by Gay Talese
In recounting my days under the aegis of Frank Adams, I do not mean to represent myself as an insubordinate, know-it-all newcomer to the newsroom. It is true I wanted to see my work published pretty much as I had written it; and I believed that newswriting could be both literary and factually reliable; I understood that my being transferred from the sports section to the main section at Turner Catledge’s behest was rightly disturbing to Frank Adams, who had not been previously consulted. This I learned later from one of Adams’s clerks. Still, it was hardly unprecedented for the newspaper’s top editor to occasionally influence the placement and redeployment of personnel without always clearing it beforehand with mid-level management. What was the point in being at the top if it required getting permission from those below? Politesse had its place in maintaining harmonious intermanagement relationships, of course, and Catledge normally might have been expected to notify Frank Adams in advance about my transfer. But in this instance, he apparently had not. It might have been an oversight. Or maybe it was his way of indicating fatigue with Adams’s intransigence and hinting that the latter’s job was in jeopardy. Or perhaps Catledge was merely exercising his prerogative, as powerful people sometimes do to prove that they possess power, to shift an employee from one section of the paper to another. I was pleased by the move. I had been promoted from journalism’s “toy department,” which is how the New York Post columnist Jimmy Cannon referred to sports, to the Times main section, populated by full-fledged reporters. I hoped and believed that I was worthy of Catledge’s confidence.
Still, I knew that merit was not all that mattered. There were then about four thousand individuals working within the building in various white-collar and blue-collar capacities, and so autonomous were the various departments—including the advertising department, the circulation department, the promotion department, the news department, the typesetting department, and the Sunday department—that the heads of each department routinely indulged in nepotism, cronyism, and other forms of favoritism when it came to hiring or advancing people within their spheres of operation. The issue of merit was taken into account, but because there were always more applicants of merit as well as qualified employees for every available opening or advancement within the organization, the final selection tended to be determined subjectively by those holding positions of influence.
The man at the very top of the Times, the publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, got his job because he was married to the late Adolph Ochs’s daughter, Iphigene. When I joined the newsroom, I believe there were at least a dozen jobholders on the paper who were family relatives of the Times’s first lady and her husband. Among the more prominent of these was Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s cousin, who was the Paris-based chief foreign correspondent of the Times, and Iphigene’s cousin, who headed the editorial page and presided over a staff of opinionated pontificators on the tenth floor. In other departments within the paper, and in the disjointed nooks and crannies of the Gothic building’s cavernous interior, or within offices owned or leased by the Times outside the city or abroad, there were sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, brothers-in-law, uncles, and cousins galore who were collateral descendants or intermarried kinsmen of the Ochs-Sulzberger alliance. Not all of these relatives held important executive positions. Most, in fact, were mid-level bureaucrats. I am alleging, however, using one of journalism’s favorite words, that all of these people—whether it was Iphigene Sulzberger’s nephew, who assisted the advertising manager, or her niece, who clerked for the drama editor, or her other niece, who was an associate editor in the Sunday department, or her son-in-law, who would eventually succeed her husband as the publisher and who, in turn, would be succeeded by her son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and eventually by her grandson, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. (the latter in 1992)—all of these were on the Times payroll in part (if not entirely) because of their consanguinity or their conjugal affiliation with the Ochs patrilineage.
The Times was a family enterprise. No major decisions regarding the paper’s policies and practices could be implemented without the imprimatur of the ruling faction of the Ochs-Sulzberger family. It alone decided which male heir would ascend to the title of publisher. And the publisher was thereafter open to the opinions and recommendations of the family, and to certain intimates of the family, and, more often than acknowledged, to the top public figures of the day. Ochs himself had been influenced in 1929 by President Herbert Hoover’s efforts to have a reportorial job on the Times offered to young Turner Catledge.
