As the copier man and I went through the lobby, I idly wondered if he’d ever taken other assistants out to lunch. I supposed he had, or had at least tried to, although I couldn’t have imagined that many of these other women would have been too receptive to the invitation. I was beginning to notice that a lot of people in this building seemed like little spinning tops, whirling around in a perpetual speedwobble, as my father would say (that’s one of his words). And I had no idea if their bosses had made them nuts or if they had started out that way.
The copier doctor and I rode the elevator up to my floor. Before there was the narcotizing screen of the smartphone, what did we used to gaze at in elevators so that we didn’t have to look at other people? The wall? The buttons, some illuminated, some not? An elevator’s inspection card, or otherwise an official document stating that the inspection card could be viewed in the lobby upon request? (Which would always get you thinking about what it was the elevator inspectors were trying to hide.)
“We should do this again,” the copier doctor said as the door dinged open and I exited onto six.
Visitors to GQ editorial were to wait in the chairs by the receptionist’s desk. A great number of these visitors were models—models of the male variety, that is to say. The receptionist, Ruth, had a notably dark and low voice, and her face was always set in a sly half smile. I suppose Ruth had to have been somewhat amused by the spectacle of those young portfolio-clutching men as they accumulated before her throughout the day like so much human flotsam and jetsam. There was always something vaguely prey-like about these guys—handsome and symmetrical though they were, it always seemed as if their eyes were set just a bit too far apart, like lost rabbits.
This has always interested me, the whole idea of display—what’s real and what’s fake, what’s shown and what isn’t.
As soon as I got settled back at my desk, the most senior editorial assistant came up to me. She was our leader, to the extent that we had one, and I would have done anything she told me to do. I could have seen her in law school, absolutely. She would have been a killer there.
She placed both hands firmly on the white ledge above my desk and looked at me hard. “About lunch,” she said.
“Yeah?” I asked as lightly as could be.
“You’re going to have to tamp down that thing now.”
I had various thoughts about this. First of all: Way to be classist about the copier man. And also: What “thing”? There was not and there never would be a thing with the copier man. (Oh, but now who was the classist one?)
Another thought: Someone is actually watching me? I had come from a place where no one ever noticed or cared what anyone else was doing, and I’d always taken that freedom for granted. (This is not to say, however, that I was being thought about. Being observed and being thought about: different things.) Now, strangely, I was an actual part of the world. But there was a problem with being a part of the world: it imposed its ideas on you, coordinated your thinking, and told you who you were.
Also, I now had a corporate identity, and that was another way that other people got to tell you who you were.
I HAD THE RIDICULOUS GOOD FORTUNE TO START AT GQ AT WHAT SURELY must have been one of the greatest periods ever of any American magazine. The issue on newsstands when I started contained the piece “My Mother’s Killer,” by the superb American crime novelist James Ellroy. One of my bosses, the assistant managing editor, had edited the piece, Ellroy’s blistering account, now rightly considered a classic of magazine journalism, of reading the 1958 police file for his mother’s murder. Ellroy later expanded the piece into his excellent book My Dark Places. There was lots of Ellroy activity on my desk that first week, and it was fantastic.
As I was told during my job interview, “There are two things to know about James. Number one: he is the nicest man in the world. Number two: he will bark at you.”
Both of these things were true, and it was Ellroy, aka “The Demon Dog,” who provided me one of my first lessons about how, with writers, you just kind of had to roll with it.
That summer, there was a reception at the Museum of Modern Art for GQ’s retiring fashion director, Nonnie Moore. Art Cooper asked me (by that I mean he told me) to help another assistant check in the guests at the door. I figured I was being tested, or auditioned, because being asked to work at a party was understood to be kind of an honor for an assistant. Maybe “honor” is too strong a word. But at any rate, in this regard, Art reigned over an absolutist system; he got to choose the cast of characters for every GQ dinner, party, gala: guest list, seating chart (if there was one), which of his editors would be invited and which ones excluded, and which assistants would serve as his attendant Byzantines for the evening. It would turn out that I was often one of those Byzantines.
But favor would wax and wane, of course. I would always remind myself of that.
Nonnie Moore was an elegant lady in her seventies who seemed of another, less vulgar era—though also, doubtless, a more difficult era in which to be a professional woman. I had never spoken with the dignified Ms. Moore and never would, but I was certain that she was a great lady: she wore cool black clothes that seemed to me somehow interestingly Asian, she always had on fantastic jewelry, and, crucially, she always appeared to be the picture of serenity and grace amid the institutional frazzle dazzle.
The night of the event, the other assistant and I got ourselves set up in the MoMA lobby at our check-in table. This other assistant, also from the Midwest, was imposingly poised and knew how to tie an Hermès scarf with considerable élan—a word now sadly tainted, because you only ever see it in the worst possible fashion writing. She and I would later chat about how we had both read this ridiculous thing in the same magazine about how the “perfect” female breast size was, evidently, the size of a champagne flute. But what did that even mean? A tall, narrow flute or the broader coupe glass of, for instance, Casablanca? We debated this. The answer was inconclusive, although we agreed that if we were talking about the tall, narrow flute, we were both in good shape.
