The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  The heart of the story was that Kurt was assigned a short piece about a racehorse that had jumped the fence in mid-race and attempted to escape the track. Ax stopped there to note that it was obviously not much of a story and the details were sketchy—a stupid nothing of a piece, the kind editors were always dialing up hoping to get a little humor into the mix. Someone asked if Kurt had had reporter files to write from, had anyone been on the scene to report back with some detail for him to use? Kurt didn’t remember. Ax shrugged. The waiter was back, also listening to the story.

  “So Kurt sits there at his desk all morning in the Time and Life Building,” Ax went on, his punch line in sight. “He’s thinking, and he’s thinking about what he’s doing and finally he types one sentence and leaves. That’s it, and he’s not coming back. One sentence on an otherwise blank page still in the typewriter: ‘The horse jumped over the fucking fence.’ ”

  It was a story about Kurt, but it was also about what Ax called “newsweekly fuckedupedness,” by which he meant contempt for writers by silly editors who didn’t know what they wanted. More drinks were ordered. Ax said Kurt was the inspiration for how he was going to quit, too, when it came time, which would be soon because of the even worse and increasing fuckedupedness at Newsweek.

  Kurt got that and smiled but there was something in the way he looked at the faces around the table, something now not quite right about his place at that table. Maybe Kurt had heard the story too many times. Or maybe he just didn’t like the idea that Ax knew the story. Ax picked up on this too and as the waiter was now, finally, taking food orders, he started talking about how much he loved all of Kurt’s novels and could recite from them and wanted to ask Kurt a really lame question that he knew was lame but that we would all want to know the answer to.

  “Of all your work, everything you’ve done, what’s your favorite novel, or maybe just which one do you like best now?”

  “Good,” Kurt said, and stood up from the table. “Cat’s Cradle.”

  He lifted his glass of Scotch as if in a toast but wouldn’t look down at me, sitting to his right. “I think you’re all moderately gifted.”

  And he left.

  −ENDIT−

  Writer’s Block (157)

  I WANT TO MAKE QUICK WORK of this. As an editor I insisted there is no such thing. Writers could fight through it if they just kept working. If they complained, I’d quote Gloria Steinem: “I do not like to write—I like to have written.”

  This does not mean editors should be unsympathetic. No one likes to be called “the Stonecutter,” as the excellent writer-editor David Felton was by his colleagues at Rolling Stone, which was a tough place that way. Besides, careful writers were always worth waiting for, and speed often rode with carelessness. Writing well was just hard, and every good writer or editor I ever knew could empathize with that.

  For years there was no finer writer at Rolling Stone than Kurt Loder, who wrote very slowly but with great facility before moving on to anchor MTV News. When I asked him if he missed writing he said, “You have to be kidding.”

  −ENDIT−

  Steve Jobs (1,167)

  NEWSWEEK WAS REELING AFTER ATTEMPTING to buy the bogus Hitler Diaries and then shamefully trying to cover the bad judgment by writing in a cover story full of cloying language, “Genuine or not, it almost doesn’t matter in the end.” The top editors, we “Wallendas”—a self-important reference to the aerial circus act—brooded about the process that had led us to such a monumental mistake, and thus we became less enterprising.

  This was the context in early 1984 when Steve Jobs came to Newsweek wearing a sharp suit and a tiny bow tie. He was twenty-eight years old. He met with the Wallendas and our owner, Kay Graham, up from Washington for her weekly visit. For two hours Steve showed off the first Macintosh computer, flirting with Kay and teaching us how to manipulate the mouse and switch disks to launch applications and save work. I remember someone asking, “Why call it a mouse?”

  Not long after, I had dinner with Jobs and Washington Post writer Tom Zito at Tiro a Segno, a private club in the West Village that had a shooting gallery in the basement. Zito’s father was the club president and Tom showed us around. The rifles in the basement were very old, the targets elegant. There were murals of Capri in the handsome dining room and the maître d’ looked like the dapper Argentine actor Fernando Lamas. Zito and I had dates, but Steve came alone.

  When we sat down, Zito ordered a round of Negronis. It was a long way from Steve’s hometown of Cupertino, and he was circumspect, but Zito put him at ease with leading questions that let him show off without seeming arrogant. Dinner became an interview as Zito drew Steve out, and everyone’s enthusiasm mounted for his many ideas. He didn’t seem to notice, but I could see that the women found him attractive, even though he was at least ten years younger than they were. In fact, they were very interested. Maybe they would even buy one of his intriguing new computers. That, he noticed.

  “What are they called?” one of the women asked.

  “Macintosh,” Steve said.

  “Like the apple?”

  Steve said his dream was that every person in the world would have his or her own Apple computer.

  “That’s going to be all about marketing,” Zito said.

  “I know,” Steve said. “But I’m talking about the greatest tool ever.” He went on about how people were going to shop on his computers, and keep their own libraries, and even send messages to each other.

  “What a great appliance,” I said. He was just so serious.

  “Yes, but don’t call it that,” he said. “Bad marketing.”

