by Gay Talese
So Clifton Daniel returned to New York to study Russian at Columbia University. After class he lunched at Sardi’s, checking his Russian primer with the blonde in the cloakroom. He also took a trip down to Zebulon to see his parents and friends, and while in the Zebulon Post Office he was approached by the clerk, Whitley Chamblee, who leaned forward and whispered, “Did I hear you’re going to Russia?”
After Daniel confirmed it, Whitley Chamblee asked, “I wonder, when you’re there, if you would buy me one of those cuckoo clocks.”
“Whitley, I don’t believe they make cuckoo clocks in Russia,” Daniel said. “They make them in Germany and Switzerland. But, well, if I find one, I’ll send it to you.”
A year later Clifton Daniel was in Geneva for the Big Four Conference. He had flown there from Moscow to join a team of Timesmen reporting on the big story. While there he also bought a cuckoo clock and mailed it to the postman in Zebulon.
Clifton Daniel arrived in Moscow in the late summer of 1954, a vintage period in Russian news—Stalin only eighteen months dead, Khrushchev emerging with a new party line that would include vodka toasts and receptions in the Great Kremlin Palace; at one reception, Daniel reported to the readers of The Times, “I was as close to Mr. Malenkov as this paper is to your nose.” His reporting in The New York Times was remarkable in that it captured not only the political rumblings but also the mood of the people: the audience at the Bolshoi and the barber in Kharkov; the athletes preparing for the Olympics, and the fashion models wearing designs of “socialist realism” in this land where “bosoms are still bosoms, a waist is a waist, hips are hips, and there is no doubt about what they are and where they are situated.” He reported, too, how tipping—a “relic of the dark bourgeois past”—was a necessary reality despite government disapproval, and he also described the arrival of winter:
This was Christmas morning in Russia, and a cruel snow-laden wind blowing straight out of the pages of Russian history and literature whipped across roofs and through the frozen streets of Moscow. At midnight the bells in the tower of Yelokhovskaya Cathedral in the northern quarter of the city set up an insistent clangor. The faithful of the Russian Orthodox Church—women tightly wrapped in shawls and men in fur-collared coats and caps—hastened through the churchyard to escape the icy bite of the wind.
Since Daniel was then the only permanent correspondent of a Western non-Communist newspaper in the Russian capital, he was able to pick his themes at will and write them well and not have to contend with the editorial second-guessing that would have come from New York had there been rival papers’ men in Moscow focusing on government spokesmen with their endless pronouncements. And not being part of a pack, Daniel had to work harder than he ever had. He developed an ulcer and lost between thirty and forty pounds. In November of 1955, Turner Catledge, acting on orders from Arthur Hays Sulzberger—who had by this time received letters from Timesmen commenting on how Daniel looked at the Big Four Conference in Geneva—ordered Daniel home immediately.
He returned, emaciated, but was not long in recovering, and soon was working in the New York office. He had been named an assistant to the foreign-news editor, although nobody in the city room knew precisely what this meant, including possibly the foreign-news editor. But it seemed obvious from the way Daniel moved around the room, and from the way the room moved around him, that he was not going to remain an assistant to the foreign-news editor for very long. Daniel’s desk, which normally would have given a clue, was in a nondescript spot. It was on the south side of the room, where all the senior editors sit, but it was partially obscured by a post. It was also up a bit between two lady secretaries, equidistant from the foreign editor and the bullpen. He also rarely remained seated. Usually he walked slowly around the big room, his glasses sometimes tucked into the top of his silver hair. Sometimes he would stop, sit down, and chat with reporters or deskmen in the Science department, or in Sports, or Education, or Financial, or Society. Occasionally he would return to one of these departments for a whole week or two, sitting in various places, and conversing in a very casual, disarming way about The New York Times, and asking occasionally what they liked about working there, or did not like. He was living at the Algonquin Hotel then, and was spotted at night also in Sardi’s after the theater, and was once seen at the opera with a tall, striking brunette.
After they had gone twice more to the opera they became a “twosome” in Walter Winchell’s column. The lady was mildly upset, partly because she felt that Daniel, a Times editor in a gossip column, might be very embarrassed, especially when their relationship had been so innocent: a drink, dinner, the opera, another drink perhaps, then home. Directly. A pleasant good-night in front of the doorman. That was it.
She had met Clifton Daniel at a New York party prior to his leaving for Moscow, had received one postcard from him, and was now pleased to be seeing him again. And, hoping that he would not be angered by the Winchell item, she telephoned Daniel at The Times.
