The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Fun?”

  “Sure. Look—everybody in town knows that Herb Rothman doesn’t know sweet fuckoff about publishing. Maybe his old man was some kind of media genius—maybe. Maybe I’ll grant him that. But this is his son, and his son ain’t his old man. So it might be kind of fun to sit back and watch Herb Rothman, and his Brit bimbo, take Mode down the tubes.”

  She gestured vaguely in the direction of the bound copies of the magazine. “About as much fun as watching your child die,” she said.

  “Look,” he said earnestly, “I know how much Mode means to you—don’t get me wrong. But, in the end, it’s only a job, isn’t it? Just as my job is only a job. My job is to work in front of a television camera, but it’s only a television camera, and it’s not the only television camera in the world. Putting out a magazine is putting words and pictures on paper, but Mode isn’t the only magazine in the world—it’s not your last chance to prove that you do what you do brilliantly, that you’re a brilliant editor.” He put down his drink and moved toward her and put his hands on her shoulders. “But listen, I know you’ve been through a hell of an evening, and you’re still in a state of shock. Maybe we shouldn’t even be talking about things like this tonight. We’re both too upset.” He kissed her lowered forehead. “I love you, Alex,” he said. “Meanwhile, I’ve had no dinner. I’m hungry—hungry for food, and hungry for you. Know what my Jewish grandmother used to say? ‘If it’s a problem that can be solved with either a little love or a little money, bubeleh, it isn’t a problem.’ Just think—it’s not every man in the world who gets to make love to a high priestess.”

  She stood up. “I forgot to tell Coleman to fix us chicken sandwiches,” she said miserably. “But let’s see what we can find in the refrigerator. There must be something left over from the party.”

  In the kitchen, they sat side by side on stools at the long butcherblock counter.

  “You really think I should resign?” she said.

  “Absolutely,” he said, munching on a veal chop. “Absolutely. It’s the only way you can come out of this with a shred of dignity, with a shred of pride.”

  “I’d like to fight him, you know.”

  “Don’t. Too undignified. You’re a classy dame. Fighting Herb Rothman would be about as dignified as mud wrestling.”

  “Maybe I’m not so proud,” she said. “Remember, this is my entire life.”

  He put down his chop. “Your entire life? Then where do I fit in, I wonder?”

  “Oh, you know what I mean. My entire professional life.”

  His gaze at her was even. “I’ll tell you this,” he said; “if you get into a mud-wrestling match with that little putz, you’ll lose a hell of a lot of respect from me.”

  Later, in bed, she said to him, “Please, darling. Not tonight. I just can’t make myself be in the mood.”

  He rolled away from her, across the bed, and pretended to go to sleep, but she knew he was only pretending.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I think you’re still in love with Steven,” he said.

  She said nothing, merely stared up at the dark ceiling, and the only sound in the room was the low moan of a tugboat’s horn from the river below. She felt really terrible now, because she loved their lovemaking. It was so even, so smooth, so perfectly timed and cadenced. Not like that first love long ago that overpowered her with its vastness, but more sharing. When she and Mel made love, they were like one soul.

  You blew it, darlin’, the tugboat’s horn seemed to say.

  7

  Alex had learned how to deal with her husband’s grandfather, Herbert Oscar Rothman—or “Ho,” as he was usually called, an acronym of his first two initials—and she had learned early on. There was nothing particularly complicated about Ho, once you discovered what drove him, impelled him, stimulated him, inspired him, which could be summed up in a single word: Power. There was no particularly fine-tuned intelligence here, she had discovered. There was no “fingertip on the pulse-beat of America,” as his hired publicists boasted. There was no sophistication, no sensitivity, and not even very much in the way of education. Ho, she soon realized, understood very little about communications, or publishing, though he headed what was usually described as “a Communications/Publishing Empire.” But he understood Power, and how to use it and abuse it. Lenny was right.

