by Nora Ephron
Brendan Gill is now sixty and went to work at the magazine in 1938, and someone I know there suggested to me that he arrived too late to understand its early years, and too soon to understand the late ones. That is unfair: the explanation for Gill’s insensitivity probably lies more in his character than in bad timing. Gill’s character is the shall-I-compare-me-to-a-summer’s-day variety: he is a joyous, happy man, he tells us, who has never suffered a day’s pain in his life. Compared to other New Yorker writers, whom he describes as unsociable moles, he is uncommonly gregarious and fun-loving. He attends five or six parties a week. “I am acquainted with far more people out in the world than anyone else on The New Yorker,” he writes. Life has been a lark. He was born into comparative wealth, went to Yale, made Skull and Bones (an achievement he mentions a half-dozen times), had a rich father to aid him in the purchases of his town houses and mansions and country homes, several of which are actually pictured in his book. The smug self-congratulation of all this extends to his professional achievements. “In sheer quantity of output—most trivial of measurements!—I am by now something of a nonpareil,” he writes.
The book Gill has written is not really a book; it’s a series of anecdotes star-dashed together at four hundred pages length, a sketchy memoir masquerading as history. The omissions in it are gigantic: there are bare mentions, captions really, of Lillian Ross, J. D. Salinger and Robert Benchley; on the other hand, there are oddly lengthy descriptions of pseudonymous minor writers and clerks who dressed badly, had oily hair, hung their wash in the men’s room, committed suicide, or turned out to be homosexuals. The so-called younger writers at The New Yorker are virtually omitted. “I don’t know the younger writers,” Gill said recently, by way of explanation.
The people Gill does write about are a good deal less fortunate than the ones he omits. Part of the problem here is the form he has chosen; the anecdote is a particularly dehumanizing sort of descriptive narrative. But the main problem, once again, is Brendan Gill. Most of the people he writes about are, for the most part, people he clearly thinks of as friends. God help them. The stories he tells, stories he seems to mean to be charming and affectionate, are condescending, snobbish and mean. Here, to take one interesting and subtle example, is Gill on cartoonist Alan Dunn and his wife Mary Petty: “[They] were cherished by their friends like prizes that had been won in some incomparable secret lottery; none of these friends wanted to risk making the Dunns known to the world at large, and the Dunns were content within their small circle and with the superb consolation of their work.” Wolcott Gibbs, the subject of a long section in the book, was a man who we discover married beneath himself not once but twice, was rude, would like to have been tapped for Skull and Bones, wore a brown fedora with a tuxedo, smoked and drank too much, and “had as many affairs as the next man.” And what of Gibbs’s work? Gill tells us Gibbs was brilliant at parody, “a form favored by writers of the second or third rank,” and then goes on to devote several pages to an analysis of Gibbs’s only play, A Season in the Sun, which contained a character based on Harold Ross. The play, Gill tells us, was a waste of Gibbs’s talents and was unfairly praised by the critics, who were fond of Gibbs. Stanley Edgar Hyman, another writer who had the bad luck to be Gill’s friend, surfaces in his book to chase girls, wear multicolored socks with sandals, and drink himself into a stupor. He and his wife, writer Shirley Jackson, attend an anniversary party at the Gills’ country home. “On a stretch of lawn between our house and the surrounding woods,” Gill writes, “we had pitched an enormous white marquee; metal-lined boxes, ordinarily used to hold potted flowers, were filled with ice and scores of bottles of Piper-Heidsieck, and a very satisfactory occasion it turned out to be.… Shirley was wearing a shapeless, reddish coverall, which served to exaggerate her size and not, as she must have hoped, to diminish it, and with her sharp writer’s eye she cannot have failed to note that to many of the other guests she seemed an apparition, impossible to account for in their world of strict bodily discipline.”
I feel squeamish even quoting all this; it seems to me I am compounding Gill’s cruelties by repeating them. I want to make one more point, though, before moving on to Shawn and Ross, and that is about Gill’s prurience. Brendan Gill is uncommonly prurient, and his book is full of leering references to women, sex and adultery. Gill notes several times that he does not understand why his friends persist in thinking of him as a Catholic when he is in fact a lapsed Catholic; my guess is that they think of him this way because he is as prurient in person as he is in print.
