The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  I thought hard about this and, since Armani was the most important advertiser for Esquire, I asked Gay Talese to sign a copy of his new book, Unto the Sons, to Giorgio. Esquire had excerpted Gay’s history of his family’s immigration to America from Italy. The book’s most intimate passages were about Gay’s father, who was a tailor. I had the book with me when I saw Armani the following spring at the men’s shows in Milan. Without Liz beside me, there would be no lunch, but we had coffee in his office. Giorgio opened the book, saw that it was signed, passed it over his shoulder to an assistant without reading the inscription, and asked me about Liz. When was she coming next to Milan?

  I saw that same copy of Unto the Sons a year later on a bookshelf in Gabriella Forte’s apartment in New York.

  —

  LOOKING FOR FASHION MATERIAL for my “Editor’s Notes” column in Esquire, I asked Liz what it was she noticed first when she met someone—expecting, I suppose, something smart about shoes or haircuts. Instead she paraphrased a line from a Katharine Hepburn film: “I notice whether the person is a man or a woman.”

  Very sexy, when she said it—and direct, like her taste as an editor. She had a clear eye for the sociology of fashion that could capture (or shred) any look she saw on any runway or street. “Downtown Marie Antoinette” was the look her friend Jean Paul Gaultier was showing that year. “Blind Anchorwoman,” which she pointed out to me one day when we were walking across Central Park South, was maybe a bit of a reach but I knew what she meant. Our boss was “Black Paw” because of his fingernails. “Being wicked,” she called it and we did a lot of it. Her only insecurity as an editor was dealing with writers.

  In England she had been a celebrity as a fashion editor, even appearing on the sides of double-decker buses with her oldest son in an adoption-awareness campaign; but there was a disconnect with journalists, because she was just a fashion editor. She was worried that New York would be like London, where the literary scene was closed to her. This could be problematic if she couldn’t get interesting writing (part of Vogue’s mix) into Bazaar. I said I could introduce her to writers if she was feeling pressed.

  “What about you,” she said. “I wouldn’t be afraid of editing you.”

  “You wouldn’t be doing the editing anyway,” I said. “What’s your idea? You have to give your writers an idea first.”

  “Oh, yes, I know that,” she said. “Write fashion and rock and roll. You edited Rolling Stone, or so you say.”

  “What’s the piece again?”

  “Roll over, Beethoven,” she said. “Tell Balenciaga the news.”

  When I finally wrote that piece for her, it was called “Not Fade Away: Mingling Destinies of Rock and Roll and Fashion.” I was all over the map—her map—when it came to which designer went with which rocker. I had the obvious: Giorgio Armani with Eric Clapton, and Calvin Klein as a Mudd Club vet. Liz explained that fifteen years previous, Richard Tyler had dressed Rod Stewart in glitter and spandex for his Blondes Have More Fun tour, and last year he had fitted himself with the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s most prestigious award as Womenswear Designer of the Year. “That has to mean something,” she said.

  Voguette that she was, having begun as an unpaid intern in the late ’60s, Liz was amused by my characterizations of the period. “All that hard-rocking creative sexuality and open rebellion, come on…” Where was my nuance? She told me about Pop and Op Art overpowering textile design, and Twiggy flirting around London in little gym slips. She told me not to ignore Dr. John because his gris-gris was about voodoo accessories, and that Carnaby Street had a men’s shop named I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet; it sold used military uniforms, and she had slapped several into her “More Dash Than Cash” pages as soon as she saw them.

  She insisted she was not about language (“My mind is too full of pictures, not enough room then for words”) except she was as hungry for specific details as any line editor I ever worked with.

  —

  WHEN SHE TOOK OVER at Harper’s Bazaar in 1992, Elizabeth Jane Kelly Tilberis was a size 12, which she said was “practically illegal in our business.” One gossip column applied the word bovine. She laughed that off and lost weight as her Bazaar came together, dropping to a size 8. She said her “slinky” staff helped her look the part but added, with a green-eyed wink, that “fashion editors should never look better than their models.”

  Liz knew every fashion trick, every cliché, but she didn’t pander. Instead of snapping at the heels of the flush and splashy Vogue, she decided to simplify. Her relaunch of Bazaar (September 1992) was quieter than expected. The cover was a very graphic Patrick Demarchelier shot of Linda Evangelista looking smart and confident with a small cover line: “Enter the Era of Elegance.” It was cool, but there was no snobby chill. Even cooler, the logo was unbalanced, an act of innovation that winked with subliminal ink. By comparison, Vogue’s grunged-up models covered with type looked sloppy. Downtown suddenly seemed almost quaint. Liz’s inside pages too were sleek and inviting, with understated glamour in the white space and more of creative director Fabien Baron’s innovative typography. It was practical, democratic fashion, elegant in its execution.

  In a little over a year, Bazaar was back as one of the world’s preeminent fashion magazines, challenging Anna Wintour’s Vogue. The paparazzi loved Liz, and she dazzled them with her bob of white hair, which looked silver in photos. She was having another jolly riot. Bazaar’s circulation climbed as she nurtured her photographers, swapped risqué stories with models, complimented stylists and charmed advertisers. With readers, she stressed building personal style with common sense. One of her “Editor’s Letter” columns celebrated the humble sweater. By then she was a size 6.

