The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  I finally went after Bob when I landed at Esquire in 1990. By then I was very aware of Robert F. Jones as a literary figure and, to borrow a phrase or two from P. J. O’Rourke, Bob was a “pants-down” environmentalist at a time when the environmental movement looked like a “goldfish tank of irrelevancies.” Bob and I had drinks at a midtown Manhattan hotel and agreed to try to work together as soon as he could find some time. Bob was occupied with his novels. And his bird hunting (read: dogs). And his fishing. The assignments we had talked about withered.

  When I was leaving Esquire, for Sports Afield where Hearst was moving me, Bob called and told me that getting “canned,” as he put it, was a badge of honor. He said that at one time or another he had hated every boss he’d ever had, but he didn’t put me in that category yet because he sensed I had a nice “touch.” He made me feel like a much better editor than I was thinking I was.

  In 1994 I talked Bob into a piece for Sports Afield about, as we said in the subhed, “How Fishing for Records Will Make You Crazy.” Bob said it was pretty much a bullshit idea but agreed to concoct a piece he insisted on calling “Wampus Cats & Oyster Toads.” In it, he told fishing stories, but they were about almost everything besides the fish—like love. My favorite bit of language echoed Macbeth as it described the fishing of a friend who had just broken up with a longtime girlfriend as his attempt to knit up with flyrod and feathers the raveled sleeve of his care. None of Bob’s stories were about competition in the hook-and-bullet tradition of “mine’s bigger than yours.”

  He ended the piece with an explanation of his personal best for ugly, as well as big, weird and hazardous. It was set back in the early 1970s, when Bob was writing what he called his post-Uhuru stuff for Time. He was stuck in Nairobi waiting for an interview with Jomo Kenyatta and drinking too many chota pegs at the Long Bar in the New Stanley, so he decided to charter a small plane and fly up to Kenya’s Northern Frontier, to what was then Lake Rudolf (now Lake Turkana). Peter Beard and Alistair Graham would set their edgy and enthralling 1990 Eyelids of Morning: The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles and Men…on these shores, but this was the 1970s and Bob had just gone for some fishing. Conditions were harsh. Sandstorms, 120 in the shade, fifteen-foot crocodiles in the shallows and gangs of wild-ass Somali bandits called shifta roaming the surrounding desert with Kalashnikovs.

  One night, Bob pulled in a Nile perch that weighed 187 pounds, 8 ounces—a record that would have held for twenty-seven years if he had bothered to submit it. Instead, he ate it (no catch and release in East Africa) with the affable Guy Poole, who ran the makeshift fishing camp; his mechanic, an ex–World War II POW named Tony; Priya Ramrakha, a Time-Life photographer who was killed by a sniper in Biafra a few years later; and some friendly local El Molo tribesmen. All Bob’s kind of guys. That night was his thirty-ninth birthday and he lay happy and full under mosquito netting while hyenas whooped him to sleep.

  I have been paraphrasing Bob’s story up to now; this is his language:

  Eighteen months later shifta fell upon the camp, tortured and killed Guy Poole and a Catholic priest who was there to fish (Poole’s wife and children had gone to Nairobi for supplies), shot up the radio, generator and three of the trucks, and burned the camp. They disappeared into the desert in the fourth camp truck, the El Molo said later. Tony was driving with an AK pointed at his neck—once again a POW. But not for long.

  They were bound for a well called Gus, the El Molo said. When they got there, they filled their water bottles, burned the truck, banged Tony on the head, and skinned him out like a catfish. They took the hide for a trophy.

  Now that’s a fucking fishing story.

  —

  BOB’S WORLD WAS LARGE, but also disarmingly small as I found out after he had died, in 2002. On a trip to Kenya I did not realize at first that our outfitter, Bill Winter Safaris, was the same one Bob had spent much of his time with in Africa—except that it was now run by Bill Jr., who’d grown up in the bush learning from his father’s tracker, Lombat, a Dorobo from up in the Mukogodo country. Lombat was still with Winter, tall and dignified, with a Bulova watch and the patience that comes from years of hunting. He smiled quickly as Bob’s name bubbled up with the coffee one morning at breakfast. Bob was rafiki, a friend.