But we had some immediate professional concerns. The more high profile the assistant duty, the greater the possibility for disaster. Gravely, we pondered what would happen if we somehow didn’t recognize one of the prestigious guests whom we were expected to recognize tonight. What if we embarrassed ourselves, and the magazine, by messing up and not knowing who was who?
Because whatever happened that night, we just did not want Art Cooper to yell at us the following morning. Because when Art, being the lighthouse he was, shone his beam upon you, you knew there were two possibilities: you were (1) in trouble, or (2) going to be invited into his office for drinks. (No one could decide which of the two scenarios was worse.) We finally reached the comforting conclusion that these VIPs were seasoned professionals in all regards, and they would certainly know how to handle themselves at the door. Noted: Art Cooper did not acknowledge us as he trundled past. This hurt my feelings, although I knew it shouldn’t have.
The scene at the party in the MoMA garden was almost unbearably exciting. Nonnie Moore was clearly such a legendary figure that even Art yielded her the floor that night. The fashion celebrities turned out to be completely polite and great with us, the attendant Byzantines—another mark of the high regard in which Ms. Moore was held. Calvin Klein was delivered to the front door of MoMA in a sleek gray Mercedes. The disconcertingly boyish Tommy Hilfiger looked just like Tommy Hilfiger (or maybe he looked like an actor playing the part of Tommy Hilfiger). Donna Karan was the one who held my particular interest, although I could never possibly speak to her, of course. (I’d been a Donna Karan watcher since her Anne Klein days. What a brilliant career!) I now functioned within such a rigid and complex caste system, it was understood that the other assistant and I were certainly not permitted to hobnob with any of these fashion-world celebrities. But I think we were both relieved about that—attempting to mingle with the powerful and well-known felt to me like summoning a demon somehow. I w
as already suspicious of those who had power and of those who wanted it.
The following morning, as I sat at my desk, alternating taking big bad-mannered bites of my enormous salt bagel with cream cheese and clipping the newspaper gossip columns, an editor stopped at my desk to chat.
“Well, that was fun.”
“Yes,” I said. “Last night was great.”
Conspiratorially, he stage-whispered, “I wonder whom the next retirement party is going to be for.”
He was the most overtly erudite person on staff, had an impressively formal way of speaking, and could be really, really flinty.
“You know, Art is going to be sixty in three years,” he said.
Art was only fifty-seven? (Actually, it turned out he had a couple of months to go until he turned fifty-seven.) Man, he seemed a lot older than that—already into his King Lear years, if you asked me.
“And you know that isn’t a birthday he’s going to want to celebrate,” the editor said.
I was getting this sense that growing older was a crime for which every high-echelon media figure—women and men both—would eventually be punished.
In these couple of months at Condé Nast, memos had been circulated announcing that someone with a very senior position was no longer with the company and welcoming a gleaming new replacement person to that same very senior position. These magazine jobs were high status, yet high risk, which had to mean that the sense of power they provided was, in part, an illusion. Didn’t it? This was a theory I was working on. Everyone seemed to be clinging on to what they had by a thread. It was not impossible that that also included Art Cooper.
Remember (remember, remember): we are always a part of things, never the whole.
6
In college, I spent a lot of time driving around the ghost towns of Butler County, Ohio, listening to Mozart and Cole Porter and thinking about how the people who lived in these places really were up against a lot. I used to have this haughty idea that human unhappiness could be corrected if people were given the right tools—and the tools to self-liberation, I was pretty sure then, were to be found in art. I used to think that if I ever got into bad shape, if I ever had to have a different kind of life, the way to save myself was to remember the great artists (such as Mozart and Cole Porter and Nabokov and whomever else I was into at the time). Everything we needed was there.
It’s fair to say that I was always sending messages in a bottle to my future self. But why did I believe I was heading for future trouble?
During that first summer in New York, I flew back home for some weekend visits. On the drives home from the airport in Cleveland, I noted how happy I was to see the great flame leaping volatilely from the smokestack of the LTV steel mill along the interstate—that very iconic feature of the Cleveland skyline. In high school, I’d believed that I was so clever for having all sorts of darkly poetic associations with the famous LTV flame stack, entirely unaware of its ugly reality—that it dispersed lead, carbon monoxide, benzene, and asbestos—but now that fire for the first time seemed interesting and hard-won and maybe even beautiful.
During these trips back home, my parents and I would ride bikes on a path along the Ohio and Erie Canal. This was one of my favorite things in the world to do. A hundred, a hundred and fifty years before, mares and donkeys used to tow canal barges along the path, before the railroad came and changed everything. Imagine that—a whole world, now vanished, right along the canal. My mental soundtrack for these bike rides was always that wonderful old song “Low Bridge,” recalled from third-grade music class.
I’ve got me a mule, her name is Sal.
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.
She’s a good old worker
and a good old pal.
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.
