Just the Funny Parts

by Nell Scovell

  The second week of my freshman year, I entered the stone and brick building of The Harvard Crimson where a group had gathered to “comp” (i.e., compete) to join the paper’s staff. Editors addressed the group, making pitches for their various departments: news, opinion, the arts magazine. A senior wearing a rumpled overcoat and holding a cigar took the floor. He looked like he was auditioning for the part of Oscar Madison in a Sarasota dinner theater production of The Odd Couple. It was a short audition. He uttered just two sentences: “Anyone who’s cool, stick around. We’re gonna talk about writing sports.”

  An airhorn went off in my head.

  I’d never been cool in my life and someone had just offered me an opportunity to change that. Sportswriting wouldn’t be a stretch for me either. I’d been manager of the boys’ track team in high school and my brother was a ranked New England tennis player. Being a Boston sports fan was easy in the late sixties and seventies. The Bruins were world champions. The Celtics were world champions. The Red Sox were (almost) world champions. The Boston Patriots were not the champions that the New England Patriots are today, but I liked the young quarterback Jim Plunkett. I took dinner theater Oscar Madison up on his offer. I stuck around and became a sportswriter. I’m still waiting to be cool.

  The decision was made impulsively and remains one of the best of my life. Covering straight news didn’t quite suit me. I always felt like I was playing at being serious. My brainy Crimson colleagues like Nicholas Kristof, Susan Chira, and David Sanger were reporting on apartheid protests while I spent fall weekends on the banks of the Charles River, covering crew sculls gliding through perfectly arched bridges as the sun burnished the red and gold leaves. Who’s the brainy one now?

  Sports Editor John Donley taught me that a game’s final score was the news hook, but the real story concerned the characters on the field and the history between the teams. Competition is deeply emotional. It’s not just who wins and loses; it’s the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. For one of my first college assignments, I interviewed actor Tommy Lee Jones, who played offensive guard on the legendary Harvard 1968 football team, which staged a sixteen-point comeback in the final forty-three seconds against Yale. The Crimson headline the next day blared Harvard Beats Yale 29-29. On the tenth anniversary of “The Game,” I spoke to Jones about its significance.

  “Ending my career with that particular game against Yale was like dying and going to heaven,” he told me.

  That’s Fugitive-level drama.

  Fledgling sportswriters were taught to sweat over the first paragraph—the lede—where the goal is to inform and amuse. Once, when covering a regional track and field event, the men’s team tied for second place after a day of competition and the perfect lede popped into my head. Back in the Crimson building, I smiled as I banged out my killer opening, which played off an old saying. I wrote:

  If a tie for first is like kissing your sister

  then a tie for second is like French kissing her.

  I finished my story and handed it to the copyeditor. He read the lede, then looked up at me.

  “Is this a joke?”

  I nodded. “Funny, right?”

  “No, it’s in really bad taste.”

  I watched him slash a line through my lede.

  “What are you doing?” I cried.

  “We can’t print this,” he said.

  The editor and I argued over what was appropriate. I lost. The fact that I couldn’t see his point about the line’s tastelessness was an early sign that I might be more suited to comedy than journalism. I truly believe that if you’re a comedy writer and have never been told “You’ve gone too far,” then you haven’t gone far enough. I also believe that if you’re constantly told “You’ve gone too far,” then maybe you’re an asshole.

  My colleagues in the sports “cube”—as our tiny office was called—were fun and supportive. I moved up the ladder and sophomore year became one of three Associate Sports Editors who reported to newly crowned Sports Editor Jeffrey Toobin. Jeff is now a CNN legal analyst, best-selling author, and one of the most entertaining people on the planet. He still loves sports. In 2008, Jeff was providing commentary during a vice presidential debate and got busted when eagle-eyed viewers spotted him watching a National League playoff game on his laptop. Come on. It was a vice presidential debate.