He could not have been nicer. He only laughed when the Winchell subject was brought up, and hardly seemed sorry about the item appearing—which, she had to admit, surprised her. Shortly after that, in March of 1956, she read in the newspapers the engagement announcement of Margaret Truman and Clifton Daniel. She wrote a note of congratulations to Daniel, and received in turn a note thanking her “for being such a fine cover-up for myself and Margaret.”
The brunette was devastated by the note, and she neither spoke to nor saw Clifton Daniel again for two years. Now, looking back, she concedes that perhaps she was wrong to have reacted as she did. Perhaps this was his way of being light, she thought, or humorous.
4
The editors in the newsroom, having heard from their correspondents that the world today was in its usual state of greed and disorder, confusion and apathy, were now preparing to attend the news conference and relay the information to Daniel. Daniel would take it all very calmly, they knew, and within an hour the conference would be over, and within a few hours the news would be printed, and then most Timesmen would go home and forget about it, knowing that in the morning it would all come out neatly and tidily in The Times.
They regarded The Times as one of the few predictable things left in modern America and they accepted this fact with degrees of admiration and cynicism, seeing The Times with a varying vision: it was a daily miracle, it was a formula factory. But no matter. It was The Times. And each day, barring labor strikes or hydrogen bombs, it would appear in 11,464 cities around the nation and in all the capitals of the world, fifty copies going to the White House, thirty-nine copies to Moscow, a few smuggled into Peking, and a thick Sunday edition flown each weekend to a foreign minister in Taiwan, for which he would each time pay $16.40. He would pay this because, with thousands of other isolated men in all corners of the earth, he required The Times as necessary proof of the world’s existence, a barometer of its pressure, an assessor of its sanity. If the world did indeed still exist, he knew, it would be duly recorded each day in The Times—as the world was in the process of being recorded on this particular afternoon in New York, June 23, 1966, at three minutes before four, in The Times’ massive Gothic gray-stone building off Broadway at Forty-third Street.
At this moment there were approximately four thousand employees working within the fourteen-story building. They were receptionists and telephone operators, printers and photoengravers, map makers, cafeteria cooks, nurses, editorial writers. Most of them had been in the building since 9 or 10 a.m., arriving as big trucks were backed into the curb unloading dozens of huge rolls of paper that went bumping, thumping down into The Times’ basement and into machines whose paper consumption each year devours more than five million trees.
Of The Times’ complete roster of 5,307 employees, only seven hundred work within the News department on the third floor. They are editors, reporters, copyreaders, critics, news assistants, and they tend to think of themselves as the totality of The Times, its embodiment and only spirit. If t
hey do not completely ignore such other large departments within the building as Production, Promotion, and Advertising, they acknowledge them with a certain condescension. This is particularly true with regard to the Advertising department, which, after all, deals directly and constantly with that most contaminating of commodities, money. It hires hundreds of men to sell what in the News department cannot be bought. It exists as the mundane side of Ochs’s sanctuary.
In the beginning Adolph Ochs was fundamentally a businessman. Later he became much more than that, but without his uncanny business sense he could not have taken over the declining Times in 1896 and revived it, an achievement accomplished by such expedient if inglorious tactics as price-cutting. Ochs in 1898 reduced the price of The Times from three cents a copy, which is what most respectable journals were then charging, to one cent, which was the standard price of the more sensational sheets. Ochs’s associates thought that he was making a major mistake, cheapening The Times’ image without solving its financial problems. Ochs disagreed. The New York Times would not diminish in character, only in price, he said, adding that great numbers of bargain-conscious New Yorkers might switch from the cheaper papers to The Times if the price were the same.
That his assumption was correct was apparent within a year, when The Times’ circulation had tripled, advertising revenue poured in. And by 1915 Ochs’s paper was rich and powerful enough to select and reject advertisers and to eliminate certain ads when more space was needed in the paper for late-breaking news. Such prerogatives, which would quite naturally breed pride and pretension within the News department, were highlights in the career of Adolph Ochs, allowing him to satisfy a duality of drives—he could, under one roof, run both a thriving business and a theocracy, but there must be no intermingling, he knew: they must function separately on different floors; the money changers must stay out of his temple. He meanwhile, financially solid and rising socially, responded to the higher call, never succumbing to such circulation gimmicks as comic strips in his newspaper (although comics were tolerated in his first newspaper, the Chattanooga Times, and still are); and following his death, history would not place Adolph Ochs with so many of his landsmen, those great businessmen, the merchant princes who became bankers—Ochs would be in the more stately company of noble servants.
