Or maybe that wasn’t right. Maybe we use public grief as an excuse to express some of the private heartbreak we all live with, because we all know that pain is never overcome but is something that just sits there like a scab.
But there was another thing I didn’t like about it: living a life onstage, as Jacqueline Onassis so spectacularly had, also meant having a death there. That seemed too great a price.
At the Eighty-Sixth and Lexington subway stop, I bought enough subway tokens to get me through my first week at work. I took the train downtown, to SoHo, and, with the money my parents had given me so that I might survive until my first paycheck, purchased luxury footwear: a pair of black Robert Clergerie platform boots and a pair of blue suede Prada wedges. Of the boots, the salesman said, “All of the top girls are wearing these”; of the wedges, another salesman at another store wrote on his business card: “Now ‘Go Get ’Em’ at GQ!! In a year from now, YOU will be on the cover!! (MY PREDICTION).”
I’ve always been fatally susceptible to any sales pitch agreeable to my self-image.
Whatever minuscule leftover parental sum I still had was spent on prepared foods at the old Balducci’s, with its beautiful outsized green awnings, on Sixth Avenue and Ninth Street—yet another stop in what I somehow assumed would magically be the upward-mobility train. That was dinner. I made calls on the pay phone in the basement of my dorm: my parents, a couple of friends back home, and my professor who started the whole thing.
“You should start keeping a journal,” she said. “You don’t want to forget any of this.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t forget.”
It always seemed to me that my parents existed mostly in the present tense: they didn’t reminisce, they didn’t “tell stories” (it was impolite to talk about oneself, yet they never told any stories about my childhood, either), and so it had always been up to me to remember everything. That was my job; I was always the family rememberer, the one who would watch, who would pay attention, who would try to put everything together. If I weren’t watching watchfully—trying to be a reliable witness, trying to get to the bottom of things, trying to understand the story behind the story—then everything about us, and about me, would be lost.
Remember this, I’ve always said to myself. Remember this, remember this, remember this.
The prospect of my new job at GQ was so thrilling to me, but I also knew that my future was already narrowing: magazines. Magazines, magazines, magazines. Did doing one thing in the world mean a life of endless repetition? I didn’t sleep that night before I started my job. How could I have? I had the world before me, but I was scared to death. I already knew that there was a problem with saying yes to a certain path: It meant a denial of everything else. It said that the life I’ve chosen is bigger than my imagination for what my life could be.
4
My morning began in a human resources conference room at the company. There were maybe four or five other people seated at a long table with me, also starting their jobs at Condé Nast this very day. Before us loomed an HR woman, asking if anyone had worked at the company before. One hand went up. That hand belonged to an older (in my perspective) woman in a smart blue pantsuit. She went through her professional history: she had worked at one magazine at the company; she had left the company for another magazine; she was now back at the company, working at a third magazine.
If she’d been a writer and if I’d been an editor, I might have suggested she try to jazz up her narrative a bit.
Yet what an interestingly equalizing experience it was, being at this table—magazine veterans such as this woman (the next time I saw her, she was struggling through the lobby on crutches) and newcomers such as myself, democratically coexisting. For all I knew, the woman in the pantsuit could have been starting a job as an editor in chief somewhere. As the HR lady went into her little recited speech about company policies and procedures, I thought: Am I the youngest person here? Had to be, right?
The HR meeting lasted an hour, and I was released to GQ editorial on the sixth floor. The GQ assistants had long white laminate desks in the hallways outside their editors’ offices. My desk was outside two of my three bosses’ offices and was likewise mere feet from the editor in chief’s corner office. All three of my bosses stood before my desk as I got settled into my black swivel chair. I twirled around in a three-sixty.
“It’s so big,” I said, meaning my workspace.
“It’ll get smaller,” replied all three in sober unison.
Helpfully, my predecessor had left a printed list of job duties at my desk. As I read through the pages, it occurred to me that I had no idea what my new job actually involved. It was with a sense of real discovery that I learned I would answer phones, sort and open mail, draw up contracts, help manage editors’ and writers’ schedules, make writers’ travel arrangements, communicate with writers (whatever that meant), help writers research and report stories, process expense reports, make photocopies of the gossip pages in the mornings, and make photocopies in general. At the bottom of the memo was a note about how to handle the short-story submissions described by the grave, ugly word “unsolicited.”
Then came an even graver and uglier term for those manuscripts: the “slush pile.”
The slush pile was to be tackled if and only if there was nothing else left to do. In general, the slush stories were to be responded to with a form rejection letter. Maybe one slush story out of a hundred could be passed on to the literary editor, and probably not even that many.
Granger took me on a tour of the office, offering a log line about each group. First was the art department. The room was dark, illuminated by desk lamps and the ambient glow from desktop computers. Many of the art department people had headphones on; most wore jeans; none bothered to look up as we did our walkthrough. On their computer screens were prototypes of pages in the magazine, and no matter what stage of my career I was in, no matter how much I liked or disliked the content of the magazines I worked for, watching these pages materialize on-screen always seemed a feat of alchemy.