Everything about animals has always just killed me—the Chagall painting I and the Village (a boy and a cow, or maybe it’s a lamb, stare at each other, a faint dotted line connecting their eyes) so beautifully captures the profundity of the human-animal bond, and I’m always a puddle of tears whenever I see it at the museum—and as my parents and I biked along the canal, now overgrown with soft green grass, we saw blue herons, and beavers, and frogs. I thought about the animals, all so beautiful and peculiar, and the boats, and the people, the people whose lives were the canal—the voices lost to us, voices never heard, buried in history. My parents and I rode our bikes in a straight tense line, trying to take up, as always, as little space as possible—my dad in front, my mom in the middle, and me in back—and I watched their legs pedal, and I thought about how I’d never live at home with them again (although I hadn’t lived with them since I was eighteen), and I thought about how everything was shifting and changing and changing again. These were always very emotional homecomings for me, those first couple of years.
But why was it always this way with me—when I was in Ohio, I couldn’t wait to get out of it (this is not the place to be, my friends), and now that I was out of it, I wanted to go back? Why was it that whenever you achieved exactly what you wanted, the allure of that thing dissolved in the grasping?
Every morning before work, I had to buy all four of the daily NYC newspapers. The day’s first job task was to clip the gossip pages from each of them. I’d paste each cutting onto a piece of paper, copy the page, and make twenty gossip packets to distribute to all the senior people at GQ. I minded this chore less than you’d think.
I bought all four of my daily papers from my man Jerry, purveyor of a famous newsstand on Astor Place. His stand was located in front of the new Starbucks, which had until recently been the Astor Riviera Café. I liked the sound of that: the Astor Riviera. When I first became his customer, Jerry was a black-haired character actor; throughout the years, I saw him age right before my eyes, dark hair going gray, then white, while I, of course, stayed exactly the same.
On my first day at GQ, Peter Richmond, one of the best writers at the magazine, and who once brought in extravagant masses of lilac branches, cut from a bountiful home bush, had this suggestion for me: “Whatever else you do, make sure you read every New York paper every day.” Good advice. And so, on my big four-stop, fifteen-minute commute to work, I would peruse the papers—all still black and white—although I really can’t say I found much to enjoy in them. This was the summer—the first summer—of O.J. and surely had to be the grim pivot point when we entered our current media age and everything became tabloid journalism. The news got canceled that summer, and it stayed canceled.
So far in my life I’d been aware of some pretty weird non-news news cycles—Gary Hart, Donna Rice, and the inauspiciously named yacht Monkey Business; Jim Bakker and his whole freakish crew; that time when Ronald Reagan looked into the camera and said, re: Iran-Contra, “My heart and my best intentions tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not” (the very moment when I knew that politicians would lie, just lie right to your face); that baby who fell into a well in Texas; that time when Dan Quayle put an “e” on “potato”; Tonya Harding and Gennifer Flowers and the now omnipresent bimbo eruptions—but suddenly everything felt different and extremely weird. The media had finally found the formula: take one story, usually involving the abuse—or, preferably, the ghastly death—of a female person, and hammer away at it forever. There were now media distortions in every direction, and people were seemingly oblivious to obvious facts—and that seemed to be just fine. No one really seemed to care all that much that our culture was suddenly—was it suddenly?—and irrevocably broken.
Also troubling to me was the fact that the media had become the enemy. I was but an ultra-low-ranking member of the media, but did it mean that I was also the enemy?
This was another thing to start worrying about.
In the early days at GQ, a couple of wizened (not really—they were about twenty-seven) old-time assistants took me under their wings. Sometimes we’d get margaritas after work; sometimes we’d pick up huge focaccia sandwiches for lunch and take th
em to Bryant Park. These women explained that the park had recently been redesigned, and the consensus was that the new green chairs were attractive but not very comfortable, and then someone said that if you squinted at the London plane trees at the perimeter of the park at just the right angle, you could almost believe you were in Paris. But why were we pretending we were in Paris? Were we not exactly where we wanted to be, in an echoing green in the middle of everything?
Mostly, these get-togethers with the slightly older assistants (who, like me, did not have advanced degrees and who, also like me, did not have particularly sparkling CVs) functioned as complaint sessions and as warnings, as they would recount tales of the tyrannies, injustices, and humiliations, petty and not, they’d endured in their brief careers. They seemed to feel expendable, disposable, replaceable . . . although maybe one of the big secrets was that everyone else felt that way, too. This was another one of the theories I was working on. Nearly every assistant wanted to get her stuff in the magazine, but this was many years before publication was seen as a self-evident right and also before magazines had online components onto which to dump an assistant’s, or a freelancer’s, stuff—gratis, of course, or close to it.
During lunch, one assistant asked me how frequently I had seen any assistant’s byline in the magazine. I didn’t have a great answer for that. “Think about it,” she said, “zero times.” Publication in GQ, or anywhere, was tough, nearly impossible, and there were all sorts of gatekeepers blocking our points of entry, they warned me, this somewhat square and shy but always hard-feeling midwestern kid who didn’t understand why these people, all allegedly on the same team, weren’t being more helpful toward one another.
In the Land of Men Page 6