Behind the Times (61 page)

The tale of the amputated review stirred vile thoughts about the politics of book reviewing at the
Times.
The
Book Review
machinery could pump up interest in any given book, or shunt attention away. Its power existed; but it did not necessarily follow that the juice moved in a certain conspiratorial direction or supported a specific agenda. Many of the alleged plots, upon inspection, are more bureaucratic than cablistic: they appear to be aimed at putting out a newspaper every day and a
Book Review
on Sundays, while trying to keep mistakes to a minimum—all without overtime. Leonard’s editors, he recalled, thought he should keep his “leftist views” out of the paper; but they also valued his writing and kept giving him good display. He thought they were tilting rightward, and calling it centrism. In fact, the editors could live with Leonard’s political attitude—up to the point where it implied some criticism of the
Times’
news-gathering abilities. Any attack on the Warren Commission’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination by extension meant an attack as well on the news department’s coverage of both the assassination and investigation. That’s
what brought on the Kennedy amputation. The operation over, the surgeons moved on. A few months later, the same people who cut Leonard’s Kennedy review promoted him to editor of the
Book Review
, a powerful pulpit to give someone suspected of too much leftist sermonizing. Leonard repaid their confidence by devoting most of one issue of the
Book Review
to a critical essay on Vietnam by Neil Sheehan (the article wore the light camouflage cloth of a roundup review of a half-dozen books on the war). Leonard’s tenure at the
Book Review
was relatively short; by 1975 he was back as a daily reviewer—bounced from the editor’s job for his politics, in some accounts. In Leonard’s version, however, he hated being a boss and hated not writing; in addition, his marriage was falling apart and he had what was euphemistically referred to as “a drinking problem.” Leonard said that he tried to quit for the better part of a year before his editors could agree on a replacement. Again, they valued his talent; “They will love us just as much, or as little, as it serves their interests,” he later wrote.

Leonard told the tale of the Garrison-Shaw review on several occasions, to me and to others. Not until the fall of 1992, however, did I learn from him the story of what I came to think of as (in the manner of Kennedy conspiracy theorists) The Second Amputation. Leonard reviewed
My Story
, Judith Exner’s memoir of her years as the mistress of Sam Giancana, the Chicago mob boss,
and
John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States. The singer Frank Sinatra was the go-between in each case, according to Exner. Critic Leonard found Exner’s story wholly believable; he discerned unsettling similarities in the behavior of the outwardly dissimilar characters of Giancana and Kennedy. The review was killed. “The editors had a thing about the Kennedys, they loved them,” Leonard recalled. More accurately, the editors had “a thing” about the
Times.
Leonard said he asked for and received permission to publish the
Exner review elsewhere, and it eventually appeared in the
SoHo News
, a now-defunct downtown New York weekly. Leonard could say whatever he wanted about the compulsive sexual adventurism of J.F.K.; he just couldn’t say it in the pages of the
Times.

In 1982 Leonard resigned from the
Times.
Self-interest was a two-way street; he had written for the
Times
because he wanted to, and the paper ran his reviews because they fit its marketing plans: “They did not publish me out of the kindness of their hearts. We were even every day.”

*        *        *

If there was not a unified conspiracy theory that explained every publishing decision at the
Times
, the notion that the
Book Review
was apolitical also belonged in the fiction genre, as improbable as any Harlequin romance. The fantasy had its origins in the Adolph Ochs years. Then as now, the
Book Review
carried no masthead or any other indication of the men or women involved in the selection and editing of its materials. “To list any names of the editors would be to imply that a personal point of view might be involved,” a previewing editor of the
Book Review
explained not long ago. But the individual editors themselves—the ones no longer at the
Book Review
, at any rate—acknowledged that they brought just such a point of view to their work. John Leonard was cast as the bright, young California hipster, imported from Berkeley, to bring the
Book Review
into the twentieth century. “I was hired in the late 1960s as part of a general loosening up at the
Times,”
he says now. “They wanted younger, more stylish writing.” (A quarter of a century later, Max Frankel was still seeking the same fountain of youth for the
Times’
news columns.) When Leonard arrived, “the place was full of good old AFL-CIO anti-Communists. I had worked at Pacifica radio.” Leonard had an agenda for the
Book Review
: “I wanted something eye-catching on the front page each week, something that would make people think and talk about it.”