Prior to gaining the White House in 1928, Hoover had been the secretary of commerce, and it was in this capacity, while observing the damage caused by the overflowing Mississippi River, that he had become friendly with the affable and diligent twenty-four-year-old Catledge, then covering the flood story for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Hoover recommended Catledge to Adolph Ochs; but it was not until after Hoover had won the presidency that Ochs hired Catledge away from the Baltimore Sun, to which Catledge had gone in 1927 after leaving the Commercial Appeal. Catledge was brought onto the New York staff for five months, and was then told by one of Ochs’s senior editors that he was being sent to the paper’s Washington bureau so that he might capitalize journalistically on his connections with the president.
Catledge did very well during the Hoover administration, but he did equally well during the years of Hoover’s successor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1936, when Catledge was thirty-five, he was named the paper’s chief news correspondent in Washington. At the same time, he was told by his bureau chief, Arthur Krock—whom Ochs had brought to the Times in 1927 at the suggestion of the financier and statesman Bernard Baruch—that within a year or so he, Arthur Krock, would probably retire and Catledge would take over the bureau. Krock held on as the bureau chief for another seventeen years. So Catledge resigned in 1941 to work for the Chicago Sun, being at first a roving correspondent and then the editor in chief. But after seventeen months with the Sun, a paper of limited prestige that would soon merge with the Chicago Times, becoming the Chicago Sun-Times, Catledge accepted an offer in 1943 from Ochs’s son-in-law and successor, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, to return to the New York Times.
Catledge was assigned to the New York staff for a while and was then sent overseas on special assignments. Near the end of World War II, as a passenger in an overcrowded military transport flying bumpily through a storm in the Burma-India theater, Catledge saw his life careening toward a disastrous conclusion, and, having been the last man aboard, he stood against the door, feeling nauseous and nervous, anticipating his having to leap from a burning wreckage after the plane had crashed into the desert. The pilot, however, did manage to land the plane safely; and, as the aircraft was brought to a halt, a British officer opened the door from the outside and announced, “Gentlemen, you are in New Delhi, the capital of India. You will please leave the plane by rank.”
“Guess that means the American taxpayer first,” declared Catledge, thrusting himself unsteadily down the steps ahead of everyone else.
After the war, Catledge was appointed by Sulzberger to serve as an assistant in New York to the managing editor of the Times, Edwin L. James, and on James’s death in mid-December of 1951, Catledge took over as the managing editor. Catledge had been residing in various hotel apartments since his separation two years before from his first wife, whom he had met and married in Baltimore in 1931. The couple had two daughters, neither of them driven to become journalists, but Catledge did bring to the Times some friends who had served with him on other newspapers. One of these individuals was a tall, broad-chested, gregarious native of Louisiana named John Randolph, who had briefly attended the University of Alabama, among other colleges, and who, because he had served effectively as Catledge’s picture editor at the Chicago Sun, became the picture editor at the Times in 1952, remaining in that job until he offended Iphigene Sulzberger by printing that picture in 1954 that showed Marilyn Monroe on her wedding day French-kissing her husband, Joe DiMaggio.
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p; Catledge would have preferred overlooking the incident, and probably would have if the complaint had not come to him from the publisher’s office, prompting him to demote his old friend to a copydesk position for a couple of years until Randolph was transferred to sports in 1956 to write the hunting and fishing column. This allowed Randolph to travel around the country on a liberal expense account, writing about what he most liked to do: hunt, fish, relax on a boat, and escape the clamor of big-city life—a dream assignment, as Randolph saw it. For the next five years, until he died of lung cancer in 1961, his column was one of the most readable features in the paper. I got to know Randolph quite well while we were coworkers in the sports department, and it was he who had identified Iphigene Sulzberger as the one who had reacted negatively to the Monroe-DiMaggio photo. Mrs. Sulzberger, then in her early sixties, was rarely seen in the Times building except when walking through the lobby on days when the board of directors met on the top floor, but it was generally believed by veteran Times men that she stood constantly behind her husband with gloved hands, reenforcing her late father’s definition of what constituted good taste within the paper.
