The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  Most stories that get better as they get longer are charmed like that from the beginning. When I read in a bound galley of Rick Bass’s Oil Notes that just by the way the corporate guy “put his hands on the table you knew they were going to make a deal,” I knew that Bass was the real deal himself. Of course Bass had worked as a geologist. Like his father.

  Sometimes I saw talent everywhere, in everything I read. Other times I thought there was no such thing as a bad idea, just bad execution. This sounds self-serving, but being interested in everything makes you a more effective opportunist—and that’s what an editor has to be, a student of unintended consequences.

  That issue of Esquire with the Vollmann piece had Winona Ryder on the cover in a black slip (the piece by Michael Hirschorn: “Winona Among the Grown-ups”) and a literary and journalistic lineup that featured Ken Auletta on the presidential press corps (“The Boys on the Bus Are Dead”), Jim Harrison with “Outlaw Cook,” Jacob Weisberg with “The Devil in John McLaughlin,” Stanley Bing offering advice to “Fail Big. Win Big Bucks,” Kurt Loder with “Honky-Tonk Heaven,” David Owen with a “Letter from Golf Camp,” Ivan Solotaroff on crack in the NBA (“Swee’pea and the Shark”), and a “Best New Restaurants of 1992” package by John Mariani. It was a good issue, even without Vollmann, but it needed something more. Something nobody had ever before thought to write or assign.

  Even if it all came together with the fortuity of drawing to an inside straight.

  −ENDIT−

  Little Jimmy (1,471)

  JIM HARRISON LIVED ON A FARM in Lake Leelanau, Michigan, fifty miles from where he was born. There was also a cabin on sixty acres off a two-track road five hours north by car, beyond Grand Marais on the Upper Peninsula, where he sometimes retreated to write. But Jim could write anywhere, and he did.

  Some writers set themselves up so they could work with a view—the mountains, the sea, a river, perhaps an interesting cityscape. Others worked closed in, with no distractions, just their desk and whatever they had on the wall in front of them. Jim was like that, working best from two to four in the afternoon in tight places like the one-room ranch cabin with small windows and a calendar twenty years out of date on the back of the door. This was the winter place in Patagonia, Arizona, that Jim’s early screenwriting money had paid for. A journalist sent from New York to interview him had walked with Jim the half mile from the main house to his writing cabin and asked if it was a movie set. This turned into a story Jim would tell about what he saw as the double misunderstanding about his work because no, he wasn’t in the movie business. Not really, anyway.

  The stories about Jim’s adventures writing for film began when Jack Nicholson loaned him $30,000 to live on for the time it would take to write three novellas that might make good movies. They could also be published together as a book, which was more important to Jim. He had a draft of Legends of the Fall in ten days and was done with the second, Revenge, in another two weeks. The Man Who Gave Up His Name came a little slower and was the only one that didn’t become a film. It was about a just-retired midwestern CEO named Nordstrom who visits Manhattan to see his betrothed daughter, does battle with coke dealers and moves on to the Florida Keys, where he finds work as a chef and dances all night with the waitresses.

  Jim kicked off all three novellas with great show, but the lede of The Man Who Gave Up His Name was my favorite:

  Nordstrom had taken to dancing alone. He considered his sanity to be unblemished and his nightly dances an alternative to the torpor of calisthenics. He had chided himself of late for so perfectly living out all of his mediocre assumptions about life.

  But it was the title novella, Legends of the Fall, the one Jim said he wrote in ten days, that became his big ticket. It was a triumph when then editor Clay Felker ran it in Esquire at twenty-three thousand words in 1979, followed by Revenge at a thundering thirty thousand. The magazine appeared bolder than it had been in years, and Jim seemed to have invigorated American fiction. The traditional four-thousand-word short story, the meat of MFA programs and the staple of all the major magazines, looked claustrophobic in comparison. Jim’s vocabulary was not tricky. Although his sentences ran long and were compound, it was a surprising style, fast and clear, that suggested moving water that one reviewer said “you could see through down to the bottom of his meaning.” Other reviewers mentioned Hemingway’s “iceberg,” with its unstated currents beneath the surface, and for years after, the prominent blurb on the paperback editions of all of Jim’s books was from Bernard Levin in the London Sunday Times about the Legends of the Fall collection: “Jim Harrison is a writer with immortality in him.”

