The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  Jann and Matt liked the grandstand seats, so I went back down to the fence to be with the boys. We were close enough to catch some of the dirt spraying from the hooves of the bucking stock and we could see close into the riders’ faces. At one point a rodeo clown dressed like a 1950s idea of a hobo but wearing football pads underneath the outfit went up the fence very close to us and the bull slammed after him. The announcer said something about rodeo clowns having the most dangerous jobs and being the bravest stars of the rodeo. The boys all took that in very seriously and I caught the eye of Jann’s middle son.

  “Your father is very brave, too,” I said.

  “I know,” said Theo.

  —

  ON ROLLING STONE’s FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY, Jann sent me a silver Tiffany box engraved with the magazine’s logo and the Grateful Dead line “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” I’m not sure how many others got one of those boxes, but I was glad to get mine and thought of Jane when I read the lyric. By this time, Jann and Matt had three young children of their own and were quietly gone from the Hamptons, with a sixty-five-acre estate up the Hudson River.

  We hadn’t seen each other in a couple years, but I followed the anniversary coverage, which went two distinct ways. In the tabloids, it was predictably mean and unfair to Matt. He had been on the cover of Out (“He Married a Mogul & Charmed the Fashion Elite. Does This Boy Have It All?”), and that just fed the cliché. In the serious press, Jann was recognized as a genius come of age. The best piece was in the Washington Post, by Peter Carlson, who noted that a smashed Pete Townshend guitar was still on the wall (“like some priceless relic of a prehistoric civilization”). But Carlson led with Hunter being dead and the Capri Lounge gone.

  The reference to the Capri Lounge threw me, like the mention of a long-forgotten adolescent misdemeanor. Who had let that out? From the early days in San Francisco, the magazine’s photo-imaging work had stayed in-house, in the Capri Lounge. I don’t know who first called it the Capri, but it was the extension of Jann’s eye for photography and his insistence on quality reproduction. It was expensive, but that’s what it took, and the guys who ran it moved to New York with the magazine.

  Because of the camera work, which went on around the clock on deadline, the lighting in the Capri ranged from spooky, glowing orange to blazed-out white. This made for interesting Polaroids, which were mandatory if you happened into the Capri looking for a bump of coke to get you through the night. A lot of guests went through there too—writers, photographers, actors, agents, musicians—and when the walls were covered, the stoned Polaroids went into an album for everyone’s amusement. Ken Kesey said that being in that album was like being “on the bus,” his blessing that meant you were cool enough to be a Merry Prankster.

  Asked about the Capri by Carlson, a surprised Jann explained that the Capri was long gone, and that it had been counterproductive. “It was a bad situation. And they had all those Polaroids there—I have that book now.” So in the end, Jann did have the Polaroids. In the next graph, the Post noted, “He [Jann] smiles. ‘Those were the good old days,’ he says.”

  Well, they were and they weren’t.

  —

  THE LAST TIME I QUIT Wenner Media, it was to go to Sports Illustrated. By this time I had edited all of Jann’s magazines, starting with the launch of Outside (left to finish a novel and found Rocky Mountain Magazine), Rolling Stone (went to Newsweek), Men’s Journal, and Us Weekly, where I oversaw the repositioning from a struggling entertainment fortnightly to an occasionally ironic glossy tabloid—it was at Us where “Fashion Police” first appeared (the brainchild of deputy editor Charles Leerhsen).

  “My work here is done” is what I remember telling Jann, probably grinning. He was amused too, I think, and we agreed that my journalistic destiny was not buying celebrity baby pictures, overseeing lipstick pages and editing pieces about Britney Spears. He asked me if Bonnie Fuller (Cosmopolitan, Glamour) could edit Us, and I said sure but Leerhsen would be my choice.

  A couple months later, after I had moved across Sixth Avenue to the Time & Life Building, Jann decided not to honor the retirement benefits in my contract and we headed for court. I would not have left Hearst for Wenner Media without matching benefits. The Daily News reported, “Swaggering publisher Jann Wenner is being sued by Terry McDonell, the mag’s former editor and his friend for 30 years.” The piece went on to note that Jann had “recently agreed to pay editor Bonnie Fuller, McDonell’s successor at Us Weekly, about $1 million a year.”

