The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  If I woke at three a.m. with a fresh thought about the lede of a problematic story, it might lead me to the layout or how that story fit into a package that hadn’t occurred to me, or a sidebar or a cover line or whatever. Maybe that troublesome piece was really a sidebar to another piece if I just cut it by two-thirds.

  I kept a notepad on the night table, but that wasn’t as good as getting up and going to the typewriter or, by the mid-’80s, the computer. (Only now, with an iPhone, do I write in bed.)

  In the beginning my notes sometimes went unread, but they cemented this or that idea in my head as I wrote them down. I tried to work in complete sentences. Rank journalists by audience, best sellers and income is more valuable the next morning than journo power list. But lists were also good, especially of calls to make. I never made lists like that during the day, when it would not occur to me to stop what I was doing and cold-call Robert Stone to ask him to write for Rolling Stone. But he got on my list one night when I woke up thinking about how much I liked the New American Review and remembered that my favorite story in all of the issues had been his “Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta” and that for the title he had used lyrics from “La Cucaracha” about not being able to get anywhere without marijuana…And that’s how I met Bob Stone.

  —

  EDITORS ARE EXPECTED TO WORK all the time, which is no problem for highly motivated and ambitious people, but their ambitions vary. Some want the fame and power that comes with editing a prestigious title. The freedom to do what you want, and the expense-account hedonism that can come with that, is another road. So is knowledge, etc. The one thing I am sure of is that ambition and creativity do not always go together, or we would have much better journalism.

  Some editors have egos bigger, even, than those of their star writers. You would think the most confident editors would have the biggest egos but they are usually the most reflective and accessible. They also keep the most complicated appointment calendars but are usually on time. The most effective media executives are like this too, but that doesn’t mean editors are media executives—certainly not in the way Rupert Murdoch thinks of himself, although Rupert can write headlines and certainly knows his way around a newsroom.

  As much as egos are reflected in the personalities of editors, specific magazines take on the personalities of their editors like owners coming to resemble their dogs. Put another way, a magazine always reflects the editor’s ego, and the various personas of that editor follow along behind like parade floats. The more ambitious the editor, the more obvious what the parade is celebrating and where it is going. The biggest parade for the last three decades marched behind Anna Wintour at Vogue, but Tina Brown’s parties celebrating Vanity Fair and Graydon Carter’s VF Oscar parties were bold and effective bandwagons for the journalistic Big Life as well.

  Until quite recently, many top editors had lavish offices with private bathrooms, kitchens and personal conference rooms. My first office at Esquire was like that, and I was self-conscious about it. But two floors above me, the editor of Town and Country, the sophisticated innovator Frank Zachary, had a suite of five rooms, including a sitting area with a view of Columbus Circle and a fireplace. He said it was designed to be comfortably intimidating. Top editors hate going to another top editor’s office, however faint the whiff of subservience.

  Calling people to your office might be good for your ego, but it will never build loyalty unless you sometimes insist on going to the office of whomever you want to see. And having an assistant place calls is both a sign of efficiency and a badge of arrogance. To show respect, I always placed my own calls to writers unless I was under deadline pressure or trying to make a point. Sometimes they’d tell me how annoying it was to pick up and hear “Please hold for…”

  That annoyed me too, but I was not afflicted by the sense of being disrespected that I figured for many writers was related to their suspicion that nobody was reading them. Many said that that was what kept them awake at night. My job was to be encouraging, to keep them working. I suggested they try taking advantage of their insomnia: the middle of the night was a fertile time for thinking about difficult work. Many said they already had a similar routine but would rather just get some rest. Not me.

  −ENDIT−

  Shooters (1,093)

  I DON’T REMEMBER THE EXACT YEAR, but it was before we worked together at Esquire that I was in a cab going down Fifth Avenue on my way to the office earlier than usual one morning when I saw the photographer Peter Beard emerging from Central Park with a beautiful woman, a model I recognized but couldn’t name. They were both barefoot and laughing.

