never conned himself that he would be welcomed and embraced as an emancipator below Fourteenth Street, but he couldn’t have anticipated how much resistance he would draw as the Voice’s new stepfather. “Why am I being thwarted?” he would bellow. Accustomed to barking orders, he didn’t expect to hear so much barking back, often from the very editors he had hired to execute his game plan. Sometimes the back talk was accompanied by rude slapstick, as when Richard Goldstein poked Clay in the panda stomach. Felker would also find himself at the receiving end of Ron Rosenbaum’s dramatic farewell when Rosenbaum crumpled up his paycheck and flung it with bite-me gusto at Felker, who reportedly asked in bafflement after Rosenbaum steamed off, “Who was that?” Felker ran into headwinds trying to install punctuation, proper capitalization, and paragraph breaks into Jill Johnston’s cataract of free association, and his top lieutenant, Judith Daniels, would face the wrath of a writer scorned when Truscott, just back from the Middle East on a reporting mission, gave a command performance of outrage and invective comparable to Jack Nicholson’s monologue in Carnal Knowledge. Standing over Daniels’s desk, Truscott railed, “While I was risking my fucking life over in the Middle East, you had the fucking nerve to not run the fucking pieces that I was fucking over there to do”—or words to that fucking effect. (In McAuliffe’s book, he has an exchange where Daniels, over drinks, explained to Lucian that his pieces had just sort of “evaporated,” to which Truscott exploded: “Evaporated? … What do you think my typewriter prints—little teacups full of water?”) Unlike for others who left the Voice during the transitional trauma, it panned out for Truscott. He went on to write a best-selling novel about West Point called Dress Gray, adapted into a made-for-TV miniseries scripted by Gore Vidal. Years later, ringing me up for reasons obscure, Lucian asked me if I knew how long fame lasted for a best-selling author. Unfamiliar with the experience, I said no. Four years, he said. The first year, you’re in the exalted thick of it. The second year, you’re still bobbing in the success, carried with the current. Third year, the gold plating has chipped away, and people are asking you if you’re working on anything new. Fourth year, they’re no longer asking, and you might as well drape yourself over a coat hanger in the closet and get accustomed to the dark. Truscott sounded almost resentful, despite having hit the jackpot that so many writers daydreamed about in those days when a fiction best seller didn’t require the bestowing tap of Oprah’s sparkly wand. A lesson it would take me a while to learn was that nothing makes writers happy for very long, there are always ravens pecking on the roof.
The Dan Wolf cone of silence over his run-silent-run-deep decision making gave way to a more democratic airing of what was in the works at the regular editorial meetings on the fifth floor. The more rambunctious ones sometimes yielded the raw disclosures of an encounter session. At one meeting a senior editor casually shared that although his penis might be on the snubby side, what he lacked in size he more than made up for with dedicated effort. (“It takes a liberal to brag about how small his dick is,” one of the staffers wisecracked, he being more old-school in such matters.) The point-blank pillow talk of popular feminist fiction in the seventies—best sellers such as Lois Gould’s Such Good Friends, with its forest of desultory blow jobs, Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, and, most famously, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, which introduced the “zipless fuck” into the lexicon and established the runway for Carrie Bradshaw to parade her stilettos in Sex and the City—empowered frisky mouths. My then editor, my latest piece lying before her ready to undergo the blue pencil marks of what Terry Southern immortally called “tightening and brightening,” once apologized for not yet having the opportunity to give my copy a proper going-over. She was just feeling too