Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble

by Nora Ephron

  From the beginning, People was conceived as an inexpensive magazine—cheap to produce and cheap to buy. There would be a small staff. Low overhead. Stringers. No color photographs except for the cover. It was intended to be sold only on newsstands—thus eliminating the escalating cost of mailing the magazine to subscribers and mailing the subscribers reminders to renew their subscriptions. It was clear that the magazine would have to have a very strong appeal for women; an increasing proportion of newsstands in this country are in supermarkets. Its direct competitor for rack space at the check-out counter was the National Enquirer. A pilot issue of the magazine, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the cover, was produced in August, 1973, and test-marketed in seven cities, and it is the pride of the Time Inc. marketing department that this was done in the exact way Procter & Gamble introduces a new toilet paper. When Malcolm B. Ochs, marketing director of the Magazine Development Group at Time Inc., speaks about People, he talks about selling “packaged goods” and “one million units a week” and “perishable products.” This sort of talk is not really surprising—I have spent enough time around magazine salesmen to know they would all be more comfortable selling tomatoes—but it is nonetheless a depressing development.

  The second major decision that was arrived at early on was to keep the stories short. “We always want to leave people wishing for more,” says Richard B. Stolley, People’s managing editor. This is a perfectly valid editorial slogan, but what Stolley does not seem willing to admit is the reason for it, which is that People is essentially a magazine for people who don’t like to read. The people at People seem to believe that people who read People have the shortest attention spans in the world. Time and Life started out this way too, but both of them managed to rise above their original intentions.

  The incarnation of Life that People most resembles is not the early era, where photographs dominated, nor even the middle-to-late period, when the photography and journalism struck a nice balance, but the last desperate days, when Ralph Graves was trying to save the magazine from what turned out to be its inevitable death. This is not the time to go into Graves’s most serious and abhorrent editorial decision, which was to eliminate the Life Great Dinners series; what I want to talk about instead is his decision to shorten the articles. There are people over at the Time-Life Building, defenders of Graves, who insist he did this for reasons of economy—there was no room for long pieces in a magazine that was losing advertising and therefore editorial pages—but Graves himself refuses to be so defended. He claims he shortened the articles because he believes in short articles. And the result, in the case of Life, was a magazine that did nothing terribly well.

  People has this exact quality—and I’m not exactly sure why. I have nothing against short articles, and no desire to read more than 1500 words or so on most of the personalities People profiles. In fact, in the case of a number of those personalities—and here the name of Telly Savalas springs instantly to mind—a caption would suffice. I have no quarrel with the writing in the magazine, which is slick and perfectly competent. I wouldn’t mind if People were just a picture magazine, if I could at least see the pictures; there is an indefinable something in its art direction that makes the magazine look remarkably like the centerfold of the Daily News. And I wouldn’t even mind if it were a fan magazine for grownups—if it delivered the goods. But the real problem is that when I finish reading People, I always feel that I have just spent four days in Los Angeles. Women’s Wear Daily at least makes me feel dirty; People makes me feel that I haven’t read or learned or seen anything at all. I don’t think this is what Richard Stolley means when he says he wants to leave his readers wanting more: I tend to be left feeling that I haven’t gotten anything in the first place. And even this feeling is hard to pinpoint; I am looking at a recent issue of People, with Hugh Hefner on the cover, and I can’t really say I didn’t learn anything in it: On page 6 it says that Hefner told his unauthorized biographer that he once had a homosexual experience. I didn’t actually know that before reading People, but somehow it doesn’t surprise me.

  Worst of all—yes, there is a worst of all—I end up feeling glutted with celebrity. I stopped reading movie magazines in the beauty parlor a couple of years ago because I could not accommodate any more information about something called the Lennon Sisters. I had got to the point where I thought I knew what celebrity was—celebrity was anyone I would stand up in a restaurant and stare at. I had whittled the list down to Marlon Brando, Mary Tyler Moore and Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo, and I was fairly happy. Now I am confronted with People, and the plain fact is that a celebrity is anyone People writes about; I know the magazine is filling some nameless, bottomless pit of need for gossip and names, but I haven’t got room in my life for so many lights.

