The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  After we closed the issue, Jann and I went through it in his office. The piece he liked best was an essay by the novelist Scott Spencer, which I had assigned with a twenty-four-hour deadline that first night. It ended with “It’s hard to believe our luck has gotten this bad.” The piece from inside the Dakota that we had argued about was also included. Jann had a small number of issues bound and numbered for some of us who had worked on it.

  —

  JANN WAS A RESOLUTE EDITOR, and his eye for talent was irrefutable. When he locked onto a writer—Tom Wolfe, say—he went after him hard and got him into Rolling Stone and the work was always superior. Tom said that The Bonfire of the Vanities would not have been written without Jann and the deadline pressure of publishing it serially, with a new chapter in every issue. They had agreed that writing a novel on deadline, the way Charles Dickens used to do it, would give Tom the motivation he needed. Tom said Jann was the best editor he ever worked with and that Rolling Stone was his home from 1972, when Jann assigned him to cover the launch of NASA’s last moon mission, Apollo 17. A four-part series, “Post-Orbital Remorse,” ran in the magazine, and led to his book The Right Stuff in 1979.

  Jann never got much credit for his actual editor-to-writer editing work, however, or what he called his “Buddha-like” levels of patience as deadlines approached for Tom (or, in the beginning, for Hunter—who would not finish a piece without him). As with the best and most productive editor-writer relationships, Jann and Tom became true friends. When he presented Tom with the Creative Excellence Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors in 2011, Jann changed into a white suit before going onstage.

  As much as he loved his relationship with Tom, Jann was wary of bad work by famous writers he hadn’t recruited himself. An editor would wrangle for months to bring in a piece and Jann would call bullshit on it. Which it sometimes was, but not always because Jann carried grudges, which is what the spiked editor would leave his office muttering. Mostly, though, Jann busted pieces for negligible reporting or self-promotion or recycling. Writers feared this from him, but those who stuck respected him for it too, especially when they understood that he really did care about the words. Jann nurtured writers as much as any editor I ever knew, although I doubt nurture was a word that came to mind when writers thought about him, and it was one he never would have used. “Buddha-like” was just funny.

  Jann himself was easy to edit, a clear writer who always knew what he wanted to say. Although he was never interested in line editing, he knew what a story was and was as good at recognizing a lede as anyone I worked with at Newsweek or, later, at Time Inc. When his news judgment lined up with his commercial instincts, he was ferocious.

  Arguing once about why I had not put the Rolling Stones (or some configuration of them) on the cover four issues in a row, I said I didn’t think that would have been very smart.

  “I think being rich is smart,” Jann said.

  Our numbers were up, and I bristled.

  “Don’t get woolly on me,” he said. “The Stones always outsell everybody.”

  It was late 1981 and the band was winding up an American tour, playing almost straight through from September to Christmas, making a fortune behind their new hits “Start Me Up” and “Waiting for a Friend.” The tour was important for Rolling Stone because elsewhere in rock and roll, both the music and the business seemed stuck. MTV was still in its embryo stage and music felt less important than it had for almost two decades. Even Jann had been a bit disengaged. His interests had drifted into the movie business, and at the same time, his gun-control work after John Lennon was killed was both relentless and frustrating. It was a tricky time to work for him. Chris Connelly (the future editor and ESPN correspondent), who manned the front switchboard then, told me that judging by our body language, “You and Jann don’t meet, you collide.”

  Shortly after I arrived at Rolling Stone, Jann moved out of his townhouse on East Sixty-sixth Street and began living in Richard Gere’s apartment downtown. He was heavy then, which made him look puffy, and most days he came to work a little ragged, rolling into the office for a call or two before a one o’clock lunch at Harry Cipriani in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, across Fifty-ninth Street. He made a show about being very busy and was irritable to the point of barking at assistants with messy desks. The joke in the office was that Jann’s secret to getting what he wanted from people was that he “had the Polaroids.” This implied a sexual friskiness at Rolling Stone that didn’t exist beyond the usual office promiscuity, and Jann never hit on anyone. His private life was very private.

