Behind the Times (36 page)

Late in 1986, when Punch Sulzberger announced his decision to appoint Max Frankel executive editor, Rosenthal began the shift to his new role of columnist. AIDS activists shifted their focus a bit. Larry Kramer, for example, moved from the Gay Men’s Health Crisis center to Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Kramer no longer denounced “the
Times
” or “the editor.” Rather, he criticized individual
Times
reporters, for their supposed failures in AIDS coverage. The criticism took highly public form. Kramer acknowledged “creative responsibility” for the Act Up campaign aimed at
Times
medical writer Gina Kolata. In the late winter of 1990, Act Up members affixed stickers on
Times
vending boxes around New York City. “Gina Kolata is the worst AIDS reporter in America,” the stickers read.

A year later, the guerrilla attacks let up. The
Times
was no longer regarded as the enemy. Allan Siegal amended the newsroom stylebook to allow the word “gay” to be used interchangeably with “homosexual.” Reporters came out of the closet, sometimes right into the columns of the “About Men” feature in the
Times Magazine
, to talk of their sexual orientation and HIV-positive status. The new publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, sent a message of support to a national association of gay and lesbian journalists, the new
Times
publicly aligning itself with its cause.

Perhaps the most dramatic “outing” at the
Times
involved Jeffrey Schmalz, a 1975 graduate of Columbia University who began working for the paper while still a student. Schmalz is a homosexual, “a reporter with AIDS who covers AIDS,” he informed
Times
readers in a remarkable article that appeared in the Week in Review section on December 20, 1992. He is also a self-described “by-the-book
Times
man.” He rose quickly through the ranks to become one of the youngest city editors at the paper; by 1980, he was a regional editor. Then, he says, his career trajectory stalled: “The executive editor at the time, Abe Rosenthal, was not comfortable with homosexuals, and so I was reassigned in 1984.” Pressed to be more specific, Schmalz conceded that Rosenthal “never made his homophobia explicit to me. My understanding is, he called in my editor and said, ‘I want that guy off the desk.’ ” Schmalz returned to reporting, and got a somewhat lateral assignment, career-wise, to cover politics out of the state capital in Albany. After Rosenthal left the newsroom, Schmalz returned to New York and to editing, this time on the national news desk.

One day in late 1990 Schmalz rose from his computer terminal and
suddenly fell to the newsroom floor. He was having an epileptic seizure—an early sign of the advance of the AIDS virus. Max Frankel was among those who rushed to Schmalz’s side. Over the next several months Schmalz rallied, returned to the paper, and fell sick again. “In February 1992, I almost died,” he says matter-of-factly. He had brain surgery, took the drug AZT, and by the fall was well enough to cover the presidential campaign. In March 1993, his T-cell count stood at 0 to 2 (the normal count is 1,000); but he was working full-time again—in fact, he was writing and talking about his own experiences as a gay, HIV-positive man in the
Times
newsroom, breaking the informal barriers
Times
people ordinarily throw up around their work. “I am going to die of AIDS—so my life’s now a gift,” he explained. “That’s why I speak now. When a homophobic editor took me off the desk, I didn’t fight it. I was cowardly. When I got AIDS, I decided not to be cowardly anymore. I would speak out.”

There was also a practical side to his decision. “AIDS is a good news story. I was and am a child of the
Times.
I know how to work the paper, how to get play for stories, what language to use.” For Schmalz, too, the
Times
was more than a way to get good display for his stories. He didn’t march or contribute to AIDS groups: He was a
Times
reporter first, an AIDS sufferer second. He was single, he lived alone; “The newsroom is my support group.” The paper, he said, was changing under the younger Sulzberger, Frankel, and Lelyveld—“They’ve hired more women, blacks, gays.” A listener, skeptical, wondered about the
Times’
new enlightenment; perhaps demographic factors—the size and relative affluence of the homosexual community in the city—made “gay news” more compelling to management, and to advertisers. Schmalz appeared to consider the idea for a long moment. Well, “Frankel was sincere—there were real tears in his eyes” as he bent over the fallen Schmalz. But yes, perhaps “the
Times
is an institution driven by trends and politics.”