Still, Ochs never left his store untended, and now in the summer of 1966 the man in charge of making money for The Times was an all-business, no-nonsense type named Monroe Green. Green, who is sixty, sits behind a busy desk in his big office on the second floor, directing the 350-man department that brings in more than $100 million a year by selling ads. A full-page advertisement costs roughly $5,500 in the weekday edition, and $7,000 on Sundays, and the revenue derived from advertising is three times what the paper earns from its circulation sale and its other business ventures combined.
Monroe Green is a big, dark, wavy-haired man who wears sharply tailored dark suits, gleaming cufflinks, white or silvery ties. He speaks quickly, forcefully into a red telephone that rings incessantly on his desk, and he keeps a thousand facts at his manicured, tapping fingertips. He has been on The Times for twenty-five years as an advertising man, before that was on the advertising staffs of the Herald Tribune and the Journal-American, and before that was advertising manager of Macy’s department store, to which he had gone after working his way through the University of Pennsylvania. The luxurious world that is portrayed each day in the advertisements of The Times, the romping happy people off to Europe on holiday, the slim mannequins wearing mink or Tiffany gems, resembles not in the least the world that Green knew most of his life. His father, who ran a small clothing store in South Amboy, New Jersey, died when Green, an only child, was ten years old, and while he can be light-hearted and pleasant, he is more naturally a serious man, a hardened realist, one not easily affected by the airy dreams of his ads.
From his office window he can see the street and a wino sleeping on a stone step behind an old theater. Green can faintly hear the horns of a traffic jam that will inevitably attract a mounted policeman who will inevitably notice press cars or trucks parked illegally but will give out no tickets, knowing that he will park his horse in The Times’ enclosure behind the loading ramps later in the day. Green can feel the vibrations of the press machinery below and sense the power of The Times in ways quite different from Clifton Daniel on the floor above, and his view of life is certainly different from that of the editorial writers on the tenth floor who, within their quiet retreats, write of lofty expectations and ideals that sometimes irritate Green. He remembers one morning when he read a Times editorial critical of the new luxury-apartment skyscrapers being built along the Hudson River, on the New Jersey side a mile south of the George Washington Bridge; the buildings as seen by The Times’ editorial writer were a desecration to the natural beauty of that section of the Jersey cliffs. But Green did not agree—and besides, he had recently sold the builders and owners of the apartments, the Tishman Realty & Construction Company, a $50,000 advertising supplement that had just appeared in The Times praising the project. The Tishman family would be most unhappy about that editorial, Green knew, sitting at his desk expecting a call from them at any moment. They might even wish to withdraw future advertising, which is not an uncommon reaction among some big-business men when a Times article or editorial offends them. A cigarette manufacturer boycotted the Advertising department after a Times editorial dealt with smoking and lung cancer, and this cost the paper several thousand dollars. But with the possible exception of Green, no executive at The Times really cared. When The New York Times cares about what its advertisers think, a few executives have said, it will no longer be The New York Times.
While this is true, Green nonetheless quietly resents the cavalier attitude of a few of his Times colleagues on the floors above, suspecting that their approach to the business side of the paper might also be a reflection of the way they secretly feel about him. He is as aware as they of The Times’ magnetic appeal, but he also believes that it is not this magnetism alone that attracts more than $100 million a year in advertising revenue—Green had something to do with this, his drive, his determination, and that of his staff. It is they who bring in the money that permits piety to reign among the ten wisemen who write editorials on the tenth floor, and it is this money too that permits reporters on the third floor to place a telephone call to Cambodia if necessary to check a single fact. Green also feels that the advertising, though it is paid for by partisans, still provides legitimate news to Times readers. It not only tells what is selling and where, but it also gives a daily portrait of the nation’s economy, an insight into contemporary taste. The ads offer a second perspective on the day, proof that the world is not entirely preoccupied with poverty and threats, bombs and ashes. The pretty girl in the ad wearing a Peck & Peck dress, the man inhaling a mild luxury-length Pall Mall, both offer Times readers an indulgent pause between the gray columns of gravity. And the historians fifty years from now, Green suspects, when they want to know how people lived and dreamed in the Nineteen-sixties, will get as many clues from reading the ads as reading the news. Of course the advertising will stress the positive, the news the negative. The truth will be somewhere in between.