Brendan Gill’s book is dedicated to William Shawn, who has been The New Yorker’s editor since 1952, and he provides a number of anecdotes about Shawn that are meant to be jolly. They mainly concern Shawn’s fear of automatic elevators and his extreme discomfort about sexual references. I cannot imagine that a man who is constitutionally incapable of taking an automatic elevator finds anything but pain in the situation; that does not seem to have occurred to Gill. He has even less comprehension of what Shawn has done for the magazine: there is only one reference in his book to The New Yorker’s coverage of Vietnam and Watergate.
It is generally accepted over at The New Yorker that Gill’s greatest sin is in not understanding Shawn. I’m not even sure he understands Shawn’s predecessor, Harold Ross. He paints him as a buffoon, a gat-toothed, ill-dressed social incompetent who made typographical errors and disdained Freud. All of this is doubtless true; but it is, like everything in Gill’s book, only a small part of the picture. Shawn provided Gill with a seven-page essay on Ross that closes Here at The New Yorker. The essay tends to give Shawn’s imprimatur to the book—it is said he regrets having done it. At the same time, though—and I have no idea whether it was intentional—Shawn’s essay is a gentle but thorough rebuke to Gill: it has all the complexity and depth that Gill’s book lacks. As Shawn writes of Ross: “He lent himself to anecdote. Because of this, and because his personal qualities were large in scale and included a formidable charm and magnetism, the serious and inspired work that he did as an editor tended at times to be lost sight of.” The articles Ross published by Liebling, Mitchell, Bainbridge, McKelway, Hamburger … the list is endless, really, but the point is simply that The New Yorker has always published brilliant magazine writing; it has always been a serious publication—if not about its subjects, at least about its prose. Under Ross, the profiles had an edge and bite that have been sadly missing—and this is Shawn’s weakness as an editor—in recent years. (In many ways, the war in Vietnam, and Shawn’s decision to hammer at it, rescued the magazine from the blandness that still characterizes some of what it prints.)
Gill’s New Yorker—under Shawn and Ross—is no more serious than Gill’s view of life. It is a parody of The New Yorker, the Eustace Tilley stereotype, the frivolous, upper-class publication with a sensibility best described as Jaded Preppie, the old “Talk of the Town” column, we went to a party last night. Gill has written a history of the magazine to conform to his image of it. As he himself admits, albeit in another context: “I am always so ready to take a favorable view of my powers that even when I am caught out and made a fool of, I manage to twist this circumstance about until it becomes a proof of how exceptional I am. The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.”
June, 1975
Bob Haldeman and CBS
The decision by CBS to pay H. R. Haldeman at least fifty thousand dollars to appear in the 60 Minutes time slot this spring is one that no one at the network—no one with any sense, that is—defends any longer. Dick Salant, the head of CBS News, has gotten to the point where he admits flat out that it was a mistake. The news personnel were appalled at the decision in the first place, and when the interview turned out as it did, they began walking around with a smug sense of vindication. The only person I spoke to at the network who was willing to defend the action was the man who negotiated it, Bill Leonard, the head of som
ething called soft news; and even his defense lacks conviction. It was worth doing, Leonard says, because it raised the question of whether the networks should pay former public officials for interviews. It’s a shame CBS could not have managed to raise this question without Haldeman’s help; Gordon Liddy, to whom CBS paid fifteen thousand dollars earlier this year, ought to have been enough. At the same time, though, I think there is something to be said for the Haldeman transaction: it was worth every penny simply because of what it demonstrated about television.
