Behind the Times (59 page)

The
Times
is a general-interest newspaper and it has, as Miller said, a consumerist function. It conveys to readers how much a given experience is worth. That is, whether to see the show, or buy the book, or patronize the new restaurant, or make other cultural purchases. The
Times’
cultural report also offers quantitative information unequaled by any other news organization. Finally, though, the
Times’
cultural authority rests neither on the quality of its reviews, nor the amount of space devoted to the arts and entertainment. It is powerful by default.

To the extent that a
Times
review pumps up, or deflates, an individual’s reputation among peers, then what the
Times
says matters. The
Times’
critical opinions also affect investors (in plays or restaurants), New York theater-party bookers, and concert managers in Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Atlanta, and other points west and south. They all believe the wider audience consults no other sources—in part because the audience thinks that the
Times
is good, or good enough, in part because of laziness or inertia. Harry Cipriani was remarkable for being the condemned man who faced the firing squad disdaining both blindfold and last cigarette. He survived in spite of the attack by Bryan Miller, but then developed a wonderful case of protective amnesia afterward (“Really, the
Times
trashed me?”). Most targets of the
Times
—restaurateurs, producers, writers, artists, promoters of the arts and leisure—are not so bold, or so foolish to risk the musketry in the first place.

8:00
P.M.

The late-desk staff arrived for work on the 8:00
P.M.
to 3:00
A.M.
shift.

The news pages took shape. Columns of type spewed out of computers; they were pasted up on the makeup boards, and the sheets of headlines, photos, and line rules trimmed and dropped in.

8:30
P.M.

The main shift of pressmen reported to work. In the pressroom, finished plates—the pages on photographic sheets—began to arrive from the platemaking department. John O’Keefe, a junior pressman, carried one of the plates to the designated press. The first sheets of newsprint paper were webbed, led through the presses.

9:03
P.M.

Final first edition pages left the composing room. A ten- to twenty-minute cheat factor was built in, allowing for late closings and still enabling the pressroom to “make the trucks.”

9:15
P.M.

Pressman Tom O’Brien plated up—attached the plate to the rollers in one of the presses. Flashing green lights and clanging bells signaled a “Safe” on the presses, stopping any mechanical movement while pressmen worked inside on the rollers. In the press room, green lights meant Stop. The Safes stayed on almost continuously until 9:30, when plating was completed. The green Safe went off. Red lights signaled the start of the press run.

As usual, the first papers in the print run were all black; the ink and water had not yet mixed together correctly. The black paper, streaming up through the ceiling from each press, bypassed the main floor where the stacking machines were, and continued up to the mezzanine level. There, the stream was directed north toward the truck bays on 44th Street; the black paper spilled off into rag tops—open-top trailers—to be trucked away for recycling.

9:40
P.M.

Rudy Rella and Nick D’Andrea, the nightside plant managers at 43rd Street, checked and finally approved the quality of the ink-water mixture. The printed papers moved from the presses to the main floor and the stackers. The stackers and their machines counted the papers, bundled them in fifty-pound packages, and tied the bundles.

Outside, along the 43rd Street bays, mailers loaded the bundled papers into their delivery boxes—42-foot-long trailers. The trailers were hooked to the
Times’
fleet of Kenilworth trucks, twenty feet long and powered by 250-horsepower Cummins V-8
diesel engines. Paul Medina, a
Times
driver for twenty years, climbed into the cab of truck no. 70134. He pulled out, turned west on 43rd Street, right onto Eighth Avenue, right again onto West 44th, over to Madison Avenue, and uptown to the Major Deegan and on to the Albany-Troy area.

9:45
P.M.

The turnaround meeting. The late desk ran through the layouts it would update for the second edition, working from fresh photocopies of pages provided by the pressroom.

Gloria Emerson, who covered the Vietnam war as a correspondent for the
New York Times
, was a ferociously determined reporter. Tall and rail thin, she stood over six feet tall in her combat boots, prompting a friend to describe her as “all arms, legs, and talent.” Emerson left the
Times
in 1972 to do free-lance work and to write
Winners and Losers
, a memoir of the war and its effects on some Americans. The book received favorable reviews from, among others, David Halberstam in the
Los Angeles Times
, Walter Clemons in
Newsweek
, and Alden Whitman in the
Chicago Tribune
; it was not well received in the
New York Times.
One of the
Times’
daily book critics, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt—the three Germans, columnist Jimmy Breslin called him, not affectionately—wrote that Emerson’s prose was “execrable.” According to Emerson, Lehmann-Haupt was “clearly infuriated” at her because she had “mocked” him in the preface to
Winners and Losers.
“That he was allowed to review a book that scorned him,” Emerson complained, “says much about the prevailing ethic of that newspaper.”

Winners and Losers
could very well be the title of a memoir about the
New York Times Book Review.
Every other author has a story about the crimes that
Times
reviewers committed, in the name of literature, on the author’s book. For the author of a mainstream book—a book
like Emerson’s or a book such as the one you hold in your hands now—the
Book Review
is regarded as the preeminent sales tool in the trade-book business. New York is the center of the U.S. publishing industry, and New Yorkers purchase more books than the residents of any other metropolitan area in the country. But the influence of the
Times
is felt beyond the city as well; if the
Book Review
did not reach every book buyer in the country, it came closer than any other publication. Television was an increasingly important marketing force; a segment on the “Today” Show or an appearance on “Donahue” or “Oprah” could help the sales of any given book. So could good word-of-mouth: Every publishing season, two or three trade book titles defied the laws of gravity and publishing and managed, like magic water, to run uphill without a major
Times
review, and sometimes without any notice by the
Times
at all. These successes aside, trade publishers put their money where the market was: In 1991 advertisers spent over $16,000,000 to buy space in the
Book Review.

