The first grievance in many grievance-rich decades occurred in 1960, when the headline “Superman Comes to the Supermart” was changed from the more pragmatic “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” Mailer did not appreciate the odd, anachronistic “supermart” and felt that the headline had been snuck past him. (Another of the tenets of old-time magazine editing: try not to share display copy with authors if you can possibly help it.) Rust Hills had valiantly patched that one up, but a lifetime of exciting squabbles was to follow.
It was now clear to me that there were many ancient Esquire feuds being perpetually enacted all over the place—mostly by writers, but also by agents and by other literary-world figures. Almost everyone I encountered these days seemed to have some sort of beef with Esquire. A writer had been jerked around in various ways by the magazine; a story had been acquired, then killed by the magazine; a submission had received a discourteous rejection letter; a submission, God forbid, had not been responded to at all. Not infrequently did I feel I had to apologize for something someone I’d never met before (and possibly had never even heard of) may or may not have done years before.
One well-known fiction writer sent me an email nobly headlined “WHY I DO NOT WRITE FOR ESQUIRE ANYMORE,” presenting a bravura inventory of Esquire-generated offenses. At a party, I was introduced to a veteran female literary agent (and truly one of the worst people ever), and I offered my hand for a shake but received only a vehement glare in return.
Said another old-time literary agent at another party, “I would never recommend to a client of mine that he appear in a men’s fashion magazine.” With a smile, I told the agent that he and his authors were free to ignore the fashion pages in the magazine—I always did.
“But Esquire used to publish Camus!” Camus had been an actual client of his, so I suppose he felt he had the right to rub it in. “Camus!” he declared again as he wagged a finger in the air and walked away.
Another affronted writer said to me of his own uneasy situation with the magazine, “But don’t you know what happened?”
Hell no, I didn’t know what happened. I was flying completely in the dark. How was I supposed to know one damn thing about some writer’s decades-steeped rancor toward Gordon Lish?
Hearing about these various traumas was helpful in a very important way, though. They introduced me to one of the most important aspects of the editor’s job: defusing writer rage. That was a very big element, it would turn out. Some editors had that talent, and some of us would really need to work on that one—and on everything else.
AS SOMEONE CONSPICUOUSLY LACKING THE GIFT OF “SPONTANEOUS eloquence” (Nabokov’s phrase, applied to himself), I’ve always been dreadfully susceptible to the charms of the swift tongued. I’ve always wished I could be more like them, those suspiciously showy elocutionists, rather than being the way I am: slow and deliberative about what it is I want to say before I say it, and even that doesn’t get me too far. In the editorial meetings at Esquire, I would watch transfixed as many of the men would just gab away—just gab and gab—without seeming to give much thought at all to what it was they were saying.
At some meetings, editors and staff writers might have to pitch a few story ideas. Most of the ideas were about famous people (the subtopics: persona, if the celebrity was a man, and appearance, if the celebrity was a woman). I could just never get over the feeling that there was something so dreadful about seeing people as “stories,” although I must also add that I was no longer quite as sanctimonious about celebrity profiles as I had been. I had now written some of my own, and, good God, they were terrible. Very crudely, the Esquire house style (the tone and usage conventions each magazine follows to give the sense of one consistent voice) those early days seemed to be something like bombast plus sentimentalism (plus a weakness for the second person), and it proved chillingly easy for me to absorb. But I’m passing the buck. Something happens to you when you just want to see your own byline.
One of the best comments to come out of these story idea meetings: a man suggested, invoking Devo (Akron’s fourth-finest export after Rita Dove, LeBron James, and Jim Jarmusch), that we change the motto of the magazine from its bland “Man at His Best” to the mordant “Are We Not Men?” One of the worst comments: a man—someone situated squarely in the middle of the talent pool of life—made a remark that if a reporter from the New York Times called and asked you some sneaky background questions about yourself, you knew that an advance obit was being prepared about you. You were that powerful in the world.
