The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  Back: (seated, far back, on truck roof) Becky Fonda, (center with scarf) Peter Fonda, (second from right) Guy Valdene

  DAVID STRICK

  The Other Bob Sherrill, LA office, Los Angeles, 1975

  TERRENCE MOORE

  Ed Abbey, on assignment, the Sonoran Desert, Arizona, 1982

  WENDY PERL/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK VIA GETTY IMAGES

  P. J. O’Rourke going on stage, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, L.A., 1992

  With Judy Lewellyn (left) and Roger Black (bottom right), LA office, 1974

  JEAN PAGLIUSO

  Quail hunting with Jimmy Buffett, Thomasville, Georgia, 1992

  STET

  THERE WAS ALWAYS A WAY, a trick, to tie loose threads into a piece, to save the painterly detail and sidecar narratives every writer hates to lose. The paragraph might start with “I have not forgotten…” or “There were other stories…” or “I haven’t written about…” followed by flashy story fragments that would never be fleshed out. Such riffs are an unthinkable luxury at magazines, where space is so precious—now more than ever. Editors often tell their writers to save it for the book, the one that actually seldom follows. But it was a great trick when Hemingway used it in A Moveable Feast.

  There is no mention of the Stade Anastasie where the boxers served as waiters at the tables set out under the trees and the ring was in the garden.

  Maybe that was important, maybe it wasn’t, but he wanted it in. For me, finding meaning in what I left out of these pages became a roll call of acknowledgment for colleagues and friends not mentioned previously—these are my darlings. When it comes to a career, it may be more attractive to say you were pushed by a mentor than tripped by a rival, but I was lucky both ways.

  START WITH KARL FLEMING, who brought the courage he showed covering the civil rights movement in the South to Los Angeles as Newsweek’s bureau chief. His was the best coverage of the Watts riots, and he was severely beaten covering a subsequent demonstration in L.A.’s South Central. When I worked for him, he taught his reporters to go after bullies. That was after he had left Newsweek and founded LA, where he hired the Other Bob Sherrill, who hired me, so I owe Karl for that, too.

  GAY TALESE DOES NOT REMEMBER meeting me at the Other Bob Sherrill’s house that night in Los Angeles the week LA folded, but when I got to Esquire years later he gave me wise counsel and every sentence of his I ever saw was immaculate. Elon Green, on a project for Nieman Storyboard, worked with Gay in 2014 to annotate his 1966 piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Both will be required reading if I ever teach a class in journalism.

  I hold similar respect for the work of many of the writers I have written about, especially Gary Smith—although I’ve mentioned him only in passing—and Richard Ben Cramer, whom I have not written about until now. In early 1992, I gave a small dinner for Richard at the ‘21’ Club before sending him off to Paris as Esquire’s European correspondent. His masterpiece of political reporting, What It Takes: The Way to the White House, was just out, and the maître d’ welcomed Richard by name, even though he had never been to the restaurant before. The parties and events Esquire gave at ‘21’ were predictably expensive and well mannered, but that night we were asked to leave when Richard’s wife, the former Rolling Stone editor Carolyn White, excused herself from our private room to conduct a survey in the main dining room: “Do you think this pretentious dump is really worth it?” Carolyn was Richard’s best editor, and whatever bumpy weather came with her was worth it to him. They were both more than worth it to me.

  ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST once asked me to hold a suitcase of notes he was afraid would be subpoenaed in an art fraud matter he was writing about. He didn’t want to know where I put it until a year and a half later, when he thought it was safe. That was 1990. I didn’t see Anthony again until 2013. He was sitting in a Starbucks on Tenth Street in the West Village, reading the papers with speed and intensity, like the naturally inquisitive reporter he always was. After saying hello and catching up, we agreed that we were both, as Anthony put it, “fundamentally unchanged.”

