After lunch, the other assistant and I parted, and I stopped in at a Chemical Bank branch on Madison Avenue to open my very first checking and savings accounts. I arrived back at my desk two and a half hours after I left it, and this seemed to be . . . OK?
I had no external email. The real mail came twice daily, morning and afternoon, and those arrivals more or less set the psychic clock for the assistants’ days. One of my other bosses, the former Rolling Stone guy, was listed on some publicity databases as both the travel editor and the grooming editor, and he probably got more mail than just about anyone else in editorial.
Now, what sort of wizard could possibly be an expert in both travel and grooming, you ask? (A “grooming” editor being the men’s magazine equivalent of what is euphemistically called a “beauty” editor at a women’s magazine; these jobs involve the sorting and organizing of nearly indistinguishable bottles of lotion and/or packages of cosmetics.) Well, I’m not certain this gentleman did have much expertise in the travel and grooming categories, but he had something better—he was a genuine character. There were still some of those around.
This editor was known to bebop down the hallway, snapping his fingers and humming to a tune he alone heard; he’d sometimes say “dig it” to introduce a point; he’d sometimes start his days, upon the morning’s first flick of the light switch, by invoking Dorothy Parker and proclaiming to me, to no one, to the universe, “Ah, what fresh hell is this?” He was also a repository of information about sixties pop culture—most of which was interesting and, I believed, accurate enough, although it did sound fishy when he told me that Brian Epstein, the amazing, heartbreaking Beatles impresario whom I’d always felt so much for, was the inspiration behind the lyric “he blew his mind out in a car” from “A Day in the Life.”
“Yeah, but wasn’t Brian Epstein still alive when Sgt. Pepper’s came out?” I had asked, since I did not know when to keep my smart, smart mouth shut, or when to open it.
At my desk, I intercepted a call from a woman with a forbidding British accent, calling on behalf of something called Cunard. She wanted to speak about a product, or maybe an event, or even possibly a location, which I spelled phonetically on my message slip as “The Queue Eee Two (?).” I hoped that that befuddled “(?)” would exonerate me at least somewhat.
Had there been an Internet then, I might have done a quick search and come up with the answer: the QE2, the Queen Elizabeth 2 luxury cruise line. But there was no Internet at work to ask; we were on our own. (This would have been an ideally capricious question to ask a fact-checker, but I didn’t know about that option yet, either.) It had not been explained to me that calls from travel and grooming publicists were not always necessarily meant to be passed along. Editorial assistants are required to be discerning about the messages from their call sheets they choose to convey to their bosses. It is often the only exercise of creativity the editorial assistant possesses.
So what else did I do that first afternoon? Glaring at me on my desk was a troublesome expense report, awaiting the arrival of the new girl (the new person), from a recently killed story. I’d never heard that term before—a “killed” story. Definition? Patiently, it was explained: the story came in, and it sucked; edits were submitted to the author and the edits went unheeded; the story still sucked; there was another round of edits, and again the edits went unheeded; therefore, the story continued sucking. Hence, the arrival of the guillotine, swift and merciless.
But this particular situation had to be handled with extreme delicacy—there was some relationship between the author of the killed story and an important contributor to the magazine, and the important contributor needed to be kept happy, or at least placated somewhat. I noted the existence of webs of influence and power, and it occurred to me that things could go disastrously wrong with a story, despite the initial good intentions of everyone involved.
I was asked to make some photocopies of something. The copy machine was attractively located across the hallway from the ladies’ room, which GQ shared with the ad/sales department for Mademoiselle (now defunct). Sylvia Plath, that brilliant possessor of one of the most devouring imaginations of the twentieth century (the other being David Foster Wallace), had worked at Mademoiselle in 1953 as a college student—she won an internship there—and her unhappy tour of duty at the magazine inspired The Bell Jar. From what I could tell from my frequent perch by the copy machine, some of the Mademoiselle ad/sales women who used the bathroom as a regrouping area seemed to exist in similar emotional states themselves. We men’s magazine gals were a tough bunch, though. We had to be.