  Immortality is a big word, but Jim’s friends, his rivals even, just nodded and looked forward to the next book. The novellas were heroic, in what Jim later called “an oracular style.” That’s what sold to the movies—or, rather, to the specific people in the movie business who wanted to work with Jim. Not just Jack Nicholson but producers and directors like John Huston and Mike Nichols. The list was long and Jim was proud of it, and he liked being friendly with movie stars. I think everyone Jim knew in the movie business got something memorable from him, something personal, a little bit of poetry like the story he sometimes told over steak dinners about the most devout girl in his youth Bible group having “the feral odor of a butcher shop to go with her great beauty.”

  Jim became more self-referential as you got to know him. Some people were put off by this, but I liked it because the stories would tumble out. My mention of the documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture prompted a story about going to the director Bob Evans’s house with Jack to screen movies and play tennis. Or about how Jack bought Bob’s house when it was in foreclosure and then gave it back to him. Or how Nicholson’s business manager said that Jim was the only guy who ever paid Jack back.

  —

  JIM WAS INTERESTED IN VISITING the graves of writers and sometimes traveled for that purpose. Out of that came the idea (mine) of a literary travel column (mine), which became “The Raw and the Cooked” when Jim turned it toward food (his idea). It was also Jim’s idea to borrow the title from the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, following Lévi-Strauss’s idea that “opposites drawn from everyday experience with the most basic sorts of things—e.g. ‘raw’ and ‘cooked,’ ‘fresh’ and ‘rotten,’ ‘moist’ and ‘parched,’ and others—can serve a people as conceptual tools.” Heavy lifting, but then suddenly on the nose and droll when applied to, say, cuisine minceur, which Jim wrote was the moral equivalent of the fox-trot. After a massive lunch at Ma Maison, in West Hollywood, with Orson Welles, Jim wrote that he had to brace his boot on the limo’s doorsill to hoist the great director to the curb.

  Food—cooking it and eating it—had always been central to Jim’s writing in that it offered a commensurate and restorative joy. A large portion of his days fishing and hunting, especially with close friends, were, as Jim Fergus described it in his introduction to his “Art of Fiction” interview with Jim for the Paris Review, “devoted to planning, shopping for, preparing, discussing, and finally eating one breathtaking meal after another, at the end of which preliminary discussions and preparations for the next meal begin almost immediately.” Jim’s e-mails often noted cooking truths, such as the impossibility of finding Gambel’s quail or antelope in the supermarket—or that in my youth there were so few presents that I liked, mostly a jar of herring or a small orange.

  “The Raw and the Cooked” began in Smart in late 1988, moved with me to Esquire in 1990 and ran up twenty-nine columns there—all of them about joy, obsession, love, sex, family, landscape, life, death and all of the confusing reasons why there is nothing better than having something good to eat. I bragged that Jim was giving America its appetite back.

  Most publicly ambitious of all Jim’s meals was a thirty-seven-course lunch prepared by French chef Marc Meneau from recipes drawn from seventeen cookbooks published between 1654 and 1823. Jim wrote that the meal lasted the same amount of time a
s the Varig flight from New York to Sao Paulo. The piece ran in the New Yorker in 2004, and gourmands still talk about it. Chefs loved him too, because he cooked himself, with great attention to detail and respect for the most normal foods.

  Eventually, Jim wore some of this on his face, and with the blind eye from a childhood accident and the disappearing teeth that he refused to replace, he could look a bit weathered, but he was still handsome in the manner of a mahogany stump. He also put on some weight, which annoyed him, and he watched it in his own way, explaining that a two-hour walk in the woods earned him a thirty-two-ounce rib eye. Tom McGuane said that if he added up all the weight Jim had mentioned losing over their years of correspondence, it would top two thousand pounds.

