I Remember Nothing [7]
The famous 114-day newspaper strike (which wasn’t a strike but a lockout) began in December 1962, and one of its side effects was that several journalists who were locked out by their newspapers came to Newsweek to be writers, temporarily. One of them was Charles Portis, a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune whom I went out with for a while, but that’s not the point (although it’s not entirely beside the point); the point is that Charlie, who was a wonderful writer with a spectacular and entirely eccentric style (he later became a novelist and the author of True Grit), was no good at all at writing the formulaic, voiceless, unbylined stories with strict line counts that Newsweek printed.
By then I had become friends with Victor Navasky. He was the editor of a satirical magazine called Monocle, and it seemed that he knew everyone. He knew important people, and he knew people he made you think were important simply because he knew them. Monocle came out only sporadically, but it hosted a lot of parties, and I met people there who became friends for life, including Victor’s wife, Annie, Calvin Trillin, and John Gregory Dunne. Victor also introduced me to Jane Green, who was an editor at Condé Nast. She was an older woman, about twenty-five, very stylish and sophisticated, and she knew everyone too. She introduced me to my first omelette, my first Brie, and my first vitello tonnato. She used the word “painterly” and tried to explain it to me. She asked me what kind of Jew I was. I had never heard of the concept of what kind of Jew you were. Jane was a German Jew, which was not to say she was from Germany but that her grandparents had been. She was extremely pleased about it. I had no idea it mattered. (And by the way, it didn’t, really; those days were over.)
I could go on endlessly about the things I learned from Jane. She told me all about de Kooning and took me to the Museum of Modern Art to see pop art and op art. She taught me the difference between Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. She’d gone out with a number of well-known journalists and writers, and long before I met them I knew, because of Jane, a number of intimate details about them. Eventually, I went to bed with one of them and that was the end of my friendship with her, but that’s getting ahead of things.
One day after the newspaper strike was about a month old, Victor called to say he’d managed to raise $10,000 to put out parodies of the New York newspapers, and asked if I would write a parody of Leonard Lyons’ gossip column in the New York Post. I said yes, although I had no idea what to do. I’d met Lyons—he appeared nightly at Sardi’s, where my parents often had dinner when they were in New York—but I’d never really focused on his column. I called my friend Marcia, who’d recently babysat Leonard Lyons’ son’s dogs, and asked her what the deal was with Lyons. She explained to me that the Lyons column was a series of short anecdotes with no point whatsoever. I went upstairs to the morgue at Newsweek and read a few weeks’ worth of Lyons’ columns and wrote the parody. Parodies are very odd things. I’ve written only about a half dozen of them in my life; they come on you like the wind, and you write them almost possessed. It’s as close as a writer gets to acting—it’s almost as if you’re in character for a short time, and then it passes.
The papers Victor produced—the New York Pest and the Dally News—made their way to the newsstands, but they didn’t sell. Newsstand dealers really didn’t understand parodies in those days—this was long before National Lampoon and The Onion—and most of them sent them back to the distributor. But everyone in the business read them. They were funny. The editors of the Post wanted to sue, but the publisher, Dorothy Schiff, said, “Don’t be ridiculous. If they can parody the Post they can write for it. Hire them.” So the editors