Lucking Out - James Wolcott [118]
I, however, rode the rising surf in the wrong direction, managing somehow to move up professionally while knocking my quality of life down a notch. In the late seventies, my career had started to go slick. Still writing for the Voice, I would be hired as a columnist at Esquire, the Don Draper of sixties magazines, whose columnists at various times had included Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, the English gadfly Malcolm Muggeridge (who, after his religious conversion, would enjoy a third-act career revival as “St. Mugg,” the praise-singer of Mother Teresa), and Kingsley Amis, heroes all. Esquire had changed ownership in 1979, purchased by Chris Whittle and Phillip Moffitt, a team of Tennessee investors who were greeted with the askance condescension New York publishing kept on ice for anyone perceived as provincial and soft-padded, possible banjo-pickers. After the financially ruinous tenure of the previous editor, Clay Felker, who had converted Esquire from a monthly to a fortnightly (“an ingenious scheme to lose money twice as fast,” someone pointed out), the non-nudie men’s title needed a savior, only the Tennessee Two didn’t fit anyone’s fantasy twin bill of the reincarnation of Esquire’s founder Arnold Gingrich and Harold Hayes, the editor who ran the ranch in its New Journalism renaissance. Who could have? Their outside status may have immunized them to the daunting weight of institutional lore that would have crushed those who approached the magazine as a sacred trust. They took proper care of the property. Unlike the entrepreneurs, arbitrageurs, and turnaround kings who would vulture attack vulnerable businesses to strip assets, cut payrolls, and enrich shareholders, leaving behind skeletal remains and a debauched brand, the Tennessee Two weren’t out for a quick kill. Where Felker had salvaged the Village Voice by dragging it into the future with iron claws, Whittle and Moffitt propped Esquire back on its feet with deerskin gloves, dusting it off and making it respect itself again, no matter how much the other kids laughed at it. Moffitt, who would become editor to Whittle’s publisher, conducted business in his office with a bluegrass lilt to his voice that was as far away from Felker’s seal bark as could be imagined. It was like listening to a transcript of James Taylor’s greatest croons, and although Esquire revitalized itself by catering to baby-boomer consumerism (yuppies in their puppy stage, discovering the talismanic powers of the perfect saucepan), it was little surprise decades later to discover that Moffitt had become a yoga guru, preaching the dharma of nonattachment.
He was not the one who talent-scouted me. Contact was made by Lee Eisenberg, who, knowing my devotion to a certain black feline, had a bag of kitty litter delivered to my door. The editor to whom I was assigned at Esquire was a young woman in her mid-twenties named Dominique Browning, imaginative, scarily proficient, bound for the higher rafters of magazine-dom, with transfixing crystal blue eyes whose glance always seemed to catch you unawares even if you had been looking forward to it the entire elevator ride up to Esquire’s floor. I had a crush on Dominique. Everyone had a crush on Dominique. There was a secret society of Dominique infatuees who stroked her name aloud as if it had dove wings. I probably fantasized that she would be the editorial Suzanne Pleshette to my rippling raw-talent James Franciscus in Youngblood Hawke, only Dominique wasn’t droll and raven-dark like Pleshette posing in