  Jim’s seventieth birthday dinner was private, except for the e-mails that went to friends who would not be in attendance but needed to know that Mario Batali would be flying out to Patagonia loaded with food and wine to prepare an appropriate meal. I noted that Mario had made sure the Sauternes and the Madeira were from Jim’s birth year, 1937. When Jim sent the menu, he explained that it was for “Little Jimmy’s” birthday dinner. You could almost see him cocking his head like he did sometimes to emphasize a childlike joy that I figured went back to that jar of herring or a small orange.

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  Display (511)

  IF THE EDITOR IS GOOD, you can understand every story in his or her magazine just by reading the display copy—which is what a lot of readers do, no matter what the research says. Display copy includes headlines (or “heds”), subheds (or “decks”), pull quotes and captions; and it is usually finished last, on deadline. Tone lives in display copy, and so does credibility.

  Even short captions have to add facts and narrative; you can’t just drop “Lake Tahoe” under a photo of Lake Tahoe. Depending on what the story is about, Lake Tahoe has to be polluted or mysteriously deep or perhaps where Michael has Fredo killed by Al Neri in The Godfather: Part II.

  My rule about profanity was that it was allowed in body text, never in display copy. But there were fine lines there, too. I cost Rolling Stone $500,000 in automotive advertising when I ran the phrase “Mexican hum-job” in a pull quote from a Richard Price short story called “Walk on It.” The client was offended. At least that’s how the agency guy explained it, even though the client was infamous in the Detroit advertising community for making sales reps pay for many drinks and tip wildly at his favorite topless bars on Big Beaver Road. It didn’t matter that “Walk on It” was nominated for a National Magazine Award.

  The best headlines are witty and a little self-mocking, like the all-time great “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” from the New York Post in 1983 or, more recently in the Sun, the playful “Obama Lama Ding Dong” over a photo of the president and the Dalai Lama meeting in the White House.

  You can kill a great story with a bad headline. But writing heds can be the most fun part of editing if you’re good at it. If you’re not, collecting howlingly bad ones makes you a better editor. I am thinking here of “Federal Agents Raid Gun Shop, Find Weapons” and “Statistics Show That Teen Pregnancy Drops off Significantly After Age 25” and “Missippi’s Literacy Program Shows Improvement.” Bigger mistakes are never that kind of funny.

  When his film Malcolm X came out, I put Spike Lee on the cover of Esquire with his arms crossed in an X. It was a strong cover. But the headline inside the magazine on the story by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison was a big, smart-assed mistake: “Spike Lee Hates Your Cracker Ass.” I knew it was all wrong the moment I saw it in print, which was, of course, too late. It was so simple in retrospect, like all stupid mistakes. I thought about blaming my staff of editors for not talking me out of it. None of them had tried. Naturally, Spike called to tell me with measured politeness what a cheap shot it was.

  That headline was hate-mongering and I’m still ashamed of it. But it wouldn’t have been, and it would have been so easy to make it a much better headline, by changing just one word: “Spike Lee Loves Your Cracker Ass.”

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  The Older Bob Sherrill (885)

  EDITORS ARE USUALLY OLDER than the writers they edit, but I was younger than most until I was over forty and editing Rolling Stone. By the time I got to Esquire, ten years later, I was interested in what it—growing up? growing old?—was like, but I wasn’t sure how to frame it as a piece. I wanted something amusing and smart, targeted toward Esquire’s aging male demo. My young editors thought it would be a downer however I framed it. They said the Esquire I was editing was too serious. Floundering, I gave up on the feature but wrote to Sherrill with the vaguely related suggestion that he write an advice column for the magazine. That’s all I said, on a postcard with the image of a crazy-looking Albert Einstein on the front—the one with him sticking out his tongue. I figured Bob would come up with something.

