And so if Condé Nast was a wondrous gravy train, it was also an effective reality denier. Where would we be without it? What would we be without it? What would happen if—when—we were fired like everyone else? Because people were fired from our magazine and, it seemed, every other one all the time.
Word had it that assistants in our building were fired in this manner: there would be a call from our lady in HR, and she would say, “Um, can you come and see me?” That was it. That was when you knew it was all over for you and that you’d have mere minutes to pack up your things and get out. Additionally, someone must have told me very early on that when assistants were given the ejector seat, they weren’t allowed to take their Rolodexes with them; Rolodexes, evidently, were company property and had to remain at the desk. Of course I was sufficiently cattiva (and enough of a doomsday planner) to make copies of each card as I went along.
But when people at more middling levels got the heave-ho, there frequently seemed to be more of an attempt at group civility. Sometimes goodbye cards, hidden inside manila folders, would be circulated around the office (but what to write on them? “Good luck!” “So long!” “SORRY!”?). There might even be an awkward office party—OK, a nonparty, let’s call it. These nonparties would take place in the hallway in front of my desk, and the fired person would usually be forced to make a little “All Hail Our Dear Leader” speech and may or may not have received an attractive pen (ballpoint—no fountain pens for you, friend), presented in a keepsake box. There would probably be a few bottles of Veuve Clicquot. That merrymaker, the Widow Clicquot. Would there be cheese and crackers? There could be cheese and crackers at these nonparties; this was not a given.
I’d watch these sad and magnanimous little speeches, pondering what the firees were going to do with their days now. A job was helpful for a number of reasons, one of which: your days were automatically filled for you. Because what would you do with yourself otherwise, when condemned to freedom? Eventually you always get thrown back into who you are, and when that happens, you’d better have something there. I’d already figured that out, at least. You build up an image of yourself as an actor, but you’d better not get too invested in that image, because then that’s all you were.
After these speeches were over, we’d all stand in the hallway, clutching our prop cups and our prop plates, ponderously chitchatting. It always felt (to get back to Jung’s theory of the collective unconsciousness) that we were all joined in the same thoughts then—each thinking more about ourselves than we were about the person who’d just been cast out, each of us considering how it would soon be our turn. Ask not for whom the bell, etc. . . . And when it did toll for thee, how much grace would thou display?
A question: How much can you give up and still be “you”?
8
One winter afternoon, Whitney, another assistant at the magazine, and I went to lunch with a GQ journalist and a notorious restaurant maître d’ at a German biergarten in midtown. Why did these two men invite us to lunch? Who knows, but lunches were big in our business, and whenever a professional contact asked me to dine with him in those days, I’d usually comply. I’m not sure why the biergarten was selected—for the anachronistically down-market nature of the place, I guess. To say that the restaurant was on the casual side was redundant in the extreme: there were long picnic tables; there were squeeze bottles of mustard and ketchup on the tables. The journalist and the restaurant maître d’ were both older than my father.
The journalist was a known bon vivant, not to mention a real wisenheimer, and he always seemed to be snickering about something whenever he went down the hall in the office. Once at a work Christmas party, as the Sinatra recording of “Jingle Bells” (“I love those J-I-N-G-L-E bells / Oh!”) played on the restaurant sound system, he announced to several assembled people, “Adrienne doesn’t even consider me male!” That comment embarrassed the hell out of me, although it was also from him I first heard the magical words “the Crillon,” so it all evened out, I guess.