  Bill Winter Sr. was Bob’s first guide in Africa and they grew close. Bob wrote that to travel Africa with Winter was to have Dickens, Darwin and Monty Python at your elbow. Not to mention Allan Quatermain, the prototype great white hunter and the hero of King Solomon’s Mines. We hit some of their spots—the Masai Mara, Funzi Island, Lewa Downs—and heard about the time on the Talek River when Lombat saved SI photographer Bill Eppridge from a spitting cobra, and the night elephants stampeded through the camp (“at least sixty or eighty of them”). And, of course, there was that time the lioness came after them. It was adventure for its own sake in the name of journalism.

  —

  FIVE YEARS AFTER BOB DIED I contributed to a collection of his work and tributes to him edited by his friend and Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx. Working on that piece in my office at Sports Illustrated, I had on my desk a journal I’d kept on my safari. It is full of rough notes, drawings and maps, with bits of grasses and leaves pasted on them. Next to the journal was a thick and faded red folder I’d found in the SI library. It was the Robert F. Jones file, story after story, word after word, a reckoning for my simple notes. In it, in a 1978 story about the wildlife in Kenya, Bob wrote this:

  A yellow and blue agama lizard crept out on a rock to bask in the heavy-hitting sun; as if in some strange counterbalance, the crocodile across the way slid into the roiling water, out of sight.

  I copied that into my journal, knowing I was reaching back for something. Journalism as adventure was over for me, and I was becoming a different kind of editor than I had been when I’d edited Bob. Soon enough I’d be spending more time with tech developers and executives than with writers. But the new work was fast and satisfying too, and I thought that what I saw coming could be very good for traditional publishers, a counterbalance, if we moved quickly. It was 2007 and magazines were already hemorrhaging readers, and advertisers weren’t making those multimillion-dollar buys anymore, but change was always good if you could adapt. I made speeches about that at management meetings. It wasn’t until later that my job began to feel like an embed in a routed and retreating army.

  −ENDIT−

  Less Money (387)

  EVERY HISTORY OF TIME INC. mentions drink carts rattling from office to office on closing nights. At Newsweek, the Wallendas went out to Friday night dinners for three hours. At Time there were buffet tables with carving stations for prime rib and turkey and ham, along with the shrimp cocktail, Caesar salads and strawberry shortcake. Some days during the week, bootblacks made the rounds of all the newsweekly offices shining shoes at desks. They came to Rolling Stone, too. I saw the last of that, and saw how it made people uncomfortable, but there were inequities everywhere. It was party time. The publishing sides of every magazine had sales meetings in the Caribbean. Planeloads of advertisers were flown to the Olympics.

  Calvin Trillin, who was a Time correspondent in the sixties, said that when he would see a particularly lavish house in a foreign capital he would think “That’s either an Arab embassy or the home of the Time Inc. bureau chief.” Writers, especially if they had staff gigs, could also pile it on. The favorite expense-account story at Newsweek was about how its most famous correspondent (eighteen wars at least), Arnaud de Borchgrave, filed to replace five Savile Row suits after a stray bullet came through his hotel window in a troubled Middle East city, entered his closet and left a small hole in each of them. National Geographic expense-account forms were said to have a “gifts to natives” category.

  Even into the 1990s, I signed off on expense accounts but never checked them, except maybe to see whom this or that editor was buying veal piccata for. I don’t think the people who signed off on my expenses paid much attention either, and nothing I filed
ever got bounced back. It was all just part of the deal. Then.

  An editor I once worked with told me that his first month on the job at SI, in 2000, an older editor had taken him to lunch (expensed) and recalled being chastised for not spending enough on his expense account. He said those days had just ended. That was shortly before I arrived. At one point SI was spending $1.5 million a year on sports tickets. The publishing side took clients; editors took friends and family. By 2010, the tickets had to go to save jobs.