  He was a diminutive, almost frail-seeming man who had stood, in his prime, at no more than five-feet-five and, over the years, had seemed to shrink. When Alex met him, he could have weighed no more than 120 pounds. But Power was tangible in the huge, sprawling signature, “H. O. Rothman,” which was attached to the directives that came down from his office on the thirtieth floor of the Rothman Building at 530 Fifth Avenue. Power was apparent in the size of his office itself, which was as big as a squash court (the offices of other Rothman executives were for the most part half-walled cubicles), and in the dimensions of his oversized antique walnut partners’ desk, behind which he sat in a chair on a raised platform, usually with an unlighted cigar clamped between his teeth.

  In front of this desk were two low, black-leather sofas, so deep that, once a visitor had settled into one of them, he usually had difficulty rising. And the sofas seemed to have been strategically placed so that sunlight from the tall south- and east-facing windows blazed directly into the visitor’s eyes, making it hard for the visitor to get a good look at the president and chief executive officer of Rothman Communications who gazed down upon him.

  Covering the entire north wall of the office was an enormous map of the United States of America—Texas alone was nearly five feet wide—and this map was dotted with large gold stars, indicating the cities where Rothman owned newspapers, radio and television stations, or otherwise maintained offices. When Alex first met her new husband’s grandfather, there were 119 of these gold stars. Today, there were 171. The country, the map not very subtly implied, was Ho Rothman’s domain; to each of these cities and towns, his Power extended.

  It was true that many people in the communications industry hated Ho Rothman. Like many men who sit in seats of absolute Power, Ho Rothman had made his share of enemies. The great Moe Markarian, the other communications czar and Ho’s chief rival during the years of his rise, had written a famous will. After directing that he be cremated, Markarian had instructed his executors “to take my ashes, place them in an open box, carry them to Ho Rothman’s office, and blow them in Ho Rothman’s face.” Needless to say, this directive was never actually carried out.

  It was Moe Markarian who had labeled Ho Rothman “the chameleon,” and while Alex would agree that Ho had many lizard-like qualities, she had decided that he was not really a bad fellow, simply because his deviousness was so obvious as to be almost reassuring, almost endearing.

  She had had her first experience with the way Ho operated at a luncheon at “Rothmere,” the Tarrytown house, not long after she married Steven. The principal guest at the table was a young editor whom Ho had just hired to run a newspaper he had acquired in Taunton, Massachusetts, and the subject under discussion, for some reason, was the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Pounding on the tabletop with his fist for emphasis, and jabbing his skinny finger angrily at the young editor as though accusing him of feeling otherwise, Ho Rothman was depicting Roosevelt as a traitor, an apostate, a Judas.

  “He was Communist!” Ho was saying. “He sold out million pipple to Stalin! He was Russian agent, Russian spy! He should have been hung for treason! He sold out his country!”

  “He was worse than that,” the young editor agreed. “He was a bastard, a son-of-a-bitch adulterer!”

  “He was liar, cheat! In his own country, he sold out to unions and Mafia. In Russia, he sold his own country to Stalin!” And he pounded the table so hard that the stemware trembled.

  “He was a disgrace,” the young editor said. “The country will never recover from what Roosevelt did. I could tell you stories—”

  “In nineteen thirty-five, he save
d this country from revolution,” Ho continued, without missing a beat. “You don’t remember nineteen thirty-five, but in this country would have been revolution if not for Roosevelt. He saved America! Thank God for Roosevelt. Without him, the whole world would be Communist. He was a saint.”

  “You’re right, Mr. Rothman,” the young editor said, nodding enthusiastically in agreement. “No doubt about it, he was the greatest president America ever had.”

  “The greatest!” Ho said, pounding his fist on the table again.

  At first, Alex had wondered whether Ho’s sudden reversal in midargument might be intended as a subtle lesson to editors—that they should be able to back, with strong words, whichever side of a political discussion they happened to believe in. Then she realized that it was simply a performance designed to remind all who witnessed it—including, no doubt, herself—that Ho’s power was so vast that he could completely contradict himself in front of anyone without losing one shred of his dominance, and that whichever side of an argument he chose to take was the right one, even when he took both sides at once.