  Junior year, I toyed with the idea of comedy writing and attended an introductory meeting at The Harvard Lampoon. The humor magazine’s premises were dark and a little smelly even to a college student. The Lampoon editor running the “comp” meeting was intimidatingly tall and had an enormous head. His instructions seemed designed to scare us off. “Compers” would be required to turn in three pieces which would be thrown on the floor. Lampoon editors would then read and write comments on the back where the criticisms could be viewed by everyone. The potential for public humiliation seemed high, but did I let this guy stop me from pursuing my dreams?

  Yes. Yes, I did. I never went back to the Lampoon. Over a decade later, I was chatting with then-Simpsons writer Jeff Martin and we discovered that we’d been in the same college class and hadn’t known each other.

  “You should’ve comped for the Lampoon,” he said, enthusiastically. “We would have loved you.”

  I was touched, then noticed he was intimidatingly tall and had an enormous head. He’d been the comp director who had scared me off. Now he wasn’t scary at all. I’d been foolish back in college not to even try. I refused to allow myself to be judged and I didn’t move forward creatively.

  Heading into senior year, my plan was to throw myself into writing a thesis on “The Influence of Ecclesiastes on Early Twentieth Century American Literature.” Fortunately, an August phone call changed that plan.

  Out of the blue, a Boston Globe sports editor tracked me down while I was still at home in Newton. He’d read some of my Crimson articles and was wondering if I’d be interested in joining a team of four college students covering high school sports for the city newspaper. It was like getting called up to the big leagues. I ditched Ecclesiastes and went pro.

  The other three “schoolboy correspondents” were enrolled at Northeastern University. I later learned a fourth NU student had been selected—a female—but she fell out at the last minute. When that first choice fell through, it would have been easy for the editors to say, “Well, we tried for diversity,” and then hire another male. They didn’t. And whenever I hear a TV producer say, “We’d love to have more female writers, but we just can’t find any,” my response is, “You’re not looking hard enough.” Vince Doria, who led the Globe’s award-winning sports coverage in the eighties, did more than just make an effort, he made a difference.

  On a typical week at the Globe, I might write a field hockey roundup and profile a cross-country runner. Each Saturday, I’d cover a high school football game in some remote Massachusetts town. I’d spend the week taking a crash course in the town’s football history, then freeze my ass off watching the game while my roommates were back in our dorm room sleeping off their Friday night fun. The deadlines were brutal. On the drive back to the newsroom, I’d start composing the copy in my head. I once screeched into the Globe parking lot, threw my blue Ford into park, jumped out, and slammed the locked door just as I noticed my keys dangling from the ignition. I stared in horror for a beat, then realized I had no time to consider what an idiot I was. I sprinted toward the building to file my story.

  Working at the Globe taught me how to swear, guzzle lousy coffee, and find towns in Massachusetts that are still not on Google Maps. It was a treat to sit desks away from world-class sportswriters Will McDonough, Lesley Visser, and Leigh Montville. Most of the full-time Globe reporters ignored the college correspondents, but veteran Mike Madden used to stop by my desk to offer encouragement. One day, he threw me a great piece of advice about journalism.

  “Specialize,” he told me. “There will always be better writers out there, but if you’re the expert on a subject and th
at subject comes up, they’ll call you.”

  About a week later, he stopped by my desk again.

  “I was just thinking, I’ve never seen a woman in the press box at boxing matches.” He handed me a flyer for a local boxing event. “That would be a good specialty. You should go,” he said.

  I sensed that he was right, but I wasn’t cut out for boxing. In all my favorite sports, an athlete got a penalty for throwing a punch. I tossed the flyer away and then watched as boxing exploded in the second half of the eighties. If I’d taken Mike’s advice and started doing my homework in 1981, I would have been positioned perfectly.

  There was another hitch. Sportswriting in general had begun to lose its appeal to me. My direct editor at the Globe was a “just the facts, ma’am” kind of guy who wasn’t looking for a clever lede. After I graduated from college, I hoped to find an editor that appreciated humor.