  Our lawyers handled everything; Jann and I settled without ever talking. Over the next ten years, Jann was very friendly whenever we ran into each other, as if nothing had gone wrong between us. At first I responded coldly, but my anger was meaningless to him. He was sentimental about the work we had done together and in the end I guess I was too, because we became something like friends again.

  —

  I NEVER HEARD ANYONE CALL Jann handsome, although if you look at the old photographs you see that he was, and even hungover and bloated, with reddened eyes, he had a glow that you can see now in his sons.

  One day, I ran into Theo Wenner on the street in the photo district in New York. He was a photographer by now, with a solid career and much promise. We talked about what he and his brothers were doing and how they sometimes ran into my sons—all of them still good friends. I asked Theo if he ever thought of the Salmon River trip and how Jann and I had jumped off that cliff.

  “Of course,” he said. “We had great times.”

  I e-mailed Jann the day after to tell him that I’d seen Theo, and that I had been brooding about writing him one of our father-to-father notes like in the old days and finally couldn’t help myself. Jann came back right away, with news of all the kids and compliments for my sons. “Think of you often,” he wrote at the end.

  In what way? I wondered. Hunter was still on the Rolling Stone masthead and maybe the Stones will always sell magazines, but that didn’t matter when it came to where Jann and I had landed our friendship. So when people ask me about Jann Wenner, and they still do, I say he’s a great father.

  −ENDIT−

  The End of Fun (896)

  HUNTER SAID HE NEVER EXPECTED to live to fifty, which was no consolation to anyone when he killed himself just before dark on a Sunday in February 2005 while his son, Juan, daughter-in-law, Jennifer, and grandson, Will, were visiting for the weekend. Reports said he’d been depressed by advancing age, chronic medical problems and the end of football season—the banality of the latter rang in my ears. He was sixty-seven, at times almost incontinent, and had suffered alcohol withdrawal during hip and back surgeries. When I thought about his last moments, I wondered about his final secret, the one hinted at when he laughed, the one he kept as he loaded the .45. I remembered what he had written about Pete Axthelm: He got out just in time. What did anyone expect.

  A week later, about a hundred mostly local friends got together in the swank new ballroom of Aspen’s Jerome Hotel. This was not the circus of promotion that Johnny Depp organized at Owl Farm that summer, with fireworks blasting Hunter’s ashes into the Colorado sky. I have a photograph of me speaking at that first memorial service. Behind me is an eight-foot-tall cutout of Hunter, drink in one hand, giving the finger with the other, and I have lipstick on, the way Hunter liked to wear it, like clown makeup but smeared and aggressive. Everyone in the room knew about the lipstick, and a tube of it was on every table, along with Dunhill Reds and noise hammers.

  I told the story about Hunter offering cigarettes to my young sons, said a few more words about him sending George the black spot and sat down. Hunter’s son, Juan, said that from now on a phone call at four a.m. would be only bad news. Jack Nicholson got up in dark glasses and said the suicide was probably another one of Hunter’s stunts, a hoax. The actor Don Johnson recounted how Hunter would lie down with Johnson’s horse when it was sick. Johnson did not know what to make of that. Come to think of it, he added, he also didn’t know what to thi
nk of Hunter taking his wife, Kelley, out to lunch when he was out of town, and he also admitted that he had once lamely asked Hunter to explain the sound of one hand clapping and Hunter had slapped him across the face. Everyone in the room got every word of that. Bill Murray showed up late but spoke with much soul and love about Hunter’s molecules—“his very molecules”—now living everywhere, especially within all of us. Near midnight, a former waitress from the Woody Creek Tavern sang “Amazing Grace.” It felt communal, with undisciplined sorrows.