  −ENDIT−

  David Carr (2,210)

  A YEAR AFTER HE DIED SUDDENLY in the newsroom of the New York Times, David Carr still pops up several times a day on the Google Alert I set for him back in 2005, when he first explained to me what that was. This is not ironic, rather simply true in the way that something you learn from someone keeps them in your mind.

  No one made the transition—the “migration,” as he was one of the first to call it—from legacy to digital better, although David always said that Brian Stelter, a colleague of his then at the Times, was the new prototype for a journalist. He pointed to Stelter’s growing presence on various platforms, especially Twitter, and his early citing of a student who’d remarked, “If the news is that important, it will find me.” David said that was all you needed to know about where news was going. But David was the one everyone I knew started following, as he became ubiquitous himself in the evolving news ecosystem he helped define. He mastered and interpreted the new tech—speaking Twitter like the native he was—and still delivered reported, stylish print columns for the paper every Monday.

  He was gifted and haunted, and you saw that right off. He had been handsome as a kid but by his early forties, when we met, he looked like a cousin of the Edgar the Bug character from Men in Black, with a ropy neck and tortuous posture and clothes that never quite fit because of his fluctuating weight. I first became aware of him through his work at Inside.com, a pioneering start-up where his beat was the magazine business, and his determination to be fair was as obvious as his charm.

  Hey Terry,

  David Carr from Inside.com here. I need to talk to you on Sunday if you happen to be checking email about some things. While credible people said nice things about you and the things you are doing…, they suggest US is tanking on the newsstand. I imagine that you have a thing or two to say about that and I’d like to print it.

  Thanks for any attention. I have to file Sunday nite.

  David Carr

  Call on God, but row away from the rocks.—Hunter S. Thompson

  Noting his signer, I called on Sunday night and spun some numbers at him. Us Weekly was selling 1.5 million per month on the newsstand, which was a threefold increase over its newsstand sales as a monthly. I said I was aware of the sniping and negative rumors that had, most likely, been coming from Time Inc., where apparently Us Weekly was viewed as some sort of threat to People because, I tossed in breezily, the women reading it were a younger demo and didn’t live in trailer parks. Plus, we were already outselling Entertainment Weekly by more than two to one on the newsstand after just ten weeks as a weekly.

  “Exactly,” David said. “Us Weekly is a weekly, so divide 1.5 million by four and see how that works.”

  He was pointing out that we were selling 375,000 copies of the weekly, while People was still selling that same 1.5 million number we were bragging about as a monthly number but they were doing it every week. It was not a particularly relevant point, but his speed with circulation and advertising numbers made our conversations a back-and-forth game. Although he never let me win, I sometimes got the feeling that he was trying to give me a break. Good reporters can always make you think that. Another part of David’s charm was the careful curiosity that always defines a great reporter. It surprised no one when he was hired by the Times. When he wrote a piece about my arrival at Sports Illustrated, his angle was that I was coming in as a “well-traveled” outsider and an “agent of change.” Neither of us knew then that he would become so significant an agent in a media revolution that had not yet been named. That careful curiosity turned out to be perfect for the moment when old-school media companies got smashed in the mouth by digital.

  So what if news found its own digital path. David broke stories anyway. He seemed to be everywhere, from the red carpet (where he wrote as “the Carpetbagger”) during the awards season in Los Angeles to throwing parties at SXSW in Austin. He was the star of Page One: Inside the “New York Times,” the notable 2011 documentary directed by Andrew Rossi about the paper. His column “The Media Equation,” in which he analyzed business and cultural developments in news, publishing and social media, became a “must-read”—to use jargon he would never touch. His intersecting contacts and sources across the platforms he covered both vertically and horizontally made his reporting like 3-D chess. By 2015 David Carr, the brand, was approaching half a million followers on Twitter.