If I could repeat that John Adams quote—the one about the passion for distinction being the principal human urge—on every page without ruining my narrative flow, I would.
Outside my office, they gave me two, or possibly three, depending on how you did your calculations, dedicated fiction department cubicles. I now had a staff (a grandiose noun) of three freelance readers. Were these women officially interns? That depends on what your definition of “intern” is. Some were students, some were adults; some were paid twelve dollars an hour, some nothing at all.
Throughout the years, a few of the brilliant and judicious women who came and went as Esquire fiction readers/interns would become my closest friends. I needed smart women around me, and in eight years at Esquire, I would hire more than a dozen women, but only one guy. I was never much of a mentor to anyone, though; I had little wisdom to supply, and I was uncomfortable being an authority figure. To clarify: I wanted authority, but what I wanted was literary authority, aesthetic authority; I didn’t want the authority that came with being someone’s boss. I was better (though rarely great) at being a buddy.
One of my first readers/interns/assistants/Venticelli was a woman named Amanda Davis. She had springy auburn curls and a minuscule nose ring, drove a truck, and lived in an area of Brooklyn that then seemed terra incognita but is now jammed with art galleries, tech start-ups, and luxury lofts.
Mere days after Amanda started at Esquire, she asked me if she could write short book reviews. After she’d been there for a few weeks, she started receiving postcards from celebrated authors, communiqués to be tacked up on the wall of her cubicle like the trophies they were. After she’d been at the magazine for a couple of months, she asked for a raise; after a few more months, a promotion; after six months, she wanted health insurance. (She was a freelancer and got nothing, alas. Recall: it’s very hard to move from assistant to non-assistant.) For an afternoon snack, she’d go out and get two York Peppermint Patties, and even though I’m not sure she really liked me all that much, she’d give one to me. Six years later, at the age of thirty-two, when she was on a tour for her second book, Amanda was killed, along with her parents, in a plane crash in Asheville, North Carolina. It still seems incomprehensible that this ebullient young woman who loved writers and writing and teaching, who loved the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference more even than seemed reasonable, and who was so perturbingly well read in contemporary fiction, is gone forever.
THERE WERE, AND ALWAYS WOULD BE, EDITORS AT ESQUIRE WHO BELIEVED that fiction should be assigned. They wanted fiction to be approached like journalism, to be reported like journalism. This topic would inevitably come up in meetings: short stories ought to be “relevant” and should incorporate current events. Esquire wanted the social realism of Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser or, more appropriately, Tom Wolfe: their idea of what Esquire fiction should be squared perfectly with Wolfe’s infamous manifesto about how to save the American novel, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” which insists on “a highly detailed realism based on reporting, a realism more thorough than any currently being attempted, a realism that would portray the individual in intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him.”
The idea was that I would approach writers with story ideas from the news and commission them to write short fiction on such-and-such topic. I wasn’t so sure that fiction worked that way—didn’t it have to come from the inside out, not from the outside in? (Hail, muse, etc.?) Any ac
utely topical fiction would certainly be of dubious artistic substance and would serve only the moment but not much else. Whenever someone again suggested that I commission a short story (Timothy McVeigh was one such concept), I will admit that I saw myself as “the Lord High Executioner of middlebrow culture,” in Louis Menand’s nice phrase about Dwight Macdonald (Esquire writer, by the way, and the magazine’s film critic for a period in the sixties). The approach was anti-literary, most certainly middlebrow, though I don’t believe any other editors there saw it that way.
But yet it wasn’t as if anyone was ever looming over my desk or anything, like black-cloaked Death in The Seventh Seal, grimly pressing the phone into my hand: Hello, Mr. Roth. Any chance you’d be interested in writing a short story for Esquire narrated by Posh Spice?
But in the early days, it was still easy for me to acquire any short story I wanted to acquire. My principal struggle then was to woo the writers I wanted to publish and try to convince them that they didn’t always need to automatically think first of submitting to The New Yorker (although it made a lot of sense that they did, I had to admit).
