Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin

by Calvin Trillin

  “Why is she wearing an Adolfo gown?” Emily asked.

  “You be watching, good people,” the guide said. “She be sacrificing chicken and giving the back and gizzard to poor folk on strictly volunteer basis.”

  The chorus now began hauling some sort of idol on wheels into the clearing.

  “It’s a Trojan horse,” Edgar said.

  “There be the chicken now, kind mister,” the guide said.

  “That’s no chicken; that’s a Trojan horse,” Emily said, as the sorceress slit open the belly of the horse and tax breaks for the rich began to pour out.

  “Nice fat chicken it be,” the guide said. “Lucky poor be getting nice fat gizzard.”

  “Let’s get out of here, Edgar!” Emily said.

  “Furthermore,” the guide continued, “a deregulated oil and natural gas industry assures all Americans a dependable energy supply within the framework of traditional American free enterprise.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Edgar said. “He is an oil-company lobbyist!” Edgar grabbed Emily’s hand, and they scrambled toward the path.

  “It be nice chicken,” the guide shouted after them, having quickly fallen back into his role. “Voodoo be bringing chicken in every pot, two cars in every garage.”

  1982

  All Puffed Up

  I haven’t quite figured out how cigar smoking got taken over by Wall Street types who wear red suspenders. I haven’t figured it out partly because I don’t like to think about it. I don’t like to think about it because I’m afraid I’ll start wallowing in nostalgia for the days back in Kansas City when stogies were smoked by people like my cousin Sam, a man who played in the American Legion drum-and-bugle corps and never heard of a power breakfast.

  I hasten to say that I am not bringing this up out of concern for the health of Wall Street types who wear red suspenders. I hasten to say that because they’re always quick to respond to such expressions of concern with a lot of hot air about how the New Puritans have tried to rob independent-minded (and maybe even dashing) Americans of their freedoms. If the health of Wall Street types who wear red suspenders was high on my list of worries, I would have long ago devoted some attention to studies indicating that wearing red suspenders, instead of a belt, lowers your sperm count.

  My cousin Sam probably had his faults; I’m aware that people with discerning ears for music might have included the American Legion drum-and-bugle corps in this category. But if his wife, Min, ever told him to get that smelly cigar out of the house, I can’t imagine that his response would have been to start kvetching about smokers being oppressed. As I understand the customs of American Legion members in Sam’s era, the acceptable response to Min’s request would have been to go out on the porch with the cigar or to tell Min to shut her trap. The New Puritanism wouldn’t have come into it.

  One way to figure this, I know, is that cigar smoking follows logically from wine drinking for people who want to demonstrate that they’ve arrived: one more habit that’s expensive and lends itself to pedantry. That view is supported by a recent advertisement for the magazine Cigar Aficionado, which lists among the subjects discussed in the current issue “the expensive gamble of owning thoroughbred racehorses, the mystique of a Savile Row suit, and a blind tasting of eighty-three maduros.”

  In other words, Cigar Aficionado can be seen as Martha Stewart Living for males, a guidebook for the man who is not quite secure about whether he has truly become what used to be called in my high school a suave dog (with “suave” pronounced, of course, as if it rhymed with “wave”).

  Someone who is analytically inclined, I realize, would maintain that red suspenders and cigars, one formerly associated with firemen and the other with people like fight managers, have a significant connection. Is it an accident, he’d ask, that people who make their living fiddling with money, an enterprise traditionally considered effete compared with manufacturing a decent American widget, have taken on the symbols of tough guys?

  One problem I have with that approach is that the Wall Street types who wear red suspenders and smoke cigars don’t necessarily work on Wall Street; some of them just want to look like Michael Douglas in the movie. Another problem I have with it is that my normal response to hearing the analytically inclined ask whether something is an accident is to say, “Yeah, probably.”

  That attitude makes me equally skeptical about the possibility that this all has to do with sex. After all, even Freud may have said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” To which Jung may or may not have added, “Sometimes it’s an affectation.” To which my cousin Sam would have said, “Or a stogie, bozo.”