  A journalist I knew told me later that Peter often insisted on taking new women friends on predawn walks through the park and that it was part of his charm. She knew about this firsthand.

  “Photographers,” she said. “You know…”

  I did know. But the glamour of being a photographer was misplaced. Peter’s sybaritic reputation (Bob Colacello famously described him as “half Tarzan, half Byron” in Holy Terror, his book about Andy Warhol) masked the meticulous nature of his work. Peter always prepared for shoots, sometimes compulsively, submitted budgets and all the rest that it took to keep working, and then obsessed over what he brought back before distressing and drawing on his prints (sometimes with his own blood) to turn them into documentation in the way that art critics use the word. He wasn’t vain about his images, but you could tell he loved some of them more than he could articulate. He’d tap at a print with one of his crooked fingers and nod to himself.

  Most of the photographers I knew were like that: not especially good at explaining themselves but loving what they did more than writers loved writing. And they all guarded their work, but in very different ways. Annie Leibovitz never wanted to show you any but what she thought were her best two or three frames. Neil Leifer loved his pictures so much he wanted to show you everything, and would talk about how you had to “prepare your own luck.” Walter Iooss said he sometimes had trouble recognizing his best shots but was so calm about it he almost always got his way when he said he preferred one image over another. David Strick described a “sense of confused awe” that came with the surreal movie-set shots he was known for, but he usually knew what he had before he looked at his contact sheets. To work with any of them you had to remember that their talent spooked them a little, and you had to respect the larger idea of photography as the soul-stealing juju it is.

  As an editor I favored large, type-free, full-frame images—a photographer’s sensibility which, I was told, was obvious in my assignments and photo selection. I positioned myself as a purist and talked about knowing the great Eddie Adams at the Associated Press, which was true, although I am sure his awareness of me then did not go deep. But I studied his work, how he caught the off moment as well as the explosive image. It wasn’t just his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1968 picture of the street execution of a Viet Cong prisoner, it was his portraits of West Virginia coal miners and Anwar Sadat looking out a window and Louis Armstrong cleaning his trumpet in Las Vegas. I told photographers that I wasn’t interested in the obvious picture, and beyond that they were on their own.

  That changed when I couldn’t get what I wanted. Over the years, I occasionally said I would look only at images for a particular assignment that were framed horizontally if I already had such a layout in mind. I threatened to make photographers use lens filters with our cover’s dimensions and logo to frame their cover tries. I even refused to sign off on expense accounts if there was not an admission or catalog receipt proving attendance at a gallery show I wanted a particular photographer or photo editor to see. And there was always someone new to work with.

  There were many, many good “shooters,” as some liked to be called, and an entire school of smart, artful celebrity photography was fanning out behind Annie. Plus, the great lions of fashion from the 1950s and ’60s were still hungry for work. The suave and eminent Norman Parkinson, who shot several stories for Smart after he s
topped working for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, told me that if he didn’t work he didn’t have any fun. “Parks,” as he was known to his many friends, had had plenty of fun reinventing his style decade by decade since the late 1930s—always with what appeared to be spontaneous images. Most charmingly, he insisted that he was a craftsman, not an artist, and also said, “A photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields.” I loved that.

  The obvious implication was that magazine editors wielded almost feudal power. I kept that in mind when I was making assignments but never used the quote on photographers. “Surprise me,” I’d say, falling back to my little speech about not being interested in the obvious. “Of course you’re not” was Peter Beard’s response. He said otherwise we wouldn’t even know each other.