  —

  DAVID’S TRIP from a Minneapolis suburb through the University of Minnesota and on up a slippery career ladder (Twin Cities Reader, Washington City Paper, Insid.com, New York magazine, the Atlantic) to the New York Times was riled by various addictions. Finally kicking them left him straight and, I thought, benignly bitter. In Interview magazine, he told Aaron Sorkin that for a while he had been a low-bottom crackhead, sobered up for 13 years, and then decided to try to be a nice, suburban alcoholic and see how that would go. That lasted…Well, it ended in handcuffs, so it didn’t go great.

  He was never aggressive about it, but he would occasionally drop the fact that he had been a single father on welfare or (so horrifying that you didn’t want to believe him) that he had beat up women. When we were out at night, as we were from time to time, he never seemed more unhinged than anybody else, though he could take shots at you just to let you know that maybe, just maybe, he knew more than you did.

  One night we met at Joe’s Pub to see his friend Ike Reilly, whose indie-rock band, the Ike Reilly Assassination (“IRA, get it?” David said), was his longtime favorite. David sensed that I didn’t like the music as much as he did, and he kept turning his pack of Camel Lights over and over on the table until Ike joined us after his first set. I knew Ike had paid weird dues, like working for more than a decade as a doorman at the Park Hyatt in Chicago. His music was political and strong and I did like it, and I said so and we talked for a while about what music had been like when we were all younger.

  “Terry’s been rocking that same haircut since high school,” David said. I think Ike said something about never getting any substantial coverage in Rolling Stone, which I had edited twenty years earlier, and he and David agreed that “the Stone” had always been kind of square. This was bait I had learned not to take, so no argument from me. Besides, Ike’s new album, Junkie Faithful, had just come out and it was strong and they were both drinking Diet Coke. I wondered how hard that was.

  David was already a star and still rising at the Times when he published his 2008 memoir, The Night of the Gun, in which he reported out on himself—tracking down what really happened this or that time he was too drunk or stoned or both to remember clearly. The subtitle was A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life—His Own. He looked at police reports and welfare documents and recorded sixty interviews—many with the people he had gotten high and in trouble with—and finally made his own sense out of the conflicting memories and the relentless question of whom to believe. His writing flowed and hit at the same time: Where does a junkie’s time go? [Mostly] in fifteen-minute increments, like a bug-eyed Tarzan, swinging from hit to hit.

  It was brave, unfeigned work but David was shy about it when he sent me the bound galleys, e-mailing me in advance that he didn’t want to sound like a self-involved creep, but he was proud of the book, if not the story it told, and wanted me to read it.

  I wrote back that it was acutely human and terrifying and somehow also hilarious and that I could only imagine the courage it had taken to get it so right. Later I hoped he was getting so
me pleasure, or at least satisfaction, from the success of the book as it climbed the best-seller list. In the Times Book Review, Bruce Handy noted, perhaps a little too cleverly, “In that conundrum [what was true and what was not in David’s memory] lie both the genius and a primary flaw of this brave, heartfelt, often funny, often frustrating book.” I got that, but I thought too that David had opened a very dangerous door for himself, yet then had been able to close it. In any case, his work at the paper seemed to me more and more ambitious as he took on what looked to me like the trickiest assignments he could get. Here’s one lede from the following spring:

  Write about the media long enough and eventually you type your way to your own doorstep. Lately, when I finish an interview, most subjects have a question of their own.

  “What’s going to happen to The New York Times?”

  David answered the question with clear declensions of business plans and the various “levers” the company might use, and he hit every digital bumper.

  I e-mailed him that the column was graceful and sharp and hard to do. I ended with “Hats off to you.” David came back to say that we were due for dinner at Odeon and suggested an additional “hats off” to Ike, who had recently played a benefit in Minneapolis for a pal of David’s with six kids who was dying. At the end of it, Ike had walked up to David with a bag of $20,000 in cash—“Shades of the old days,” David wrote. “Great guy.”