by Bruce McCall
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I’ve bored people to tears describing my childhood fixation on The New Yorker. By this time, those printed pages stapled together to form a magazine had frozen into an icon. A lifetime’s admiration had hardened into something so far beyond and above that I had long since abandoned the ambition—even the hope—of ever seeing my name in its pages. I dared not even try. Mysterious supermen, Ivy Leaguers, clubmen, dinner companions of the great writers in the English language wouldn’t deign to talk to a vulgarian upstart from nowhere, without an education to speak of. Better to get what pleasure I could from reading it every week than to try horning in where I didn’t belong, only to have my reverence smashed by reality.
I’d been intrigued by The New Yorker since the age of eleven, when I found some 1931 issues tucked in a closet off our living room. In fact, issues of The New Yorker were scattered around every living room in every house or apartment the McCalls occupied. Exactly why Dad had lovingly packed away those fifteen-year-old copies, he never said—we didn’t indulge in that kind of table talk at dinner, on car trips, or anyplace else he’d be vulnerable to personal questions. Both my parents read the magazine front to back, as they were supposed to.
The New Yorker. It figured in my dreams before I knew what made this then-drowsy magazine so special. Because Dad and Mother were avid readers, I longed for their acceptance and reasoned that perhaps our mutual admiration for The New Yorker was the link I’d been hoping for. Dad, however, wasn’t interested when I tried to get his attention, and Mother ceded such matters to him. Still, after I’d excavated those issues from the closet, I began surreptitiously reading the magazine.
I remember reading a profile of the flamboyant archcriminal Legs Diamond all the way to the end. As I worked my way through issue after issue, I gradually detected a streak of something running through the magazine, something behind the words or even within them. This comforted me. Half a century later, when my first piece was published, this quality was still there. No single word covers it. Wit? Intelligence? Elegance? Grace? Sophistication? The distillation of all of these. In time I developed admiration both for the magazine’s literary and artistic contributors—Vladimir Nabokov, John McPhee, Roger Angell. It seemed wildly improbable that I would one day follow them into the magazine’s pages, and from the pages to the covers.
So, in 1980, when I wrote a piece that seemed passably New Yorker-ish, I wavered for weeks before finally summoning the courage to send it to Liz Darhansoff, my agent, to pitch to the magazine. Titled “Browsing,” my submission featured my favorite literary form—satirical image captions. They included a soldier relieved of his nose in a World War I army camp; President Gerald Ford’s preferred footwear; and a taxonomy of weevils, to name a few of the twenty-six. When the magazine agreed to publish it, I was alarmed and elated. I still can’t believe my name appears on the contributors page and, now, on the New Yorker website, where the entirety of my oeuvre waits patiently to be drawn out of the crypt by the magic of search queries.
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Fortunately, I always managed to work from home. I only had to show up at the office to drop off work or meet an editor for lunch. I’d learned after many years of working in offices every day that this arrangement was self-protective, one of the best things about my new freelance career. Not having to attend meetings or join clandestine overthrow-of-management plots hatched in the men’s room saved a lot of time. Working at home kept me from being trapped in hallway klatches with nothing to say and fifteen minutes to say it. It also let me work at my own pace and tune my radio to whatever crap I chose.
I was free to organize my stuff—tubes of gouache paint that could cost $12 and up, arranged in a spectrum of light to dark, along with big, fat, manly tubes of Permanent White, which I could mix with all colors that needed a lighter effect. (I eventually renounced this toning-down and accepted working with bright colors that were so shocking to a timid thirteen-year-old that I’d avoided seeing vibrant color, even in my own art.)
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I can’t teach a subject that I learned from a self-taught instructor (me), yet I educated myself to a level of skill that earned me a good living. A penchant for art is rewarded by the pleasure of doing it. It needn’t be prizeworthy to thrill its creator, either. Catching the play of light in the frothy waves of a violent sea can stimulate feelings in the artist that are simply electric.
