I Remember Nothing (3 page)

Three months later, I was promoted again, this time to the highest rung: I became a researcher. “Researcher” was a fancy word—and not all that fancy at that—for “fact-checker,” and that’s pretty much what the job consisted of. I worked in the Nation Department. I was extremely happy to be there. This was not a bad job six months out of college; what’s more, I’d been a political science major, so I was working in a field I knew something about. There were six writers and six researchers in the department, and we worked from Tuesday to Saturday night, when the magazine closed. For most of the week, none of us did anything. The writers waited for files from the reporters in the bureaus, which didn’t turn up until Thursday or Friday. Then, on Friday afternoon, they all wrote their stories and gave them to us researchers to check. We checked a story by referring to whatever factual material existed; occasionally we made a phone call or did some minor reporting. Newsmagazine writers in those days were famous for using the expression “tk,” which stood for “to come”; they were always writing sentences like, “There are tk lightbulbs in the chandelier in the chamber of the House of Representatives,” and part of your job as a researcher was to find out just how many lightbulbs there were. These tidbits were not so much facts as factoids, but they were the way newsmagazines separated themselves from daily newspapers; the style reached an apotheosis in the work of Theodore H.
White, a former
Time
writer, whose
Making of the President
books were filled with information about things like President Kennedy’s favorite soup. (Tomato, with a glop of sour cream.) (I ate it for years, as a result.)

At
Newsweek
, when you had checked the facts and were convinced they were accurate, you underlined the sentence. You were done checking a piece when every word in it had been underlined. One Tuesday morning, we all arrived at work and discovered a gigantic crisis: one of the Nation stories in that week’s
Newsweek
had been published with a spelling error—Konrad Adenauer’s first name was spelled with a
C
instead of a
K
. The blame fell not to the writer (male) who had first misspelled the name, or to the many senior editors (male) and copy editors (male) who had edited the story, but to the two researchers (female) who’d checked it. They had been confronted, and were busy having an argument over which of them had underlined the word “Conrad.” “That is not my underlining,” one of them was saying.

With hindsight, of course, I can see how brilliantly institutionalized the sexism was at
Newsweek
. For every man, an inferior woman. For every male writer, a female drone. For every flamboyant inventor of a meaningless-but-unknown detail, a young drudge who could be counted on to fill it in. For every executive who erred, an underling to pin it on. But it was way too early in the decade for me to notice that, and besides, I was starting to realize that I was probably never going to be promoted to writer at
Newsweek
. And by the way,
if I ever had been, I have no reason to think I would have been good at it.

The famous 114-day newspaper strike (which wasn’t a strike but a lockout) began in December 1962, and one of its side effects was that several journalists who were locked out by their newspapers came to
Newsweek
to be writers, temporarily. One of them was Charles Portis, a reporter from the
New York Herald Tribune
whom I went out with for a while, but that’s not the point (although it’s not entirely beside the point); the point is that Charlie, who was a wonderful writer with a spectacular and entirely eccentric style (he later became a novelist and the author of
True Grit
), was no good at all at writing the formulaic, voiceless, unbylined stories with strict line counts that
Newsweek
printed.

By then I had become friends with Victor Navasky. He was the editor of a satirical magazine called
Monocle
, and it seemed that he knew everyone. He knew important people, and he knew people he made you think were important simply because he knew them.
Monocle
came out only sporadically, but it hosted a lot of parties, and I met people there who became friends for life, including Victor’s wife, Annie, Calvin Trillin, and John Gregory Dunne. Victor also introduced me to Jane Green, who was an editor at Condé Nast. She was an older woman, about twenty-five, very stylish and sophisticated, and she knew everyone too. She introduced me to my first omelette, my first Brie, and my first vitello tonnato. She used the word “painterly” and tried to explain it to me. She asked me what kind of
Jew I was. I had never heard of the concept of what kind of Jew you were. Jane was a German Jew, which was not to say she was from Germany but that her grandparents had been. She was extremely pleased about it. I had no idea it mattered. (And by the way, it didn’t, really; those days were over.)