Television news coverage has gotten away with a great deal in recent years—partly because of its coverage of the Vietnam war. Television showed us the war. It showed us the war in a way that was—if you chose to watch television, at least—unavoidable. You could not turn the page. You could not even switch channels: all you got was another network showing you the war. All of us who had worked side by side over the years with television reporters, who had watched in dismay as the cameras moved in and the television reporter cornered the politician (“How do you feel about the vote, Senator?”) or cornered the man on the stretcher being carried out of the burning building (“How do you feel about the fact that your legs were just blown off, sir?”), calmed down a bit during the war years. Television was showing us the war. But giving television points for that was a little like giving a hooker points for turning a trick; that, after all, is what television does: it shows things. And beyond that, television for the most part was showing us the war in much the same way it was showing us everything else. Simply, and in two-minute snippets. Bleeding babies and bleeding soldiers. Explosions. Helicopter insertions. GI’s on stretchers being asked how they felt about the fact that their legs had just been blown off. We got very little from the Vietnamese: most Vietnamese do not speak English. We got very little about what the war was doing to Vietnam, about the corruption of the South Vietnamese government, its political prisoners, about the morale of ARVN, about the depth of racism among United States forces. There were exceptions to this, of course—documentaries, mostly, and here I think immediately of Robert Northshield’s on mixed-race children in South Vietnam. But even documentaries were governed by the overriding fact of television: it is a performance medium. It must attract an audience. And the way to attract that audience, the people in television assumed, was to show the war in the most simple, sentimental way. Our boys. Dying children. And most recently, orphans. The condescension implicit in all this is obvious; what is not so obvious, I think, is the utter lack of thought among television people about how television ought to cover news.
I don’t claim to know exactly how television ought to have handled H. R. Haldeman; what is clear, though, is that no one at the network ever considered doing anything but a traditional face-to-face interview. Haldeman approached Bill Leonard back in October, before the cover-up trial began. Through his lawyer, he submitted a handwritten outline for a book called Inside the Nixon White House, which an agent, Scott Meredith, had refused to handle. It is an astonishing document, amateurish and virtually puerile. “Richard Nixon led me,” it begins, “into the four most satisfying, trying, productive, demanding, enjoyable, difficult, rewarding, challenging, stimulating—and truly whole—years of my life.… Nothing in the course of future events can change the facts or the goals, feelings and actions of those of us who proudly served a great man in a great time.” The chapter outlines begin with short paragraphs of introductory remarks, followed by sections titled “Headlines,” “Characters” and “Inside Stories.” The introductory remarks to a chapter called “The Inner Circle” go like this: “Insightful anecdotes about the four key men—Kissinger, Connally, Mitchell and Ehrlichman—and other important men (Agnew, Rogers, Moynihan, Shultz and Burns) and groups of men and women (White House assistants, young staffers, Cabinet, Congress, personal friends and family) around the President, and their relations with Richard Nixon.” The character list includes just about everyone who worked for Nixon, name after name, and the headlines, all properly capitalized, are: “Secret Nixon Plan To Make Connally VP”; “Martha Really Was the Reason Mitchell Quit”; “Kissinger’s Salzburg Tantrum Was Just Latest in a Series.”
Leonard and another CBS executive, Gordon Manning, went to Washington to discuss the proposal over dinner with Haldeman. “My conclusion,” said Leonard, “was that there was a possibility it might be an interview of considerable lasting public value. I never did think he would say something on the air in terms of a holy confessional. He made that clear. But he ran the White House, and I thought if you could find out how he ran it …” Leonard paused. “Maybe I was a little naïve about that.” The three men discussed where the interview was to be done, and who was to do it. (Leonard claims he thought of Mike Wallace from the first, which was logical: Wallace is a first-rate television interviewer, and he has always had good connections with the Nixon White House, which considered offering him Ron Ziegler’s job in 1968.) All that remained to be worked out was the money. Haldeman’s lawyer suggested a figure of either $150,000 or $200,000—Leonard, possibly from spending too much time around Haldeman, has suffered a memory loss about the exact figure. CBS said that was far too high. But they never attempted to call Haldeman’s bluff by offering to put him on the air for nothing; they were, after all, doing him a favor. Instead, they settled on a price that was an incredible tactical error: CBS would pay Haldeman $25,000 for each hour of interview that was used. This was done, Salant says, to provide an incentive for Haldeman to be forthcoming, to be worth the money he was being paid. It did nothing of the kind. Haldeman managed to screw a television network in a way that eluded him in all his years of White House plotting against the media. (Haldeman also sold CBS twenty-five hours of home movies, of which the network used four minutes. Industry insiders suggest that Haldeman may have been paid additionally for the film.)
