Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [213]
Shawn had weathered a number of tense situations in the past several years; one had come in 1976, when several staff members brought the threat of unionization to a head. The New Yorker had never been a union house, and in a memo written to the staff in the fall of 1976, Shawn articulated his opposition:
Dozens of people had advanced . . . from typist or secretarial jobs into jobs as checkers or proofreaders; or gone from jobs as checkers or proofreaders to Talk reporters or messengers into jobs as editors or into writing for the magazine. Everything has been open to everybody. The organization has not been stratified or rigid. This openness and this freedom of movement have been basic for the way The New Yorker works. This is a place in which scores of people, over the years, have learned and have found themselves. We have not thought in job “categories.” People here have been thought of as individuals and treated as individuals, with a good deal of latitude for individual temperaments and work habits, and even idiosyncrasy. This is, in fact, a magazine of individualists. I think that a union might introduce a rigidity in the way the office functions, hinder the free flow of people from one kind of work to another, reduce the opportunity for experiment, and reduce the emphasis on the individual. I also think that it would tend to polarize the office.
Shawn won the battle over unionization, but as time went on, it was increasingly clear that he could not really face the idea of a succession plan. Even many of those who loved and respected him had long recognized his enormous capacity for manipulation; by now, it seemed that he was unwilling to entertain the notion of a New Yorker without himself at the helm. Even the old-time company man Brendan Gill had written in his memoir, published on the occasion of the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary in 1975, “If Shawn were to give up some of his duties as editor, it might have the welcome effect of freeing him to write more. For it is as a writer that he could still achieve, if he so wishes, a second and equally distinguished career.”
Those who kept a close eye on such matters were aware that The New Yorker was not keeping pace in the competitive 1980s marketplace. Circulation and advertising were on the decline, and the magazine’s longtime owner, Peter Fleischmann, was in failing health and wearying of the responsibility of presiding over the publication; eventually, as the majority stockholder, he sold all of his shares to Samuel I. Newhouse, Jr., head of the immense publishing and media corporation Advance Publications. In May 1985, for a final payment in the neighborhood of $170 million, Newhouse became The New Yorker’s new owner. For a time it seemed that Newhouse might honor the magazine’s family-oriented process of advancement by naming the veteran editor Chip McGrath to succeed Shawn. That plan fell through, however, and in January 1987, Newhouse sent a memo to staff members informing them that a new editor would be brought in from the book industry: Robert A. Gottlieb, the highly regarded editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf—a firm that happened to be owned by Newhouse.
Many longtime members of the magazine staff were devastated that Shawn would be dismissed in such a manner. A letter was composed to Gottlieb, informing him of the staff’s “powerful and apparently unanimous expression of sadness and outrage over the manner in which a new editor has been imposed upon us.” It went on to explain to Gottlieb that “The New Yorker has not achieved its preeminence by following orthodox paths of magazine publishing and editing, and it is our strange and powerfully held conviction that only an editor who has been a long-standing member of the staff will have a reasonable chance of assuring our continuity, cohesion, and independence.” The document was signed by all but a handful of staff members