When I got to the copier, I found an unpleasant, but unsurprising (I’m always having trouble with electronic equipment), error message on the screen. I was too stubborn and too afraid to ask any other assistant for help, so I called an in-house copier doctor, whose number was posted up by the machine. The copier doctor arrived immediately. He was probably in his forties, had white hair and a young face, and, like all doctors at the time, wore a pager attached to a belt loop.
He crouched down to the floor and opened a door on the machine, started rooting around in there.
“Got a real bad paper jam,” he said in the direction of the machine. “Real bad one.”
I told him I didn’t really know what I was doing. I told him I had just moved from Ohio.
He glanced up at me. “Fresh off the boat, huh?”
But saying you’re from Ohio does not even count as information. Everyone is from Ohio, it turns out. And, as data, it’s just not that interesting—saying you were from Ohio was like saying you were a seven on the pH scale, a neutral solution. An everyman, as it were. You were the peak of the bell curve, a golf ball driven straight and square down the middle of the fairway, the leaden mean. Saying you were from Ohio was basically like saying your name was Matt Miller. You were just good enough.
“You play volleyball?” the copier doctor asked.
Without looking at his work, he did a series of complex maneuvers that could be understood by only the copier professional.
“God, no,” I said.
“You look like a volleyball player,” he replied, peering back into the copy machine. His toolkit was placed on the floor next to him. “You must get that all the time.”
“Actually, no,” I said. Basketball. That was what I got all the time. The tall girl’s unfortunate fate. Are you a basketball player? Hey, how’s the weather up there? Did you play basketball in school? No, sir, I do not and did not play basketball.
From within the ladies’ room came the sudden thunder of a flushing toilet.
The copier doctor stood. “You want to get lunch sometime?” he asked.
I didn’t really see what possible professional reason there could have been for having lunch with this man. It would seem a bit strange, maybe? But on the other hand, everyone here seemed to have lunch all the time. Lunching seemed to be what they did.
I had been raised with an iron fist of egalitarianism—I enjoyed telling people (somewhat smugly, looking back on it) that I came from a line of old-school FDR progressives—and also this guy seemed kind of weird, and I liked kind of weird (although with an emphasis on “kind of”) . . . and so, partially to be contrary, I said, “Sure.”
“Next week?” the copier doctor asked.
“Sure.”
From my parents, I’d received as a graduation gift (selected by me) a pricey Filofax organizer, and I’d spent an embarrassingly large amount of time these past few weeks fantasizing about what cosmopolitan NYC happenings I’d fill it up with. I now had something to write down. Poignant to think that a Filofax was an actual status symbol to a certain (very specific) demographic back then. More innocent days; days of paper, days of ink. For years, my hands were blotted with ink stains, supplied by fountain pens of a lesser kingdom than Art Cooper’s.
“I’ll pick you up here,” the copier doctor said.
“Here” being the copy machine.
At the end of th
e day, as I waited in the lobby for the elevator, the most senior member of the art department—English, dapper, droll—passed by and did a gallant thing.
“So how was your first day?” he asked.
I already knew what a hierarchy-obsessed world I now found myself in, and this guy was disarming for bothering to talk to me at all.
“Harrowing,” I said.
I didn’t know why I said that. I just liked the word, I guess, and sometimes when you hear yourself speaking, you may not even really know why you’re saying what you’re saying. Sometimes your brain doesn’t actually sync up with your lips, to expand on a Laurie Anderson lyric.
I put my headphones on and walked forty blocks back to my dorm. On my red Sony Walkman, a holdover from adolescence (the device was about the size of a toaster), I listened to a tape of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23, the Adagio movement, over and over again. Only Mozart could supply what I needed that evening.
