Tina Brown was really my main subject, the person I really had the strongest feeling about, and the most mixed emotions. I did a big story on her. By that time [Peter] Kaplan was there. That was a great story for me to learn how to write. I learned how Kaplan edited something, which was different from how Susan Morrison edited. Whenever I turned in a column, she would always appear slightly unsatisfied, except she would laugh at something and then she would send it back to me for certain details like, “What color was the truck?”—that kind of stuff, which was good because you learn how to do it. And when you’re starting out, you forget that those details are important. I remember it was often, “What color…” Kaplan asked me the same thing another time—“What color was Wes Andersen’s SUV?” With Kaplan, he didn’t line-edit the way Susan did. Kaplan was more like before you wrote it, he really wanted to sit down and talk.
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
And the pranks?
When [Peter] Stevenson arrived, it became mayhem. That’s when we started calling George Stephanopoulos and stuff. That was in 1994, Clinton’s midterm. And I used to do Maya Angelou’s voice to prank-call people. The best one was George Stephanopoulos. I would get such a laugh at the fact that once you started calling people, you realize that everybody’s reachable and there is no line between you and other people.
That’s one thing you learn from journalism. Everybody is findable. When I was a kid I thought that there was a wall between you and the people who were on the other side of the TV screen and other people who were doing stuff—but there isn’t any. To call George Stephanopoulos, all I had to do was call the White House switchboard—the number that’s in the phone book! So I called using the Maya Angelou voice and said: “Yeees, may I speak with Geooorge Stephanopoulos, puhleeeeeaase?” And his assistant bought it. Clinton had had Maya Angelou read at his inaugural. And this was when Whitewater was starting, right before Monica. I was calling to offer to read a poem at his midterm. And Stevenson and I had written a fake Maya Angelou poem that had a Whitewater rafting conceit: “I riise on my whitewater raft…” And Stephanapolous was listening. I had him. And he’s just silent, listening. Finally he goes, “Who is this?!” Then he starts cracking up. He bought it for long enough so that it was really funny. I also used to pose as a Singaporean political donor—we called Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaign and said we wanted her to pose with an exotic mountain cat. And if she would, I would consider giving a large sum to the campaign. And we had these Clinton people for weeks, negotiating finer points! I would hint that the amount I wanted to donate was in the millions—cash—just to see what would happen. We didn’t tape it. Just me and Stevenson. What happened was the rhythm of the Observer week: You kill yourself Friday, Monday and Tuesday. Then Wednesday you’re still dead. Then we’d do these crank calls Wednesday afternoon, then it’s back to work.
What about the transition from Susan to Peter?
I feel like Peter [Kaplan] opened it up. Graydon made it relevant to New York City. The first thing he did was make sure that people from other publications read it—so you get a magnified sense of how important it is, because The New York Times is going to mention you. You can have a small circulation but if you reach people in the media, suddenly, it has a bigger impact. Look at where almost all the Observer reporters went from there: They went almost immediately to The New York Times—like 15 people.
Graydon gets a ton of credit. He did that first transformation and Susan Morrison continued that. Then she did a great thing—she brought in Peter Stevenson and Rich Cohen. Then I also wrote feature stories as well as the column. And so I just remember, in a given week, we had a really strong lineup where Peter, Rich—and after a while Warren St. John—we had a lot of people writing feature stories. You had the top of the fold of the front page, which gave the paper gravity, and then you can do all this bullshit on the bottom half of the page, which was usually what I was involved in. So it was a good mix. The paper didn’t look like a flyaway thing. It had some news in it.
So Kaplan takes over in 1994 and there was a redesign in 1996?
Kaplan was very big in this thing: One thing I got involved in with him was writing the headlines every Tuesday. I’d sit in there every morning and that would be a two-hour thing—writing the front-page headlines. And it was a lot of fun. He would say this thing over and over again: “You’ve gotta talk directly to the reader.”
Kaplan had a different mentality from Spy because he had a warmer voice, because he comes out of a slightly different tradition, which is Clay Felker’s New York magazine. Kaplan’s style is, you’re looking at a moment in time that’s happening right now as if you’re looking at it five years from now. There were also a couple of different voices. There was this old guard thing that [Observer owner] Arthur [Carter] would call “an underground paper for the Upper East Side”—for the elite, which it was. The underground paper for billionaires. It got more and more open with Kaplan—less clubby. The ’90s were a happy little time. It was a time that was like the ’20s—when comedy comes to the fore because they were easy times. When the Trade Tower was bombed in 1993, it was taken so unseriously that I did a story on it and it’s on page 18. I went down to the Manhattan Correctional Center and I visited the guys in jail. That’s all the story was, the conditions they were being held in, under 23-hour lockdown, they got to go to the roof one hour a day. That was it. And they prayed. I looked at their cells, they looked at me—it was kind of cool. Like, “Who are the crazy goofballs who attempted to do that? Of course you can’t bring down the World Trade Center!” When the Clinton sex scandal is in the newspaper every day, you’re reading in a time of farce, not tragedy. “The Monica Diaries” that Stevenson wrote were hilarious. And Kaplan was the type who was interested in what the president meant for the country, how it affected the times. He loves to see things like that. There’s Rudy, the mean-ass mayor, and you have a really intelligent president who’s involved in a sex farce. Sex and the City was perfect. That was a great post-Reagan view of New York City, because instead of The Village Voice in the ’60s, which was “Come to New York City and be an artist, live in the rubble!”, the message of Sex and the City was “Come to New York City and be FAAAAABULOUS!” But the weird thing about Sex and the City is that it’s the most depressing column in the world if you actually read it in The Observer. Every one of those columns basically ended with, “I’ve come here to New York City in pursuit of love and I’ve failed again, reader.” Candace didn’t get married at the end of that. There was no happy ending. The column had a measure of contempt for the same things it was showing people were cool.