  1996

  Embarrassment of Riches

  The way I see it, some enterprising executive who would be willing to work for, say, $10 or $20 million a year might be able to maneuver himself into a position to become CEO of The Walt Disney Company. Of course he’d have to play his cards right.

  The thought that the CEO job at Disney might be available first occurred to me in 1988, during a protracted strike of Hollywood screenwriters. One of the issues in contention was the studios’ insistence that, because of the “new, colder realities facing the entertainment industry,” the writers accept a rollback of the residual payments they were receiving.

  In an article in The New Yorker, Joan Didion pointed out that the total received in residual payments by all nine thousand members of the Writers Guild was $58 million, and that the 1987 compensation of The Walt Disney Company’s CEO, Michael Eisner, was estimated at $63 million.

  The juxtaposition of those two figures cried out for a mathematical adjustment. You could almost hear the readers murmuring, “If the studios simply subtracted fifty-eight million dollars from Eisner’s compensation to pay the residuals, the screenwriters would be happy, Eisner would still have five million dollars a year to live on, and everyone could go back to work.”

  But Disney’s board of directors couldn’t have simply subtracted $58 million from Eisner’s compensation. That would have indicated a lack of confidence in the CEO, and that, in turn, would have weakened the stock—including the stock of the directors.

  So, for the good of the stockholders, it would have been better to replace Eisner than ask him to take a $58 million pay cut. That’s why I thought some ambitious executive might, while having a round of golf with some members of the Disney board, mention that he would, if given Eisner’s job at the same level of compensation, pay screenwriters’ residuals for the entire industry out of his own salary, finance his own car and driver, and never put the National Secretaries Day flowers for his secretary on the expense account.

  At the time, after all, there were, as there always are, five hundred executives considered capable of running a Fortune 500 company. As I remember the 1988 figures—BusinessWeek’s annual issue on executive compensation has always been the one business publication I don’t miss—people were running some of the top ten American corporations for as little as a few million dollars annually. Some CEOs may be less capable than others, of course, but $55 million a year less capable?

  Disney directors apparently thought so. Eisner remained as the CEO who led the company into Euro Disney, which has now piled up debts of $4 billion despite the insistence of the Disney officials that it is attracting as many people as their projections indicated it would draw.

  When I read about those projections being on target, I was reminded of a man in Nova Scotia I’ll call Mr. Martin, who used to sell picnic tables for $15 until he discovered, after being urged by a friend to do some calculations, that the materials in each table were costing him $17. So this sort of thing can happen to anyone—although it should be said that nobody ever thought of paying Mr. Martin $63 million a year.

  Now Disney wants to build another theme park, called Disney’s America, near the Civil War battlefields of northern Virginia, and wants the state to pitch in $132 million for the necessary road improvements. Why should that worry a CEO who makes only half that much annually? Becaus
e $60 million is no longer Eisner’s salary. The directors, apparently pleased as punch about Euro Disney, last year gave him a compensation package of $202 million.

  So Disney, in its public relations battle with opponents of Disney’s America, is faced with another tempting juxtaposition of numbers. Virginians can see that if Eisner himself paid for the roads he’d still have a $70 million annual income—$10 million more than the one he lived perfectly comfortably on as late as 1988.

  That is not the only embarrassment. A group of distinguished historians oppose Disney’s America as a project that will “create synthetic history by destroying real history.” The natural way to counterattack is to accuse the historians of being elitists who have lost touch with the common American. And who is the just-folks spokesman for that populist message? A man who pulls down $202 million a year.

  Which is why I think this is the time for some wily executive to offer to do Eisner’s job for, say, $10 million a year, enabling Disney to pay for the road improvements and have enough money left over to hire fifteen $4 million-a-year CEOs from other corporations.

  After working for $10 million for a few years, the wily executive would be in position to go for the real money.