If we all have one Jamesian moment that defines us, mine happened when I was thirteen and saw the Milos Forman film Amadeus. It was the single experience that opened the curtain for me in every way. I was a child before I saw the movie at a somewhat shabby but still glorious second-run theater in east Akron called the Linda, and afterward I was a proto-adult, with a body still in middle school, doing dumb things like making deep-fried doughnuts from Pillsbury dinner rolls for extra credit in home ec class, but now with a brain haunted by capricious eighteenth-century entities, the Enlightenment, rage, retribution, passion, and art. I inhabited a liminal world that year, somewhere between reality and unreality. Art wants its own perfection, and if I have any kind of religion, it is an appreciation of mastery, and it started then.
I made my father take me to see Amadeus eight times. He would drop me off at the Linda for evening shows and for Sunday matinees. I would watch it alone. I remember every detail about the theater: the smell of damp, ancient popcorn; how cold it always was; the velvet seats; the globular sconces on the blue fabric-covered walls. Amadeus was a release into a different world. It had starfish tentacles, as David Wallace used to say, that took me everywhere; my interest in it proliferated and changed, and I now had a project—many projects—to undertake. I was now ravenous for information. I wanted understanding. I wanted to understand. I made my father drive me to the Akron Public Library every Saturday, where I read everything the great playwright and Amadeus screenwriter Peter Shaffer had published: The Royal Hunt of the Sun, anyone? Lettice and Lovage? (Let me add here that Shaffer is probably as great as Harold Pinter, not to mention Michael Frayn and David Hare, and probably even approaches Tom Stoppard–zone greatness, though he hasn’t gotten his due—but literary reputations are wrong and unfair, often.) I discovered that I loved reading plays because I loved reading written dialogue. Because what was a play—and what, really, was human life—other than a series of verbal conflicts?
And I thought: Maybe I could write some plays someday. But I had no idea how to go about that—how did you even do anything artistic? The idea seemed about as unattainable as getting myself to Jupiter.
In the library, I read about Mozart and learned that he considered himself a man of the theater above and beyond everything else, and that at the time of his early death he was considering writing an opera based on Faust, and I learned about Mozart’s sister and about the Kingdom of Back, the fantasy world they created together where everything went backward; I read about the classical style, the best of all possible styles, which led me into the highly pleasurable topic of eighteenth-century decorative arts, which led me to Boucher and Fragonard (although both were too froufrou to be officially considered of the rigorous classical style), which led me to the French Revolution and to A Tale of Two Cities, and I fell wildly in love with Sydney Carton, but I was still only thirteen and was then, of course, stalked by nighttime dreams of the guillotine.
But then came the tempering influence of Thomas Jefferson, another enduring obsession, and I had to know everything about the founding generation of Americans (with a special emphasis on crabby Jefferson frenemy John Adams). I revised my handwriting to look like what I believed to be some sort of eighteenth-century style, because everything ought to be regarded as an art form and should be as splendid as you can make it, even and especially your handwriting. Although I was not a promising pupil, and although my piano teacher always gave a shrug and a lethargic “good enough” at the end of each of my lessons, I committed myself to piano practice with a renewed vigor. I started taking violin lessons, too.
Obscurely, at thirteen, I knew that I had been exposed to some new kind of knowledge. My life at school—it just kind of gave reality to us. And who wanted that? I needed to have a place at civilization’s table. What you had to do, it seemed to me, was to teach yourself, so you’d know enough to create your own story.
5
In the midcentury, 40 percent of the nation’s tires were made in Akron. When I was growing up there, Akron was pretty much a one-industry town, and nearly all the parents of the kids I knew worked for the venerable tire companies: Goodyear, Goodrich, and General Tire. Here’s something I learned early on: corporations, for better or worse, run your life. Everything you had, and everything you were, you owed to the company. You bought a house thanks to the largesse of the corporation, you bought a car thanks to the corporation, you raised a family thanks to the corporation. You depended on the company for everything. If you weren’t part of the company, what were you?