  People’s only serious financial difficulty at this point is in attracting advertisers, and one of the reasons the people at People think they are having trouble doing so is that their advertisers don’t know who the People reader is. Time Inc. has issued a demographic survey which shows that People’s readers are upscale, whatever that means, and that 48 percent of them have been to college. I never believe these surveys—Playboy and Penthouse have them, and theirs show that their readers are mainly interested in the fine fiction; in any case, I suspect that People’s real problem with advertisers is not that they don’t know who’s reading the magazine, but that they know exactly who’s reading it. In one recent issue there are three liquor ads—for Seagram’s Seven Crown, Jim Beam and a bottled cocktail called the Brass Monkey, all of them brands bought predominantly by the blue-collar middle class. It’s logical that these brands would buy space in People—liquor companies can’t advertise on television. But any product that could would probably do better to reach nonreaders through the mass-market women’s magazines, which at least sit around all month, or on television itself.

  “The human element really is being neglected in national reporting,” says Richard Stolley. “The better newspapers and magazines deal more and more with events and issues and debates. The human beings caught up in them simply get squelched. If we can bring a human being out of a massive event, then we’ve done what I want to do.” I don’t really object to this philosophy—I’m not sure that I agree with it, but I don’t object to it. But it seems a shame that so much of the reporting of the so-called human element in People is aimed at the lowest common denominator of the also-so-called human element, that all this coverage of humanity has to be at the expense of the issues and events and ideas involved. It seems even sadder that there seems to be no stopping it. People is the future, and it works, and that makes me grouchiest of all.

  March, 1975

  The Palm Beach Social Pictorial

  I am sitting here thinking a mundane thought, which is that one picture is worth a thousand words. The reason I am sitting here thinking this is that I am looking at one picture, a picture of someone named Mignon Roscher Gardner on the cover of the Palm Beach Social Pictorial, and I cannot think how to describe it to you, how to convey the feeling I get from looking at this picture and in fact every other full-color picture that has ever appeared on the cover of this publication.

  The Palm Beach Social Pictorial appears weekly throughout the winter season in Palm Beach and I get it in the mail because a friend of mine named Liz Smith writes a column in it and has it sent to me. There are several dozen of us on Liz Smith’s list, and I think it is safe to say that we all believe that the Palm Beach Social Pictorial is the most wonderful publication in America. Beyond that, each of us is very nearly obsessed with the people in it. My particular obsession is Mignon Roscher Gardner, but from time to time I am unfaithful to her, and I get involved instead with the life of Anky Von Boythan Revson Johnson, who seems to live in a turban, or Mrs. Woolworth Donahue, who apparently never goes anywhere without her two Great Danes nuzzling her lap. One friend of mine is so taken with Helene (Mrs. Roy) Tuchbreiter and her goo-goo-googly eyes that he once made an entire collage of pic
tures of her face.

  Mignon Roscher Gardner, who happens to be a painter of indeterminate age and platinum-blond hair, has appeared on the cover of the Pictorial twice in the last year, both times decked in ostrich feathers. Anyone who appears on the cover of the Pictorial pays a nominal sum to do so; Mrs. Gardner’s appearances usually coincide with an opening of her paintings in Palm Beach, although the last one merely coincided with the completion of her portrait of Dr. Josephine E. Raeppel, librarian emeritus of Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. Most of the painters whose work appears on the cover of the Pictorial are referred to as “famed, international” painters, but Mrs. Gardner is a local, and the furthest the Pictorial will go in the famed-international department is to call her prominent. “Prominent artist-aviatrix,” for example—that’s what they called her last February, when she appeared on the cover in her hair and turquoise ostrich feathers along with a painting from a new series she called “The Cosmobreds.” The painting was of a naked young man on a flying black horse, and according to the Pictorial, it was a departure from her usual work in animals and sailboats and portraits because “Mignon wanted to combine her love for horses and for flying.” In back of the painting of the Cosmobred and Mrs. Gardner herself are some curtains, and if you ask me, they’re the highlight of the photograph. They are plain white curtains, but the valances are covered with chintz daisies, and the curtains are trimmed, but heavily trimmed, with yellow and green pompons, the kind drum majorettes trim their skirts and boots with.