  I was running the magazine day-to-day, and we had seen a surprising (to Jann, at first) success on the newsstand with box-office actors like Jack Nicholson and Goldie Hawn. I had moved the music coverage to the back of the magazine and Rolling Stone now led with an “Art & Politics” rubric. New writers included Larry McMurtry, P. J. O’Rourke, Bill Greider (hired away from the Washington Post), and even Jayne Anne Phillips with an early short story titled “How Mickey Made It”—a rockspeak monologue about sex. It was a bigger deal around the office that Hunter was back, not in the magazine yet but on an assignment to cover the Roxanne Pulitzer divorce trial in Palm Beach. The magazine seemed to be growing stronger and Jann and I were getting along. We snorted coke in the bathroom at the RS Christmas party, and I gave him a stuffed piranha as a present—which he bragged about and displayed on his desk for as long as I was working there.

  When I told him I was leaving for Newsweek, he asked me what my title was going to be. I remember we were both wearing ties. When I said, “assistant managing editor,” he got up from the big round table that was his desk and looked out the window with his back to me.

  “Humiliating,” he said. “Newsweek isn’t even any good.”

  I couldn’t read him; were we both humiliated? I looked at the piranha and waited for his punch line, which surprised me when it came as he turned back to face me.

  “You won’t get to work with Hunter anymore.”

  −ENDIT−

  Covers, Newsstands, Hits (1,271)

  IF YOU WERE GOOD at writing cover lines, it was like a gift. Some of the best editors I worked with were lousy at it, in the way some people can’t tell a joke. The connection is obvious because the best cover language is almost always funny, and writing good headlines on deadline can make you feel like a Looney Toon producing an anvil or stick of dynamite from behind your back. If you could do that you earned a special status among other editors and word got around. Jann was good and so was David “the Stonecutter” Felton, who slapped “The Quitter” on the Rolling Stone cover when Nixon resigned—a particular favorite of mine.

  Not long after I got to Rolling Stone, we had a big success with a Jim Morrison cover, which was surprising at first because he had died ten years earlier in his bathtub in Paris. We had no new information except the sense that the Doors were having a revival among teenagers. My deputy editor, David Rosenthal, spotted it early and assigned Rosemary Breslin (Jimmy’s daughter) to talk to some kids, get the recent sales numbers and bang out a piece. We found a head shot with Jim’s blue eyes piercing out at you, but what made the cover was the headline:

  He’s hot,

  He’s sexy

  and He’s dead

  The cover, especially the headline, got a lot of pickup and we celebrated with some drinks in the office. I thought I had written the line but David corrected me, pointing out that he had said it in my office when we’d first started fooling around. Then Jann took credit for it, saying that David and I had come up with something like “still sexy” and he had fixed it with “he’s dead.”

  It was a brilliant cover whoever wrote the lines, a meld of idea, execution and timing that pulled huge newsstand sales. For any cover to work it has to be surprising, smart in some way that throws attitude and handsome. Check, check and check.

  —

  ALL THE CLICHÉS ABOUT COVERS are true and I revisited them often. The cover is the face
of your magazine; it should be a poster for what’s inside; it should stop people for a second look; it should make them want to buy it. Some editors thought a bad cover that sold well was better than a good cover that didn’t, but that was only true in terms of their job security. You could humiliate yourself with a bad cover, the way desperate editors still do all the time.

  Some editors talked about “building” covers, and that’s the right verb to use. The idea comes first, even if it’s just “beautiful famous person looking beautiful and famous.” Once the art director and I had two or three photos we liked (or were resigned to using the best of what we had), we would sit at a huge screen and start trying different crops, headlines, type sizes and styles. For a while I was prone to adding borders, and I went through two sticker phases—first real stick-ons (Esquire) and then fake photoshopped replicas (Men’s Journal). Some editors were superstitious. Not me, except for no green logos, ever. Covers usually took a day or two because you wanted to reflect and tinker, but I’ve done them in ten minutes.