CBS never considered following Haldeman around for a couple of weeks with hand-held cameras in the hope that he might eventually reveal himself. They did not consider using Dan Rather, or any of the print journalists who knew enough about Watergate to interview Haldeman properly. They did not cut into the show some of the other television footage of Haldeman that was available, obtained at no cost, like the moment when he bared his teeth at the Ervin subcommittee; they did not contrast Haldeman’s fuzzy, sugar-coated recollections with his remarks on the White House tapes. Instead, they sent in Wallace. Wallace does his homework. Wallace studies. Wallace was stuffed, like a Strasbourg goose, with papers and facts and questions and quotes. He spent fifty-five hours in preliminary talks with Haldeman—a period of time so long as to make me suspect he left the fight in the locker room—and when he sat down to tape, for over six hours, he found out firsthand why H. R. Haldeman used to be called the Berlin Wall. Haldeman gave a brilliant performance: he played the part of a vibrant football player who had been taken out of the game by a fluke, a minor muscle spasm no one could cure. I said only a paragraph ago that Wallace is a first-rate television interviewer; that is what he is, and that is all he is. He too gave a performance. He gave us a bit of obsequiousness, and he gave us a lot of exasperated sighs. And two hours of sweet talk and exasperation did not make up for the fact that Wallace just did not know enough to follow through. Time after time, Haldeman made remarks that were not supported by the facts, and time after time, Wallace blew it.
When Haldeman insisted that many of the excesses of the campaign were the fault of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, not the White House, Wallace failed to point out that there was no real difference between the two, that Haldeman in fact controlled the CREEP secret fund. When Haldeman claimed that Woodward and Bernstein had admitted in their book they were wrong about him, Wallace did not correct him; what Woodward and Bernstein actually wrote was that they were wrong in saying that Hugh Sloan had named Haldeman before the grand jury as one of the men who controlled the fund. When Haldeman made what was the only potential news of the interview, by admitting that he occasionally chose not to carry out Nixon’s
orders, Wallace did not press him for an example not already publicly known; more important, he neglected to ask Haldeman how, in view of this, he could base his defense at the cover-up trial on the claim that he was just following orders. Haldeman’s outline had made the CBS people believe that he would be anecdotal and gossipy about the so-called inner circle. But all Wallace got from him were the headlines of his book. Secret Nixon Plan To Make Connally VP. Martha Really Was the Reason Mitchell Quit. Kissinger’s Salzburg Tantrum Was Just Latest in a Series. Wallace prodded Haldeman for embellishment, but to no avail.
Back in the days when it was still defending its decision, CBS claimed that it was paying not for hard news but for memoirs. Solzhenitsyn, Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Walter Lippmann were also paid under this guideline. The other networks were swift—and hypocritical—in denouncing CBS. NBC, which paid Marina Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, the Fischer quints, and recently negotiated a roundabout deal with John Dean, said through News President Richard C. Wald that they would never have done it. ABC, having paid Lieutenant William Calley indirectly for an interview, said through its News President William Sheehan: “A news maker should not be paid for an interview.” CBS continued to insist for a time that it paid only for memoirs; in fact, the network paid Dispatch News Service and Seymour Hersh ten thousand dollars for an interview with Private Paul Meadlo on the My Lai massacre.
A few days after the second Haldeman interview appeared on the air, New York’s WNET did a Behind the Lines show on the whole business, and on it, CBS’s Bill Leonard asked a question. “If we could forget just a moment whether he was paid or not,” Leonard asked, “was it in the nature of a public service? Was it important or not important? Was it useful or not useful …?” It is an interesting question—largely because it is totally invalid. There is no way to forget that Haldeman was paid. He was paid. The smell of money perfumed both hours. The shows were dominated by the fee, and Haldeman’s responses were dictated by how far he thought he had to go to earn it. And all in all, the entire episode has made me change my point of view on checkbook journalism. I used to think it was a mistake to pay anyone for a story. I used to think it made it impossible for serious journalists to cover events. I used to think it would mean that news stories would begin to go to the highest bidder. Now I think the networks should pay everyone. Hard news sources, soft news sources, everyone. It will serve to remind us that, at this point at least, there is no reason to confuse television news with journalism.
