The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  As I write this, the next wave, an even newer New Journalism, is breaking over those old companies. I do not make this point with any comfort in stating the obvious, but it is on parade like a naked emperor scrambling to catch up. The success stories are all about agile developers and journalists using social media for reporting and distribution across ever more devices (journalistic appliances?) and the Web. The bigger story is what it means and what it costs to disrupt everything. A young engineer I met through the MIT Media Lab asked me what I thought of algorithms becoming the epic poems of journalism. I told him Machiavelli would love that.

  By the end of my SI run—as tenure is called at Time Inc.—it became clear to me that I had spent a lot of time thinking about products and it was time to think about tools. I began imagining one that would manage a constantly aggregating database to provide research, analysis and fact-checking for journalists in the field. Kind of a one-person-band idea that would work for a kid showing up in a war zone looking for context.

  My other realization was that I wasn’t an editor anymore. Check, please.

  −ENDIT−

  When Editors Were Gods (813)

  DURING MY LAST YEAR at Time Inc., my favorite blog was When Editors Were Gods, which its creator, Greg Daugherty, characterized as covering “the geniuses, egomaniacs, do-gooders, and scoundrels behind America’s great magazines.” It was loaded with arcane tidbits and apt quotes and reminded me of the files I had kept for years as I’d moved from job to job. When Editors Were Gods was especially engaging when it came to disturbing patterns and eccentric scraps.

  It was like a tutorial in what editors need to know, delivered with a kind of sweet causticity to take you down a peg if you got even a little vain in your estimation of your editorial thinking about, say, big ideas. Reading the site I found that in 1957, Hugo Gernsback, then editor of Radio-Electronics magazine, predicted a thirty-five-mile-wide TV picture projected on a sixty-mile-wide satellite mirror orbiting the earth. It would be called Sky Television. The following year, the editors of Chemical Week foresaw a pill that caused people to perspire cleaning solvent so they could do their laundry while they wore it. In counterbalance to those “big ideas” was the motto of a magazine called the Delineator that bridged the turn of the nineteenth century and is sometimes remembered as having been edited for several years by Theodore Dreiser. This was the motto: “Safe fashions for home people.” During his tenure as editor, the middle-aged Dreiser, who had already published Sister Carrie, left his wife and took up with the teenage daughter of a colleague.

  Top editing jobs have always been precarious perches, especially for editors whose complete identity is based on their job. Thinking about that one day, I found an unfortunate tradition of editors jumping out of windows. In 1931 Parker Lloyd-Smith, the twenty-nine-year-old managing editor of Fortune, leaped naked in what was described as a “perfect swan dive” from the twenty-third floor of his Manhattan apartment. Interestingly, Lloyd-Smith left several notes behind, but his motive remains a mystery. In 1950, Laird Shields Goldsborough, a former foreign editor of Time, who was known for coining the word “tycoon,” died when he jumped from a ninth-floor window in the Time-Life Building wearing a homburg and holding a gold-tipped cane. He was forty-seven.

  Saddest of all, in 1971, Margaret Case, an editor at Vogue, jumped to her death from her Park Avenue apartment building. She had been forced out at the magazine, and Diana Vreeland recalled in her memoir, b.v., that Case had failed to take management’s hints that her editorial services were no longer required. “One day she was at her desk, which she’d had for forty or fifty years, and some moving men came and said they had to take the desk away. She said, ‘But it’s my desk. It’s got all my things in it.’ Well, they took her desk away and dumped everything in it out.”

  Death is never funny, of course, but in 1959, Elliot Cohen, a onetime editor of Commentary magazine, was found dead with a plastic bag tied over his head in his New York City apartment. It looked like Cohen had killed himself, but police did not rule out the possibility that he’d died accidentally while experimenting with the bag as research for a magazine article on suicide.

  When Editors Were Gods also posted a link to the prospectus for a magazine dreamed up by Edgar Allan Poe, the haunted poet and short-story writer, who earned his living primarily as a magazine editor. Like many editors then and now, he wanted his own magazine. His was to be called the Stylus, and, like most such dreams, it never found financing. Desktop publishing would have changed Edgar’s life.

  I went to When Editors Were Gods every day, paraphrasing and borrowing from it often—as I have above—to make myself if not a better editor, at least a more interesting one. Then one day there was this:

  June 02, 2013

  See you later…

  “When Editors Were Gods” is going on vacation for a while, so its editor (me) can work on another project. If the subject matter interests you, please feel free to poke around in the archive; there are more than 1,800 posts in all here, going back to 2008. I may add a new item from time to time and expect to be posting daily again at some point. See you then.

  I stayed on the site for hours, wandering in the archive until I came across two lines of doggerel that felt like an omen. They were written by Robert H. Davis, one of the most respected magazine editors and journalists of the first half of the twentieth century. After fifty years of intrepid reporting, writing and running magazines, this became his legacy.

  How much wood would a woodchuck chuck

  If a woodchuck could chuck wood?