  This childlike faith in his power she found almost charming, and having discovered this fact about Ho Rothman, she was able to maneuver him from one position to another with relative ease.

  Over the years, she and Ho had had any number of spirited arguments, which Alex had learned to relish, and even look forward to—if not actually predict. Most of their arguments had to do with the kind of advertising her magazine would accept. Selling advertising, after all, was what Ho understood best. Selling advertising had made him rich. Alex often supposed that Ho would advertise raincoats in the Gobi Desert, bikinis in Antarctica, condoms to a convent, if he could find advertisers to foot the bills. “I make a rule for you,” he used to say. “I make a lesson for you. All advertisers is momzers. Each is momzer, each is liar, each is crook. But if the momzer will pay your page rate, and his check clears bank, the momzer is a mensch.”

  But Mode was a specialty magazine, with a specialty audience, and it was necessary for Alex to bring Ho around to her point of view, and persuade him that certain advertisers, despite their ability to pay her page rate, were not suited to her special breed of women readers, or to the special image her magazine was trying to project. She refused, for instance, to accept advertising for feminine hygiene products, or laxatives, and she had turned down an ad depicting an implicitly incontinent June Allyson cavorting on the deck of a cruise ship, implicitly wearing Depend adult diapers. She would not accept cigarette advertising, a lucrative category for many magazines. She would accept ads from Armani, Calvin Klein, and Bulgari, but not ads for Jacyln Smith’s designs for K mart clothes. She accepted Calvin Klein’s mysteriously erotic advertising for Obsession, featuring elaborately intertwined nude bodies, but when Avon Products submitted a moisturizer ad depicting a nude female, she turned it down. She scrutinized the copy for painkiller advertising carefully, and would not accept anything with the words “pain,” “inflammation,” “suffer,” “hurt,” “ache,” or “flare-up.”

  Naturally, Ho Rothman disagreed vociferously with all of these decisions, seeing them simply as a needless loss of revenue. When Ho disagreed with you, he became an outraged prima donna, screaming imprecations, tugging wildly at the wispy fringes of his hair, pounding his fists on his desk top, even hurling breakable objects across the room. “How can you talk this craziness?” he would wail. “You a crazy woman, Alex? Why you trying to ruin me? Why you trying to make me crazy? I think you a candidate for nuthouse!” And he would cast his eyes heavenward, and throw his clasped hands in the air, as though beseeching the Old Testament deity for the gift of sanity. “I am surrounded by lunatics!” he would cry.

  She had tried explaining that she did not see herself as putting out a magazine that would advertise only expensive products to expensive people. Her own demographic studies showed that many of her readers were far from wealthy. It had more to do with what she called her magazine’s “chin-line.” “We’re a chin-up publication,” she would say to him. “We try to come to our readers saying we’re proud of who we are, and we want our readers to come away from us feeling a little prouder of who they are. No publication is worth its salt if it doesn’t boost its readers’ self-esteem.” Needless to say, this argument made no sense at all to Ho.

  She had also tried to point out that advertising money that might be lost in certain advertising categories was more than made up for in others—automotive advertising, for instance. It used to be an article of faith in Detroit that the purchase of the family car was a man’s decision, and Detroit refused to advertise in publications that could not deliver a large male readership. Alex had managed to change all that. She produced studies that showed that even in households where the man completely controlled the purse strings, the woman had a great deal to say when it came to choosing a car’s make, size, color, and styling. She also showed a study indicating that women were seventy-five percent more willing to finance the purchase of an automobile than men were—an important factor in new car sales. “We women have a reputation for liking to run up bills,” she had told a meeting of potential advertisers at the Detroit Athletic Club, with a wink. “But since, in eighty percent of American households, the wife balances the checkbook, we don’t run up bills that we can’t pay.” She produced a now-familiar statistic showing that the majority of America’s personal wealth was in women’s hands—and, finally, a survey showing that American women actually drove more automobile miles than men did, running errands, delivering and picking up children at school, collecting their husbands at commuter trains, and so on. As a result, Mode had become a primary medium for automobile advertising. But none of this impressed Ho Rothman, who saw rejected advertising only in terms of disappearing dollars.