  When I was first thinking about covers, I looked at a lot of album jackets and the best of them were wordless—the Beatles’ Abbey Road and White Album, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin. It’s a very long list. The strongest magazine covers don’t need language, either. Annie Leibovitz’s image of John and Yoko, and later images of 9/11 on Time and some other titles, proved that. The devastating torque of the story made any language beyond the date banal. The popularity surge of a dead rock star was, of course, a very different story. And so too was Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair thirty-four years later.

  —

  EDITORS KEPT SCORE WITH NEWSSTAND sales. Many had bonuses based on the percentage of sell-through and total copies sold built into their contracts. Richard Stolley, the preeminent Time Inc. editor who bought the Abraham Zapruder footage of the JFK assassination for Life and was later the founding managing editor of People, had a kind of mantra for what sorts of covers sold best.

  Young is better than old.

  Pretty is better than ugly.

  Rich is better than poor.

  Movies are better than music.

  Music is better than television.

  Television is better than sports.

  …and anything is better than politics.

  He wrote it for his editors to follow, and it was key to People’s success as the most profitable magazine of all time. But he amended it in 1980, following John Lennon’s murder, which for many magazines was the best-selling cover until Princess Diana died.

  …and nothing beats celebrity death.

  Coverage of Diana both before and after she was killed was like an open cash register for the print media. “Lady Di launched at least a thousand covers,” wrote Newsweek media critic Jonathan Alter, “and hundreds of millions of newspaper and magazine sales.” The most uncomfortable irony was that she was being chased by motorcycle paparazzi in Paris when her Mercedes swerved head-on into a pillar in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel at sixty-five miles per hour.

  All the newsweeklies scrambled to put her on the cover, and then Time, Newsweek, People and TV Guide followed up with commemorative editions as well. On newsstands, Time’s first issue about Diana’s death sold about 850,000—which was 650,000 more than usual. The commemorative edition sold 1.2 million copies. Time’s managing editor at the time, Walter Isaacson, announced that they were the two largest sellers in the history of the magazine. People’s commemorative issue ran without a headline and sold over 3.1 million, which makes it the second-highest People cover of all time, behind 9/11.

  —

  IF I’D HAD A NEWSSTAND MANTRA, it would have been that there are no rules. And smart wasn’t necessarily better than dumb. By the 1990s celebrity weight loss and TV reality shows sold the best, except, of course, for dead celebrities. Now nothing sells like it used to.

  Page views are the new measure, and cute puppies and cheap-trick penis headlines rule the click-bait newsstand. But before you feel too sorry for the old newsstand stars (both the subjects and the editors who put them on their covers), note that in an ever-fractionating media universe of aggregation and crypto-plagiarism it’s both easier and more fun to manipulate traffic than it ever was to game the old newsstands. I leave it to someone else to say which turns editors more cynical.

  The Big Get is always obvious in retrospect. When Vanity Fair put Caitlyn Jenner on the cover in July 2015, its website scored its largest ever single-day audience, with over nine million unique users, and according to a company-wide memo at Condé Nast, more than 46 million people consumed Jenner’s cover story–related content on digital outlets like VanityFair.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter in the first twenty-four hours. But the print newsstand came in at less than 500,000. Gone are the days of a decade ago, when Jennifer Aniston gave Vanity Fair a newsstand record with 738,929. What is also obvious is that the newsstand as the anchor of any magazine business model is long dead.

  —

  DAVID ROSENTHAL AND JANN each still insist that the Jim Morrison headline was theirs. I’m the only one who can settle that argument. I think of it as mine.