  −ENDIT−

  The Accidental Life (1,909)

  THE WEEK BEFORE LA FOLDED, Gay Talese came to the Other Bob Sherrill’s house for drinks. Bob invited me and other reporters from the paper over to meet him. Vodka and tonic was what we all drank then. Gay drank martinis, but he wasn’t drinking that night because he was on his way to work, which Sherrill had told us was managing an all-night massage parlor in the San Fernando Valley, or maybe going to an orgy in Malibu. It was reporting for his next book, Thy Neighbor’s Wife. We were in awe. Gay said he thought we were brave the way we were facing almost certain unemployment.

  When we were out of work a few days later, Sherrill told me he wasn’t worried about any of us, that most would wind up at the Los Angeles Times, which is what happened. He also said that this was not going to happen to him and probably not to me, either.

  “The more places you work,” he added conspiringly, to emphasize his subtext, “the more places you work.”

  He was developing a theory around what he later called “the accidental life.” He said the lives of most reporters and editors at big papers followed a straight line from story to story, beat to beat—a path with small detours as distractions—“as lost to history as any hamster on a wheel.” I didn’t want that. Plus, no one was offering. I started a novel and hustled photography assignments and documentary film work. No paycheck. That part of the accidental life was already mine.

  When I finally got a magazine job, it was thanks to the production director of LA, who had become the editor in chief of San Francisco Magazine and hired me as a combination writer and editor. Michael Parrish had started as an intern fact-checker at I. F. Stone’s Weekly, the revered investigative newsletter, and was as reliable a journalist as I worked with anywhere. When he left San Francisco for City magazine, I went with him, but we began to lose touch after Warren Hinckle replaced him as editor in chief. I thought Michael would be bitter about losing his job to Hinckle, because he had brought Warren in as a “guest editor,” but he was graceful about it and moved back to Los Angeles, where he lived for the next thirty-seven years.

  His obituary in the Los Angeles Times in 2013 described how he discovered that he had been laid off from that paper in 1995, after a long and solid career there. He had taken a source to lunch and tried to pay the bill with his company credit card, which had been canceled. The obit also said he later put his research and reporting skil
ls to use as a private investigator.

  I wondered if he had thought about looking into the murder of Las Vegas mob daughter and journalist Susan Berman, who had been Hinckle’s girlfriend when Hinckle had grabbed his job at City. I remembered sitting next to her in the City newsroom, and the two tiny dogs she leashed under her desk when she was writing a story. Listening to them yip as she banged away on her IBM Selectric, I was far from imagining I would ever become what I thought of as a real editor, like Sherrill, let alone work at his hallowed Esquire and edit him and Gay Talese there.

  But that’s what happened, and I met new writers and worked with them and all of our stories changed. Everyone kept moving. I got married, had two sons, got divorced and married again. My life seemed normal except that it was very different every day, which I knew was what Sherrill loved most about his editing life. His accidental life. It wasn’t always easy. Ideas got broken and jobs didn’t work out. Friends faded. Love failed. But the thing was, no matter how strange or rocky it got, there was redemption in the work. That was not accidental. Journalism, editing and writing filled the days and nights.

  It was a way to live. Don’t get locked in. Take life as it comes—the future and past together in the same moment. Mortality becomes a gyroscope, the wheels within wheels of growing older. Expect angels pulling chariots across the sky. Enjoy the ironies. The Other Bob Sherrill was right about letting life happen to you, regardless of the pain and so on but with its soaring joy. The accidental life was good that way. There was something edifying in the randomness of the people you met and worked with who then passed on, sometimes to stranger connections or unforetold madness.

  I thought about that again early in 2015 when Susan Berman’s death became the focus of HBO’s true-crime documentary series The Jinx, and her friend the troubled New York real estate heir Robert Durst was arrested in New Orleans on a murder warrant issued in Los Angeles on the eve of the final episode. The episode where he accidentally admitted to killing her. More accidental lives, marbles rolling around in an old cigar box.

  —

  FOR ALL MAGAZINE EDITORS, there are exhilarating moments that no one else can know, like when you start reading and you know just from the first sentence that it will make your mix and give your issue a subtext that will echo how smart you want it to be. I have been able to recite Rian Malan’s opening line of My Traitor’s Heart since I first read the galleys to excerpt it in Smart:

  I’m burned out and starving to death, so I’m just going to lay this all upon you and trust that you’re a visionary reader, because the grand design, such as it is, is going to be hard for you to see.

  The voice, the challenge, the rhythm, the vulnerability are all there, and what followed paid off the promise. I have been very lucky that way and thought about including an appendix listing the works of all the writers in these pages. It seemed a righteous endeavor but then also felt self-serving, as if taking credit for their work when I had just sometimes been helpful. And what’s the Internet for anyway?

  Editors do many different things and with wildly varying styles. The editing jobs I had were never only about the words; and for some brilliant editors, and at some spectacular magazines, it’s not about the words at all, and that’s fine. Wit and clever observation are never enough. You need images that work on more than one level. And real art and fine-tuning and polish and nuance and finish carpentry and sharp display copy and surprising (but readable) typography. In other words, you have to make all those boxes perfect before the monkeys can start jumping out of them.