As for Rosenthal, after Schmalz went public with his illness, the former editor took the reporter to lunch. “He said there had been a terrible misunderstanding on the part of the middle-level editors,” Schmalz reports.
Imagine them thinking that he was homophobic!
Schmalz did not challenge Rosenthal’s account. “I thought to myself, The fact that he took me to lunch ‘to clear things up,’ that was enough for me.”

There were no more complaints about the “homophobic” Abe
Rosenthal. Columnist A. M. Rosenthal began referring to the AIDS epidemic as “the story of the decade” in his Op-Ed page space. He, as much as anyone, could read the new spirit of the day. By 1992 the transformation was complete. Together with his wife, Shirley Lord, he became a regular at the charity balls and fashion-industry cocktail parties intended to raise funds for AIDS research and care.

To their credit, the activist critics avoided overly glib analyses of Rosenthal’s psyche. But the proposition that Rosenthal somehow kept the AIDS story from being reported nevertheless misrepresented the news department’s overall record, and failed to take into account how the
Times
worked. A more thorough analysis would have included the Sulzberger family and its attitudes about “Gays and AIDS 101.” The role of the publisher was ignored by Kramer and mentioned only in passing by Kinsella, who reported that Punch Sulzberger—and his mother Iphigene Sulzberger—were furious after the
Times’
Sunday Travel section of April 6, 1975, ran a free-lance writer’s rollicking article about a week-long all-gay cruise from Florida to the Yucatan. The marketing strategies of the
Times
and their effects on Rosenthal’s news judgments also remained unexplored. The
Times’
energies in the early 1980s were still being channeled into its new sections and the related drive to build suburban circulation. An upbeat news report in the
Times
would please a number of crowds—among others, affluent readers and upper-end retail advertisers. If Rosenthal’s
Times
was slow to move on the AIDS story, it was not solely “because of” Rosenthal’s homophobia; there were other reasons: reporter Altman’s interests, the editors’ efforts to keep the paper “light and up”—as Sulzberger desired—and, probably, lower-ranking editors’ beliefs about Rosenthal’s homophobia. But Rosenthal was too much the competitive newsman to leave out the ingredient of serious news from his soup. He began giving the AIDS pandemic the attention it deserved.

In the end, too, the efforts of the cottage industry to “explain” Rosenthal fell short because the quest was poorly framed. It was never “his”
Times
; he was an employee. He worked for the Sulzberger’
Times.
Even as a hired hand, Rosenthal served as junior member of the team. He and his merry henchmen of the news department were pushed, prodded, and pulled along by Walter Mattson on the business side. The critics concentrated on Rosenthal, snarling and aggressive, king of the third-floor newsroom. They didn’t see Rosenthal, the serving
man, attentive to his ringmasters. Rosenthal was not a paper tiger. He wasn’t a monster, either. A midregister interpretation would sketch a competitive, angry, exuberant journalist, always looking over his shoulder, worrying about his prerogatives, fearful of those he believed out to challenge his authority. He constantly dramatized. He would have made a good tabloid journalist if he hadn’t gone to work for the
Times
: the Bronx boy’s tale of the ketchup sandwiches, beautiful Nehru and tacky Poland, poor Kitty Genovese, the rape of Kosinski. He confided to his friend Gay Talese that 1968 was the
worst year of his life. He was “sitting shivah” (the Jewish practice of mourning the dead). What events of 1968 had driven him into a mournful state? The Robert F. Kennedy assassination? The mounting American casualties in Vietnam? The turmoil on university campuses? The street riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago? Richard M. Nixon’s election? No. His friend, James Greenfield, wasn’t the new
Times
bureau chief in Washington. Punch Sulzberger had rejected Rosenthal-candidate Greenfield at the behest of James Reston, who conspired to put in his own man, Tom Wicker. Reston had won the
Times’
great New York–Washington power struggle. A decade later, in the fall of 1978, Rosenthal wrote his friend Jerzy Kosinski about another “worst time” of his life. The
Times
was shut by a strike; he had torn his knee cartilage and was (again) on crutches; a group of women at the
Times
was bringing a class-action suit against the paper, charging sex discrimination; his wife, Ann, was going in for a doctor’s appointment, and “if she turned out to be pregnant, I was going to kill myself.” And then the boy-from-the-Bronx punch line: “She wasn’t and I didn’t.”