The maître d’, whom I had met once at his restaurant, was high-spirited, “colorful,” as they say, and struck me as a confabulator of the sort I could appreciate—in small doses. I knew he was completely full of it, but I was along for the ride. The maître d’s restaurant was a temple of power, a shrine to the worship of power and to the display of it. Art Cooper took me to lunch there once, but I didn’t understand why: my interactions with Art were distant and transactional and would remain so even after the lunch. (The king does not want to make himself too familiar.) I was comatose with nerves and nearly catatonic during the entire meal. I’m sure Art considered our lunch a spectacular dud, if he even considered it at all, which I can guarantee you he did not, but on the upside, he insisted that I join him in a martini—my first ever. (And then another. These were vodka martinis, as opposed to my parents’ gin ones.) From my end, I will say that I came away from the lunch with somewhat of a better understanding of Art as a man who had started in the periphery. Through a combination of luck, industry, and will, he had gotten himself from the middle of Pennsylvania to the center of it all. To the red-hot center, you might even say.
But back to my skepticism about people with power. I always had this idea that you can never trust anyone with it—that that’s the only way you can remain free and maintain the independence of your thinking.
At the biergarten, the journalist and the restaurant maître d’ put themselves in charge and ordered a pitcher of beer for the table. They ordered our meals for us, too: bratwurst, sausage, spaetzle. Beer was distributed into plastic cups (ladies first). The journalist and the maître d’ set about entertaining Whitney and me (as she and I exchanged quick little surreptitious eye rolls across the table) with some high-level gossip about the NYC restaurant biz. The talk was simultaneously expansive and narrow, and the stories were mean, funny, and absurd, and nowhere in them did any women appear. As the men spoke, it occurred to me that I wasn’t sure how much I cared about food (I’ve always had a simpleminded food-is-food attitude; I’ll save whatever money I have for more durable satisfactions) or about restaurants: restaurants as entertainment, restaurants as theater, restaurants as stagecraft, restaurants as conferrers of power, restaurants as analyses of power, restaurants as the main (the only?) event of the day.
It was curious: the whole of the maître d’s world seemed to exist within the confines of this one particular restaurant, as if there weren’t a life outside of it at all. Which, come to think of it, was a lot like the stance toward the world you saw when you worked somewhere like GQ in this, the still-golden era of magazines: if “we” didn’t cover it, it didn’t happen.
Somehow, I now found myself lurking about in the periphery, in the shadows, of a world of pure power, ruled by men. But what was interesting to learn was that power, once someone had it, was a force rarely scrutinized. I had begun to observe that powerful people (or those who think of themselves that way) didn’t really have much of an incentive to examine themselves or their own subjectivity.
In other words: themselves = subject; everyone else = object.
“What about your boyfriends?” the journalist asked. “Would your boyfriends be jealous if they knew that you were having lunch with two handsome, witty, and charming men?”
Although I was pretty friendly with Whitney and admired her mordant sense of humor—and we had even gone on a weekend trip together—I had no idea whether there was a boyfriend or a boyfriend-type individual in the picture. The subject just never came up. There is something hidden in people, something kept private, and they will tell you exactly what they want you to know. You’ve got to respect that. (Also—and I realize this may be impossible for the males of the world to comprehend—women don’t actually always discuss men. It is a fact that two young women can spend a few days together and find other things to talk about.)
An order was placed for another round of beer. Bratwurst, sausage, and spaetzle arrived on the table, on platters.
&nbs
p; Before the maître d’ cleared us to dig in, he indicated that he had an announcement: a gift for us. He reached into his bag and produced something round and roughly the size of a golf ball. There it was: one splendid black truffle.
The maître d’ passed the truffle underneath each of our noses. I’d had no previous truffle experience; I was interested to learn that it smelled pleasantly of meat, dirt, and some deep, unidentifiable scent from Middle-earth. Again, the maître d’ reached into his bag. This time he pulled out a truffle slicer made of, in memory, polished silver. He paused with it for a moment, allowing it to gleam in the light. Flash, flash, it went. Flash, flash. He then began shaving wantonly away, strips of truffle falling onto the plates in great decadent heaps—onto bratwurst, sausage, and spaetzle. The three of us—the journalist, Whitney, and I—exploded into a round of applause.