  He was taking two assignments for Esquire Gentleman—stand-alone special issues timed to the spring and fall fashion collections in 1993. Fifteen years earlier, I’d edited the text when Outside had run images from The End of the Game, the first collection of Peter’s documentation of the destruction of African wildlife, even though, as Peter said, it probably “wouldn’t save a single fucking elephant.” His next project, Eyelids of Morning, was about the crocodiles of what was then called Lake Rudolf (now Lake Turkana), and was my favorite photo book. But then his images for the first of these assignments—an “existential safari” to Miami Beach with the novelist (Candy), screenwriter (Dr. Strangelove) and Esquire vet Terry Southern—were obvious. We dressed them up with language about taking the obligatory swimsuit piece to a “harrowing, hallucinogenic new level” and called Miami “a place where nature’s spectacle is overwhelmed by stress and density,” but all we really had were good-looking models almost naked on a beach. I told Peter I thought the pictures were obvious.

  For the second assignment, he chartered small planes to Kenya’s northwestern frontier and hired hundreds of Turkana tribesmen as extras to surround his mostly naked white models as background and shot tribal elders at the center of the story in Armani blankets, Dolce & Gabbana patchwork sweaters, Byblos scarfs and Norma Kamali leopard-print coats. The elders all looked great and kept the clothes.

  That’s where the glamour was.

  −ENDIT−

  Slide Culture (1,135)

  IT HAD OCCURRED TO ME in the summer of 1987 that I needed my own light box. Launching Smart out of Jean Pagliuso’s photo studio on West Sixteenth Street, that simple plastic-and-metal box, with its translucent top and the light shining up from inside, was crucial throwback technology, even as we were “desktop-publishing” a national magazine for the first time. To see an Alvin Satin-Glow light box sitting on a worktable next to a Mac II was to see the past and future prankishly paired.

  I already had my own loupe (magnifying hand lens), which I had taken to wearing around my neck as an unconscious if unsubtle signal that I was spending much of my time looking at pictures—which, because of the great photographic work being done seemingly everywhere then, was the right thing to be doing if you were a magazine editor. That was my message. I had already been acting like a photo editor, calling in submissions and looking at so many pictures I’d come to realize I was spending much too much time walking between my desk and the light table in the art department, way at the other end of the studio.

  For those of you born after 1990, a “slide” was a positive photographic image recorded on 35mm film—usually either Kodachrome or Ektachrome, which were the best when it came to color accuracy, tonal range and sharpness. Kodachromes actually exhibited a visible “relief” image on the emulsion side. It was beautiful. Ditto Fujichrome when it came a little later and could also be processed a little faster, which was good for news and sports action. One or the other was what all the pros used, but everybody else could use them, too—typically Kodachrome. Every serious shooter I ever knew swore by this film. You could get technical and explain that a 35mm Kodachrome slide held detail equivalent to twenty-five or more megapixels of image data, but you didn’t need to know that to be blown away by what you saw through your loupe on your new light box.

  The two-by-two-inch cardboard or plastic mounts on the slides both framed and protected the images when photo editors dropped them into plastic carousels. The ensuing slide shows brought together various editors, researchers and designers working on a particular story. These shows could be shocking and disturbing, with thick silence in the room as you clicked through Jim Nachtwey’s combat images. You could also be moved while viewing an old slide of a teenage Marvin Gaye when you were looking for an obit picture after the singer had been shot dead by his father in 1984. It felt like theater in those so-called color rooms.

  Depending on the time of day and the proximity of the deadline, the shows could also turn suddenly into boisterous, impromptu captioning sessions, like one I remember at Newsweek, when an image was shown of vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle holding up a golf club with a particularly stupid look on his face: Tennis, anyone? Sometimes it also felt important.

  I remember one Sunday night at Newsweek, sitting in that cool, dark color room on the nineteenth floor at 444 Madison Avenue drinking lukewarm coffee and looking at academic slides of Paleolithic cave paintings for a back-of-the-book piece about a discovery in southern France, when I made the connection between what I was doing and the thirty-thousand-year-old art I was looking at. It went beyond that art history experience we have all had sitting in a college lecture hall looking at Gothic cathedrals. It was tribal. It was what we did in my tribe. Prehistoric hunters squinted in the firelight at shamans’ paintings of game on cave walls; editors like me looked at slides.