  I have had time gaps like that in my working life with many colleagues and friends, mostly writers and editors not mentioned previously, and crossing paths with them always results in similar conversations. An alphabetical run of some names: John Alexander, Jane Amsterdam, Alexandra Anderson, Robert Sam Anson, Xana Antunes, Joe Armstrong, Ken Auletta, Peter Bonventre, Bob Bookman, Bill Broyles, Joan Buck, Bill Buford, Ben Bycel, Steve Byers, Conrad Cafritz, E. Jean Carroll, Shelby Coffey, Tom Cohen, Jennet Conant, Vince Coppola, Lynn Darling, Patty Detroit, Barbara Downey, Michael Elliott, Bret Ellis, Sid Evans, Tom Freston, Maura Fritz, Bobby Ghosh, Gary Ginsberg, Peter Goldman, Karl Taro Greenfeld, David Granger, Bill Greider, Bob Guccione Jr., Larry Hackett, Austin Hearst, Tony Hendra, Michael Hirschorn, Lisa and Richard Howorth, Chris Isham, Mark Jacobson, Susan Kaufman, Michael Kennedy, Rik Kirkland, Joe Klein, Steve Kroft, Charla Lawhon, Sarah Lazin, Judy Lewellyn, Bob Love, Cynthia Lund, Guy Martin, Win McCormack, Jennifer McGuire, Jay McInerney, Thomas McIntyre, Linda Nardi, Carl Navarre, Sarah Nelson, Maureen Orth, Julia Reed, Bob Rivard, Linda Ross, Gil Schwartz, Corey Seymour, Deb Shriver, Barry Siegel, Jim Signorelli, Scott Spencer, Jim Stern, Rick Telander, Bill Tonelli, Kristin van Ogtrop, Maryanne Vollers, Bob Wallace, Kate White, Meredith White, David Willey. That reads like an old-fashioned Rolodex; but every one of those names carries a richness that is fundamentally unchanged.

  SITTING DOG would travel to New York from Oregon in the late summer to take orders for hash brownies, and they would be delivered in slick packaging by Thanksgiving. At Thanksgiving dinner the first year I shopped with Sitting Dog, the fine writer Winston Groom ate too many brownies without knowing exactly what they were and wound up very stoned in the bathtub. Winston was my age and a good friend, but he was much closer to Jim Jones, Willie Morris and Irwin Shaw and some other older writers who lived out at the beach. They drank together and talked about their wars—World War II and Vietnam, where Winston had served as an army second lieutenant in an infantry company.

  Not long after that Thanksgiving, I think Winston may have started buying from Sitting Dog, and strangely, in some kind of elliptical orbit, he and I began arguing about Vietnam. We agreed that the war had been a mistake, but we frustrated each other with details of why he had gone and I hadn’t. Sometimes he’d grit his teeth in a kind of FDR forced smile and tell me I’d never understand. This is how it went until he moved back to Alabama and wrote Forrest Gump, a much tougher book about that war than you’d think watching the movie.

  FOR MANY YEARS the Vietnam war seemed everywhere. Michael Herr’s Dispatches opened it up for me and many other journalists, whether they covered it or not. In the last chapter, when he is flying back to the States out of Tan Son Nhut, Herr quotes his friend the photographer Sean Flynn: “Don’t piss it all away at cocktail parties.” The astuteness of that advice I found to have broad implications. Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion was another book of unlocking insights into journalism, and still I return to it often—as well as her other reportage, essays, memoirs and novels. I never edited her, but I was proud to run pieces by her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in Esquire and also in Smart. Sometimes I would see them out to dinner talking quietly alone at a good table. Their work (especially about California) informs this book although they are only briefly mentioned. I never met Harold Hayes, who edited Esquire from 1963 to 1973, but his issues were an exhilarating curriculum for many editors, myself included.

  I HAVE QUOTED CRITICS on these pages but have not written about the ones I edited, like Greil Marcus, whose breadth of interest and perception gives the comfortable sense that everything he writes will one day fit into a single colossal essay. You need to see a critic’s mind working that way, word by word in every sentence. If not, it’s just somebody talking. Or, worse, telling you what to think instead of leading you to a more interesting view, like Paul Nelson’s reviews and interviews for Rolling Stone (Clint Eastwood, Warren Zevon
), which reflected a sincerity unique among rock critics. Jack Kroll, who reviewed film and drama at Newsweek for thirty-seven years, used to say that when young snakes attack, they deliver all their venom with the first strike. Old snakes test and locate first, their subsequent bites becoming more lethal. He would sometimes add that old snakes also had more venom. Jack was the son of a showgirl and a radio host (The Goodwill Hour) and wasn’t like that at all, but there was a melancholy about him. I also noticed that bad critics, those prone to bullying, often talked about how good they felt about their work.