Leonard’s successor, Harvey Shapiro, promoted a different agenda. Shapiro represented another tradition at the
Times
; a second-generation American Jew, he grew up in an apartment building near the LIRR tracks in the Five Towns area just across the Nassau County line from New York City. He served with distinction in the Air Corps during World War II, attended Yale on the GI Bill, and worked at the
Times
for over thirty years in a variety of editing jobs. Shapiro was among the last of a breed of journalists who regarded the
Times
as a day job that enabled them to pursue their muses. “The
Times
paid the rent so that you could write your novel at night, or, in my case, poetry. Now it’s a full-time, demanding occupation.” Shapiro edited the
Book Review
from 1975 to 1983. “I looked for the consumer element in our reviews. I wanted to tell people whether to buy and read the book; I didn’t think that we could engage in a pure literary exercise.” As an example of his approach, he cited his reasoning when Norman Mailer’s novel
Ancient Evenings
was published. “I first thought about assigning the Mailer to Harold Bloom. Then I realized that Bloom
wouldn’t review the book, but would launch into some other disquisition. I asked Ben DeMott, and Bloom did it for the
New York Review
 … Leonard wanted to stir things up. With me, there was more celebration of the writer.” As for reviewers, “I invited the usual suspects, like Irving Howe.” After Leonard, the Vietnam-era provocateur-editor, Shapiro wanted to be recognized as a more literary editor. “My proudest moment came when I put an anthology of Chinese poetry on the front page of the
Book Review.
” Later Shapiro amended the record slightly. He said a prouder moment came back in July 1962, before he joined the
Book Review.
The Reverend Martin Luther King was serving a jail sentence in Albany, Georgia; Shapiro telephoned the Southern Christian Leadership Council offices in Atlanta and said the
Times Magazine
would be interested in publishing a “letter from prison” written by King. The SCLC people decided it was best for King to hold off for a while; a year later, in April 1963, King was arrested again.
The Shapiro idea reappeared in the form of King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” That August, the
Atlantic Monthly
published it.

Shapiro was moved off the
Book Review
in 1983. “They”—Abe Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb—“wanted their own man in.” Did that mean “they” were unhappy with his editing? Did he fail to carry out management’s wishes? No, he never felt any pressure from his superiors. Shapiro is a small man, still slender as he approached his seventieth birthday. His half-closed eyes, wispy beard, and thinning white hair, worn long in back, gave him the aspect of a Mandarin of the Middle Kingdom court. Why then would “they” want him out? There must have been some conflict? Assignments refused? Requests ignored? In the manner of a careful witness on the stand, he repeated, several times, “No, I can’t recall anything like that.” His Mandarin eyes, now almost shut, suggested otherwise. Shapiro took his demotion from the
Book Review
with equanimity. Rosenthal wanted to know what Shapiro would like to do next: “He said, ‘Ask for anything.’ So I asked for a trip to Japan and got it. Then I went back to the
Magazine.
I made my peace.” During an interview in January 1992, he said he just sent his ninth book off to his publisher. Shapiro smiled a Mandarin smile. The
Times
was still a day job.

The editors’ “own man” was Mitchel Levitas. Levitas was a native New Yorker and a graduate of Brooklyn College. He joined the
Times
in 1965, as an editor for the
Times Magazine.
Unlike Shapiro, Levitas
never regarded the
Times
as a way to help with the rent; he put his full-time energies into his
Times
career. Rebecca Sinkler became Levitas’s deputy in 1985 and succeeded him in 1989, the first woman editor of the
Book Review.
Levitas returned to the news department as Max Frankel’s weekend editor, in charge of the Sunday-Monday front pages. Twenty months later he became Op-Ed page editor. During the Levitas-Sinkler years the
Book Review
paid more attention to politics and current events; it was, at once, less literary and more predictable. Levitas introduced an essay feature that started at the bottom of page one and often filled one or two inside pages. The essays, usually by big-name authors and academics, were intended to discuss books in ways other than the review form. “I wanted to make the
Book Review
more journalistic,” Levitas remembered. “I wanted it to carry news as well as reviews.” In pursuit of a newsy
Book Review
, Levitas introduced boxed interviews with authors to accompany the reviews. He also consolidated all the shorter reviews on their own page in the center of the
Book Review.
As Levitas explained, authors might not receive full-length treatment, but they were still entitled to some “dignity” in a 250–300-word review.

