A Writer's Life (42 page)

“But what if one of these African-American women on the campus had been raped by a white man from Selma?” I asked. “How would you have reported
that
?”

“That's a hypothetical question, and I don't really know the answer,” he said. After giving it some thought, he said that if it
had
been a reversed situation—rapist white/victim black—it
would
probably have sparked a public protest led by black student activists, and this would have undoubtedly drawn outside media attention. He assumed this, he said, because of what he himself had seen during his freshman year on the campus, in 1991. Having heard that some white female students had attended a fraternity house costume party in blackface and had attached basketballs under their skirts to simulate pregnancy, Kelley decided to publish an account of this in
The Crimson White
. His story was picked up by the Associated Press and wired around the country. A camera crew from CNN soon appeared on the Alabama campus to film the black-led protest rally, which was also joined by several sympathetic white students. Hundreds of demonstrators marched past the Sigma Chi fraternity house where the costume party had taken place, and someone hurled a brick through one of the building's windows. The crowd also gathered in front of the offending girls' Kappa Delta sorority house, shouting words of condemnation up toward the darkened windows and locked doors of the white-columned manor, which was being guarded by a row of police officers.

This had been the first time that Sean Kelley had seen how his journalism could inflame and arouse the passions of other people, and the experience instilled within him a heightened sense of responsibility and even feelings of remorse. In bringing national attention to what he described as the “stupidity” of a few white sorority girls, he had unwittingly resurrected on the UA campus the specter of George Wallace, which was an association that hardly any of Kelley's contemporaries and elders desired or deserved. The behavior of those girls was not typical of the UA student body, he explained, and yet he had chosen to expose them in print because he sought the acclaim it would possibly bring him as a young investigative reporter. His story appeared on page one of
The Crimson White
, and it was also a worthy addition to his scrapbook when he applied
to the
Birmingham Post-Herald
for the correspondent's position, which he obtained in 1992.

But now, as he spoke to me a year later in the car during my homecoming visit, he said that he was no longer entirely sure that he would pursue a career in journalism following his graduation. He knew only that, in his report about the rape in that morning's
Post-Herald
, he had been colorblind. He had not wanted to risk stereotyping black people any more than he had wanted to sensationalize the story by revealing that it had been a white woman from Selma who had been preyed upon.

During the days that I remained on the campus, the police had nothing further to say about the rape case. More security guards had been quickly added to the college's parking lots, and flyers alerting everyone to the occurrence had been posted on dormitory bulletin boards and elsewhere. But in the weeks and months that followed, the identity of the rapist would remain a mystery; and, according to what Sean Kelley would subsequently communicate to me via the mail or during our many exchanges over the telephone, there remained a palpably muted reaction to the rape on the Alabama campus. There were no “take back the night” rallies by white feminists, no interracial discussions initiated by any groups of student leaders, and no follow-up articles in the Alabama press. After having published a short piece in
The Crimson White
that was similar to what he had done for the
Post-Heraldy
, Kelley had been told by his editor in Birmingham that no further coverage was necessary. In essence, Kelley said, there was general agreement between the two of them that this was a one-day story.

I was able, with Sean Kelley's assistance, to arrange an interview with the young Selma woman during one of my later visits to the University of Alabama. She agreed to see me, with the understanding that I would not publish her name, but in our two meetings she basically told me what she had already told the police. She said that she hoped to forget as quickly as possible what had happened to her, and to concentrate on her studies and eventually graduate with a degree in education. Her father had also graduated from the University of Alabama, she said, and having been provided with her parents' address, I managed to see them when I was next in Selma.

Both her mother and father had been born into prominent old families. Her mother hardly spoke a word to me during our interview, but her father had plenty to say.

“I would have liked to have killed that man for what he did to my daughter,” he said. “And I could have found out who did it, if I'd wanted
to,” he went on, indicating that the police were inadequate to the task of tracking down the culprit and rendering justice. “When I heard what had happened, I drove right up there so fast that it's a wonder I didn't kill somebody along the way. Oh, I could have sued the university,” he declared, “and if I had done it, I would have won. They were negligent. The university was definitely negligent,” he repeated, citing in particular having inadequate security in the freshman dormitory's parking lot. “But I had to back away from it. I
wanted
to get involved, to open up that case and get involved, but I had to back away. I just didn't want to put all of us through all the publicity and the rest of it.…”

He was speaking to me in his office, which was located within a large framed building that stood along the edge of a gravel road and led to the entrance of what had long been the family's cotton plantation. Adjacent to this land was the highway that Martin Luther King, Jr., and his civil rights followers had used in 1965 while traveling toward Montgomery.

P
RIOR TO MY HOMECOMING VISIT TO
A
LABAMA
, I
HAD FREQUENTLY
been in contact with the newly appointed editor of
The New Yorker
, Tina Brown, a forty-year-old British-born, Oxford-educated blonde who reminded me of my high school English teacher—a comely, decorous, and demanding taskmistress who was often at the center of my teenage erotic fantasies, and who was the first woman to personify for me the awesome combination of sex appeal and professional power.

In fairness to Tina Brown, I should explain that these dual qualities in her case were accompanied by a well-bred manner and a subtle sense of humor and also the capacity to influence people through a bit of flattery and a directive style that was never so ironclad as to seem unreasonable. I further think that Brown was particularly compelling and seductive when dealing with men of means or other assets who were close to the age of her father, George Hambley Brown, a film producer, whom she adored and who, in turn, stalwartly supported and encouraged her throughout her meteoric rise in the magazine business, beginning in London as the editor of the
Tatler
when she was twenty-five.