  I LEARNED MUCH about both journalism and bars from John Walsh, who, long before he got to ESPN, invented the “A-to-Z Bar Tour,” on which he led a bus full mostly of writers as they stopped for a drink at a new bar for each of the letters of the alphabet. That was a lot of drinks in San Francisco, where he started it, and it seemed like more in New York, where he ran it like a head coach, with a clipboard and a whistle. On that one—a play on “I ♥ New York” called “I Drunk New York”—Bill Murray got everyone in the Oak Room at the Plaza to sing “God Bless America.” John Belushi and Tim Russert were also on the bus. In Washington, D.C., it was called “Werewolves of Washington.” Normally, however, John and I just met for drinks at places he discovered in San Francisco, like Toad’s in the Marina, with “Toad” Williams behind the bar, riffing like a giant hallucination of his little brother Robin. Tosca in North Beach, where Jeannette Etheredge took care of everyone, was where we’d find Hinckle. Later, in New York, Runyon’s on East Fiftieth got its strange energy from a mix of regulars from Newsweek, ABC Sports and Rolling Stone. And you could get a bet down. I have told Walsh many times he should write about all this. As a journalist, he was trenchant—the same word applies to our friendship.

  WHEN OPRAH (THE MAGAZINE) won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2012, it was edited by Susan Casey— the only person to win ASME awards in three categories. She had previously won as a creative director (Outside, 1996, ’97, ’98) and as a writer (Esquire, 2009). She has been a friend and collaborator in all three of her ASME categories. Casey writes best sellers now on Maui, a very long way from the former Time & Life Building in midtown Manhattan, where we worked together and where she was once told to “stick to art directing.”

  I LOVED WORKING with all the designers I came to know, even if they didn’t always love working with me. It takes more than graphic imagination to unify the look of a magazine. The designer needs to solidify the so-called vision of the editor—which can be whatever collective mumbo jumbo comes out of editorial meetings—while the editor resolves the inevitable political conflicts. I have a long list of designers as co-conspirators: Nancy Butkus, Bea Feitler, Chris Hercik, Steve Hoffman, Neil Jamieson, Michael Lawton, (Robert) Priest + Grace (Lee), Mary Shanahan, Rina Migliaccio Stone, and Virginia Team (“Terry, I have everything I never wanted…”). None of them sabotaged my underdeveloped ideas, rather refined them. Some fed on obtuse concepts like hungry cats. I should also note that they were all fighters, and mention that in frustration back in the days of “paste-up,” Roger Black sometimes threw X-Acto blades. They would stick in the wall like gypsy knives. Later, he became the definer of digital typography and I borrowed his flip but eventually sage remark that “Type is the sushi of the ’90s” for my “Code is the typography of the ’00s” speech a decade later.

  I STARTED IN JOURNALISM as a photographer, thinking I might move on to documentary film. That would have been fine, but working in magazines allowed me to stay with words and occasionally shoot pictures. My admiration for photographers in general, and for many in particular, goes beyond those already mentioned in this manuscript: Andy Anderson, Jessica Burstein, Gwendolen Cates, Rachel Cobb, William Coupon, Sally Gall, Liz Gilbert, Pam Hansen, Kurt Markus, Tom Montgomery, and Howard Schatz all magnified the way I look at the world. Jean Pagliuso always came through with even more than her artful pictures. The staff photographers at Sports Illustrated were the last in the Time & Life photojournalistic tradition of Robert Capa and Gordon Parks. Tim Page, whom I knew in San Francisco, where he lived after making a name for himself in Vietnam, said you pay for every picture you take in a war. I believe that is true of good pictures you take anywhere. Even selfies.

  The best shooters always cared more about their images than whatever magazine they were working for, which was a good thing. What was not so good were photo editors becoming advocates for the photographers at the expense of their magazines—even if there were times I couldn’t blame them. Laurie Kratochvil, Steve Fine, Jimmy Colton and, especially, M. C. Marden understood how to walk that line. I credit each of them with instinctive understanding of whatever Venn diagram defined their working relationship with this or that editor, including me.

  ALTHOUGH THEY NEVER MET, I spent more office time with Beverly Hills Xua and Joan Rosinsky than any other colleagues. Both had uncanny administrative radar and ferocious spirits. They answered my phones, managed my calendar, booked my travel and filed my expense reports. They also picked Kentucky Derby horses, babied writers, charmed advertisers, came to weddings, picked up tabs and generally “got the cows to Abilene”—as we used to joke. Most important, they told me when I was wrong.