“I’m all for good old Victorian and French hypocrisy,” she later admitted in a book about the Ochses and Sulzbergers called The Trust, written by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones with the cooperation of the families. What Iphigene did not exactly say in The Trust, but what its authors suggested, was that she was more protective of the propriety of the Times’s news columns than she was openly censorious of the infidelity of her husband, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was known for his extramarital affairs and most particularly the one with his longtime mistress, a movie star during the 1930s and 1940s named Madeleine Carroll. One evening when Carroll was on her way up to visit Sulzberger in his executive suite, a reporter from the drama department, who was surprised to see her riding in the elevator, posed the question: “What brings you to the Times, Miss Carroll?”
“Don’t ask,” she replied.
When Arthur Hays Sulzberger was close to sixty-five, in the middle 1950s, he was involved with an actress named Irene Manning, and he once saw to it that Turner Catledge got a photograph of her into the paper’s theater section. At around this time, the publisher’s thirty-year-old son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger—who would take over as publisher in 1963—was being charged in a paternity suit with impregnating a staff reporter named Lillian Bellison, whom he would refuse to marry and who, in turn, would not accede to an abortion. “She was sleeping with other people in the news department,” he was quoted as saying in The Trust, but he went on to explain that since a blood test in connection with the paternity suit “couldn’t prove that it wasn’t mine,” he agreed to long-term financial assistance, although he would always avoid personal contact with Lillian Bellison’s son. “I’ve never seen him,” Sulzberger said in the book. “It’s a piece of history, it’s over, it’s done.” Many years later, when Lillian Bellison’s son was in his twenties, he would sue his presumed father and eventually settle for an undisclosed portion of the Ochs-Sulzberger inheritance. His mother kept her job on the Times despite her differences with Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and she was never shy about bringing her boy into the newsroom, introducing him to her reportorial colleagues, including myself, as George Alexanderson, the surname being that of her onetime husband, who died two years prior to the birth. The prevailing view in the newsroom was that young George was a “spitting image” of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. And while most of the news personnel on the third floor seemed to be quite blasé about this unusual situation—quoting from the lyrics of a saloon song they attributed to the late Stanley Walker and other staffers on the Herald-Tribune: “Drink is the curse of the Tribune, and sex is the bane of the Times”—I had naïvely joined the Times in 1953 thinking that the private lives of the people who owned or worked for the organization would reflect the conventional standards and restraints that prevailed each day in the paper’s news and editorial pages. But after being on the paper for a while—and especially after the Sulzberger-Bellison revelations—I realized that I was working in a place of appearances. It was as if the walls of the Times building were made of one-way glass that gave us a view of the outside world and prevented those on the outside from looking in and judging us. As long as we journalists did not despoil the image of Ochsian propriety in the columns of the paper—which John Randolph had apparently done—then we could presumably deal with our dirty linen in private and cope as best we could with whatever problems we caused one another.
Still, recalling those long-ago years, it is noteworthy that during the supposedly dowdy days of the Eisenhower fifties there existed such a high tolerance for risqué behavior within the Times, and it was certainly not limited to the activities of Sulzberger père and fils. A married man who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter on the third floor had a mistress who worked on the eleventh floor in the promotion department. Seated near the Pulitzer winner’s desk was the best female general-assignment reporter on the Times, and she was having an affair with one of the senior editors who assisted Theodore Bernstein. In the middle of the newsroom sat a male reporter who was married but was also privately involved with a young woman who wrote “Talk of the Town” pieces for The New Yorker. For some reason, he kept a diary during his free hours in the office, describing in vivid detail his extramarital activity; he updated the diary during his free hours in the office and kept it locked in the bottom drawer of his desk. But when he suddenly died due to an allergic reaction to a doctor-prescribed drug following minor surgery, one of the clerks cleaned out the reporter’s desk and mailed home to the widow all the contents, including the diary.
