minutes.”
I researched the hell out of it and Wallace was hugely cooperative, even to the point of asking me to dinner with him and his wife Loraine at a chic Park Avenue bistro, Perigord Park. I had never been asked to dine socially with an interview subject, surely not a TV star, but Wallace insisted and it worked out for both of us.
I got a rare domestic glimpse of Wallace and his wife and he got a great cover story-- not a puff piece, by any means, and in fact full of negative comments about his nasty tough-guy interview style, but he loved it. Everyone read, or at least saw, The News Sunday magazine cover, which also had a great caricature of Wallace.
Mainly on the strength of the Wallace piece, Hagerty hired me to join a team of writers in the paper’s new Special Features department, which would do longer pieces on social and cultural matters, also science stories, political pieces and even investigative stuff, usually reported by a classic Daily News reporter named Joe Martin. Joe had been at the paper 30 years, knew where all the bodies were buried and loved to talk about stupid police, the Mafia and anything criminal. He looked like an Irish cop and talked out of one side of his mouth but he was funny and even sort of grandfatherly.
It was a unique kick to join The Daily News, the model for The Daily Planet in “Superman” because of its huge revolving globe in the lobby and rowdy tabloid reputation. The paper had the largest circulation in the country--2 million-plus daily, close to 3 million on Sundays. True, nobody I knew read it, me included, but I tried to overlook that. It turned out to be the right place at the right time. While The New York Post was awash in stylish, witty writers, The News was heavy-handed, without much levity, its clever headlines aside (“Headless Man Found in Topless Bar,” “Ford to City: Drop Dead”), so I might be able to add something new.
I got assigned all the lighter stuff--pieces on how “Who’s Who in America” is patched together, a two-parter on socialites in which George Plimpton revealed his classic ploy for ducking party bores (“Always carry two drinks and, if you need to get away, just say you have to deliver the other drink to someone”) and something about how to “dress for success” when the phrase was on everyone’s lips.
Hagerty’s assistant, John Quinn, the Special Features editor, fancied himself something of a dapper dresser and thought it hilarious to assign me a fashion feature. John was forever appalled by my California wardrobe, especially my penchant for wearing short-sleeve shirts during the summer, and always threatened to take me shopping at Paul Stuart’s, the fashionable men’s store.
Quinn was one of the paper's vivid characters--a tall, slender, sardonic guy (he always greeted my wife as “The first Mrs. Nachman”), full of high dudgeon and disdain for everything. He was forever sounding off in lengthy harangues about Jimmy Breslin (“a professional Mick”), Mayor Abe Beame and, most of all, the Daily News editors, writers and readers, which he thought were well beneath him even as he was constantly forced to cater to them.
John would stride up and down spewing invective, to our great amusement, but usually he kept his tongue in his cheek so you didn’t take him totally seriously. He mocked all of the paper’s star columnists, especially a nice guy named Sid Fields who wrote warm-hearted profiles in a column called “Only Human” that Quinn always referred to as “Barely Human.”
Over lunch at The Palm, he and Hagerty laughed privately at The News’s blue-collar readership. Hagerty and Quinn may have worked at The News but clearly they were not of it; they were well above it and made sure we realized it. The two of them edited our features from a slight remove, as if afraid of catching lower-class germs if they got too close to any actual readers.
Even more eccentric than John Quinn was the book critic, a lanky raw-boned guy from Atlanta named Judson Hand, whose vest was always speckled with cigarette ashes. Hand, like Quinn, had nothing but disdain for the readers and felt himself badly miscast at The News.
Judson sat with his long legs up on a desk piled high with stacks of books, largely unread, chatting into the phone all day or button-holing anyone within arm’s reach to rattle off his theories on poetry, religion, art, The News, the world, anything, in his thick Georgia drawl.
He never ceased blabbing but he was never boring; in fact, he was pretty funny, if you had 20 minutes to spare, and he was always trying out his best lines on you. Two of his cracks, which I still quote: “Ah want to be home but Ah don’t want to GO home” (via the F train to Brooklyn); and, remarking on an effete film critic, “Terry would be so much happier if only he’d been born gay.” (Maybe not: Terry managed to have a much-discussed affair with Judy Collins.)
The big moment in Judson’s week came each Friday when, after work, he would stuff review copies into big tote bags and trundle down to the Strand bookstore to cash them in for about half his week’s salary. Then suddenly, without warning, he didn’t go home one Friday, left his wife, moved in with a young book publicist and was rarely heard from again.
Meanwhile, I was gathering a small reputation
at the paper for my light pieces, so after a couple of years
I figured that maybe the time was ripe to talk to Hagerty and
editor Mike O’Neill about doing a humor column--an outlandish
idea, but what the hell? I was in an outlandish mood. New York
can do that to you.
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman caricature is ©2000
by Jim Hummel. The cartoon 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 April 23, 2007.
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