No one has ever claimed that the finest art in the world has already been painted. Maybe you’re too old and strapped for time, or maybe you just lack the semi-suicidal lust to invest psychic energy in a hopelessly stupid cause. But somewhere, in the basement of her parents’ ranch house in the Denver suburbs; in a tiny bedroom in the 18th arrondissement of Paris; and in the kitchen on an Argentine farm where she’s babysitting a three-year-old while burnishing the chalk portrait of her father astride his palomino—someone is taking the same chances I did. Good luck!
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Here is a story no one would want to tell, but it happened, so I will. Then we can get on with it.
I smashed my right shoulder to bits early in 2014. Recovery took three months. It was the only serious health issue in my life, aside from that dustup in Frankfurt. Let loose from the hospital, I looked forward to getting back to my normal routines. I celebrated the retrieval of my former life a week or so after my discharge by lunching with friends. Afterward, Dan Okrent and I trekked north on Broadway. We crossed Eighty-Sixth Street, and shortly thereafter Dan peeled off for his apartment on West End Avenue. I decided to walk the rest of the way. My body needed the exercise.
Walking east from Broadway, I stopped for a moment at Amsterdam, aware of a subtle change in my gait. No pain, only a strange new way of walking. It had to be connected to three months of no exercise. What else could it be?
I was tipping forward and walking on my toes. Until this point, willpower had always been enough to let me wrest control back from any physical malfunction. (Did someone or -thing brainwash my feet? I wondered.) I was woozily off balance by the time I reached Columbus. A bunch of probably-not-typical Trinity School boys across the street were joking and laughing at my struggle. What if the little savages came over and beat the stuffing out of me? Fortuitously, a lost little dog rounded the corner. My boy torturers succumbed to their adolescent attention spans and moved on, probably to pull leaves off the trees in Central Park.
I now felt more than woozy. By Central Park West, I had lost nearly all balance and had to grab lampposts to keep from sliding down to the sidewalk. Our apartment building sat on the next corner. The longest walk of my life was one city block. I wanted to collapse on the street. At the door of the building stood a middle-aged couple chatting with Joe, the day doorman. With my last reserve of energy I wordlessly barreled past everybody in my path and stepped/fell into the elevator.
Thus in 2014 I was diagnosed with a mild case of Parkinson’s disease. No big deal; “mild” meant no tremors or uncontrollable muscle spasms. My drawing and painting skills would be unaffected.
Until it was revealed to me that all early Parkinson’s cases are mild. It progresses for the rest of the sufferer’s life, and no treatment has been found to stop or reverse it.
My contributions to The New Yorker have tailed off over the past five years or so. Until then, my output was prolific: more than a hundred “Shouts & Murmurs” pieces and seventy-seven covers in the course of forty years.
Novelists tend to shun the compressed “Shouts” form. Those eight hundred words have to start working with the first sentence. The end comes up so fast that the closing line should go snap! or your story will dribble off, forgotten before the reader is finished with the magazine. My only advice to wannabe Shoutspersons is vague but truthful: Look for a subject anywhere, anytime. That’s it. Think of yourself as a blotter. I’ve had “Shouts�
�� ideas watching a perfume commercial on TV and while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room as a nasty hubby and his hateful wife duked it out.
This little discussion is way longer than eight hundred words. Which reminds me: the most important thing by far about writing a “Shouts” is . . . discipline! And the most important factors in enforcing that discipline are . . . editors! (Although I worked from home, the spatial autonomy did not exempt me from the usual editorial rigors.)
My first editor, for my first piece, “Browsing,” was Dan Menaker, who was invariably perceptive and hilariously self-critical. (Nor was it an act: Dan was dead serious about his moral failings; his irrepressible wit saved him from being a bore.) To put it as tactfully as I can, he was not a fan of William Shawn, the magazine’s editor for a total of thirty-five years, and never accepted the widespread belief in the editing genius of this strange little man. When something had to give, it wasn’t Mr. Shawn.