  —

  THAT DECEMBER, some 250 fashion and publishing people were invited to the brownstone in the East Eighties she and Andrew had rented from director Mike Nichols. There was a huge Christmas tree in the living room and white flowers everywhere, and the townhouse was packed with her New York friends—Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder, Barbara Walters, Jann Wenner, people named Trump. The party was to celebrate her triumphant first year and Bazaar’s many honors, which included two National Magazine Awards. Hearst had taken out a full-page congratulatory ad in the New York Times. The columnist Billy Norwich wrote that it was the kind of soigné party he used to read about in urbane novels.

  When Liz walked me to the bar, I said, “The gang’s apparently all here.”

  “Someone named Jerome just whispered to me, ‘There are people in this room who should not be here,’ ” Liz said. “I don’t know what that means exactly.”

  “Yes, you do,” I said, figuring it had to have been the notorious “social moth” Jerome Zipkin. “You want me to kick his ass?”

  “Oh yes, please.”

  She made a very short speech that night. “A magazine is only people,” she said. “It walks in the door in the morning, and out the door at night. Please let’s never forget that.”

  None of us knew she had been diagnosed with stage III ovarian cancer and had a procedure scheduled for the next morning.

  —

  WHEN HER CANCER WAS REPORTED in the media, she came forward with some of what she had been going through, first on the “Editor’s Letter” page: I never wanted to be a poster girl for cancer. But cancer has become part of who I am, along with my big feet and my English accent. I have greenish eyes, I was born on Sept. 7 (the same day as Queen Elizabeth), and I have ovarian cancer. So do almost 175,000 other women in the United States.

  Privately she joked that she had arrived hungover for her procedure, the day after her Christmas party. For the next seven years she would balance treatments and operations with her work at Bazaar. She wore catheters under evening dresses. She escorted Princess Diana on one of her visits to New York, even though she was in chemotherapy. Diana had been one of the first people on the telephone when Liz emerged from her first major operation.

&
nbsp; “Diana who?” said Andrew.

  “Diana Windsor.”

  Sometimes Liz didn’t feel like talking to anyone, but the depression that must have come with the cancer otherwise never showed. “My cancer diet” she said of her slender figure. There were sores in her mouth and her appetite was gone. Then her mouth dried out and her fingernails splintered. Growing weaker, she would tell a story about Andrew having to get her tights on for her in the morning, and somehow make it funny.

  One morning in her office, when I said something about how good her hair looked despite chemotherapy, she laughed. “It’s a wig,” she whispered. Her sons called it “Larry,” for the way Laurence Olivier looked in Henry V.

  By then she was a size 4.

  Her memoir was called No Time to Die. In it she wrote about the place she and Andrew had found on the bay in East Hampton: I’d go down to the narrow strip of beach at the back of our house each morning and sit on my favorite rock with a cup of tea, often so weak that he’d have to carry me back. In what was a real family tragedy, Sophie, one of our Labradors, had recently died.

  I knew that dog. That house was where Liz and Andrew had sheltered me during the summer when my marriage was ending. Too soon after, I got a call from Andrew.

  “She’s gone,” he told me. “There’s nothing left to say.”

  —

  THE BARE STAGE WAS EDGED by pots of her favorite white orchids, and overhead was a large black-and-white Patrick Demarchelier photo of Liz, smiling out at the more than a thousand people filling Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. Every important designer was there, along with top editors and Hearst executives. Si Newhouse and Anna Wintour came together. Hillary Clinton sent a statement. Bruce Weber, Trudie Styler and Calvin Klein were on the program, along with Liz’s doctor, and her brother, Grant, also a doctor. I spoke, too. I said Elizabeth Jane Kelly Tilberis was a caviar hound and a rocker. Last on the program was Dr. John. He played “My Buddy.”

  −ENDIT−

  Cowboy-Hippie-Poet Weird (459)

  In the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford there is a display called “Treatment of Dead Enemies.” Behind some very old glass, you can see shrunken heads, ear awls and change purses made out of scrotums.

  WRITERS CAME AND WENT, usually moving on to other magazines or writing books or for television or films. (Eureka!) Most were careful to avoid any bridge burning. Editors tended to stick where they were and found it in their competitive interest to mock other editors.

  Art Cooper, the shrewd and affable editor of GQ, once called me “Montana-cowboy-hippie-poet weird,” a phrase that my publishing colleagues at Esquire said GQ advertising sales people were using to illustrate the difference between us (the hillbillies) and them (the sophisticates). Art lunched in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons restaurant almost every day, wore black turtlenecks and was famous for his colognes—which I thought was differentiation enough. But he was also smart and mockingly funny, hence his description of me.

  I didn’t hear from Art when I was unexpectedly fired from Esquire (another story), but two years later when I landed back in the men’s category editing Men’s Journal, Art wrote me a note: “Here we go again.”