And the attitude the paper had?
It’s capturing that time. Everyday life and how it felt at the time. The atmosphere Kaplan created, it wasn’t like I’d go to him and say, “Heya boss! I got this idea!”, where I had to write a proposal and then he has to say yes or no. Instead I’d interview a hundred people, cut it down and we had an article! To me that sums up the mood. There were things happening and you just looked at everything like it was a story. There was one where I’d heard people complaining, saying they couldn’t wait to leave the city because it’s so annoying. So you do a story where you report on people who keep saying they want to leave the city, but never do. Articles like that aren’t stuffy things you expect to see in a newspaper, they’re things you expect to see on page 210 of a novel.
Can you talk about the 64th Street office?
The townhouse was cute because it was crowded, but I despised that neighborhood. You walk outside and you would see boutiques and expensive stores. La Perla one day showed up and Kaplan looked and went “WWWOOOOOOW!” Then there was Books & Company, which went out of business. It was very quiet and felt like a library and Stevenson and I would go in there on our gigantic Wednesday lunches. Sometimes we’d eat by Central Park Zoo and watch how the German tourists always wanted to take pictures of this fierce, muscular-looking goat statue.
You went after Michael Pol
lan in a book review, right?
My Michael Pollan review was one of the meanest. He’d built a hut in the woods, and then he wrote a book about building a hut in the woods! And he wrote the book in the hut! It drove me absolutely crazy. In the last paragraph, I challenged him to a fight.
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My Michael Pollan review was one of the meanest. He’d built a hut in the woods, and then he wrote a book about building a hut in the woods!
And he wrote the book in the hut! It drove me absolutely crazy.
In the last paragraph, I challenged him to a fight.
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What about the National Magazine Award winners you predicted?
Somebody who knew who the winners were going to be leaked it to me and Stevenson. Kaplan assigned us to write a forecast of the event, to choose which articles and magazines we thought would win. We read every article that was nominated and said we’re going to pick our own winners. And the source gave us 13 out of 14 actual winners. I guess they gave us one wrong on purpose to hide their asses. We wrote “Here’s Who Should Win / Here’s Who Will Win” and then at the event, we went and everybody had seen our predictions. And one by one, our predictions were coming true as each editor or publisher went up onstage to get their award, and then they realized we had a source. Which showed how connected the paper was. And after that, they really shut down their process so that there aren’t any leaks. Now they make sure no one person knows all the winners.
Was it a normal, healthy work environment?
One time I was on deadline—Tuesdays would be crazy. I’d be editing and people would be calling constantly, and something pissed me off and I smashed my keyboard and the letters jumped off the keyboard and I went down to [office manager] Barry [Lewis] and said, “I need a new keyboard.” They gave me one and I went back upstairs and plugged it in and just went back to work. Kaplan kept coming in, so I closed that door and I barred it with a filing cabinet.
When did Kaplan start throwing stuff out the window?
Once he tried to throw my computer out the window. There were a lot of things flying out of Kaplan’s window. We’d be like, “Here, did you see this article in New York magazine?” and he’d be, “Fuck that article!” then he’d throw it out the window.
And it wasn’t like after work we’d head to the Waverly Inn the rest of the night. It was kind of gross: We were there late and we were exhausted; we didn’t go out after work. We joked around at lunch and at the office but I was always married and had kids so I was always running home.
What about some of your profiles?
Well, I did Jon Stewart in 1995. That was after he left MTV. I interviewed him at this bar down by N.Y.U. and after the interview I realized that he had lied to me about his age, which pissed me off. He’s since corrected it. He used to shave four years off.
David Letterman?
He wouldn’t cooperate so I had to write an essay. That was a desperate cover story where Kaplan was like, “Letterman’s turning 50, we need something!” And I had to pull something out of my ass in two days. I learned to think for the publication as a whole—that was what’s fun about being an editor. You weren’t just one writer; you were trying to look at the paper as a whole—what makes a good cover illustration and a good front page headline, and can you make a piece that at least is decent enough to hold?
Larry David. You wrote the first profile?