  Slides had a physical reality that you could play with, move around and sequence and move around again on that light box. A short stack of slides felt good in your hand, like poker chips. Some editors held slides up to overhead lights and blew on them, as if that was a smart way to get rid of dust. Others wore thin white editing gloves all the time. The big light tables at magazines like Rolling Stone and Esquire became editorial watering holes where people would meet to socialize, and the translucent surfaces got smudged with Brie and spilled wine, some of which dried in the lines scratched from chopping cocaine with an X-Acto blade—a standard art department tool. Slide culture threw good parties.

  —

  PAUL SIMON WILL TELL YOU that he came up with his song “Kodachrome” while trying to rhyme “going home” into a melody he already had. But “going home” was much too square, and he already had those wonderfully defiant first lines, the true ones:

  When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school

  It’s a wonder I can think at all

  So he kept working, letting his mind wander until it slipped into something less familiar, and his cultural pitch was perfect. It (both the song and the film) was just so not full of crap. Nikons were cool; so were the growing number of hard-core professional and semi-outlaw freelance photographers roaming the world. When you were working at a light table in those days with a spread of images glowing up at you under your loupe, the film was so rich and sharp that those slides could, in fact, make you think all the world was a sunny day—especially for the photographers out there in it.

  Making a deal to run William Wegman’s photos of his Weimaraners Man Ray and Fay Ray, it struck me, strangely, that all the new creative photography had the feel of something coming and going very fast. That felt good and I even mentioned it to other editors, who agreed. But the changing technology rather than the art was the metaphor—a theme that would repeat with paper and ink. What we didn’t understand was that the slides themselves would be disappearing, and fondness for our unnamed slide culture would look increasingly sentimental in the rearview mirror.

  It was all over by the mid-1990s, when Kodak abandoned Kodachrome and digital photography came of age with the refinement of Adobe’s Photoshop. A refrigerator full of the film still lingers as status among the most veteran pro shooters, but everyone knows that digital allows higher
resolution at faster speeds. The only problem is almost academic: the concept of photograph as document is lost. Altering images with no record or verification turns everything into photo illustration as memory cards are wiped over and tricked out. Forget Peter Beard distressing and drawing on his prints with blood. Think instead of ISIS manipulating propaganda images and the betrayal of photography as witness.

  −ENDIT−

  Collaboration (with Rust Hills) (2,590)

  RUST HILLS WAS A CLEVER, precise writer known instead for his work as the fiction editor of Esquire, where he discovered, edited, championed, befriended and drove crazy generations of literary talent, including many of the writers in this book. By the time I got to work with Rust, he had published three books of personal essays, known as the Fussy Man Trilogy. Their titles were straightforward, their subtitles long winks at the reader:

  • How to Do Things Right: The Revelations of a Fussy Man

  • How to Retire at 41; or, Dropping Out of the Rat Race Without Going Down the Drain

  • How to Be Good; or, The Somewhat Tricky Business of Attaining Moral Virtue in a Society That’s Not Just Corrupt but Corrupting, Without Being Completely Out-of-It

  I loved them all. When they were collected into a single volume, Rust wrote in an introduction that his mission was to create order out of chaos, but by then I knew he more often accomplished the opposite.

  I arrived at Esquire in the late fall of 1989, and that July, in its annual “Summer Reading” issue, the magazine had run a “Tree of Fame.” This was, more exactly, a “Pyramid of Shame,” made of perhaps three hundred small yellow Post-its with the name of a writer carefully hand-printed on each and arranged on a bulletin board. The Post-it on top had Saul Bellow’s name on it. Tom Wolfe was three rows down. (!!!) Cormac McCarthy was in the middle (suggesting that the idea was to move an author up and down as his reputation waxed and waned). The bottom row had twenty-seven names: Jennifer Allen, James Kaplan, Lionel Shriver….