  I moved to New York and took a day job as an executive assistant, answering phones for a CEO on the Forbes 500. I took any writing job that came my way, including my first paid magazine assignment from Cosmopolitan. Helen Gurley Brown was still at the helm and the editor commissioned me to write an essay: “My Three Ghastly Weeks with a Grade C Lover.” I saved almost all my early writing, but somehow this piece has been lost to time. Not an accident.

  My writing career was slow to take off because I acquired an unfortunate habit in my early twenties. Some spend their postcollege years in a haze of pot smoke; I liked to get married. I did it twice. And got divorced twice. All before the age of twenty-six. I guess you could call me a romantic. Seriously, only a true romantic would throw herself into a second marriage just six months after the first one failed.

  My first husband was my college sweetheart and a second-year student at NYU law school. He was brilliant and kind and knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life. I was twenty-two and floundering. When he was selected for a prestigious clerkship, I left my job as an executive assistant and moved to the District of Columbia several months ahead of him. I’d taken a low-paying job answering constituent mail for a Massachusetts congressman. The work was serious and I was unhappy. Our marriage collapsed. By the time he got to D.C., I was on my way back to New York.

  Feeling wobbly about my life, I started dating the son of the CEO I’d been working for. We’d hung out a lot at the office and got along great. He was seven years older and really wanted to get married. In my eagerness to cover up my first marital misstep, I made an even bigger one.

  The second marriage was troubled from the start. We exchanged vows at my family home in Newton and then flew to Nantucket for a short weekend honeymoon, with a longer trip to China planned for the fall. I woke up the next morning in a quaint B&B to the sound of my brand-new husband pacing. Okay, it was more like stomping.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “I’ve got to get off this island,” he said, agitated. “I’m suffocating!”

  Metaphor much?

  We left Nantucket and drove around New England for two days with no destination. It was madness. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension had come out a couple of years earlier and my brain played a loop of Buckaroo’s pronouncement, “No matter where you go, there you are.”

  Our lives should have been happy, living in a lovely apartment overlooking the Central Park reservoir. Yet we argued over everything, even over where to eat dinner.

  “If I want Italian and you want Japanese, why can’t you compromise and have Italian?” my husband once said to me, redefining the word “compromise.” We never made it to China. I hung in for over a year and then pulled the plug. He did not object.

  After two divorces, I felt utterly humiliated. Fortunately, I had a supportive family. My father tried to make me feel better. “Look, you didn’t have kids,” he told me. “So the way I see it is you had two very serious boyfriends.”

  I would never recommend anyone follow my lead, but the failed marriages did help me in a few ways. Like many young women, I entered the workforce assuming someday I’d get married, have kids, and then leave my job to raise them. After two divorces, I scratched “getting married” as a life goal. Been there, been there, done that, done that. I became determined to never again let a relationship derail my work. Writing became my salvation—a professional way to prove my value after those personal failures. My divorces also taught me not to get trapped in a bad decision. I keep two pillows in my office emblazoned with my favorite sports quotes. One pillow says, “Never change a winning game.” The other says “Always change a losing game.” I know it’s not always possible to walk away from a “losing game.” Some tough situations must be endured. But if change becomes an option, I’ll grab it.

  In the summer of 1986, I was still looking for a nonhumiliating way out of my second marriage (plane crash?), when a new magazine called SPY approached my then-husband looking for investors. He wasn’t interested, but tossed me the prospectus and said, “This sounds like something you’d like.” Let the record show, my ex was right about one thing.

  SPY billed itself as a “satirical monthly” with the tagline: “Smart. Funny. Fearless.” The magazine’s mission was to eschew fawning profiles and call out the hypocrisy of the rich and powerful. This irreverent attitude is common now—it’s called the Internet—but you can arguably trace the origin of the “snark ages” back to SPY.

  First SPY masthead. Researcher Lisa Lampaugnale later changed the spelling of her last name to Lampanelli and became the “Queen of Mean.” She was always nice to me.