I could go on endlessly about the things I learned from Jane. She told me all about de Kooning and took me to the Museum of Modern Art to see pop art and op art. She taught me the difference between Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. She’d gone out with a number of well-known journalists and writers, and long before I met them I knew, because of Jane, a number of intimate details about them. Eventually, I went to bed with one of them and that was the end of my friendship with her, but that’s getting ahead of things.

One day after the newspaper strike was about a month old, Victor called to say he’d managed to raise $10,000 to put out parodies of the New York newspapers, and asked if I would write a parody of Leonard Lyons’ gossip column in the
New York Post
. I said yes, although I had no idea what to do. I’d met Lyons—he appeared nightly at Sardi’s, where my parents often had dinner when they were in New York—but I’d never really focused on his column. I called my friend Marcia, who’d recently babysat Leonard Lyons’ son’s dogs, and asked her what the deal was with Lyons. She explained to me that the Lyons column was a series of short anecdotes with no point whatsoever. I went upstairs to the morgue at
Newsweek
and read a few weeks’ worth of
Lyons’ columns and wrote the parody. Parodies are very odd things. I’ve written only about a half dozen of them in my life; they come on you like the wind, and you write them almost possessed. It’s as close as a writer gets to acting—it’s almost as if you’re in character for a short time, and then it passes.

The papers Victor produced—the
New York Pest
and the
Dally News—
made their way to the newsstands, but they didn’t sell. Newsstand dealers really didn’t understand parodies in those days—this was long before
National Lampoon
and
The Onion—
and most of them sent them back to the distributor. But everyone in the business read them. They were funny. The editors of the
Post
wanted to sue, but the publisher, Dorothy Schiff, said, “Don’t be ridiculous. If they can parody the
Post
they can write for it. Hire them.” So the editors called Victor and Victor called me and asked if I’d be interested in trying out for a job at the
Post
. Of course I was.

I went down to the
Post
offices on West Street a few days later. It was a freezing day in February and I got lost trying to find the entrance to the building, which was actually on Washington Street. I took the elevator to the second floor and walked down the long dingy hall and into the city room. I couldn’t imagine I was in the right place. It was a large dusty room with dirty windows looking out at the Hudson, not that you could see anything through the windows. Sitting in a clump of desks in the winter dark was a group of three or four
editors. They offered me a reporting tryout as soon as the lockout was over.

There were seven newspapers in New York at that time, and the
Post
was the least of them, circulation-wise. It had always been a liberal paper, and it had had glory days under an editor named James Wechsler, but those days were over. Still, the paper had a solid base of devoted readers. Seven weeks into the lockout, Dorothy Schiff bolted the Publishers Association and reopened the paper, and I took a two-week leave of absence from
Newsweek
and began my tryout. I’d prepared by studying the
Post
, but more important, by being coached by Jane, who’d worked there briefly. She explained everything I needed to know about the paper. She told me that the
Post
was an afternoon newspaper and the stories in it were known as “overnights”; they were not to be confused with the news stories in the morning papers. They were feature stories; they had a point of view; they were the reason people bought an afternoon paper in addition to a morning paper. You never used a simple “Who What Where Why When and How” lead in an afternoon paper. She also told me that when I got an assignment, never to say, “I don’t understand” or “Where exactly is it?” or “How do I get in touch with them?” Go back to your desk, she said, and figure it out. Pull the clips from the morgue. Look in the telephone book. Look in the crisscross directory. Call your friends. Do anything but ask the editor what to do or how to get there.