  Cool, well-reasoned logic got you nowhere with Ho. Neither did carefully fact-supported argument. On the other hand, you could often play successfully on his own irrational fears, prejudices, and superstitions. And it was always important to remember that, in order to sell any idea to Ho Rothman, he had to be persuaded that the idea actually had been his own to begin with.

  When he had exploded over her wish to ban cigarette advertising from Mode, Alex remembered that Ho was almost obsessive in his dislike of what he called “colletch boys”—or, indeed, of anyone who appeared to be better educated than he was. “Look,” she had said, “cigarette advertising is for college kids. It’s for the back pages of college humor magazines, where the tobacco industry hopes it can hook ’em when they’re young.”

  “Colletch boys,” he fumed. “Is all momzers, smart-alecks, wisenheimers. But is millions dollars you are throwing out the window, Alex. Millions dollars!”

  Then she remembered how virulently he distrusted doctors, and she pointed to the mandatory surgeon general’s warning that had to be displayed prominently in every cigarette ad. “Then we’ll have to include that,” she said. “It’s a federal regulation.” He read the line slowly, moving his lips.

  His fist crashed down on his desk. “Surgeon general!” he shouted. “Who is this surgeon general? Why we plugging him in my book? Why we give him free plug? Doctors is rich enough already, and if this momzer was elected surgeon general, he is richest momzer of them all! I make a rule for you. No doctors get free plugs in my book. Doctors get rich enough from killing sick pipple.”

  Later, when she had rejected an ad for a product that claimed it was “prescribed by most doctors for relief from painful swelling and itching of hemorrhoidal tissue,” he had called her on the carpet again.

  “But, Ho,” she said. “You made a rule. No doctors get plugged in our ad pages.”

  “Right,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure you remembered it.”

  Alex accepted most liquor advertising, but she had decided to draw the line at beers that were sold in long-necked bottles, and wines that were sold with screw-tops rather than corks. This had produced one of Ho’s most violent outbursts. “You are meshugge, Alex!” he had ro
ared. “That’s the most meshuggeneh idea I hear from you! You trying to kill me, or what else?” And he tore at his fringe of hair as though trying to pull it from its roots. “Long necks! Screw-tops! Beer is beer, wine is wine. What is difference in neck, if long neck, short neck, or no neck, or if in cork or no cork? I think you are the screw-top talking long necks and corks. I am hearing true craziness now!”

  “Now listen, Ho,” she said. “Beer in long-necked bottles is what hillbillies drink in Appalachia. Wine with screw-caps is what winos drink out of paper bags down on Skid Row—because they don’t want to push a cork in and out every time they take a slug. Look at yourself, Ho. Look at yourself and Aunt Lily. You are both ladies and gentlemen. You are people of taste and refinement. You like the finer things of life. Would you ever serve a wine with a screw-top at your table? Would you ever offer a guest a beer in a long-necked bottle? Never! You’d be considered crude and uncultivated. Would you even want a magazine that showed pictures of such things in your house?”

  “Look,” he shouted immediately. “I make a rule for you. I make a lesson for you. No beer in long-neck bottles. No wines in crew-cut tops. You think we advertise to hillbillies? You think we advertise to Skid Row winos? Not in my magazine, you don’t! Never! We advertise only to the best!”

  There was something in the business world called “factoring,” which was a little like trying to sell postdated checks. A piece of paper, such as an IOU, might be worth nothing today but worth a lot next week. Still, it might be sellable today, if you could find the right buyer, and offered him the right discount, kept sweetening your sales pitch with little concessions and giveaways. Dealing with Ho was a little like that. You had to haggle with his pride, and bargain with his power. Alex called it dealing with the Ho Factor. Oh, Lenny was absolutely right. There would never be another Ho.