The Levitas-inspired page-one essays were, in effect, lengthy columns; they contributed to the explosion of opinion pieces throughout the Frankel
Times.
“We wanted to expand our role, range about, take a broader look at ideas and trends,” Sinkler explained. As with the news pages during the Frankel years, the
Book Review
tried to be lively. Levitas and, later, Sinkler, wanted the
Book Review
to serve, in part, as a consumer guide, recommending titles for the buying public. But they placed a high value on the quality of writing, in the book being reviewed and in the reviewer’s review. “We don’t care how expert an expert may be,” Sinkler said. “A book is entirely useless if it is dry or dense, or doesn’t communicate. The same is true for the reviewer. We try out authorities in their fields, and often they are not good writers. No matter how much the reviewer knows, if the judgment isn’t expressed in a lively way, readers will not read the review.”

Along with the rest of the Frankel
Times
, then, the
Book Review
worried about distracted readers, and the need to entice them into the newspaper habit. Sinkler wanted the
Book Review
to provoke news on the Rialto. It wasn’t enough that heads didn’t droop; the
Book Review
tried to make heads turn as well. In the fall of 1991, the publication of the Norman Mailer novel
Harlot’s Ghost
achieved precisely that effect.
Harlot’s Ghost
came with a kind of warning, “long awaited.” The label signified that the celebrated author had not produced anything significant for at least a decade, and that there was a suspicion he had run dry. It also signaled that the author’s publishing house had paid a huge advance for the work and was nervously waiting, hoping to get some of its investment back. The advance word had been mixed to negative, and Random House didn’t seem likely to recoup its $1 million advance. The
Times’
Sunday review, written by the theater and film critic John Simon, was published on the front page of the
Book Review.
Simon referred to Mailer’s windy metaphysics and the novel’s “lumpy, lopsided narrative that outstays its welcome.” But Simon’s mild judgments were less important than the marketing window of opportunity opened for Mailer. Mailer accused Simon of conflict of interest and, because he was Norman Mailer, he demanded—and got—what injured authors fantasize about: a meeting with Sinkler and Lelyveld to discuss the treatment of his book. Mailer thereupon produced some supposed examples of Simon’s malice, including a mildly negative review Simon had given one of Mailer’s daughters, an actress named Kate Mailer. No matter the dubiousness of Mailer’s evidence. The
Times
gave him a full page in the
Book Review
to “answer” the review, further advertisements for himself. The letters to the editor that followed became another billboard for Mailer, while changing the subject from the worth of the book to a celebrity feud.

Such celebrity reviews succeeded in getting the
Book Review
talked about. Less than a year later, in the August 30, 1992,
Book Review
, Sinkler gave front-page display to Gore Vidal’s
Screening History
, a slim Harvard University Press book based on lectures Vidal delivered at Harvard the year before. The university setting was deceptive; Vidal had lost none of his venom. “He has poisonous words in particular for academic historians and the
New York Times
,” the academic historian Michael Kammen of Cornell noted in his review. Alongside Kammen’s review was a half-page interview with Vidal, conducted by telephone from his Italian villa in Ravello. Sinkler said she never hesitated about assigning the book and playing it prominently. “Vidal told many people of his undisguised enmity for the
Book Review
, but we read these books with an open mind,” she said. “We ask, Are our readers interested in this? Is this book important? I knew we’d be accused of trying to appease him. But a Vidal book is a newsworthy moment, and the book was good.”