The maître d’ talked a little about whence the truffle had come, what type of truffle it was, etc. He was a man accustomed to holding forth, but I had spent the last two years being around men like that; this was a now familiar archetype. What I didn’t understand or appreciate was how powerful the maître d’ was in his world . . . or should I say how powerful he considered himself to be. I also didn’t understand that the amount of power you have (or believe you have) shapes your demands of life and of other people.
Oh, but still, this seemed to be a great kind of world to live in: surprise truffles and spontaneous applause, rich food, rich people (or, better yet, mean stories about them), and no apparent reason to be too worried about returning to work before anyone noticed that you’d been gone for three hours. It was also delightful to think that there were people who considered food more than mere provender—that food can be grand, and entertaining, and enchanting.
“Everyone should always bring truffles with them all the time,” I observed.
Somehow, I now seemed to know a lot of guys who put hot sauce on everything, so it was fun to know that there were also people out there who deemed truffles a basic utility, like electricity.
“If you want your daily truffle,” the journalist said, “you’re going to need to start hanging out with rich guys.”
It was a cold day. All four of us were wearing black coats. After lunch, in the taxi on the way back to the office, the journalist rode shotgun. In the back seat, the maître d’ sat between Whitney and me. Is it important to know who among us was wearing a skirt?
Without warning, a male hand suddenly appeared on my knee.
I looked at that hand. I looked over to Whitney, whose dark, expressive eyes widened. I looked at that hand again, which had now made its way to my thigh and was creeping upward.
The grotesque maître d’ then lurched toward me and forced his tongue into my mouth. He tasted like beer, truffles, salt. I moved away.
He sat back in the seat for a moment. He fixed his hair. Undaunted, he turned to Whitney and started attacking her.
She moved away.
The unctuous maître d’ came back to me again and again jammed his tongue into my mouth; like some pestilence that can’t be gotten rid of, he went back to Whitney again; back to me. This went on for a couple more rounds.
Whether the journalist up in front noticed the assault happening right in back of him, I have no idea. He never turned around.
During each brief pause in the maître d’s assault, Whitney and I exchanged quick glances. We were stunned, we were mortified, we were aghast, and we had no idea how to react or what to do. I’m sure we both wish we had risen up like goddesses, like Athena striking down Hephaestus with a stone, but that was not how it played out. (Often our behavior is unequal to our conception of ourselves.) The tone at the GQ office was informal, jocular, frequently unprofessional, often lewd, and it was confusing for us to know how to react and how to behave in our workplace.
Although we were not at our workplace. The maître d’ had nothing to do with our work.
“Look at me,” the ghastly maître d’, who was not a native English speaker, said, sitting back again. He made a sweeping gesture there in the back seat of the taxi, taking in his kingdom whole. “I have a nice lunch, and I kiss two very pretty girls.”
Whitney and I hadn’t perceived an id so unchecked, an imbalance of power so vast, that the maître d’ felt entitled to his own personal editorial assistant harem. She and I had gone into this lunch thinking that it would be a weird, fun little adventure, thinking we were all on the same team, thinking that each actor at the table would play an equal role, and we left it thinking, Man, your soul is just so bad.
(Happily, years later, the proverbial chickens would come home to roost when the maître d’, after years of accusations of sexual misconduct, was forced to resign from his restaurant following a guilty plea to misdemeanor assault charges. And then the restaurant went out of business.)
What we didn’t know was that power was the motivator.
THERE IS SOMETHING TO BE SAID ABOUT SPENDING ONE’S FORMATIVE years in a place where there are not many grand notions of power or profit. When I was young, I had only one big glimpse into the world of incredible wealth, and that was thanks to the first family of Akron, the Seiberlings. Frank Seiberling, Akron’s own Henry Ford, was the founder of Goodyear (confusingly, and in a seemingly uncharacteristic act of self-denial, he didn’t name the company after himself but rather after Charles Goodyear, the scientist who—quite accidentally—discovered the process of vulcanization and who died a pauper), and the Seiberling family lived like kings in a sixty-five-room Tudor Revival mansion in west Akron. The mansion, now a museum, has a name because why not: Stan Hywet—“stone quarry” in Old English.