Next came Veronica Geng, a collaborator as much as an editor. She was smart and charming and laughed more than anybody I’d ever worked with—and at all the parts of a piece I thought funny. A genius! In retrospect, I nominate Ms. Geng as the most talented anyone who ever wrote a “Shouts & Murmurs” entry. She did only a few; her interests extended way past humorous tidbits. I knew zilch about her private life, and found out about her role as amanuensis to Philip Roth long after we had worked together.
Veronica represented the heady literary world to me. Her seriousness about literature and humor was unique. She was an intellectual. I knew I was lucky to work with her as my editor for a couple of years. Then, suddenly, there was no Veronica. She didn’t confide in me at all. Wasn’t in her office but was too no-nonsense a character for hypochondria. Asked what was wrong with her, her colleagues said simply, “She’s sick.” Was she ever. She was seriously ill before she left the office, and I never knew why. Brain cancer, I found out after she died far too young.
Gwyneth Cravens was a close friend before she was my editor. Serious about life but funny by nature, she made me laugh when we worked on a “Shouts” in her office, for too brief a time. One day she was gone. Gwyn had effectively given her life to . . . nuclear energy. She researched the field, wrote a blockbuster on the subject, and began giving lectures and attending scientific conferences. As far as I know, Gwyneth found her calling. Good for her.
Chris Knutsen had been Dan Menaker’s assistant. He was young, with blondish hair and a gregarious manner that must have cheesed off a lot of his New Yorker colleagues. Chris wasn’t technically my editor, but he edited my “Shouts,” cheered me up during my swoons, then left me dangling over the void when he left the magazine.
Then Susan Morrison was given to me, despite a workload onerous enough to make a stevedore cringe. She made time for detailed editing. She gave me great “Shouts” ideas. She became a close and valuable friend. Meantime, as a single mother raising two daughters, Susan was successful there as well. Today her duties at The New Yorker have ballooned, but she continues to read every line I write. She rejects more submissions than all my previous editors combined. Susan also serves as president of the Century Association (formerly Century Club), the first woman to hold this position. In her spare time she’s writing a biography of the first Canadian in television history to merit the status of wunderkind in the U.S.—the individual popularly known as Lorne Michaels.
In 1987, Si Newhouse, of the Condé Nast family that owned the magazine, selected Tina Brown—editor of the revived and hugely successful Vanity Fair—to replace Robert Gottlieb, who’d replaced William Shawn as editor (Gottlieb stayed on for about five years). In doing so, Si ignited a revolt. “Flashy,” “aggressive,” and “ruthless” were the milder terms used by the Shawn-era holdouts when Ms. Brown arrived.
My personal history with Tina was perfect: she okayed everything, never turned down a “Shouts,” and seldom ordered changes. She green-lighted my idea for a piece about why so many European automobile stylists were Americans. I was stupidly ignorant of the Iron Curtain–era paranoia among carmakers about their future models being trumpeted in the media, a violation of their policy of maximum secrecy. It turned out to be a disastrously empty story. Tina could have, probably should have, reamed me out for being so utterly unprepared and for squandering the magazine’s money on a fiasco. She never uttered a word.
I must swallow my dudgeon when I recall the silly and sometimes vicious gossip her advent inspired. She made some judgment errors; the Roseanne Barr issue was a howler. But Tina also got the magazine into the black and boosted circulation. Among her host of talent-spotting triumphs was the current editor and prolific writer, David Remnick.
Remnick came from a newspaper background, and it shows—he’s fast, accurate, honest, and values and encourages strong writing. He gets to the office early and leaves way past dinnertime. Remnick is a polymath, a guy who can talk to anyone as intelligently about boxing and electric guitars as he can about ISIS or the Kremlin. Over the years he has also proven to be a tremendously kind and loyal friend (and I’m not just saying that because he is, as I write this, deciding whether or not a cover of mine will run).