Other newspapers and the weekly magazines—most notably, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Washington Post
, the
Chicago Tribune
, the
Boston Globe
,
Newsday
, the
Chicago Sun-Times
,
Time
,
Newsweek
,
New York
, the
New Republic
, and
The Nation
—have excellent staff reviewers and smartly edited book pages or book sections. Only the
Times
has the
Book Review.
The
Times’
chief rival for influence, and a small percentage of the ad dollar, is the
New York Review of Books.
The
NYRB
is the more serious and admired publication, and it has the
Times
to thank for its existence. When the strike of 1962–63 shut down New York City’s newspapers, three young editors, Robert Silvers, Barbara and Jason Epstein, started the
Review.
Great trees were crashing down in the publishing forests, and without the
Times
they made no sound. In the
Review
new books could be noted, reviewers could review, advertisers advertise. The
Review
was prepared from the first for the long haul, and didn’t intend to go away after the strike was settled. It quickly established a kind of disdainful intellectual rivalry with the
Times.
“The disappearance of the
Times
Sunday book section at the time of the printers’ strike,” the critic Edmund Wilson noted in the third issue of the
Review
, “only made us realize it had never existed.” But there was really no contest between the two publications. Or, rather, they compete in entirely different events: the
Review
academic, magisterial, relentlessly specialized; the
Times
journalistic, mainstream, and concerned about trade-book ads. In 1993, at the time of
the
Review
’s thirtieth anniversary, its circulation stood at 120,000; by then, 1.6 million copies of the
Book Review
were being printed; in addition, 60,000 stand-alone
Book Review
copies were being mailed out each week to subscribers who paid $39 a year for the privilege of getting their copies without having to wait until the weekend.

Many of these subscribers were in the business—bookstore owners, agents, editors, paperback houses, other publishers. A good part of the advertising in the pages of the
Book Review
is intended not so much for the individual reader as for these other players, and for motion picture and TV entertainment companies. A prominent ad in the
Times
was a way to let them all know of the existence of a “big book” or a “publishing event”; indeed, some authors insisted that their contracts be written to include the promise of advertisements in the
Times.
The same people who said they feared and resented the
Times’
authority over books thus contributed to the power of the
Book Review.
They were like the frontier-town gamblers who complained that the poker cards were marked, but kept playing anyway, dementedly reasoning: “It’s the only game in town.”

As in poker, too, when the politics of book reviewing played out in the pages of the
Times
, the winners smiled and the losers cried “Deal!” Ethical failures were alleged, vendettas uncovered, mutual admiration societies espied; log rolling and backscratching, paybacks and careerism, conflicts of interest, political correctness—you name it, someone already had, and attributed it to
Times’
book reviewers, though seldom on the record. The losers’ complaints were both general and specific; they sometimes pointed a finger at Lehmann-Haupt, a daily reviewer since 1965, at the
Times’
other daily critics, or at one or another of the outside experts who were tapped by
Times
editors to write for the
Book Review
on Sundays. Recipients of a so-so
Times
review, or no notice at all, suffered from severely bruised egos, not to mention damage to their prospective earnings; they reacted by questioning the motives of the messenger, rather than the quality of their own production. Edmund Wilson’s put-down to the contrary, the
Times’
existence was all too palpable for aggrieved authors. Sophisticates might slyly refer to the NYRB as the “New York Review of Each Other’s Books,” and enjoy the laugh. Few people were able to take the
Book Review
lightly. The
Times’
power was such that its critics watched it with colder eyes, held it perhaps to a higher standard than the competition, and were quicker to assume deals on the basis of circumstance and suspicion alone. A
“conspiracy” in the pages of
The New York Review
involved “only” ideology, or reputation. At the
New York Times Book Review
, a good hand or a bad hand affected sales figures. A
Times
review was serious business.

Naturally, some of the people who wrote, edited, sold, or bought books were curious about how the place worked.

On one level, the
Book Review
runs much like any other clerical operation. The staff guards its prerogatives, worries about pay raises, vacation schedules, and working hours. Martin Levine, a Harvard man (class of ’66) and a former editor and critic at the
Washington Post
and
Newsday
, joined the
Book Review
in 1982. While the
Times
paid more than the other papers, Levine was not a happy
Times
man. The promises made him by one senior editor were abrogated when that editor lost his authority in one of the periodic “politburo shake-ups” in the news department. The hierarchical organization of the
Book Review
was jarring after the looser attitudes at the
Post
and
Newsday.
During one of the
Times’
annual drives to hold down costs, Levine remembered, editors were informed that if they didn’t finish all their work in the standard thirty-seven-hour week, they could work overtime—but not expect to be paid for it. Though Levine was chief editor of the
Book Review
copy desk, he was prohibited from talking to the reviewer whose copy was being edited. All queries for the reviewer had to be transmitted via the assigning editor. “The attitude was, ‘This is
the most prestigious place in the business,’ ” Levine said. “You should obey the ukases. ‘Like it or leave, because plenty of others are lined up, waiting to work here.’ ” In Levine’s mind, the prestige that outsiders attached to the
Book Review
was at odds with what actually happened inside. Decision making was increasingly centralized, and the
Book Review
became less independent. “We more and more became part of the ‘mediaworld’—attuned to what the PR people were pushing, what the book clubs were doing, what the trendy magazines were saying.” The public authority of the
Book Review
remained undiminished, however. “It saddened me to see how eagerly awaited
Times
reviews were,” Levine said. Levine left in 1987, at the beginning of the Frankel era.