Pinned onto a bulletin board on a wall by the entrance were more mock-ups of pages in later design stages. The real text of these stories hadn’t been input yet and dummy copy was used as a placeholder. One page was filled with wild Dadaesque poetry; another with Edward Lear–type nonsense rhymes. Some clever unknown art department functionary had really spent some time on these.
“Pretty funny,” I said to Granger.
“Yes,” he replied grimly. “Unfortunately, the dummy copy is often better than many of the actual stories we run.”
Back to the office tour. Had I ever used a fax machine before? I had not. Had I ever seen a fax machine before? I had not. We popped into the fashion closet, which was, quite literally, a closet. But what were these people in there actually doing? It was explained. They sorted and organized clothing samples for photo shoots, they removed clothes from hangers, they put clothes back onto hangers, they steamed, ironed, and lint-rolled clothes, they packed up clothes and had them returned via messenger to designers’ showrooms.
ME: “That’s a job?”
HIM: “Those jobs are very hard to get.”
On to the copy and fact-checking departments now. The copy editors (the unsung heroes of every media outlet) were going about the very serious business of making the writers sound better than they actually were; the fact-checking department seemed a little more fun. Fact-checkers are the ensurers of editorial standards and are always the smartest and most hilarious people at every magazine (they’re also always great about helping when you have a question you’re too mortified to ask anyone else). Hanging out in research departments, I would also discover, was a great way to kill time when that well-known phenomenon of afternoon editorial torpor (in Joyce Johnson’s nice formulation from her Beat-era memoir, Minor Characters) had set in.
Question: If the fact-checkers did the reporting, and the copy department did the rewriting, what did the writers
do?
Unclear.
Now I would be introduced to the editor in chief of the magazine, Art Cooper, the man who had single-handedly created the brand we know, for better or worse, as GQ. He had been at the magazine for eleven years when I went to work there. This was already a great run for any editor in chief. This was also a problem.
There never was anyone else like Art. He wouldn’t exist today. He couldn’t. A midcentury boulevardier with sensibilities entirely unbuttressed by irony, Art adored Frank, Dean, Sammy, and the Great American Songbook; in his office, he smoked miraculous quantities of cigarettes; he enjoyed multiple lunchtime and non-lunchtime martinis; he had an actual catchphrase: “Heads are gonna roll!” He was a king. Like all kings, he was terrifying.
Into his corner office we went. There behind his enormous desk he sat. Art was smoking a cigarette and reading, his glasses set truculently low on his nose.
“Well,” he said in a rich, booming baritone. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
Art was wearing a chalk-striped suit with peak lapels. His beard was sparse, and he was rotund like a king who feasts on foie gras during times of famine.
On the yellowish walls of his office were jazzy expressionist paintings by the artist Richard Merkin, and on his desk, in a glass-top display case, was an extraordinary collection of gleaming fountain pens that probably weighed fifty pounds each. They looked like expensive little lacquered missiles, and I imagined the pleasure that could be had by signing my name with them, as floridly as you please, on whatever correspondence I might have with whatever writers with whom I’d soon be communicating.
“And how is he treating you?” Art asked. He looked from me to Granger.
This was a perfectly pleasant thing to say, but every encounter with Art, innocuous or not, always felt like standing in the path of a high-pressure hose. My mind became an abandoned amusement park. I had a complete language breakdown—nothing was there.
“Great?” I said comprehensively.
Art blinked at me for a moment through his glasses and turned his attention to Granger. I took the hint and scampered back to my big/little desk.
Short history lesson: GQ, founded in 1931, had essentially been a men’s clothing catalog—male models modeling turgidly, entranced by the odd prop—until Art Cooper became editor in chief in the eighties. Art transformed GQ into a truly significant magazine, molding the editorial content after Esquire’s in its glory years, but now, the tables were turned—GQ was the big fat success story, and Esquire was as thin as a pamphlet.
Yet when GQ editors talked about Esquire, I would come to note a complex succession of grievances coming from every which way. It was, I learned, like the Sharks and the Jets, and, like the Sharks and the Jets, it was hard to remember who was who. Esquire, created in 1933, had perhaps been, for a period in the sixties, the greatest general-interest magazine of all time. Under the editorship of the legendary Harold Hayes, Esquire had been at the forefront of the New Journalism movement, which brought novelistic techniques to nonfiction writing. Esquire published genre-defining pieces by Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and John Sack; two early exemplars of this kind of journalism: “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” by Gay Talese (who, sad to say, in 2016 would remark that he had not been influenced by one female writer, not one), and “Twirling at Ole Miss,” by Terry Southern. A later classic of the New Journalism: “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?,” by Richard Ben Cramer. And, of course, the greatest New Journalist of them all: Michael Herr and his reporting from Vietnam.
One of Art’s favorite parlor games involved guessing when Esquire would go, as he’d so vibrantly say, “belly-up.” The sense was that Esquire was then still running on the fumes of its three-decades-old prestige.
To the side of my computer, rising like the Grand Tetons, was the slush pile. Short-story submissions had not been removed from their manila envelopes for weeks, maybe a month—who was to say? I sliced open a few envelopes with my letter opener.