Shocked to learn that she had not only been betrayed by her husband but also by The New Yorker staffer, whom she had felt close to, the widow wrote a book about the episode and entitled it Such Good Friends. Although it was published as a work of fiction—no real names were used—it was nonetheless an accurate account of the adulterous life of her late husband, and yet neither the book nor the movie version of the book, which was directed by Otto Preminger, in fact, none of the sexual indiscretions of any of the other individuals affiliated with the Times, tarnished the reputation of the newspaper. The public posture of the Times was able to coexist contradictorily with the private lives of those who owned it and were employed by it.
On those rare occasions when what we did was newsworthy but was also embarrassing to us, we could count on collegial coverage within the media, even from our journalistic rivals and the least discriminate of the tabloid columnists. While we journalists disliked hearing “No comment” from elected officials and other public figures when they were connected to controversies—and they were often criticized editorially for their evasiveness—our spokesmen were just as likely to say “No comment” when members of our profession were entangled in delicate situations, such as when a publisher was at odds with a striking labor union, or when a television anchor or syndicated columnist, balking over a contract, was in the process of quitting one employer for another. We in the media espoused double standards, and, as it suited us, we alternated between being “insiders” and “outsiders.” We were outsiders in that we were uninvolved personally with the insiders we cultivated as sources, and we were insiders in the sense that we lived within the protective shield of the First Amendment and justified invading other people’s privacy in ways that, were it done to us, we would have resented. We were ephemerons. Most of what we wrote was encompassed in a single day, and as professionals we lived vicariously through the ups and downs of other people. Our feelings were filtered, our sensibilities secondhand. With seeming sympathy and understanding, we encouraged the cooperation of those we pursued; but inwardly we were removed from the reality we recounted and the objects of our passing interest.
We were courtiers, wooers, ingratiating negotiators who traded on what we might provide those who dealt with us. We offered voice to the muted, clarification to the misunderstood, exoneration to the maligned. Potentially we
were horn blowers for publicity hounds, trial balloonists for political opportunists, lamplighters for theatrical stars and other luminaries. We were invited to Broadway openings, banquets, and other galas. We became accustomed to having our telephone calls returned from important people, and being upgraded as airline passengers through our connections with their public-relations offices, and having our parking tickets fixed through the influence of reporter friends who covered the police department. Whatever we lacked in personal ethics and moral character we might rationalize by telling ourselves that we were the underpaid protectors of the public interest. We exposed greedy landlords, corrupt judges, swindlers on Wall Street.
But nothing published was more perishable than what we wrote. This bothered me when I first joined the newsroom. As a Catholic, I had been conditioned to think in terms of the hereafter. Once as I sat sweating over a story, fearing that I might miss the deadline, I heard a veteran reporter calling to me from across the room: “C’mon, young man, be done with it! You’re not writing for posterity, you know.” I did not know. I was habitually late in delivering stories because I constantly rewrote them, believing that what I wrote would be preserved eternally on microfilm in the archives of Ochs’s enduring paper of record. I imagined myself as a monk illuminating the Book of Kells, a prideful scribe hoping that my polished prose would make a lasting impression. We journalists, in my view, were the preeminent chroniclers of contemporary happenings, the foot soldiers for the historians.
With time, however, I begrudgingly acknowledged my older colleague’s remark. We were not writing for posterity. We journalists seemed at times to be allied with the fast-food industry, being the short-order cooks for consumers of often half-baked information and ideas. What we wrote in haste was frequently incomplete, misleading, inaccurate. While our editors sought to amend these shortcomings by printing correction notices, such notices were never so lengthy or prominently featured as had been the flawed articles that prompted the corrections. Our editors advocated objectivity and impartiality, the presentation of different positions in a manner that was fair and equal to all parties concerned. But achieving this goal was unlikely, if not impossible. Our editors—all editors—subjected the news coverage to their understanding of what was fair and balanced, of what was very important, or not very important, or of no importance. Their fingerprints were on every article, every headline, every photograph, every layout in the newspaper. Everything that was published, or not published, was traceable to their subjective selves, to their private values, their vanities and battle scars, their ancestral histories, geographical origins, and whatever influence that politics, race, or religion had over them.