Perhaps the best character analysis of the stormy, emotional Rosenthal came from Tom Wicker, who observed Rosenthal for over three decades. According to Wicker, “Rosenthal succeeded not because of his brilliance
but because of his tenacity. Over the years, he shot down all possible rivals. He was the great infighter, who wanted power.” Wicker said he noticed a new Rosenthal since the passing of his power. Others, too, commented upon Rosenthal’s new wife, his newly styled hair, his Paul Stuart suits, the calm demeanor and the ready smile. “The Most Happy Fella,” the writer Jeanie Kasindorf called him in a
New York
magazine feature article illustrated with photographs of Abe and Shirley Rosenthal in black tie at a Costume Institute gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Rosenthal signed a book contract in 1987. Six years later, he had not
produced a manuscript. The project remained vague. “It’s not really a memoir,” he told me. Then abruptly rising, and looking down at the tips of his tasseled shoes, he added: “I don’t know what it is right now. I don’t know the publication date.… Well, it’s a book.” Whatever the project’s final form, it will allow him to talk back to the axe grinders and the writers of dog shit—when he can find the time. Abe and Shirley Rosenthal are out four or five times a week during the New York social season.

Carlin Romano, a forty-year-old critic and journalist, arrived for his appointment with the managing editor, Arthur Gelb. After four decades with the
Times
, the sixty-five-year-old Gelb saw himself as the exuberant, excitable newshound, still on the prowl for new talent. Romano and Gelb had met at a party; Gelb said that he knew, and admired, Romano’s writings, particularly some of his free-lance critical essays. Gelb asked Romano to come in for an interview, “if you’re looking.” At the time, Romano was a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, on leave from the
Philadelphia Inquirer.
The year-long Columbia fellowship gave him the breathing space, as he told friends, “to consider my options.” Romano had been a philosophy major at Yale; after college he worked as a reporter for the
Washington Post
In 1980 he joined the
New York Daily News
as a feature writer and later became the book editor of the
Inquirer.
He and Gelb talked for forty minutes, mostly about books and how cultural news should be covered. Romano spent another thirty minutes with John Lee, an assistant managing editor responsible for supervising the
Times’
arts and cultural coverage.

Romano was unsure whether he wanted to write criticism or do cultural reporting for the
Times.
On one side, he told himself, “There’s the prestige of the place: no other book review outlet commanded as much attention.” Against that, he counted the drawbacks: “First, the careful, constrained, ‘balanced’ way that
Times
people have to write, even as critics. Second, the authority-bound system”—all those editing layers. “And now there were the new rules on outside work.” Much like the Washington bureauman Steve Roberts, who wanted to build up his regular panelist’s
role on public television, Romano hoped to continue writing for magazines and other journals. The
Times’
“free-lance noose” made him hesitate. Still, he was curious to see the inside of the institution, and he enjoyed his interviews with Gelb and Lee. They agreed to talk again, and arrange for Romano to meet other
Times
editors.

On the street below, the one-ton newsprint rolls that
Times
driver Mike Casanova trucked down from the Bronx were carted to the laydown area, preparatory to being loaded on the presses. Casanova backed his rig away from the bay carefully; he had exactly six inches of clearance on each side of his truck. His workday was over. In the laydown area, the rolls were lowered to the reel room in the subbasement.

The reel room work crew placed the newsprint rolls on Y-shaped reels. Each reel carried three rolls of paper. Pressman Richard Manning began making up the paster pattern. These strips of tape joined one roll of paper to another roll, so that the paper continuously feeds into the presses, located one floor above. Working in the pressroom, Ed Gruneberg webbed up the presses, leading the newsprint sheets into the equipment that printed the pages. The
Times
had nine presses in all. Both Manning and Gruneberg wore the flat paper hats that pressmen have used for generations to keep ink out of the hair (and declare their pride of craft).