I suggested to Granger that Esquire run a short short story on the back page. The back page of any magazine is prime real estate and is usually a listicle, product placement, or an attempt at humor. Remarkably, he went for it, and the back page became a 650-word flash fiction. My slug for it, Snap Fiction, was possibly not for the ages and brought to mind (for me) crisp English peas and the brightest springtide green. But I just loved that this page existed. In truth I did always approach it with a sense of leave-taking and end times, knowing that it couldn’t last, surely. It actually hung on for a couple of improbable years. We published some wonderful stories on that page, though David Foster Wallace did say to me about one of the least successful of them, “What, did he write that on a fucking cocktail napkin?”
Rust Hills was also not a fan of Snap Fiction.
“Six hundred and fifty words for a complete story?” he asked. “I can barely get a drawer open in six hundred and fifty words!”
THE DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS, ESQUIRE’S ANNUAL ROUNDUP OF all things preposterous, was created in 1962 by art director Robert Benton and editor David Newman (both of whom would go on to write the screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde) and is, or was, the signature issue of the year, I guess you could say. The format: an all-caps header as punch line, followed by a summary of a news item. Traditionally, there was always a photo of an alarmingly youthful Richard Nixon, grinning broadly, with the caption “WHY IS THIS MAN LAUGHING?” (In later years replaced with “WHY IS THIS DEAD MAN STILL LAUGHING?”) The whole enterprise aspired to sound very Harvard Lampoon—mischievous, smug, caustic, and often pretty funny.
To locate the Dubious pop-cultural era when I was new at Esquire, there were jokes in the January 1998 issue about: the Heaven’s Gate cult (those Hale-Bopp comet cultists who were talked into committing mass suicide with their Nikes on—because people can be talked into anything), Boris Yeltsin, Dudley Moore, Marv Albert (he of the sex scandal, and wearer of ladies’ underwear and a very convincing toupee), Michael Jackson, and JFK Jr. and his superlatively clueless magazine, George. There were five jokes about the Trumps and a sidebar devoted to the nutty things Norman Mailer had said during interviews about The Gospel According to the Son . . . which just went to show that there was never any lingering institutional loyalty toward you, or even any hint of vestigial affection (impossible to imagine The New Yorker mocking its most recognizable writer, John Updike, similarly—but The New Yorker house style was impersonal, never knavish), even if you’d once been the magazine’s star writer. You will always become a self-parody and made a fool of in the end.
During past editorships and regimes, Dubious was, as I understood it, an all-hands-on-deck situation—every editor and writer could contribute to it. But I don’t recall being included in one meeting that year about Dubious, although it’s possible there were no meetings that year about Dubious, as freelancers and Dave Eggers did most of the work.
These, in my view, were the best jokes in the Dubious Achievement Awards of 1998:
I’M SORRY, COULD YOU SAY THAT AGAIN, ONLY MORE SLOWLY AND WITH YOUR BUTT?
Responding to critics, Jim Carrey said, “I don’t care if people think I’m an overactor. People who think that would call van Gogh an overpainter.”
In reference to the death of Princess Diana:
AT LEAST SOME GOOD HAS COME OF THIS TRAGEDY
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s publicist said, “Andrew was a friend of Diana’s, and I think he was too near the subject to think of it as a musical.”
And the freakishly prescient:
AS THE REIGNING ASSHOLE, I HAVE TO KEEP UP APPEARANCES
Donald Trump hired a personal trainer to help Alicia Machado take off the twenty-two pounds she had put on since being crowned Miss Universe and invited the press to watch her train.
DAVE EGGERS WAS SOMETHING OF THE SPOKESPERSON FOR DUBIOUS that year and did some media for it. One cold night, I tagged along with him to a studio at a media conglomerate on Sixth Avenue for a TV interview. As we rode the elevator, I asked Dave the one thing you shouldn’t ask someone who’s about to go on a TV interview:
“Nervous?”