The villain of my northeast Ohio childhood was the late Sir James Goldsmith, the British billionaire and corporate raider, and allegedly Oliver Stone’s inspiration for the character Sir Larry Wildman in Wall Street. Goldsmith (sneeringly referred to as “Sir Jimmy” in the Akron of my youth) owned nearly 12 percent of Goodyear’s stock and in 1986 attempted a hostile takeover of the company. This takeover bid was Akron’s 9/11, an act of war on us. The whole thing was shocking and terrifying, and during that terrible fall of 1986, I made my father completely nuts by asking him over and over again if he was going to lose his job. He said he wouldn’t, but the truth is that we all believed we’d be ruined.
The people of Akron stood up to Sir Jimmy and fought back: they protested and petitioned, they put up signs in their yards that said SAVE GOODYEAR, they, hilariously, sent bags of rubber bands to Goldsmith’s town house in Manhattan (merry fate being what it is, the man who wanted to take over the great rubber company apparently had a rubber-band phobia). Ultimately, the company bought Goldsmith off; the takeover bid failed, and Goodyear survived and adapted, but went into massive debt. After Sir Jimmy, things were never the same in northeast Ohio. Many people lost their jobs, lives were destroyed, and the forces of rage, revenge, and nihilism were set in motion. At my school from then on, bubbling poisonously away underneath everything like contaminated quicksand, was the whispered word “layoffs.”
It was then that I became for the first time aware of the concept of class stratification—there was now a discernible split between the kids with parents who had the nerdy white-collar jobs at the tire companies and the ones whose parents had the manufacturing jobs. The kids with the science-y-job fathers and mothers (the engineers, statisticians, chemists) tended, like me, to have come from elsewhere, and everything usually felt more secure—psychically, I mean. The men and women with the manufacturing jobs were generally from the big, extended stay-put families, but they were the ones running scared.
It just so happens that I’m friendly now with a man who considers Sir James Goldsmith his personal mentor. This guy really loved Goldsmith. He has actually described Goldsmith as “a sweet man,” and when he speaks of Goldsmith’s human warmth, his wit and generosity, plus his daunting backgammon skills, it will always inevitably occur to me that we never have anywhere near even a partial perspective on anyone.
Yet on the other hand, when thinking in a sentimental way about kings, it is dangerously easy to forget about their power—about the severed heads upon which they walk.
&nb
sp; THE COPY MACHINE MAN AND I WENT TO LUNCH AT A RESTAURANT AT Grand Central. As he talked about his mother, his job, and his commute—he had a notable Long Island–area accent—it occurred to me that he might actually have believed we were on kind of a date. The whole thing felt kind of date-y, to be honest. I didn’t feel too comfortable with that. He also paid for the meal, which was OK, I guessed. I had no money, of course. I had spent it on footwear. And I wouldn’t have any money until my first paycheck, and that was still a few days away.
After lunch, we walked down the wind tunnel of Vanderbilt Avenue and crossed onto Madison, back to the office building. During my first week at GQ, I had become accustomed to the sight of phalanxes of Condé Nast ladies, bare-legged if in a skirt (less fashionable women still wore nude pantyhose back then, if you can believe), waiting for their hired Big Apple town cars outside the building. No matter the time of day, there they’d be, checking their watches if they had them, looking vaguely incensed, following to a T the pecking order about who stood where and who talked to whom. And although I had been in this environment for only a week, I now knew that while these women may have looked decorous, they were sharp operators. And it was true that the locus of power at the company did at least seem to be female—but a mercantile version of consumer women’s culture, I guessed. It was interesting to think about how I happened to work in the company’s sole man-based domain (Details didn’t count—it would never count).
The current on-trend look in the Condé Nast building in the summer of 1994 was a long slip dress, typically worn with a contrasting T-shirt underneath. Mostly this meant white dress, black shirt. We found ourselves at the rump end of what was known as grunge, the no-style plaid-flannel-shirt look having been co-opted two years before into some kind of fashion statement. The hair was to be long and sleek, the bag was to be Prada, and the overall impression was one of rigid control. Which was kind of the exact opposite of the grunge ethos, but whatever. What was obvious was that the clothes were armor and talismans against . . . what? Against fear—they were a way to assert your superiority over the abyss. I’ve always known what clothes are for.
In the Land of Men Page 5