  Courtesy of Sussex Publishers LLC

  I contacted magazine cofounders Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter and they invited me down to their unfurnished, raw office space in the Puck Building. Seated on folding chairs, I pitched ten story ideas. They hired me as SPY’s first reporter.

  Sheryl Sandberg likes to quote the advice, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.” SPY was a rocket ship and changed the trajectory of my life. Going to the office was a welcome distraction. People were funny but gruff. There was a lot of teasing and shouting over partitions. In short, it felt like home.

  Given my recent experience, it’s not a coincidence that my beat for the magazine became spotlighting the foibles of New York’s wealthy. I started with creatures so entitled that they had an extra set of legs. The article “How Rich Is That Doggie in the Limo?” gently mocked A-list dog owners and included ingenious photos of pampered pets shot in soft-core porn lighting.

  From “How Rich Is That Doggie in the Limo?”

  Karen Kuehn. Provided courtesy of Sussex Publishers LLC

  My reporting started at the townhouse of Pat Buckley, wife of William F., who bragged about how her King Charles Spaniels were related to President Ronald Reagan’s dogs (i.e., the First Pets). Another pet owner said she kept her miniature poodle on a strict diet because Air France had an eleven-pound limit for pets traveling in Le Club class. A Park Avenue veterinarian told me that he was performing a lot more cosmetic surgery, including wart removal and eye lifts for Shar-Peis.

  “How Rich Is That Doggie in the Limo?” was supposed to skewer these over-the-top pet owners. Instead, the piece was received warmly. It was the mid-eighties and excess was in. Regis Philbin even booked me on his cable access talk show. My next feature needed to take sharper aim.

  The Duchess of Windsor had a pillow embroidered with the motto: “You can never be too rich or too thin.” I wanted to debunk this claim by profiling wealthy women who were both. Kurt liked the concept but was skeptical that women would discuss their weight with a reporter. I thought these women would leap at the chance to brag about their will power. My hunch proved correct.

  “The last time I weighed myself, I was under one-fifteen, but I was wearing a big fur coat and shoes at the time,” Nan Kempner, a well-connected socialite, told me over the phone. Once she spoke on the record, others followed. The story’s lede featured wordplay out of my sportswriting past.
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  In New York, there is an inverse relationship between a woman’s dress size and the size of her apartment. A size 2 gets a 14-room apartment. A size 14 gets a two-room apartment.

  Susan Morrison, long-time editor of The New Yorker, edited the article and made it edgier. Art Director Alexander Isley designed an eye-catching layout with insets of these women’s bony necks and twig arms.

  Opening spread

  Courtesy of Sussex Publishers LLC

  The New York Post’s Page Six picked up the March 1986 piece with a banner headline: “Flat Facts about the Slim and Solvent.” Syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman riffed on my observation. Years later in his book Snark, critic David Denby praised “Too Rich and Too Thin” as “a lovely piece of Juvenal.” At least, I think it was praise. I’d never heard the word “Juvenal” but “lovely” sounded positive.

  SPY quickly grew into a cultural phenomenon thanks to the genius of Kurt and Graydon. Kurt kicked off each issue with a beautifully crafted essay that wove together politics and pop culture to reveal the zeitgeist. Kurt was also the first person I ever heard use the word zeitgeist. I so admired Kurt’s distinctive voice that for years I tried to copy it, totally missing the point. Graydon was an equally gifted writer whose outward charm masked his scathing prose, especially when the magazine was mocking a certain “short-fingered vulgarian.”

  Kurt and Graydon deployed me as an all-purpose reporter. I contributed to every section of the magazine: short pieces for the front, centerfold maps, and charts and sidebars for cover stories like “Colleges of the Dumb Rich,” “Wall Street Crooks,” and “Little Men.” I believe part of my success as a reporter was that I sounded young. I’m still convinced that the elusive Edwin Schlossberg (husband of Caroline Kennedy) took my call and gave me a quote because his assistant thought I was working for a high school newspaper and he wanted to be nice.