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I published my first New Yorker cover in July 1993, and my last (for now) in January 2020. I’d hoped to keep on until l smashed William Steig’s all-time record number, 117. It wasn’t to be. As the Parkinson’s gradually ruined my ability to draw and paint, I saw Barry Blitt’s style so capture the political zeitgeist of America that his cover count skyrocketed in the space of six years to exceed mine. My proud record of seventy-seven covers will soon render me a forgotten also-ran. Boo-hoo.
The magazine’s remarkable art director Françoise Mouly has overseen all my covers. Part of what persuades me to declare her remarkable is her intellect. A single conversation reveals a myriad of topics with which she’s comfortable. Topping her list of issues demanding agreement, but often prompting good old-fashioned argument, is politics. International, national, and municipal. She respects France but she loves America. Her quiet voice charms the listener by pouring French into English and combining them with an accent that would make a Parisienne jealous. She and hubby Art Spiegelman (the Maus Man) could between them fill the air on a twenty-four-hour radio network.
Let’s say you’ve pitched a kids-in-the-park cover idea. Within a week it has generated at least three entirely different concepts. You’ll have interpreted each of these concepts in three rough sketches—the basic composition of the picture and the position and relative size of the central figure or thing, or in this case both.
Before email, I’d send all sketches to Françoise via the Gutenberg-era apparatus known as the fax. (In the technology gap between the late eighties and early aughts, the Before Email Era, I’d also use the post office or a messenger.) Any one of these means saved the time it would take to go all the way downtown to discuss which sketch, or sketches, deserve to be amplified to “comp” form. “Comp” is short for “comprehensive,” the old-fashioned term now largely forgotten in the ubiquitous trend to compress words into info-blobs for faster-and-faster-and-faster communication.
After Françoise has received said fax comes the phone call with the word on how it hits. It usually hits. Françoise has seldom flatly nixed a cover completely. Acceptance from her is tantamount to high praise: her eyes are foolproof. In fact, she has frequently given extra oomph to a cover by suggesting (never ordering) a change in perspective, inevitably leading me to admit “I wish I’d thought of that.”
Timing for cover appearances varies. Usually there’s no reason to alter a scheduled date, but there’s always the chance that some hiccup may force a change: a national tragedy, for example, that so focuses public attention that not acknowledging it would appear arrogant, uncaring, or out of touch with the zeitgeist—or all three. Such circumstances, given the pressures inherent in weekly publication, may result in a cover that’s crude, less de
veloped, or so heavily symbolic that the average reader quickly forgets it. But New Yorker cover artists routinely rise to the occasion and frequently surpass themselves. A disaster’s emotional punch often allows a solid, sensible artist to come up with an ideal image—case in point, Françoise and Art Spiegelman’s solemn, all-black post-9/11 cover. The New Yorker has had a lineup of clutch hitters forever.
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My favorite cover illustrations aren’t likely to be your favorites. The artist’s view is the reverse side of the coin, the end product of the idea. What I see first is the struggle that ultimately produced it, a tug-of-war that could take another book to explain. Some covers have come to me so full-blown that I’m more copyist than agonized creator. Some are the opposite: mean tiffs with my brain that persist until an idea has turned into a drawing that is then painted.
Certain of my covers betray the sense of confusion I felt as the process developed. A good cover is so smooth, so finished, that it hardly seems painted. It looks so natural; what was the fuss behind it? You don’t want to know. But if you do . . .
The Blimp That Fell to Earth
August 16, 1993
Tina Brown let it be known that the next week’s cover must be a humorous take on the deflation of a small blimp and its flopping onto the roof of a West Side apartment building. (Nobody was killed or injured, so no lawsuits could be expected.) I was keenly aware of my amateur status; had indeed painted like an amateur and lived in the status cellar. I sat at my drawing board, attempting to solve a riddle: painting a dead blimp, I believed, would result in readers young and old barfing or falling asleep—hopefully not both. Eventually, after a four-hour thinkathon that concluded at four a.m., the solution arrived: a straight-faced rendering of a blimp parking lot, with blimps arriving and departing. Large glass walls reflect the blimps.