  A useful bit of editorial advice came from Ed Kosner, a one-time editor of Newsweek and New York, who replaced me at Esquire. In his memoir, It’s News to Me, Ed wrote, “No matter what people tell you, many decisions don’t have to be made—and shouldn’t be made—until the last moment. If you wait long enough, many problems solve themselves.” That’s the way I worked too. “Enormous changes at the last minute” would have been my credo had I thought to have one.

  At Newsweek, I learned that you can turn on the proverbial dime. “Scrambling the jets” is what Maynard Parker, Newsweek’s editor, called it, reveling in the cliché, and it was thrilling and important at the same time. In the beginning this required nerve. Later on it became second nature. If you wanted to take somebody on, though, you had to make it about something important or your colleagues wouldn’t follow you and there would be mistakes. I had only three rules: Force nothing. Be clear. You can always go deeper.

  I loved all the work and every editing job I ever had, but when I was editor in chief of Esquire, it felt like the best job I was ever going to have. The morning I was fired, my boss stood up when I walked into his office and said something about making changes always being difficult for him. That was it. Leaving the building, I tried to reason with my regrets but it was no good. As in love with the work as I was, I had missed all the signals. I had had no fear. I had had no self-defense. Had I gone too far, or not far enough? I had had no idea how my colleagues saw me. That job was suddenly like the girl you loved but never touched in college telling you at a party twenty years later that she wanted you desperately then but not now—You should have just come over.

  From Esquire on, I tried to know where I stood, not just with my many bosses but with my colleagues and the writers I edited. Out of that I learned the importance of letting them know where they stood with me. Maybe that made me a better editor; maybe it didn’t. At my last holiday lunch with other Time Inc. editors, John Huey, the wry editor in chief, presented me with a confidential job evaluation form from back in 2003. Under “Areas for Growth/Development” it noted my weakness: “patience with corporate protocol.” We all drank to that. It felt like a quick little victory lap until I thought about it later, sitting alone in my office. If I had been in any number of corporate jobs, I would have pissed me off, too. What an asshole. If I had been even a little savvier, less arrogant about my ideas, I would have gotten more done. I could have learned more from John Huey.

  The week I decided to end my career as an editor was the week after Jeremy Lin, the Chinese-American point guard out of Harvard, started a spectacular streak playing for the New York Knicks. The New Yorker ran a series of very small spot drawings sprinkled throughout the issue, as it usually does, depicting Lin rescuing a cat from a tree, helping an elderly woman across a street, delivering a baby, painting the Mona Lisa and so on. Lin was lighting up Madison Square Garden and it seemed like he could do anything and the New Yorker did that. It wasn’t writing but it was narrative and it made me think about how great magazines can be if the editors are agile.

  That same week, all the magazines I’d ever edited suddenly looked to me to be better magazines than they had been when I was editing them. Stronger reporting, better service, sharper, funnier. Once, at Sports Afield, I put a dog on every page. At Esquire I ran a white-on-white cover with the hed “White People: The Trouble with America.” I put Howard Stern on the cover three months later in a Barbara Kruger illustration that read across his face in her bold italic sans serif type: I hate myself

  What was I thinking?

  What I was not thinking was that I would ever write a book about writers and editing them and the good and bad old days in the magazine business, when probably I should have been tracking down all those writers and thanking them directly for their fineness of mind and spirit. For that, and for everything else, too.

  −ENDIT ENDIT ENDIT−

  Photographs

  In Beirut, Lebanon, September 1970

  MICHAEL J. MCALLISTER—DARK HORSE PHOTOGRAPHY

  Hunter Thompson sinking a putt in Aspen, Colorado, undated 1970s: “Bring George, I will beat you like mules….”

  JESSICA BURSTEIN

  Warren Hinckle with Melman, Elaine’s, N.Y.C., 2004

  RON GALELLA/CONTRIBUTOR

  Elaine Kaufman, Elaine’s, 1982

  JESSICA BURSTEIN

  George Plimpton under Plimpton bust, Elaine’s, 1999

  MARSHA
LL KAPPEL

  Plimpton, Central Park, 2000

  JEAN PAGLIUSO

  With Liz Tilberis, Wainscott, New York, 1992

  JOHN SCHULZ, GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

  Jim Harrison, Lake Leelanau, Michigan, 1970: Mozart de Prairie…

  TERRY MCDONELL

  Harrison, San Simeon, California, 2007

  JUDITH HUDSON

  Peter Matthiessen with garland, Amagansett, New York, 2008

  KAY ELDREDGE

  James Salter and Matthiessen, Sagaponack, New York, 1988

  ERIC PERRET

  Rust Hills, Esquire office, N.Y.C., 1993

  MICHAEL ABRAMSON

  Livingston, Montana, 1980: “A literary force field.”

  Front: (sitting, center) Laurie and Tom McGuane, (with mountain lion head) Richard Brautigan, Phil Caputo, Tim Cahill

  Middle: (far left) McDonell, (on pickup door) Russell Chatham, (center with beard) Jeff Bridges, (third from right) Susan McBride Cahill