  Dear Terror:

  Mr. Lonelyhearts? You are serious, aren’t you. Good boy! I am, too, but we better get even more serious. Certainly I am interested in giving advice to anyone who will listen. Let’s start with you. I am old, and time’s winged chariot doesn’t seem to be just flubbing around. Sooooo…

  I have been filing stuff for, maybe, a book, In Praise of the Accidental Life, a title that you will recognize as more than a little ironic. It’s about letting life happen to you, regardless of the pain and so on but with its soaring joy. I think I could draw a good bit of stuff from those files, and my experience…love, rich, poor, trouble, horror, panic, deep mystery, love…lying a lot and narrow-eyed chronic suspicion (both rife in that reality of mine)…you can only get into trouble, get hurt, feel fine, exhilarated, get sick, die etc. How about we try for something about that…But funny.

  Behave,

  BS

  “The Truth About Growing Old” by Robert Sherrill ran in Esquire in July 1992. It was a wry masterpiece. He was sixty-seven, which doesn’t play as old in 2016 but did then, and if he were writing now, at ninety, maybe that would be the new sixty-seven.

  In one section, Bob responded to an editorial in the Greensboro News and Record that had pissed him off. “Retirees now are basically a gender-role traditional group,” the writer claimed. “They are the baby-boom parents. For this cohort to have house-husbands just doesn’t work very well. It might change once you get the more so-called gender-role-modern generations retiring….There needs to be a dialogue when they’re forty-five or fifty.” Editor that he was, Bob couldn’t help attacking the jargon inherent in his subject matter. Hey, you old basically gender-role cohorts, let’s dialogue!

  From there on, he blasted away at platitudes and stereotypes, the Gospel of the Golden Years, which he called The Big Fib:

  …nouveau fogies in expensive sweat suits (sweats to hip ancients)…AND NOW FOR THE FUN YEARS….Alzheimer’s (a word that once specifically meant premature senility but now means any senility or senile dementia. I prefer dementia or senility, thank you), and on and on and on….But whatever, death does not interest me. Fuck death.

  The photo I ran with the piece was of Bob standing on the hood of his car—that sky-blue sixty-fo fo’d. He was not pissing into the wind like he was in the image he had conspired with the photographer to make, but it was from the same roll. When I told him I couldn’t use the pissing shot, he asked me who had made me an editor, anyway. And when we were closing the piece, he edited me editing him, not my line work on his copy but my thinking about how to kick the magazine in the ass. He said something about “finding another pony at the bottom of the box.” Push it, maybe with another piece or two. That’s how good editors were thinking back when he was at Esquire. I came up with a series of “The American Male at Age…” pieces—starting in childhood and hitting milestones as a man grows older.

  For age ten, I assigned Susan Orlean, who spent time with a fifth grader in suburban Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Her lede was “If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would…” followed by a run of details she pulled from inside Colin’s head, including “be good
at Nintendo Street Fighter II” and ending with “For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.”

  That’s the way editing could go sometimes—from marginal idea (Mr. Lonelyhearts) to good idea (Bob on getting old) to good execution (his piece) to bigger idea (the series about men aging) to great work (Susan’s piece). But I also knew that the adjective for editors who got to enjoy that kind of editorial progression was lucky. Sherrill had two things to say about that: Susan’s piece kicked his piece’s ass; and luck didn’t have anything to do with it.

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  Women’s Magazines (1,840)

  BESIDES THE TOP JOB—editor in chief, it was usually called—there were five key masthead positions on every magazine: art director, managing editor, copy chief, research editor and photo editor. At every place I worked except Sports Illustrated, at least three (and often four) of those five jobs were done by women. At Rolling Stone, the three editors directly below me, the art director and the photo editor were all women—and they were not “the kind of girls who get high with their cats,” as I once heard female staffers at RS described.

  It might sound condescending, sexist even, to write that those women were all creative and tough and thoughtful beyond any cliché about making the trains run on time (although they did that too), but that’s the way I remember them. “She’s a great number two” was what you heard about strong women editors, which was usually true, but at the same time there was nothing more patronizing. Tellingly, applying the same praise to a man would have been devastating—which underlines a lack of fairness when it came to moving to the top of the masthead.