I’d always had an obsession with Stan Hywet (so much so that I set a novel there), and the obsession surely must have had something to do with the knowledge that the place offered my first view at an entirely theatrical identity: the Seiberlings playing the parts of English aristocrats in a Tudor drama. The estate was built around the time of World War I, and though you may have expected to see Henry VIII prowling in a corner, the world of the Tudors would have seemed as remote to people then, during that age of Kafka and cubism, Stravinsky and revolution, as it does to us. What the house really was was a modernist dream of self-improvement—a theater in which identity games were played. The ideology, the quest, the goal: to imagine a better self.
The Seiberlings were known as famous hosts, and on house tours the docents still brag about visits by Helen Keller and the 1940s movie star Stewart Granger. But the greatest star was certainly the brilliant actor George Sanders, the man born to play Humbert Humbert. Sanders’s most famous role, and maybe my favorite film performance ever: the vainglorious theater critic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve; further to recommend him: the title of Sanders’s autobiography is Memoirs of a Professional Cad and the title of a Sanders biographical treatment, A Dreadful Man. So there you go. Sanders’s evening at Stan Hywet must have been somewhat more alcoholic than Helen Keller’s, though—displayed in a glass case on a lower floor of the house is a copy of a letter old man Seiberling, a proud teetotaler, sent to the actor, scolding him for some dramatically disruptive behavior at a formal dinner.
Interestingly, a daughter of Seiberling’s would bring the two founders of AA together at Stan Hywet, and the place is considered the birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous. Which makes perfect sense when you think about it, because isn’t this really the idea at the heart of modernism—that people can change?
No, not only that they can change. That they must.
To imagine a better self.
No, no: to surpass the self.
9
I was now teaching myself to become a professional reader. I had to adopt an aesthetic attitude and also learn how to balance competing interests. I was no longer reading to please myself, not entirely. I was reading for some idea of what the magazine was but also, practically, reading with an eye toward what I believed my bosses would like. That was the way it had to be; otherwise, left entirely to my idiosyncrati
c sensibility, I would have been reprinting excerpts from Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser all the time. (So bitter. So Austrian.)
And what about Art Cooper’s taste in fiction? Art’s taste in fiction was . . . was . . . well, who knew anything about Art’s taste in fiction. Did he have any? Was there a “GQ Short Story”? And is that even a given anyway, that a magazine editor who began his career as a newspaper journalist even has a particular taste in fiction? I knew that Art loved anything Mordecai Richler wrote, and of course Ellroy, and also Peter Mayle (whose charming and amiable columns in GQ about his life in France eventually became his book A Year in Provence; he also wrote charming and amiable fiction), and Art harangued me about getting him an advance galley of one of Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander naval-based novels (which I just could not force myself to read a page of—yes, I know his books are supposed to be great), but, really, let’s be honest: Art remained an old newspaperman at heart.
It does seem fair to say that Art had an old newspaperman’s fixations. Like all old newspapermen, Art revered the Washington Post and was, by extension, obsessed with the identity of Deep Throat. A favorite GQ parlor game involved guessing plausible suspects for the world’s most famous secret source.
“So who’s Deep Throat going to turn out to be?” Art would ask, that bullhorn-amplified voice of his blasting down the hallway.
Who was Art addressing? It didn’t really matter—let’s just say it was always some guy, and the guy, whoever he was—editor, writer, visiting dignitary, etc.—was always going to comport himself as if in the running for the slot of number one kiss-up. The oily sycophancy was always a superb thing to witness.
“Pat Buchanan!” the guy might say, whoever the guy was, happy just to be involved in any encounter with the king. Inevitably someone else would invoke that chilling word “Kissinger.” But Art would have his own ideas.
In the Land of Men Page 9