  Deborah Fuller did that for Hunter. Up until a couple years before his suicide, if you worked with Hunter you worked with Deborah, his assistant for twenty-three years, who managed everything from deadlines to grocery lists to the archive (all those boxes in the basement). She was loyal and efficient and everyone who had worked with her took her side when she unsuccessfully sued Hunter’s estate for $100,000 in back wages. We all owe her.

  I ONCE GOT A CALL that followed my hello with “Please hold for Don Simpson’s assistant.” That could make you wonder, but then again, it was the movie business. Simpson was the most roughshod of ego-heavy filmmakers, but he and his thoughtful and savvy partner Jerry Bruckheimer read more magazines than anyone in the movie business—and more than most magazine editors. Hunter knew I had talked to them about investing in Smart, and when I was losing financial control to a Japanese partner, I got a fax from him after he had run into Don in Aspen.

  Simpson says he wants to buy SMART. Now!!!

  OK, we’ll sell for $10 million. You spread the word.

  We’ll call a press conference 48 hours after the “sold” rumor kicks in…make him deny it…

  Then we throw Jack’s [Nicholson’s] name into it for $11 million. Why not Jack! Indeed…a warm-up for his re-make of Citizen Kane!

  Send magazines & I’ll do the rest…

  Ho, ho, ho…

  HST

  Everything in that fax almost happened, but I was offered the Esquire job if I could get cleanly out of Smart in a week—which I did, thinking the whole time about what great publishers Don and Jerry would have been. They were strong allies, always.

  BUSINESS WAS ALWAYS business, of course, and in the back of my mind that meant survival. I ran scared even in the highest of times, benefitting often from collaboration with many publishing executives. Specifically, I am grateful for the success handed to me, from Outside to Sports Illustrated, by publishers and presidents, especially Don Welsh, Kent Brownridge, Alan Stiles, Deanna Brown, Luciano Bernardini de Pace, Kevin O’Malley, and Bruce Hallett. Mike Wade did the work when I had the publisher title at Sports Afield. Jeannette Chang, Liz Tilberis’s publisher at Harper’s Bazaar, was a beacon in dark weather. The Machiavelli Club would never have happened without Monica Ray. Andy Borinstein taught me to appreciate research. Leslee Dart and Lois Smith did the same for what was unambitiously called publicity. Dawn Bridges, Art Burke and Scott Novak were strategic thinkers and master spinners, but never at the expense of truth. And I remain grateful to my enigmatic old friend Peggy Siegal, who still invites me to movies.

  I HOPE THERE IS a westernness to what I have written, beyond the silliness of wearing cowboy boots in New York City, as I did for too long. I am thinking of Charles Bowden on the relationship between Native Americans and w
ater, which he wrote about first in Outside. I was sometimes said to know “western writers,” which I did, although most people who said that were talking about location and I am talking about themes. The impulse to describe the landscape is just the beginning. Reading and then editing Bill Kittredge taught me that through his writing about the Great Basin, and then he passed me on to James Crumley and James Welsh and Ivan Doig. Mike Moore, the editor of the Mountain Gazette, and later a colleague at Outside, introduced me to many original writers who seldom got the recognition they deserved, even though Mike fought hard for them. I am thinking specifically of Rob Schultheis and David Chamberlain, and of the climber Doug Robinson, who cared so much about writing that he worked at it as a craft until it was as satisfying to him as his natural talent on granite faces in Yosemite Valley.

  Doug Peacock, who lives near Livingston now, became a good writer himself after he buried his friend Ed Abbey. Years later, he and Jim Harrison sometimes went camping in that same desert, packing in huge rib eye steaks and good French wine. When Jim died of a heart attack at his writing desk in Patagonia in March 2016, Peacock wrote beautifully about their friendship, including about the time Jim and the great war correspondent and superb novelist Phil Caputo got lost bird hunting east of the head of Sonoita Creek, and spent a freezing night huddling around a cottonwood fire until the Arizona Fish and Game wardens found them the next morning. This was hard to believe if you knew Phil, and Peacock had teased them both about it, and the story got around. All three of them had assignments from me at the time.

  Another friend, the writer Harmon “the Montana Maoist” Henkin, would drive down to Livingston from Missoula to trade fishing and hunting gear, books and art, in a barter economy he engineered and that other writers in Tom McGuane’s expanding circles joined like cargo cultists. They were onto something more valuable than the classic shotguns, paintings and pickups they argued over. Henkin and Richard Brautigan both wrote about this. But then Harmon was killed in a speeding accident on one of his drives and the randomness of that took the life out of the trading, too.