  Inside the Palm Beach Social Pictorial are advertisements (“Dress up your diamond bracelet”), columns and pictures. The pictures show the people of Palm Beach eating lunch, wearing diamonds in the daytime, eating dinner, attending charity functions, and wearing party clothes. Most of the people are old, except that some of the women have young husbands. It is apparently all right to have a young husband if you are an old woman in Palm Beach, but not vice versa; in fact, the vice versa is one of the few things the columnists in the Social Pictorial get really upset about. Here, for instance, is columnist Doris Lilly writing about the guests at a recent party she attended: “Bill Carter (now U.N. ambassador to U.N.I.C.E.F.) proved he really does love children by bringing his latest airline hostess.” And here from another columnist, Maria Durell Stone, is another guest list: “Then there were the Enrique Rousseaus, she’s Lilly Pulitzer, and even Lilly’s ex, Peter, was there with, well, as someone said, ‘I don’t think it’s his daughter but she just might be.’ ” Every so often, the Pictorial prints pictures of people they describe as members of Palm Beach’s Younger Set; they all look to be in their mid-forties.

  There are two types of columnists who write for the Pictorial—locals, and correspondents from elsewhere. There are two advantages to being a correspondent from elsewhere: you don’t have to spend the winter in Palm Beach, and you get a lofty title on the masthead. Wally Cedar, who writes from Beverly Hills and Acapulco, is the Pictorial’s International Editor, and Liz Smith, who writes from New York, is the National Editor. With one exception—and I’ll get to her in a minute: she’s Maria Durell Stone—the local columnists in the Pictorial have tended to be relentlessly cheerful women whose only quibbles about life in Palm Beach have to do with things like the inefficiency of the streetlights on Worth Avenue. Cicely Dawson, who owns the Pictorial along with her husband Ed, whom she always refers to as “our better half,” writes a goings-on-about-town column in which she manages to summon unending enthusiasm and exclamation points for boutiques, galleries, parties, and new savings banks in town. “Congratulations to Nan and James Egan of the James Beauty Salon on their recent twenty-fifth anniversary,” Dawson once wrote. “No client would guess from the cheerful attitude of this wonderful couple what hardship they have had these past few months. After an illness-free life, James was diagnosed as having chronic kidney failure last December. Oh that Palm Beach County had an Artificial Kidney Center!… because that’s what James needs.”

  In all fairness, Mrs. Dawson is almost a grouch in comparison to Leone “Call Me the Pollyanna of Palm Beach” King, who until her retirement in 1973 could not find enough good things to say about the place. Where else, Mrs. King once asked in a long series of rhetorical questions, “could you find families offering living quarters to people of low incomes, without at least making some sort of charge?… Where could you find friends with splendid flower gardens leaving a message with their gardeners to send certain people bouquets during the winter while they are off on a trip around the world? Where could you find big bags of fruit from a Palm Beach orange grove on your doorstep at regular intervals?… Don’t let fabulously rich people throw you. They are just the same as anyone else except they can do what they jolly well please when they jolly well please. They have likes and dislikes, aches and pains, problems. They are just people.”

  Maria Durell Stone has left the Palm Beach Social Pictorial—she has been stolen away by the West Palm Beach daily paper—but her two years on the weekly coincided, and not coincidentally either, with what I think of as the Pictorial’s Golden Era, so I cannot leave her out of this. Mrs. Stone is a Latin-looking lady with a tremendous amount of jet-black hair who is divorced from architect Edward Durell Stone and has taken not one but two of his names along with her. She began writing for the Pictorial three years ago, and no one writing in any of the Palm Beach publications comes near her gift for telling it like it is. “I’ve done nothing but praise the Poinciana Club since it opened,” she wrote last year, “but being a critic means that every now and then one must speak the truth and I am sorry to say it, but Bavarian Night there was a disaster.”