Two years later, in 1981, she married a man who was twenty-five years her senior, the celebrated fifty-two-year-old editor of the London
Times
, Harold Evans, who, when she first fell in love with him, six years before, had been married for decades to a woman with whom he had three children. Another important man in Tina Brown's life, and the same age as Harold Evans, was the American media entrepreneur Samuel I. New-house, who would agreeably lose millions of dollars while underwriting her career in New York, first installing her as the editor of
Vanity Fair
in 1984 and then transferring her in 1992 to
The New Yorker
. Notwithstanding her lavish spending on editorial production and promotion, and the high fees and liberal expense accounts she extended to her writers, photographers, and other contributors, she actually increased the market value of the Newhouse properties by adding to their name recognition
and by tailoring their appeal to increasing numbers of readers and advertisers. She was called the “Queen of Buzz” by Judy Bachrach, author of a biography about Tina Brown and Harold Evans, and the writer and ex-editor of
The New Republic
, Andrew Sullivan, saw Brown as enthralled with “the crazed cult of contemporaneity,” adding that she was a “woman of her time, acutely in sync with the delirious daydream of the 1990s and the media vanities it fostered and to which many of us fell victim.”

Although she drew much media scrutiny in the United States, as she had earlier in England, her detractors rarely seemed to rattle her to the point of discouragement. “The dogs bark,” she said, “and the caravan moves on.”

I first met her, along with Harold Evans, in New York during the late 1980s at a book party celebrating the latter's memoir,
Good Times, Bad Times
, in which, among other things, Evans wrote about his unpleasant experiences with the London
Times
's owner, Rupert Murdoch, who had fired him in 1983, a year after Murdoch had become the proprietor. This was less than two years after the Evans-Brown marriage and two years before they would settle in New York—she as the thirty-year-old doyenne at
Vanity Fair
, and he as a fifty-five-year-old newsroom veteran with a distinguished past and an uncertain future.

But by 1990, he had been selected by S. I. Newhouse to serve as the president and publisher of the Random House trade division, and with her elevation to
The New Yorker
in 1992, Tina and Harold were generally recognized as the reigning couple in the capital of communications. Nan and I enjoyed attending dinners at the couple's East Side residence, occasions that brought together individuals from the worlds of entertainment, publishing, fashion, finance, and politics. And one day when I was having lunch with Tina Brown during the summer of 1993, seated next to her at her usual corner table at the Royalton Hotel on West Forty-fourth Street, a short walk away from
The New Yorker
's headquarters, I was pleased and honored to hear her express the wish that I become a contractual contributor to her magazine. I could have my own office at
The New Yorker
, she said, and be identified as the “writer-at-large,” which was the title she had bestowed upon Norman Mailer when he had worked with her at
Vanity Fair
.

What appealed to me about Brown's proposal was that it would offer me relief, at least during the one year's length of the proposed
New Yorker
contract, from my ridiculous life as a prolific author of unfinished manuscripts. Despite all the time that I had spent in familiarizing myself with such restaurant personalities as Nicola Spagnolo, Elaine Kaufman, and Robert Pascal, and despite my delving deeply into the history of the
“Willy Loman” building of bad omens at 206 East 63rd Street—
and
all my research on the subject of Alabama—I had
nothing
that I could rightly point to as a book in progress.

I wondered if part of my problem was in choosing to write about people and places that changed little over prolonged periods of time, and about which it was difficult to draw conclusions. What could be concluded, for example, about the complex situation existing in present-day Selma? It was also possible that I was subjecting myself unduly to pondering and procrastinating because I tended to see each and every subject from different angles and varying viewpoints—a prismatic vision that is said to be commonplace among the people of Italy. I once read a historical novel by Peter Nichols about Italy's Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, a militant clergyman who was loyal to the Spanish Bourbon monarchy in Naples and led a popular late-eighteenth-century uprising against the invading forces of Napoléon, and one of the book's characters laments, “We Italians have suffered enough from being able to see too many sides at once.”

If I worked for Tina Brown, I would not have that option, nor would I have much time for ruminating. I would become part of a fast-paced weekly magazine, directed by Brown's surefire instincts and youthful, though experienced, judgment. Still, she had tilted this magazine more toward topicality and “buzz,” and I was not sure that I would fit in, especially if she assigned me to do profiles about people who had just entered the limelight or otherwise met the current definition of celebrity. Back in the mid-1960s, a year after leaving the
Times
, I had enjoyed working for
Esquire
's editor, Harold Hayes, under the terms of a one-year contract, but
Esquire
was a monthly, and I believed that with Hayes I had been allowed more space and time than Tina Brown would presently permit, although in this matter I realized I could be wrong. It was true, however, that when I had written about famous people for
Esquire
, they were usually past their prime, or were dealing with the downside of success. In fact, I had contemplated writing
more
about obscurity and failure when I began meeting with Tina Brown, but, assuming that nothing would be of less interest to her, I hesitated discussing it. But I hesitated, too, about becoming one of her contractual writers, thinking that it was not a good idea at the age of sixty-one to do what I might have already done better when thirty years younger. Also, I was motivated by the notion I might rise above my state of indecision and discontent by writing about
other people's
discontent and despair, and I believed that I should do so
immediately
and lightheartedly in a short book that might be my homage to George Orwell's
Down and Out
, or rather my own “Profiles in Discouragement” or “The Loser's Guide to Living.” It would deal with failure, perseverance, and more failure.
Not an exhilarating subject for a publisher, obviously, but I thought that with so many books in the marketplace dealing with success, and how to get rich, and how to win, it might be instructive to read something about people who had perhaps developed a unique talent for losing, or for running businesses into the ground, or behaving in ways that inevitably led to foreclosures and bankruptcies, marital separations and divorces, misdemeanors and felonies.