  When he died in 2003, after announcing his retirement from GQ after nearly twenty years, his final issue was just hitting the newsstands. We were friends by then and sometimes discussed how our magazines ran on the same economic formula: the fashion paid for the literary journalism—which is the only model that still works for legacy publishing in the men’s category. These were helpful conversations and ranged sometimes into where to eat in Milan during fashion week or if it ever made sense to invite Ralph Lauren to an NBA game (no). Art was competitive, even trying to spin a sports magazine out of GQ when I was at Sports Illustrated, but I always learned something when we ran into each other.

  The bigger lesson is that if you get to the top of a masthead, everyone with an equivalent title will make a good ally, even if they’re in direct competition with you. This may be counterintuitive, but if you think of it as making as many friends as you can among equals, it will make more sense. It’s like celebrities in television green rooms greeting each other as if they’re best friends even though the only place they see each other is in green rooms. It’s intimidating if you want it to be. And now, with so many confusing hierarchies across both old and new media companies, you need to look like you have as many friends as possible—especially if your title is now chief content officer instead of editor in chief.

  −ENDIT−

  Truth(s) (665)

  EDITORS SHOULD NEVER PREACH and that is not my intention, but whether you are a writer of fiction or a journalist or an editor of either one, when you look in the mirror you should think tireless or dogged or maybe even a stronger word (indefatigable?) to describe what you need to be to become successful, and what you should be as you go after the truth—which is your job.

  Look for the smoking gun but also for the occasional blip that at first may seem old but then suddenly makes complete sense—like finding out that the Dalai Lama likes to fix wristwatches. This is a small truth, a fact, loaded with implications because of the synchronous orbits it shares with His Holiness’s day job. Squint at it. Look closely, too, at the reach between, say, the Ogaden shepherd with his cell phone in Ethiopia and the Seattle software engineer sipping his Ogaden Americano. This is different from the false range that appears so often in flawed journalism about entertainment (“from Brad Pitt to George Clooney”). The Ogaden reach can be a zip line for all the complicated and contradictory ornaments you want to hang on it as a fiction writer or journalist.

  Fiction has its own truth in what is made up to help us see what is real. (“One morning, when Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.”) But Gregor is not going to sue, and whoever they write about, journalists have to watch out for that—even when their most important job is telling true stories. Here is the definition of “journalistic truth” that comes out of the Journalism and Media division of the Pew Research Center: “a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts. Then journalists try to convey a fair and reliable account of their meaning, valid for now, subject to further investigation.”

  This is good thinking but it often gets bumpy in practice.

  Objectivity is an illusion. Every writer knows that and makes their own deal. If you’re a journalist, this is very big. The unwiped truth is that the so-called journalism of empathy—written with an understanding of the point of view of sources and building a reciprocal relationship with readers—is a convenient escalator to ethical justification. At its best (Sebastian Junger, Gary Smith, Francisco Goldman, Susan Orlean, Jon Krakauer), you get the most powerful nonfiction narratives. At worst, truth never gets in the way.

  In her book I Remember Nothing, Nora Ephron wrote in a chapter called “Journalism: A Love Story” that there is no such thing as the truth, that people are constantly misquoted, that the media is full of conspiracies “and that, in any case, ineptness is a kind of conspiracy.” And then she killed you with “emotional detachment and cynicism get you only so far. But for many years I was in love with journalism.”

  Loving journalism is usually the beginning of the story. Then, inevitably, you find that some of the best journalists are troubled by what they do. Gore Vidal called source betrayal “the iron law of journalism.” With her usual reverberating truth, Joan Didion wrote in her preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “Writers are always selling somebody out.” You understand, and figure that is never their intention, until you come across an even more disturbing quote, from Janet Malcolm. It is the thesis of her 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer. It is also her lede:

  Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust an
d betraying them without remorse.

  The indictment is more powerful because Malcolm never renders herself immune. She is, in this way, indefatigable. But so too is the truth, even when there are many truths.

  −ENDIT−

  Richard Ford (2,066)

  Nobody gives a damn about a writer and his problems except another writer.

  —HAROLD ROSS, FOUNDING EDITOR, THE NEW YORKER

  I LEARNED AN IMPORTANT TRUTH about editing from Richard Ford, although my writing this will probably surprise him.

  Richard called himself a white-buck southerner and liked to say he had some arrows in his ass, meaning it had not always been as easy as it looked—handsome novelist, beautiful wife; the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner (an unprecedented double for Independence Day); the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As far as I knew, no one believed him about the arrows. He was important and somehow confounding—all that success!—but you wanted to be friends with him. At least I did.

  I had admired his writing since discovering A Piece of My Heart, an audacious first novel with a fineness of language that caught something violent and unsettling about our generation. We were the same age, and I was in my first editing job at Outside. Richard had enlisted in the marines and tried teaching and law school, and picked up an MFA. After A Piece of My Heart came The Ultimate Good Luck but they were both small novels—“small” as in strong reviews, low sales. He figured there had to be at least some money in journalism and he liked sports, so he got a package of his writing together and sent it to Sports Illustrated. Word came back that he should stick to fiction, although when I checked years later, there was no record of this at SI, which I think annoyed Richard because the rejection had obviously piqued him.