There were press luncheons. There were drinks dates, there were dinners, there were parties. And then there was the subset of the party, the dread book party. My tales of the peculiar torment of the book party are many, and in my growing view they now had to be avoided at all costs: invite me on a walk, to dinner, to a play—I’ll see anything (I’m just a Broadway baby)—or to plant some flowers, but do not ever, ever, ever invite me to a book party (unless you are my actual friend, in which case you must). I can’t bear them. The using of people as props. The instrumental nature of most literary relationships: What can you do for me? The fact that Charlie Rose was often to be found skeeving around at the more prestigious of them. Weren’t these things supposed to have been fun, way back when? And none of them ever had the energy of the Infinite Jest party, I’ll tell you that much.
THAT FALL, THE FIRST GQ MEN OF THE YEAR AWARDS CEREMONY WAS held. The purpose of the awards: to celebrate the most remarkable celebrities of the previous year. I started asking people in the office to explain the whole thing to me. Why did we need these awards? What, exactly, were we celebrating? What did the awards really mean to the persons who received them? Was the whole premise not somewhat toothless and manufactured? A friend put it Field of Dreams–ishly: “There is one rule about celebrities: If you throw an awards show, they will come.” And another question: Weren’t all men always Men of the Year, anyway?
The ceremony, a black-tie affair for an audience of five thousand, was held at Radio City Music Hall. I worked in an undefined capacity in the pressroom that night. In the days leading up to the event, some friends at the magazine warned me about the ego blow I’d soon endure when I, a resolute non-celebrity, had my first red carpet experience. Apparently, when you’d begin your Bataan-esque march down the red carpet, there would be a moment when everything would be held in suspension: the photographers would try to figure out who you were, their cameras at attention; but when it was determined that you were a big nobody in their books, you’d see the cameras collapse as if heliotropes in a dying sun. The worst part: the cameras would instantly spring back to life upon the arrival of the next—and, with any luck, more radiantly exciting—person in line.
But why did we even believe that we should be celebrities (or at least mistaken for them)? If global fame were the goal, were we possibly in the wrong line of work? And, secondarily, was it also possible that we all had a greatly inflated view of our own importance? This was also a thought I was beginning to have a lot at work, particularly when an issue of the magazine was closing and my colleagues were running around like marauding pirates. Back to the John Adams line about the passion for distinction being the principal human urge.
I found a side entrance at Radio City that night. No red carpet for me—then or ever, and I wanted to keep it that way.
This year’s big winners—not that there was any suspense: they were that month’s cover subjects—were Mel Gibson, Michael Jordan, and Jerry Seinfeld. The run of show: celebrities presented other celebrities with awards, Phil Collins performed a concert (of course there had been crotchety commentary around the office about how Art Cooper’s awareness of music had clearly stopped, suspended like a martini olive in aspic, in 1985—actually it was 1965), and other celebrities presented other celebrities with some more awards. Because if there was one group of people who needed more presents, more prizes, more, more, more, that group was celebrities.
But down in the pressroom was where all the real action was. As everyone else from work scurried around with clipboards, looking as if they were about to spontaneously combust, pretty much all I did was bask in the red-and-gold art deco fabulousness of Radio City and gape at the dazzling stars. I’m sure I should have appreciated far more than I did then what it actually took to organize and execute an event of this scale.
Items: Mel Gibson was a pygmy, Liam Neeson was a monolith, and the singer for Hootie & the Blowfish (the nineties! it was actually a pretty slimy decade) seemed endearingly bashful. But who cared about any of those guys, because James Brown was there. Seriously. James Brown. How did they ever get him? I watched James Brown up on the little pressroom stage, as he posed for the cameras with a prop microphone, his black shirt unbuttoned to the navel. He had on a black jacket with rhinestone-studded lapels, tight black satin pants, and pointy boots. A fine layer of glitter covered his chest, face, and hands. Silent, antagonistic, Brown went through his photo-call routine in the beam of the flashbulbs—pivoting, posing, and glimmering; pivoting, posing, and glimmering. My main thought about him: Here is a pro. When he dropped down to the floor of the small stage and did a side split, I was as sure as I’ve ever been about anything that he was the single most impressive human I’d ever seen.
Forget what I said about how celebrity worship was a deep human evil. James Brown was a star for a reason, and at that moment I would have followed him anywhere.
But there was a big oversight: somehow, no one from GQ had gotten around to arranging any food for the press. How could this have happened? How was this even possible? Emergency pizzas were ordered, but I didn’t understand that those pizzas were not meant for me (some other assistants were also similarly mistaken), and as I boorishly helped myself to the press’s food, I pondered what else I ought to do to at least make myself appear busy. At one point, I crept up to the publicity director and, trying to at least seem somewhat conscientious, asked whether I could be of any help. I got shooed away. OK, fine. But why was I in attendance, exactly?
This was a question I was starting to ask of myself at work sometimes, too. Now, at twenty-four, when taking a lunar view of my career situation, I was beginning to question just exactly how useful I actually was in the world. But then I’d think back to where I was from, and I’d settle on this conclusion: feeling useful is an indulgence that most people cannot afford.