  My notes from that night were short: “Very few people from NYC. Jann—sentimental. Hinckle—way drunk. Not many writers. Bill Kennedy in from Buffalo, some others I don’t know. Steadman—older, otherwise the same. Lots of actors. Juan very strong, poised, calling his father Hunter as he had since he was a little boy…Very sad…Now over…So over.”

  Back in New York I went through the contacts on my computer, checking to see how many others were dead, knowing I wouldn’t delete them. All the obituaries and memorial services stayed with me, too. Whenever I had to speak at one, I would say it was a miserable assignment—something I got from a Hemingway letter to Sara and Gerald Murphy when their youngest son had died. I would add that the subtext was that we were lucky to have the lives we had no matter how rocky things got.

  I spoke about Liz Tilberis this way, and also wrote it in letters to the widows of Ken Auchincloss and Maynard Parker, whom I had worked with at Newsweek, and Peter Maas, a founding contributor to New York magazine, who had opened windows into organized crime—all mentors who became friends. I said something like that, too, at the memorial service for George at St. John the Divine in Manhattan, and at the Jerome Hotel in Aspen for Hunter. I never felt bad about it because each time it was true. Sometimes I would say I was determined to be light and amusing because George or Hunter or Liz would have wanted it that way. That was true, too.

  We all save totems of our losses. I saved magazines and books and photographs. For me, it was all about the work, anyway. That bound John Lennon issue of Rolling Stone was about Jann. And Bill Murray was right about Hunter’s molecules living everywhere, and so was Hinckle, who wrote that Hunter would always be there, like a phantom limb.

  When Elaine Kaufman died, the memorial services, wakes and parties went on for weeks. The obits ran long, even those way out of town where people had probably never heard of the restaurant. And there was a silent auction of her personal possessions, with a preview in her apartment on Eighty-sixth Street. Anyone who knew about it could just show up one afternoon and look at her paintings and furniture and souvenirs where she had lived with them. I didn’t go and I never went back to the restaurant. Some people wondered about that, but I didn’t feel like it.

  −ENDIT−

  IV

  Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

  —ALBERT CAMUS

  Pocho (807)

  JOSÉ ANTONIO VILLARREAL was the first writer I ever met. His first novel, Pocho, was published in 1959 and he was a friend of my high school English teacher’s and came to speak to our class after we had all read it, just before graduation in 1962. Being a pocho meant your parents had come to the United States from Mexico, during the Depression, and he wrote about growing up spinning between two cultures. I thought it was a wonderful book, and I was embarrassed by our questions. Had he really been a migrant worker? Yes, and his father had been one after he had fought with Pancho Villa in the revolution. The class knew all about migrant workers, and couldn’t believe that anyone who picked row crops could write a book. He said he had always wanted to be a writer.

  Me too, I thought suddenly. Maybe that’s what I’d been thinking about, without really thinking about it. I don’t mean unconsciously thinking about it, I mean thinking about specific stories and details of my own life and the lives of my friends, just not as a writer.

  I would remember my mother as young and pretty, a girl with nice legs getting out of a Ford convertible on the edge of a cherry orchard in Mountain View, California, in 1949. Husband dead, shot down, gone. No one talked about the war, but there was a trunk full of uniforms somewhere and she would show the medals to me and I would turn the wings over in my hands.

  When I was five and my mother was twenty-nine we had driven out from Minnesota. I went to PTA meetings with her because she couldn’t find a babysitter and we didn’t know any of our neighbors yet. I was afraid the other parents wouldn’t like my mother because she was a new teacher and she’d brought her own kid along. I listened to what they said and felt better because all they were talking about was how smart they were to have made it to California. California had the best weather and the best fruit and the best new roads and the best new schools. And my mother was smart to be a schoolteacher because it was a job that didn’t depend on the weather, like construction or fruit and row crops. Most of her students came from Mexico, and, like one of characters in Pocho, she taught them reading although she didn’t speak Spanish.