  We all nodded and Steve said he had to stay focused and pay attention to everything, marketing of course, and all the other details beyond the engineering, even the typography. The design had to have soul. If you got it right, a personal computer could be not only the best tool ever but fun, “like a bicycle for your mind”—he had come up with this after reading a Scientific American article on locomotion efficiency and was beginning to use it with reporters.

  “That’s good marketing,” Zito said.

  I told Steve that maybe Newsweek could do a special issue about everything he was talking about—how computers were going to change the way we lived. It couldn’t be just about him and his Macintosh, but he would be a big part of it.

  “Okay,” he said, but then explained that he didn’t have much confidence in journalists getting his story right. I said I could understand that, even before he mentioned the Hitler Diaries.

  Newsweek Access: The Magazine of Life and Technology came out of that dinner as a one-shot that I hoped would turn into a quarterly. I put Steve on the cover in a tiny blue-and-white bow tie. Zito did the interview:

  ZITO

  Is the computer business as ruthless as it appears to be?

  JOBS

  No, not at this point. To me, the situation is like a river. When the river is moving swiftly there isn’t a lot of moss and algae in it, but when it slows down it becomes stagnant, a lot of stuff grows in the river and it gets very murky. I view the cutthroat political nature of things very much like that. And right now our business is moving very swiftly. The water’s pretty clear and there’s not a lot of ruthlessness. There’s a lot of room for innovation.

  ZITO

  Do you consider yourself the new astronaut, the new American hero?

  JOBS

  No, no, no. I’m just a guy who probably should have been a semi-talented poet on the Left Bank. I got sort of sidetracked here. The space guys, the astronauts, were techies to start with. John Glenn didn’t read Rimbaud, you know; but you talk to some of the people in the computer business now and they’re very well grounded in the philosophical traditions of the last 100 years and the sociological traditions of the ’60s. There’s something going on [in Silicon Valley], there’s something that’s changing the world and this is the epicenter.

  ZITO

  Do you think it’s unfair that people out he
re in Silicon Valley are generally labeled nerds?

  JOBS

  Of course. I think it’s an antiquated notion. There were people in the ’60s who were like that and even in the early ’70s, but now they are not that way. Now they’re the people who would have been poets had they lived in the ’60s. And they’re looking at computers as their medium of expression rather than language, rather than being a mathematician and using mathematics, rather than, you know, writing social theories.

  ZITO

  What do people do for fun out here? I’ve noticed that an awful lot of those who work for you either play music or are extremely interested in it.

  JOBS

  Oh yes. And most of them are also left-handed, whatever that means. Almost all of the really great technical people in computers that I’ve known are left-handed. Isn’t that odd?

  ZITO

  Are you left-handed?

  JOBS

  I’m ambidextrous.

  —

  THE REACTION TO ACCESS was mixed. It was a handsome publication, but what was it about? Wasn’t it really kind of a cross between Popular Mechanics and Esquire? And how relevant was that? But Steve liked it—especially the cover shot, which made him look princely and brooding, even with that little bow tie.

  Apple loaned me a Macintosh 128K and I took it on vacation to Florida, where I wrote my first business plan for Smart magazine on it. When Smart launched, it depended on the new desktop publishing technology available to me as a beta site for Apple and Adobe. By then Zito had moved to Silicon Valley to write a book about the early digital startups, but he became an entrepreneur himself. He was living in the best neighborhood in Palo Alto and said he couldn’t make any real money as a writer.

  −ENDIT−

  More Money (1,429)

  IF YOU’RE A WRITER, you’ve got plenty of time to think about what you’re doing, and eventually you have to confront the question of why you’re doing it—writing in the first place. And then come the practical questions. And they keep coming around, like the rent.

  “I’m not rich enough to be a writer” was a freelancer homily I heard sometimes, and it would always make me think of Taki (Panagiotis Theodoracopulos), the son of a Greek shipping tycoon with houses in New York, London and Gstaad and a sleek black-and-teak sailboat called Bushido. At one of his Christmas parties he pointed to a photo of the yacht on the mantel and said that was where my wife would be when he stole her away from me. Bushido, of course, is a Japanese word for the way of the samurai, loosely analogous to the concept of chivalry. We first worked together in 1984 when Taki was serving time in North London’s Pentonville Prison for possession of cocaine.

  He got away with much as a traditional playboy, and his columns were laced with astonishing ethnic slurs. Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld was “a very homely, simian-looking Jew who couldn’t punch his way out of a nursery.” Russian manners were a “grotesque deformity.” The Puerto Rican Day Parade was a “hoedown for slobs.” But now bankrolling Taki’s Magazine (a libertarian webzine of “politics and culture”), Taki wears the cape of the lovable old rogue. I had to insist on paying him, and he never cashed the checks. But like I said, he was in prison for cocaine possession then.

  On the other side of that coin, Rian Malan was down to his last few dollars in L.A., with no car. When I tried to advance him money on a contract for several pieces, he said he couldn’t take it because he wasn’t sure he could do the work. That he was broke was inexplicable. His searing autobiographical take on South Africa, My Traitor’s Heart, was a New York Times best seller and had already been translated into eleven languages. That didn’t mean unlimited cash, but it meant he could get an assignment anytime he wanted one. But the assignment had to be right and he wouldn’t take money he hadn’t already earned. He seemed haunted by fairness, going back to his childhood in Johannesburg in an Afrikaner clan led by his great-uncle Daniel François Malan, who as prime minister was the ideological force behind apartheid.