Kaplan and I were Seinfeld fans and watching the show and really getting into it and realizing that Larry David was the head writer and nobody knew who he was. Those were great scripts. So I saw his name in the credits and I’m like, “Who’s that?” And I started calling people about him; then I tracked down Kenny Kramer, the real Kramer, who gave me his home number, and I called Larry David at home and I thought he wouldn’t give the interview and he said, “O.K., go ahead!” And it was one of those nights—Monday, late and I’m talking for two hours with Larry David and I knew the show so well that I could say this episode this, this episode that…. And when somebody in his position gets a phone call like that, he’s glad that it’s somebody who really knows his work.
What about Elvis Costello?
That was another thing where I called him—somehow I got his home phone and it was gonna be like 20 minutes, but I knew his stuff so well that we stayed on the phone for two hours. I couldn’t believe it.
You did a piece on Hemingway.
That was a good one. I wanted that to be a cover because it was Hemingway’s centennial celebration all over the country and I thought New York should step in and say, “Here’s the New York take on Hemingway.” I interviewed Lillian Ross for that. She gave me pictures of him and I still have to give them back to her. I did a piece on the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, for it’s 50th anniversary. I got obsessed with that movie. That was the kind of thing where I, on my own, got obsessed with that movie and then I told Kaplan and he of course knows everything about it, and he gets me deeper into it and then maybe I can do a piece. I saw it on TV one night and was like, “Holy fuck, what’s this?”
I couldn’t believe it because it had a reputation for being a soap opera tearjerker and it was not like that at all and then I rented it. Got into it. I thought it was one of those bad movies that wins a lot of Academy Awards, but it turns out that it was one of those good movies that wins a lot of Academy Awards.
Any other secrets from back then?
You learn that any place is accessible. I was watching Saturday Night Live, I wanted to go to the party they have after the show. So I took a name off the credits, and I went to Rockefeller Center, and I said this name of a random cameraman and they said go right in.
But you know, I was really reading from Kaplan’s training—really going back into the New Journalism pieces from the late ’60s and ’70s and trying to do a version of it in a shorter space in The Observer.
I found a good item, about guys off the menu—guys who would go into the kitchen.
Guys who would not order things on the menu! Those guys were too cool to order things on the menu—even in a diner. What dopes. See, a little thing like that with nice little details. You’re just noticing little things about the city, getting them in print before they fade away.
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It was one of those nights—Monday, late and I’m talking for two hours with Larry David, and I knew the show so well that I could say this episode this, this episode that.
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Illustrated by Robert Grossman
1998
Much ado about nothing? Seinfeld’s eponymous sitcom ends a nine-season NBC run
James Cameron’s Titanic has jaded New York teenagers drowning in tears
Super-Pfizer me: Men pop Viagra as women try Brazilian bikini waxes
From here to eternity: consummate crooner Frank Sinatra dies at age 83
Government goes gossip-crazy and White House rocked by Lewinsky scandal
The mother of all chick lit: Bridget Jones’s Diary arrives stateside
Sean “Puffy” Combs throws Black and White Ball at Cipriani
Partnership of restaurateurs Warner LeRoy and David Bouley in crumbs
David Granger, former protégé of GQ’s Art Cooper, starts men’s-mag war at Esquire
1998
JANUARY 26, 1998 BY LORNE MANLY
The New Esquire Man Pops His GQ Mentor
Who’s the Alpha-Male Editor? The Youngish 90’s Guy or His Bearded 70’s-Style Mentor? David Granger Wanted His Own Shop, So He Broke Up Pappy Cooper’s Happy Crew
EVERY SUMMER, THE EDITORS and writers who work at GQ magazine go on a retreat at the Connecticut country home of the magazine’s editor in chief, Art Cooper. At night, in the dining room of the Hopkins Inn, they go through cocktails and dinner and bottles and bottles of wine. The mood is pleasant and raucous. But then GQ’s food writer and resident gourmand, Alan Richman, unveils the many cheeses he has brought up from Zaba
r’s or Fairway, and those present are expected to say whatever is on their minds, no matter how nasty. Someone will suggest an idea for a story or a cover, and someone else will stomp all over it with glee.
Illustrated by Victor Juhasz
It was a little different cheese time in the summer of ’96. GQ’s editor in chief, the bearded and patriarchal Mr. Cooper, had a question for his crew: “What is the good life to you?” he said. “Define it in two words or less.”
David Granger was among the 20 or so people at the long table. He was Mr. Cooper’s protégé, the editor who developed most of GQ’s best writers. Colleagues said he was like the son Mr. Cooper never had.
“I need three,” Mr. Granger said as he prepared his answer. Then he gave his three-word definition of the good life: “editor in chief.”
About 10 months later, the ambitious Mr. Granger was gone. He took the editor in chief job at Esquire and then he convinced a number of GQ writers and editors to come with him. In the testosterone-laden environment of men’s magazines, this meant war. “It’s not enough for Art to stay on top,” said someone who has worked with both men. “I think he needs David to fail.”
FEBRUARY 23, 1998 BY DEIRDRE DOLAN
NEW YORK’S STREETWISE ADOLESCENTS DROWNING IN THEIR TITANIC TEARS
The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots Page 28