  When I was in high school I had a friend who had come up from Mexico and said he had fought a professional fight when he was fourteen. That same year he found out what happened between his father and his sister, and a lot of other things he told me I didn’t want to know but was glad later I knew about. He went to jail for a while but did not die there. Another friend was Fillmore Cross, a Gypsy Joker, who got chopped into little pieces up on Skyline Boulevard in a meth deal gone bad. Other guys I knew burned a house down up there once. When we were all seniors they started stealing cars—taking the keys out of ignitions on used car lots and then finding that make and model on the street. Even Chevrolet model years had only had five different keys. It was no big deal. I rode with them sometimes. Wild because wild was the best way to be. We had all been Cub Scouts together.

  This was in the Santa Clara Valley, when Cupertino was still fruit orchards. Our town was Campbell, next to San Jose. My mother’s school was San Tomas Elementary, out near Saratoga. These are all Silicon Valley addresses now, so when I visited years later—trips to Apple, Google, et al.—I still knew my way around. The gentrification was like a thin fabric over what had been a tough place.

  On one trip from Time Inc. to Google in 2009, my development meetings ended early in the afternoon and I had an extra hour before my flight back to JFK. I drove to Mountain View High School, where we used to play night games. The football field I remembered as rough with dirt patches was now beautiful, manicured almost. Maybe all the gardeners and the janitors were still Mexican. We had never thought about them. The Shockley Semiconductor Labs were only five miles away, but none of us knew what silicon was in 1962. The Byte Shop, where Steve Jobs sold his first computers, wouldn’t open until 1975, but it was just down the road. For a while, way back, I had thought I’d write about California. Then I’d remember that José Antonio Villarreal had already written about it in as true a way as there was.

  −ENDIT−

  Deadlines (779)

  DEADLINES ARE MEANT TO BE close calls. Working better and faster when you’re running out of time is a sign of professionalism, whereas getting ahead and closing an issue early always spooked me. What was I missing? Shouldn’t I try to turn up the volume on that flat display copy one more time? When I was on (remember those Looney Tunes?), it was hard not to start changing everything. But deadlines are about tying up details and avoiding mistakes, and good editors know when to take their foot off the pedal. Some even soften up—like old pillows—and say “thank you” more than usual, but not many.

  You want your pages to be compelling, and at times that means making them confrontational, telling readers to sit down and listen or to kiss off. You need that voice, but it is not the only voice you need, and if the balance is out of whack, you usually don’t catch it until deadline, when you’re running a little scared. You also have to watch out for any whiff of narcissism or self-promotion, which you can do by checking for debased language like exclusive and inclusive and transparent in your “Editor’s Note
.”

  To set deadlines in print, you work backward from when you want your magazine to get to your reader. This involves fleets of trucks, newsstand wholesalers and the U.S. Post Office (wonders of efficiency all). You transmit to the printer with time built in to accommodate potential on-press snafus. It took thirty-six hours for Sports Illustrated to get “off the floor” in midtown Manhattan on a Monday night and wired to five printing plants across the country, and then on through the distribution chain (“make-readies” were available Tuesday) for a Wednesday a.m. (at the earliest) delivery of 3.2 million copies. If you missed your transmission deadline, it started costing you money in overtime printing fees, lost newsstand revenue and subscriber satisfaction.

  Editors in chief don’t get fired for missing deadlines, but people under them do, and even writers can get blamed when whatever happened is retraced in a kind of CSI: Deadline forensics. No one wants any of that, but more important, always, is the journalism and that’s where the pressure builds for the editor.

  It is pretentious, I know, but the French term sang-froid—literally, cold blood—is the best way to describe what an editor needs to handle that pressure. You need calmness or composure or coolness (sometimes excessive), but you also need the kind of audacity that translates into leadership. You have to be able to stand on a desk in the newsroom and make a speech about the importance of what you’re doing and of getting the facts right, too. When Jim Kelly was the managing editor of Time, he did that overnight on September 11–12, 2001. He said to stick to exactly what happened that day, no speculation on who was to blame or what retaliation might be like or any other forward spin that they were all trained to be good at. He wanted a time capsule of what that day felt like and how it unfolded, and to not look foolish or outdated in two days.