  1994

  Two Poems on Goldman Sachs

  ON CEO LLOYD BLANKFEIN’S STATEMENT THAT GOLDMAN SACHS IS “DOING GOD’S WORK”

  On every seventh day the Lord can rest.

  He knows that Goldman Sachs will do its best

  To work away at that for which He’d hanker:

  A pot of dough for each investment banker.

  As He looks down at us from high above,

  The Lord’s not interested in peace and love

  And such as that. The Lord has got this itch

  To see the Goldman Sachs folks filthy rich.

  He wishes they had more than what they’ve got—

  Another house or two, another yacht.

  His hopes for these to whom he gave the nod:

  More money, as the saying goes, than God.

  December 2009

  SEC ACCUSES GOLDMAN OF FRAUD IN HOUSING DEAL

  —New York Times headline

  They’re doing God’s work, their CEO said.

  They’re kings of the Street. They are regal.

  So now we must ask if God ever knew

  That some of his work was illegal.

  May 2010

  THE YEARS WITH NAVASKY

  “When I was approached about writing a column for The Nation, I asked for only one guarantee: Would I be allowed to make fun of the editor? When it comes to civil liberties, we all have our own priorities.”

  Ambushed

  Looking back, I realize that my first mistake was involving myself with an occasional publication called Monocle, a journal of political satire whose editor was the person I came to refer to as the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky. In those days, when we were all young and optimistic, I used to assure Navasky that the lack of a sense of humor was probably not an insurmountable handicap for the editor of a humor magazine. (He always responded with a nervous chuckle.) As an editor, after all, he was exacting. During the New York newspaper strike of 1963, Monocle published a parody edition of the New York Post, then as predictable in its liberalism as it was later to become in its sleaziness, and I suggested as the front-page headline COLD SNAP HITS OUR TOWN; JEWS, NEGROES SUFFER MOST. Navasky refused to use the headline merely because there was no story inside the paper to go with it—a situation that a less precise thinker might have considered part of the parody.

  Even then, I must say, Navasky’s hiring policies seemed erratic—particularly his appointing as advertising manager a high-minded young man who found advertising so loathsome and disgusting that, as a matter of principle, he refused to discuss the subject with anyone. What was most memorable about Victor S. Navasky at Monocle, though, was his system of payment to contributors—a system derived, according to my research, from a 1938 chart listing county-by-county mean weekly wages for hospital Gray Ladies. My strongest memory of Monocle is receiving a bill from Navasky for a piece of mine the magazine had published—along with a note explaining that the office expenses for processing the piece exceeded what he had intended to pay me for it.

  In the late sixties, Monocle folded. I wasn’t surprised. My assurances to Navasky about his not needing a sense of humor had been quite insincere. Also, I had once observed the advertising manager’s reaction to being phoned at the Monocle office by a prospective advertiser: “Take a message,” he hissed at the secretary, as he bolted toward the door. “Tell him I’m in the bathroom. Get rid of him.” Then, only about ten years later, Navasky fetched up as the new editor of The Nation. It was difficult for me to imagine that he would dare pay Gray Lady rates at a magazine of national reputation—even a money-losing magazine of national reputation. (Historians tell us that The Nation was founded many years ago in order to give a long succession of left-wing entrepreneurs the opportunity to lose money in a good cause.) The Nation, after all, had always railed against bosses who exploit workers. I thought about Navasky’s stewardship of Monocle for a while, and then sat down to write him a letter of congratulations on being named editor of The Nation. It said, in its entirety, “Does money owed writers from Monocle carry over?” I received no reply.

  I realize that this history with Navasky is one reason for speculation by scholars in the field about the sort of negotiations that could have led to my agreeing to do a column for The Nation. (“If he got caught by Navasky twice, he must be soft in the head.”) The entire tale can now be told. The negotiations took place over lunch at a bar in the Village. I picked up the check. I had asked Navasky beforehand if he minded my bringing along my wife, Alice. I figured that she would be a reminder that I was no longer the carefree young bachelor who barely complained about being stiffed regularly by the Monocle bookkeepers, but a responsible married man with two daughters and an automatic washer-dryer combination (stack model). Navasky, the cunning beast, said Alice would be most welcome. He knew her to be a sympathetic soul who somehow saw a connection in his saving money on writers and the possibility that he might buy a new suit.