  Rian was singular. But I had to insist on paying him, too.

  —

  THE BEST WRITERS were usually the best negotiators, especially when it came to leveraging where they stood among other writers. Why wouldn’t they be—they had the throw weight. Good editors paid close attention to this.

  I wrote in the introduction to the 1993 Lust, Violence, Sin, Magic: Sixty Years of Esquire Fiction that when Arnold Gingrich was thirty years old and launching Esquire in 1933, he approached Ernest Hemingway in a New York City bookstore that dealt in first editions. Gingrich had arrived to pick up a copy of Hemingway’s Three Stories and Ten Poems—one of 350 copies printed in Paris in 1923. Hemingway was just leaving when Gingrich came in, and the young editor went right at him, reminding Hemingway that he was a collector of his work (they had been corresponding in this regard for some months) and pleading with him to contribute to the new magazine.

  Hemingway agreed to Gingrich’s suggestion that he write “some kind of sporting letter” covering his outdoor activities in the course of his travels. When it came to payment, Gingrich said that he hoped to “make up in promptness of payment what it would lack in size” but that he was going to be forced to start rather low, even if it was “as much as I could to start and going up as fast as we make it, if we make it.”

  “I don’t care how much you pay,” Hemingway told him, then reconsidered immediately. “Hell, yes, I do care, but the big stuff I can always get by selling stories and you and I are just talking about journalism. Let’s say if you pay fifty bucks or whatever you pay, you pay me double.”

  Gingrich said he was planning to pay $100.

  “Fine,” said Hemingway. “That means I get two hundred, and if you find as you go along that you can do better than that, then I get that much more, too, only doubled, and right away, without making me sit up and beg for it.”

  They shook hands. That was the only deal Hemingway ever had with Esquire, and as he conscientiously met deadlines over the next couple of years from wherever he happened to be, the magazine’s rate more than doubled. By the late spring of 1936, Hemingway was making $500 per contribution and enjoying his relationship with Gingrich. When he saw he couldn’t meet an upcoming deadline for his standard “Letter From…” Hemingway sent Gingrich a story he had been working on instead.

  It was called “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and Gingrich paid Hemingway $1,000, double his standard “double rate.” It was the most the magazine had paid for any single contribution up to that time, and as Gingrich pointed out in his memoir Nothing but People, it was less than a fourth of what big magazines like the Saturday Evening Post were paying Hemingway for stories.

  Editors today who hear this story are struck by the haphazardness by which that great story came to Esquire, not to mention the deal-making eccentricities of its author and the charming opportunism of editor Gingrich. More interesting to me when I edited Esquire was Hemingway’s willingness to do the work offered by Gingrich for next to nothing because they were “just talking about journalism.”

  Journalism as Hemingway was referring to it was as greatly undervalued compared to fiction back then as it became overvalued later. In the thirties, the short story ruled, and as the decades moved on, journalists began to adopt the techniques of fiction. Narrative and scene became more important, as did believable dialogue and even speculation about what was going on inside a subject’s head. (Thanks, Tom!)

  And journalists started making more money. (Thanks again, Tom!!). For almost twenty years it was not crazy to think you could make an interesting living as a magazine freelancer, but that changed when the decline of traditional print economics and the rise of the cheapskate Internet resulted in what politicians now call an income equity gap. If you’re writing short fiction, you’ve probably got a teaching job.

  —

  I ALWAYS PAID MUCH LESS for fiction, and when I went to novelists with an idea for a nonfiction piece, they were surprised by how much more the journalism paid—usually at least
double.

  “What the fuck have I been doing?” is how Bill Kittredge put it when I called him in Missoula to talk him into what became a widely admired essay called “Redneck Secrets” that ran in the premier issue of Rocky Mountain Magazine. He had written mostly short fiction, which is what he taught at the University of Montana, but after that the personal essay was his strongest form and he also became a fine editor, putting together The Last Best Place, an anthology with astonishing range about Montana, with the filmmaker and writer Annick Smith.

  Writers have to be opportunistic. Even if they don’t recycle their pieces, exactly, they return to themes they have made their own and rework the language for different magazines. You can’t blame them. It’s survival instinct. So, too, is writing an online column for little or no money just for the exposure so you can charge more for speaking engagements. But over the years it was especially good news for writers whenever a new print magazine was launching (Egg, Spy, Outside, Spin, Condé Nast Traveler, Manhattan, Inc., all the way up through more recent business failures like Portfolio and Play). And it was even better if the rates were bouncing up, like when Vanity Fair relaunched in 1982, and then when Tina Brown began her luminous run there in 1984, and again when she took over the New Yorker in 1992. Condé Nast always paid the most and mounted the last of the big, extravagant magazine launches. Mark Golin, a colleague of mine at Time Inc., explained the writer economics of the $120 million Portfolio start-up in 2007 as “like when dogs find a tipped-over dumpster behind the Whole Foods.”