Amazingly, a couple of the cover letters didn’t even get the name of the literary editor right. Maybe the prospective authors ought to at least have had a quick peek at the masthead before sending in a submission? Just a thought. But this also seemed to me not an encouraging sign, like perhaps even aspiring fiction writers were not overly familiar with the literary component, such as it was, of the magazine. (Even I’d known the names of the current Esquire fiction editors when I was in college: Rust Hills and Will Blythe.) In the Sharks-Jets death match, Esquire, not GQ, was the clear fiction category winner. Example: GQ received around fifteen to twenty unsolicited fiction submissions a day and maybe five to ten submissions from agents; Esquire, as I would learn, received about three times that.
Granger emerged from Art’s office. We continued on our tour. He introduced me to some other editors—mostly they were men, but there were some women, too, and most of them seemed to have a limited interest in meeting the new girl. The new person. Which was fine; I got where they were coming from. I had entered a rich and complex caste system, an elaborate theater, really, and I supposed that I would be required to participate in it.
I met the other editorial assistants—all young women, and all of us joined, I would soon come to appreciate, in varying agonizing attempts to be taken seriously. Finally, I was introduced to the assistant who was charged with the task of taking me out to lunch.
“Just make sure you order wine,” said Granger avuncularly, as he handed me off to her and exited stage left.
This young woman took one long scan of me, from root to branch and back again, and said, “When I heard that you were from a state school in Ohio, I figured you’d be this gigantic hick. For the last couple of weeks, everyone here has been like, ‘Who is this going to be?’”
This comment bothered me less than it probably should have. (But yet: Do you have to include what other people think about you in your own understanding of yourself?)
Granger had made a reservation for us, the other assistant and me, at a French restaurant in an elegant town house on the Upper East Side. I’d never set foot in a town house before. The restaurant was quiet, had low ceilings and attractive up-lighting. It was elegant and civilized, and Chopin would have been the soundtrack had there been a soundtrack. The other assistant and I followed instructions and ordered wine. I still wasn’t much of a wine drinker (my go-to wine product at school: Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill, beverage of kings and up-and-coming queens, too). I ordered a glass of chardonnay.
“So why didn’t you go out of state for college?” asked the other assistant.
I thought about this for a moment. “Because I wasn’t aware of any other possibilities,” I said.
I had gone to my university because I’d won an academic award in high school and had gone to a summer camp there; thus it was the only college I actually knew anything about. (Although I hadn’t gotten the memo then that the experience of being a student there would feel like being trapped inside a Red Hot Chili Peppers video for four years.) And it was, insanely, the only college I applied to. I had considered myself a bad-attitude high schooler—although in actual fact, I was cheerful, sane, and high achieving—and was deeply irritated by the surreal nightmare of the college application process, which seemed to me corrupt, reductive, brand-name obsessed, antihuman, and profoundly insulting to me as a citizen of this, our Arcadian republic. I would opt out of the game, I decided. I had believed then that this refusal, or whatever it was, was brave and freethinking of me. The truth: I was lazy. And also self-defeating.
But at the same time, everything, and I mean everything, in my life afterward would have been different if I hadn’t gone to school there.
Of course, wouldn’t you just know it—this other assistant had graduated from a highly prestigious college. Interestingly, there would always be a discernible power dynamic at play in all my interactions with her; indeed, I was already beginning to sense something chilling about adult life in New York: you may, through no fault of your own
, find that you are expected to reflexively defer to those who attended sophisticated academies, in the way that you will also be expected to defer to people who’ve got a ton of money or power.
I ordered a starter and an entrée, both goat cheese oriented. The other assistant, who was a few years older than I, definitely did talk quite a lot about her school—understandable, though, I guessed, given that those years were clearly more of a life high point than her present reality as a disgruntled editorial assistant. Truism: there is no bitterness like the bitterness of the editorial assistant who has been on the job for three years.
She had a warning for me: “It’s very hard to move from assistant to non-assistant.”
She was a potentially corrupting influence, and I would have to keep my eye on her. Actually, we ended up becoming friendly, and she always had some good office gossip. Most of that gossip at lunch centered around Art, as you’d expect. He was our king, after all.
Did I know that Art had been the editor of Penthouse? I did not (creepy). Had I perhaps already gotten to witness the hilarious scene that occurred when Art would summon one of his GQ editors to his office, and how that editor would run wildly down the hallway to him, like some decapitated chicken of myth? Did I know that, on high-summer days, Art was known to wear a seersucker suit, a straw boater hat, and an actual gold pocket watch on a chain? (“The Fourth of July float has landed” was the email that would go cruelly around on those seersucker mornings. But I would have to wait for that.) I would soon observe that Art was immune from the opinions of grubs like us. An editor in chief is the king of his little kingdom, and the king can enact his own fantasies. It’s good to be the king, mostly—he doesn’t have to know how he’s seen, at least not by the likes of us. But from Art, I would also come to understand that power is not absolute. This was a valuable early lesson for me: you’re always just a part of things, even when you want to be the whole.
In the Land of Men Page 4