The news of this day in June focused on the “long hot summer,” the race riots in Mississippi; the ads highlighted the summer bargains—Macy’s mink stoles, regularly $299, were down to $236. The news singled out the vast problem of unemployment; the help-wanted ads were jammed with job offers for the skilled and unskilled. The news stressed the shortage of housing; the ads emphasized the availability of housing at all prices around New York, praising the neighborhoods without hinting at the discrimination that exists in these neighborhoods. The news was concentrated on fame and power, grand success and grand failure; the ads catered to the everyday dreams of Everyman, the attainable sweet life, the gadgets and vehicles of escape.
The ads recorded the average man’s tragedies, too, but only in the smallest print in the back of t
he newspaper, back between the stock-market listings and the bland photographs of executives on the rise—here, buried near the bottom, one could read in tiny type the names of those who had gone bankrupt, those who had been abandoned, those who had lost something including dreams and sought recovery, and they told this to The Times. The Times would publish this, charging a few dollars a line, within its classified-advertising pages—a special department on the sixth floor of the Times building largely staffed by middle-aged women who sit within glass-partitioned cubicles, telephones to their ears, jotting down the forlorn facts of daily life, and then they relay these facts, if they are not too vulgar or vengeful, to the composing room on the fourth floor, where they are methodically set into type for the Public Notices column of the next edition of The Times.
Today The Times would announce the fact that Jean Pompilio, sales girl, 89-01 Shore Road, Brooklyn, had gone bankrupt, her liabilities being $15,251, her assets $1,275. Today Edward Dougherty, 89-36 207th Street, Queens, would declare in The Times that his wife, Florence, “having left my bed and board several months ago,” was now completely responsible for her own debts; he would pay no longer. Today the wife of a runaway husband would plead in The Times: “Len W.—Elizabeth and I are alone and lost. We know you feel our pain and tears. We have nothing without you. Please hurry home.” A Manhattan woman on the East Side, upset because she had misplaced her favorite watch, called The Times and announced: “1 Patek Philippe square shaped gold watch, white & yellow gold band. Liberal reward. RH 4-2765.”
The watch was never returned, so the East Side lady soon purchased another one, and not another Patek Philippe, but this was not news for The Times. The whereabouts of Len W. and Florence Dougherty would not be followed up in The Times either, nor would Times readers ever know the precise circumstances that caused Jean Pompilio, sales girl, to fall $14,000 into debt. If asked to discuss her financial plight she will not do so, it is nobody’s business, she will say. It is not news. News, to The Times’ editors on the third floor, is composed of significant current events that you did not know and should know. News, in the world of Monroe Green, is the drumbeat of business with an emphasis on the upbeat, success, comfort, enchantment. It is news to Green that B. Altman & Co.’s shoe salon has an “exciting op-art pump” for $41, that J. Press Inc. has jackets of weightless Vycron Polyester Cotton Collie Cloth with patch and flap lower pockets, hook vent, washable, dryfast; that Eastern Airlines has nonstop jet service to San Antonio. It is news to Green that “Coppertone gives you a better tan!” and illustrating this point in the ad is a big tawny photograph of Raquel Welch in a bikini, a Playboy pose that raised the eyebrows but not the objections of The Times’ Advertising Acceptability department, which has become more liberal in recent years. These men, who work with Green but not under him, reject advertisements dealing with fortune-telling and horoscopes, miracle medicines, and speculative investments in mines, and they generally tone down the wording in ads to avoid overstatement—“the best buy in town” becomes “one of the best buys,” and “the finest coat we have ever seen” “the finest coat we have ever sold.” They will not permit advertisements in a foreign language unless the English translation is included, and they are quick to turn down advertising copy that is too sexually suggestive or tasteless. They disallow nudes in ads except in the case of children, but they will permit the scantiest of bikinis in ads for tropical islands and suntan lotions and soap—The Times, one executive explained, now accepts the fact that women have navels. Which is good news to Green, and he has since made a fortune for The Times from the ads of ladies’ panties and bras, particularly in the Sunday Times Magazine, which has been called the “Girdle Gazette.” It was rare insight on Green’s part to recognize the commercial possibilities of selling ladies’ clothing within a magazine noted for its weighty content, its articles on the Common Market, famine in India, dilemmas in Washington; but Green knew that the Sunday Times, with its circulation of more than 1.4 million, was browsed through by as many women as men, and the improved color process for advertising gave him an added incentive for turning part of the Magazine into a flamboyant leaping ladies’ locker room which, while it sometimes stole scenes from the foreign ministers photographed on the facing pages, actually gave bounce to the product, a recurring stimulant that seemed to unite within the pages these men who were ideologically different.