He regarded me for a moment. There was a small experimental tuft of facial hair below his bottom lip.
“Um, no,” he said. He added, somewhat reproachfully, “Nice pants.”
I was wearing leather pants—and a black Katharine Hamnett jacket—and they were nice (so was the jacket). When I was back at GQ, I had tried to get some custom leather pants made for me, but my guy (recommended to me at work as the leather guy) did a fitting in the office, cashed my deposit check, and stopped returning my phone calls. These particular leather pants—I’d saved up for them for months—were from Charivari, the best store in the history of the world (it would go out of business the following year). I was vain about these pants.
“Why are you hanging out with me?” Dave asked, referring more to the pants than to me. Leather pants: not as ubiquitous then as they are now, and more statement making back in the day. (Divergent aside: I once interviewed Simon Le Bon—that’s right, Simon Le Bon—and I noted that he referred to his leather pants as his “leathers.” I’ll always remember that. My leathers.) “You look as if you should be some rock star’s girlfriend.”
“But I don’t want to be the girlfriend,” I said. “I want to be the rock star.”
This was not true. I did not want to be the rock star. Well, I did and I didn’t. In the abstract, being the center of attention seemed like a nice thing, but being the center of attention also meant that you had to deal with people, and my preference was to not have to deal with people if I could help it. And there were few things I could imagine wanting to do less than a TV interview, especially one in which you weren’t speaking for yourself but were instead representing an institution—two institutions, Esquire and Dubious—and the potential for a high-profile screwup seemed limitless. But Dave was cut from a different cloth from I or anyone else.
Dave was my office buddy that first year, and I’m fairly sure I would have lost my mind without him. He was great to talk to and usually had controlled and impressively sane responses to things. Example: we’d seen Titanic together, and I’d squirmed in my seat the whole time, overcome with thoughts of self-immolation. “Well,” I said as we left the theater, “that was ridiculous.” But levelheaded Dave conceded that he actually believed that Titanic was very good at what it was and likewise very good at doing what a commercial movie should do—not demand too much of its audience.
Dave could be disarmingly puckish: “Do you like seafood?” he might ask, take a big bite of something, and open his mouth. He once pilfered a notebook of mine from my office desk and returned it with the following note on the inside cover: “This belongs to Adrienne, who no one really likes.” (Question: Shouldn’t that have been “whom”?) And there was that one time when he and his younger brother m
ercilessly ridiculed me, in those early-Internet days, for using the word “flame” as a verb (I deserved that one). He gave me his copy of the Madonna book Sex because he didn’t want it lying around his apartment. I soon discovered I didn’t want it lying around my apartment, either.
The elevator arrived on the TV studio’s floor. Dave was shuttled off to the makeup chair or wherever they took him, and I loitered in the greenroom.
The other guest on the show that night was—wait for it—Ed Koch, the one and only. In my youth, the main thing I’d known about Koch during his seventies and eighties mayoralty of New York City was his catchphrase “How am I doin’?” I suppose I had imagined that Koch, sitting there in that late nineties greenroom, would be this loud, feisty, wisecracking, glad-handing fellow: a stand-up comic as ex-mayor. This was the total inverse to the aura Koch projected that evening. He sat at the cliff edge of his seat, long legs extended straight in front of him (Koch was a tall man—did not know that), arms rigidly crossed against his chest. He seemed grumpy as hell; he spoke to no one, made eye contact with no one. He had no reading material. His only activity: scowling silently into the middle distance.
I helped myself to a cookie—that greenrooms vacillate wildly in terms of snack quality was a lesson still to be learned—and watched Dave’s interview on the monitor. He was swift of tongue, systematic of mind, as poised as a statesman, and terrifyingly telegenic. It occurred to me that I had to revise my take on Dave somewhat. This was another Dave to contend with—not a punk or a smart aleck, no, but a head of state, an orator, a leader—the leader of . . . something.
In the Land of Men Page 14