  Mrs. Stone’s main problem in life—and the theme of her column too—had to do with being a single woman in a place where there are few eligible men. There are a lot of us with this problem, God knows, but she managed to be more in touch with it than anyone I know. Not a column passed without a pointed remark to remind the reader that this Mrs. Stone was looking for a Roman spring. “I met Vassili Lambrinos this week and he’s divine,” she wrote one week. “Dorothy Dodson, petite, refreshing and vivacious, gave a luncheon for him and I got to know him better—unfortunately not as much as I would like to, but what’s a poor bachelor girl to do?” Another week, Mrs. Stone went to a charity auction: “There were numerous items to bid on and I did covet that stateroom for two on the S.S. France, but as luck would have it, someone else got it. I wouldn’t have known who to take with me anyway, so it’s probably just as well.” Age was no barrier: “One of the best things of the evening,” she wrote of the Boys’ Club Dinner, “was the Boys’ Club Chorus, which consisted of adorable little boys of unfortunate circumstances who sang many lively numbers at the top of their divine adolescent voices. It was heartwarming to hear.” Apparently, Mrs. Stone’s subtlety was not lost on her readers: “Stanton Griffis, that amazing ex-ambassador who sat next to me at the Salvation Army luncheon the other day, told me that if I really wanted to get the right man, I should put an ad in my column saying, ‘Wanted: Intelligent, handsome, lean, tall, romantic type with kindness and money.’ Well, now that I’ve said it, let’s see if my octogenarian friend is right.”

  From time to time, something sneaks into the Pictorial that has to do with the outside world, and when it does, it is usually in Liz Smith’s column. Miss Smith writes for the publication as if she were addressing a group of—well, a group of people who winter in Palm Beach. She interrupts her column of easygoing gossip and quotes to bring her readers little chautauquas; last year’s were about Richard Nixon (“Hope all you people who couldn’t stomach poor old Hubert are happy these days,” one of them concluded) and this year’s are about oil and the Middle East. (“So here are the most fascinating and frightening statistics I’ve read recently, from The New Republic. You remember The New Republic—it’s liberal, left, and riddled with integrity, but even so, don’t ignore the statistics.”)

  The rich are different from you and me; we all know that even if some of the people in Pa
lm Beach don’t. But it is impossible to read the Social Pictorial without suspecting that the rich in Palm Beach are even more different. One of my friends tells me that Palm Beach used to be a rather nice place and that now it’s become a parody of itself; I don’t know if she’s right, but if she is, the Social Pictorial reflects this perfectly. If there were more communities like it, I don’t think I would find the Palm Beach Social Pictorial so amusing. But there aren’t, so I do.

  The Palm Beach Social Pictorial, P.O. Box 591, Palm Beach, Florida. By subscription $10 a year.

  May, 1975

  Brendan Gill and The New Yorker

  Brendan Gill’s Here at The New Yorker was issued to coincide exactly with the fiftieth anniversary of The New Yorker magazine, and, as such, it became The Event of the anniversary, an occasion for critics to pat the magazine on the back and, in addition, to undo some of the devastation that was heaped on it and its editor, William Shawn, some ten years ago, when Tom Wolfe took them all on in the Herald Tribune’s New York magazine. The New Yorker has come through this round with garlands, and so has Gill’s book. It is a charming book, the critics say.

  The people who work at The New Yorker do not think Brendan Gill’s book is charming, but they try to be nice about it. The ethic of Nice is, in its way, as much an editorial principle at The New Yorker as the ethic of Mean is at New York magazine, and you can see, when you bring up the subject of Gill’s book, that the people who work with Gill really want to be polite about it. What they generally say is that they would not object so much if only Gill had presented it simply as a memoir, or if he had made it clear that he knew nothing whatever about The New Yorker after the death of Harold Ross, or if he had managed not to publish it at a time calculated to cash in on the anniversary. Any of these things would help, they say. Well, I don’t know that any of this would help. Here at The New Yorker seems to me one of the most offensive books I have read in a long time.