  Once we had our food, Navasky made his first wily move. He suggested two very specific ideas for regular columns I might be interested in writing for The Nation—both of them of such surpassing dumbness that I long ago forgot precisely what they were. One of them, it seems to me, was on the practical side—a weekly gardening column, maybe, or a column of auto repair hints.

  “Those are the silliest ideas I ever heard,” I said, with relief. “The only column I might like to do is so far from Wobbly horticulture, or whatever you have in mind, that I don’t mind mentioning it because you obviously wouldn’t be interested—a thousand words every three weeks for saying whatever’s on my mind, particularly if what’s on my mind is marginally ignoble.” As long as I was safe from an agreement, I thought I might as well take advantage of one of those rare opportunities to say “ignoble” out loud.

  “It’s a deal,” the crafty Navasky said, putting down the hamburger I was destined to pay for and holding out his hand to shake on the agreement. Caught again.

  “I hate to bring up a subject that may cause you to break out in hives,” I said, “but what were you thinking of paying me for each of these columns?” I reminded him of the responsibilities of fatherhood and the number of service calls necessary to keep a stack-model washer-dryer in working order.

  “We were thinking of something in the high two figures,” Navasky said.

  I remained calm. The sort of money we were discussing, after all, was already a step up from Monocle rates. The only check I ever received from Monocle—for presiding over a panel discussion in an early issue—was for three dollars. (“Well, it’s steady,” I said when Navasky later asked if I would run similar discussions as a monthly feature of Monocle. “A person would know that he’s got his thirty-six dollars coming in every year, rain or shine, and he could build his fre
elance on that.”) Still, I felt a responsibility to do some negotiating.

  “What exactly do you mean by the high two figures?” I said.

  “Sixty-five dollars,” Navasky said.

  “Sixty-five dollars! That sounds more like the middle two figures to me. When I hear ‘high two figures,’ I start thinking eighty-five, maybe ninety.”

  “You shook on it,” Navasky said. “Are you going to go back on your word right in front of your own wife?”

  I looked at Alice. She shrugged. “Maybe Victor’ll buy a new suit,” she said.

  I called for the check.

  1982

  Pinko Problems

  For some years, I was worried about the possibility that The Nation was getting to be known around the country for being a bit pinko. I was born and brought up in Kansas City, and I wasn’t really keen on the folks at home getting the impression that I worked for a left-wing sheet. They knew I did a column for The Nation, of course—my mother told them—but most of them did not inquire deeply into The Nation’s politics, perhaps because my mother was sort of letting on that it’s a tennis magazine. She was able to get away with that because The Nation is not circulated widely in Kansas City: In the greater Kansas City area, it goes weekly to three librarians and an unreconstructed old anarcho-syndicalist who moved to town after his release from the federal prison at Leavenworth in 1927 and set up practice as a crank. Still, I was concerned that The Nation’s political views could be revealed in the press.

  My concern was not based on any notion that the people back home would react to this revelation by ostracizing my mother for having given birth to a Commie rat. Folks in the Midwest try to be nice. What I was worried about was this: People in Kansas City would assume that no one would write a column for a pinko rag if he could write a column for a respectable periodical. They might even assume that payment for a column in a pinko rag would be the sort of money people in Kansas City associate with the summer retainer for the boy who mows the lawn. Realizing that I had struggled for years in New York only to end up writing a column for lawn-mowing wages, they would spend a lot of time comforting my mother whenever they ran into her at the supermarket. (“There, there. Don’t you worry one bit. Things have a way of working themselves out.”) My mom’s pretty tough, but tougher people have broken under the burden of Midwestern comforting.