After two years on the job, I did know that I really needed to start taking some rigorous self-inventories. Starting with: How, exactly, did I spend my days? Well, let’s see. There was rarely anything that unpleasant about my days, but neither was there anything necessary about them. I mean, I wasn’t exactly working in an ER or anything, and I was bad at math, or bad at whatever it was you needed to be good at to work in an ER. Recently, a question had started to form: Were there not many, many other people in the world who could also do what I did?
Was I necessary? I was not. Was I indispensable? Nope.
I would now find myself wondering whether a degree of self-delusion was necessary to work as a magazine assistant, or maybe to work anywhere. The French have a word for it: méconnaissance, which can mean, approximately, “misrecognition” plus “self-delusion.” “Self-misunderstanding,” really. Was it possible that all magazine assistants—or, to expand outward, workers of all sorts—suffered from a kind of institutional méconnaissance?
But my méconnaissance had another layer to it. Could I actually have any self-respect as a female person if I worked for a men’s magazine? Yes, yes, there was outstanding journalism in GQ; yes, there was great criticism. But weren’t men’s magazines at least half embarrassing, and maybe even more than that? But yet the representation was not the real—I kept telling myself that—and we should not confuse our actual lives with things we see in magazines.
The questions:
Could right and wrong coexist?
Was I, by mentally jettisoning the bad parts but keeping the good, operating in bad faith?
THE SELF-EVIDENT FACT OF THE MAGAZINE’S SEXISM COULD BE SPOKEN of only with the other assistants. We’d sit at Mexican restaurants with our machine-dispensed margaritas and fulminate about the representation of women in the pages: they were never actual people but were instead personlike ideas, concepts of people. Why, one of us might ask, did the women in the magazine appear unclothed, yet the men did not? Why, for example, did we always need some pervy description of each female profile subject’s lips? Why, in a larger way, did men feel so freaking entitled to women’s bodies? And if male readers wan
ted porn, why didn’t they just go buy some porn? (Pornography was then a product that actually had to be bought.) The adolescent in-betweenness of the men’s magazine was just embarrassing for everyone. It was easy to see what the obsession with women’s ages was about, though: the “GQ Woman” must always be in the bloom of her youth, which was another way of saying that she isn’t here to stay.
There was never a moment when I wasn’t hyper-attuned to the colossal gray area that also came with the job. Until I came to work at men’s magazines, I understood feminism only in the abstract; I didn’t understand why women actually need feminism. Sometimes in my darker moments, I would now find myself thinking of my life as one gigantic discord of masculine voices, each voice talking over the other. What follows are actual lines spoken to me by men, and all in professional, or at least semiprofessional, contexts:
“God, pregnant women are so fucking sexy.”
“You can tell how intelligent a woman is by the way she moves her hips.”
“Feminists are always saying that rape is about power. No, rape is about sex.”
“I wanted to say to her, ‘Honey, no one wants to see your enormous freaking bloomers.’”
“That is one gigantic can she’s got. I was walking behind it and I thought, I want to give it its own name.”
“She looks quite a bit more like Brent Musburger than I’m comfortable with.” (Actually, David Foster Wallace was the speaker of this one, but I’m skipping ahead chronologically.)
“Whenever I see a fat woman, I think, Soo-eeey! I know, I know. I can’t help it.”
Here is a colleague speaking of a photograph of a female celebrity from a recent shoot for the magazine: “Did you see the size of that flank?”
A coworker speaking of another photograph of another female celebrity: “That’s the best set of tits I’ve seen all year.”
And another one: “Does it move the sticks?”
I was called into a colleague’s office (“Hey, Adrienne, get in here”) and asked this question: “So what’s your favorite part of sex?”
A man asked me, “Do you have a pair of underwear that says DADDY’S GIRL on the bottom?”
Another man asked me, when I was wearing a skirt, to stand and twirl for him. When, in a mortified fury, I sat back down at my desk, this man came up behind me and said in a low voice, as if he were staging some sort of sinister coup, “You should wear skirts all the time.”
I’d been raised to never, never, never talk about anyone’s body. Ever. Mine or anyone else’s. When I was growing up, my parents mentioned my appearance only when they’d see me wearing an unfamiliar item of clothing: “Is that new?” they’d ask with disapproval (still do). And I had never particularly thought of the single defining characteristic of myself—my self—as my gender: I was everyone, I was no one, I was facticity and transcendence, I was all mind, all essence, I was Adri, I was Matt Miller from the plains and the Rust Belt both. Before I had this job, I had never known, like really known, that there were actually environments in which women’s bodies were evaluated as if they were tires, or trucks . . . or something finer—automobiles: luxury ones.
And then there was the experience of having to listen to men weigh in on the topic of the Tragic Aging Woman, no longer useful as a sex object, thus a figure of pity:
“Some women, when they get older, they really do start looking like men.”