  −ENDIT−

  Hunter Thompson (1,858)

  THERE WAS A PARTY for Hunter upstairs at Pete’s Tavern on Irving Place. It was to start early, after Hunter’s Letterman taping in midtown, and I brought my sons, who were then five and seven. They were promised a burger and a quick exit after we said hello, but both were skeptical, especially Thomas, whose middle name is Hunter. He had heard too much about Hunter promising to bring him “a pony from the swamp,” as Hunter had written to him in a note from Palm Beach before he could read.

  We passed through the bar and went up a steep, narrow staircase. Hunter was standing at the top of the stairs, looming and vaguely menacing when you looked up at him. As we climbed, the boys scrambling in front of me, I could see that he was smiling.

  “Good,” Hunter said. “Too much fun, eh…ho ho…”

  As the boys reached the landing, he squatted like a catcher, eye to eye with them, and presented his pack of Dunhill Reds.

  “You guys want a smoke?”

  —

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW Hunter he was smoking alone, leaning on a terra-cotta urn that held a large palm in the fake-marble lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel in L.A. He was tall and unmissable, with cigarette holder, short-sleeved shirt, high-top Converse sneakers and sunglasses, and had just bellowed some explosive insult at the closed-circuit Nixon speech the media was being served. He was covering the end of the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential race, doing the work for Rolling Stone that would become Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, and was already notorious in the press corps as “the Prince of Gonzo…the quintessential Outlaw Journalist,” according to J. Anthony Lukas. Tim Crouse, who was also covering the campaign for Rolling Stone, wrote later in his book The Boys on the Bus that Hunter had a “touch of Genet” in him, and that “he wrote to provoke, shock, protest, and annoy.” Hunter was, de facto, not on the bus, and his reporting technique was often to hang back, as he was doing that night in L.A.—except for barking at the TV.

  Nixon was there for a $1,000-a-plate dinner with his Southern California VIPs. Bob Hope was the master of ceremonies. Outside on the Avenue of the Stars, two thousand demonstrators were taunting the LAPD and reminding each other of 1967, when thirteen hundred club-swinging police tried to control ten thousand anti-war protesters while President Johnson spoke inside at a Democratic fund-raiser. Everyone was older, but the war was still with us.

  I walked up to Hunter with the photographer David Strick and asked him if he’d been outside. I was working as a reporter for the Other Bob Sherrill and knew I was going to need a quote from Hunter.

  “I’m working here,” he said, and mumbled something about getting recognized outside. I could see he wasn’t interested in explaining. “Fuck it,” he added. I nodded, and Strick ran some frames through his motor drive as we left.

  “If you see Kovic, tell him hel
lo,” Hunter said after us, jamming another Dunhill into his cigarette holder as we headed for the door. He was talking about Ron Kovic, the activist ex-marine who had been paralyzed from the waist down in Vietnam and years later would write Born on the Fourth of July, which Oliver Stone turned into the film with Tom Cruise playing Kovic. If you knew anything about Kovic, you knew he was a hero way before that movie came out, and Rolling Stone readers already knew because of what Hunter had written about him.

  Outside, it was now very loud. Police lines had been set up on both sides of the avenue, creating a no-man’s-land in the middle, where the TV crews were operating. Crossing the first line was easy. As I was crossing the second, a handsome young LAPD officer told me it might not be as easy getting back. I pointed to the credential around my neck and he shrugged, saying, “Like we’re gonna care if they start throwing shit.”

  Most of the demonstrators were UCLA students, but some serious SNCC organizers and other anti-war leaders were there, too. I saw the guys from the L.A. chapter of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, maybe forty of them in their battle vests and field hats, about to raise their upside-down American flag. I knew some of them from a piece I had recently done.

  The double police lines were keeping the vets too far from the hotel facade, hung with Nixon banners, to make for good pictures. Everybody who was ever in what they called “the Nam” was hip to the value of the right image. The year before, a thousand vets had stepped forward one by one to hurl their medals at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Kovic and many of these guys had been there, throwing away Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars on the steps of the Capitol with a big “Fuck you!” The pictures were devastating.