I arrived for my tryout expecting the city room to look different from the way it had on that dark winter day I’d first come there, but except for brighter lighting, it didn’t. It was a relic, really—a period set for a 1930s newsroom. The desks were old, the chairs were broken. Everyone smoked, but there were no ashtrays; the burning cigarettes rested on the edges of desks and left dark smudge marks. There were not enough desks to go around, so unless you’d been there for twenty years, you didn’t have your own desk, or even a drawer; finding a place to sit was sort of like musical chairs. The windows were never cleaned. The doors leading into the city room had insets of frosted glass, and they were so dusty that someone had written the word “Philthy” on them with a finger. I couldn’t have cared less. I had spent almost half my life wanting to be a newspaper reporter, and now I had a shot at it.

I had four bylines my first week. I interviewed the actress Tippi Hedren. I went to the Coney Island aquarium to write about two hooded seals that were refusing to mate. I interviewed an Italian film director named Nanni Loy. I covered a murder on West Eighty-second Street. On Friday afternoon, I was offered a permanent job at the paper. One of the reporters took me out for a drink that night, to a bar nearby called the Front Page. That’s what it was called, the Front Page. Later that night, we took a taxi up Madison Avenue and we passed the Newsweek Building. I looked up at the eleventh floor, where the lights were ablaze, and I
thought, Up there they are closing next week’s edition of
Newsweek
, and nobody really gives a damn. It was a stunning revelation.

I loved the
Post
. Of course, it was a zoo. The editor was a sexual predator. The managing editor was a lunatic. Sometimes it seemed that half the staff was drunk. But I loved my job. In my first year there, I learned how to write, which I barely knew when I began. The editors and copy editors brought me along. They actually nurtured me. They assigned me short pieces at first, then longer pieces, then five-part series. I learned by doing, and after a while, I had an instinctive sense of structure. There was a brilliant copy editor, Fred McMorrow, who would walk my story back to me and explain why he was making the changes he was making. Never begin a story with a quote, he said. Never use anything but “said.” Never put anything you really care about into the last paragraph because it will undoubtedly be cut for space. There was a great features editor, Joe Rabinovich, who kept my occasional stylistic excesses in line; he saved me from woeful idiocy when Tom Wolfe began writing for the
Herald Tribune
and I made a pathetic attempt to write exactly like him. The executive editor, Stan Opotowsky, came up with a series of offbeat feature assignments for me. I wrote about heat waves and cold snaps; I covered the Beatles and Bobby Kennedy and the Star of India robbery.

The
Post
had a bare-bones staff, but more women worked there than worked at all the other New York
papers combined. The greatest of the rewrite men at the
Post
was a woman named Helen Dudar.
Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite
. In those days, the
Post
published six editions a day, starting at eleven in the morning and ending with the four-thirty stock market final. When news broke, reporters in the street would phone in the details from pay phones and rewrite men would write the stories. The city room was right next to the press room, and the noise—of reporters typing, pressmen linotyping, wire machines clacking, and presses rolling—was a journalistic fantasy.

I worked at the
Post
for five years. Then I became a magazine writer. I believed in journalism. I believed in truth. I believed that when people claimed they’d been misquoted, they were just having trouble dealing with the sight of their words in cold, hard print. I believed that when political activists claimed that news organizations conspired against them, they had no idea that most journalistic enterprises were far too inept to harbor conspiracy. I believed that I was temperamentally suited to journalism because of my cynicism and emotional detachment; I sometimes allowed that these were character flaws, but I didn’t really believe it.

I married a journalist, and that didn’t work. But then I married another, and it did.

Now I know that there’s no such thing as the truth. That people are constantly misquoted. That news organizations are full of conspiracy (and that, in any case, ineptness is a kind of conspiracy). That emotional detachment and cynicism get you only so far.

But for many years I was in love with journalism. I loved the city room. I loved the pack. I loved smoking and drinking scotch and playing dollar poker. I didn’t know much about anything, and I was in a profession where you didn’t have to. I loved the speed. I loved the deadlines. I loved that you wrapped the fish.

You can’t make this stuff up, I used to say.