“It’s a very sad thing, to see her trying to cling to her youth.”
A man said to me of a sublime—the most sublime—European celebrity, the ultimate grande dame, by way of justifying her increasing professional indifference to him: “She wants me to remember her the way she was.” (OK, the fabulous lady was Catherine Deneuve, and the man was a modestly successful photographer.)
But possibly the most harrowing remark of all was just some careless off-the-cuff thing, a miserly comment I can guarantee you the dude who said it never thought of again, spoken about a female media veteran (who, incidentally, could have made a meal out of this guy—and I hope she did):
“She’s just your standard-issue suburban mom.”
I would hear these things and think: There is no hope for any of us. I would wonder how it was that I would survive in the world, in this world, as a woman.
I would think: There is always a drip, drip, drip. There is always a stripping away.
Yet I would be remiss if I didn’t offer a reminder that, when presenting the speech of others, individual utterances should not necessarily be interpreted as answers or as the final word. People often don’t quite mean what they say (and often don’t quite say what they mean), so speech sometimes is nothing more, or less, than partial evidence. (And I’m the queen of blurting out dumb things, too, God knows.) Uttered speech is skywriting, essentially. That’s one way to look at it.
The other, more durable way is the Maya Angelou (or Oprah) approach: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”
I often wondered if these guys, who I, on my good days, believed were otherwise quite smart, had any idea how much their comments affected the young women who heard them. Could they have understood how much their words changed our perception of the way the world really was? And if they understood, did they care?
11
In the winter of 1997, Ed Kosner, the editor in chief of Esquire, killed a short story scheduled for an upcoming issue, “The Term Paper Artist,” by the writer David Leavitt, purportedly fearing that the homosexual content of the piece would offend a particularly conservative American automobile advertiser. (Kosner would deny this as the rationale for killing the story, by the way.) The well-respected long-term Esquire literary editor Will Blythe resigned in protest, and the whole thing blew up and became quite the brouhaha in what is politely called the literary world. (Magazine short stories making headlines!) Not long after that, Kosner was gone from Esquire, too.
Granger was hired as the magazine’s new editor in chief in the spring of 1997. This felt impending, inevitable. The morning he gave me the news, he glanced around the GQ office, as if on the lookout for an army of clever spies, and said, “After I tell Art, you’re never going to see me here again.” I watched as he squared his shoulders, inhaled deeply, and deployed himself into Art’s office.
I let the knowledge of my new reality marinate in my brain. You make yourself, but you unmake yourself, too. If I didn’t play this right, I could very well end up back in Ohio.
After a minute, two (maybe not even), Granger emerged from Art’s office.
“He was very gracious,” Granger said.
Here is where we might expect the story to leave me, for at least the moment, and to follow one of the men—maybe we could go out the door with one, into the office with another. But this is my story, not theirs.
In a few days, I was scheduled to leave for Chicago, for the gargantuan annual book trade event BookExpo (now BEA). Why Art suggested the trip I have no idea, though I supposed it was meant as a gesture of goodwill toward me. I had no business to do in Chicago, no reason to go there, and I had not planned for the expedition in the slightest. This was a year of high drama at the book trade event, though, as far as these things went: many of the big publishers and chain bookstores had boycotted the event, protesting its expense and overall antiquatedness.
A few minutes after Granger had departed, Art emerged from his office. He walked down the hall and stopped in front of my desk.
“Are you looking forward to your trip?” he asked. Did I detect a flash of tension in his voice, a telltale strain? And why my imminent voyage to Chicago was at the forefront of the Cooper brain right after Granger’s announcement, if even for just that one second when I happened to be right in front of him, don’t ask me.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s going to be so great.”
Art turned to go down the hall, hesitated. “Go to Charlie Trotter’s,” he said. “Have the tasting menu. Tell them Art Cooper sent you.”
My days in the office were numbered, of
course. Art would consider Granger’s departure to Esquire, GQ’s chief rival, a defection and a betrayal. I could likely function as collateral damage, being an unpleasant visual reminder to Art, as he viewed me toiling away at my very public desk, that his power was not absolute. And I was, of course, expendable and disposable, and so very easily erased from the picture: a girl.
That afternoon, I furtively started packing up my books and papers, those obstinate things.
In Chicago, I was transported via shuttle bus from hotel to convention center, from convention center to hotel, and back again. For three days, I wandered around McCormick Place (“the largest convention center in North America,” crowed some press materials) in a daze. Truism: nothing kills the magic of literary creation quite like a book convention. Books, you were reminded, were a product like any other product: cans of sardines, kazoos, toilet-bowl brushes. Despite the flashy publishers’ boycott, the event seemed formidably well attended—the main floor was the size of an airship hangar, an overlit hell world jammed with exhibitors’ stands and booths, thousands of them. A thought I’d been having a lot lately: Everyone is a writer. I’d never even met one writer before I came to New York—college teachers didn’t count, naturally—but now was there any person upon the fruited plain who wasn’t a writer?
In the Land of Men Page 11