Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble

by Nora Ephron

  I can’t quarrel with the financial settlement Goodwin got. I don’t like it, but it’s a business decision, I suppose. But Goodwin got the money and the apology. This is a tribute to him: he is as crafty and manipulative and brilliant as Bo Burlingham said he was. But it’s a bad moment for this magazine. Abe Blinder told me that he had no problem with the settlement because: “There is no principle involved.” I would like to state the principle involved. It’s very simple. A magazine has an obligation to its writers and readers to stand by what it prints.

  In any case, the Goodwin business is over. Bo Burlingham got $1,250 for his article and Dick Goodwin got $12,500 and an apology. There are all sorts of lessons to be drawn here, but the only one that seems to me at all worth mentioning is that I will henceforth try, when assigning articles on controversial subjects, to find writers who know the Tisch brothers.

  In our conversation, Abe Blinder said that another reason he would probably not allow this column to run in Esquire was that Arnold Gingrich is dead and cannot defend himself. I am deeply sorry that Arnold is dead, for many reasons. For one thing, he was a man who could change his mind, and I like to think that by now he might have come around to Burlingham’s way of seeing Dick Goodwin. For another, I think he meant it when he said what he did at the end of his monologue on Goodwin: “I’ve always said that this is a magazine of infinite surprises where people can say what they damn please, even to the extent of the editors disagreeing among themselves.” If he were alive, I think that on those grounds he would have allowed me to print this column in the magazine: he would also have admitted that I outfoxed him just a little bit on that one small point.

  One last thing. I speak only for myself, but I would like to apologize to Bo Burlingham.

  November, 1976

  Gourmet Magazine

  I’m not sure you can make a generalization on this basis, which is the basis of twice, but here goes: whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine. I think of it as my own personal bride’s disease. The first time I started buying it was in 1967, when everyone my age in New York City spent hours talking about things like where to buy the best pistachio nuts. Someone recently told me that his marriage broke up during that period on account of veal Orloff, and I knew exactly what he meant. Hostesses were always making dinners that made you feel guilty, meals that took days to prepare and contained endless numbers of courses requiring endless numbers of plates resulting in an endless series of guests rising to help clear. Every time the conversation veered away from the food, the hostess looked hurt.

  I got very involved in this stuff. Once I served a six-course Chinese dinner to twelve people, none of whom I still speak to, although not because of the dinner. I also specialized in little Greek appetizers that involved a great deal of playing with rice, and I once produced something known as the Brazilian national dish. Then, one night at a dinner party, a man I know looked up from his chocolate mousse and said, “Is this Julia’s?” and I knew it was time to get off.

  I can date that moment almost precisely—it was in December, 1972—because that’s when I stopped buying Gourmet the first time around. And I can date that last Gourmet precisely because I have never thrown out a copy of the magazine. At the end of each month, I place it on the top of the kitchen bookshelf, and there it lies, undisturbed, forever. I have never once looked at a copy of Gourmet after its month was up. But I keep them because you never know when you might need to. One of the tricky things about the recipes in Gourmet is that they often refer back to recipes in previous copies of the magazine: for example, once a year, usually in January, Gourmet prints the recipe for pâte brisée, and if you throw out your January issue, you’re sunk for the year. All the tart recipes thereafter call for “one recipe pâte brisée (January, 1976)” and that’s that. The same thing holds for chicken stock. I realize that I have begun to sound as if I actually use the recipes in Gourmet, so I must stop here and correct that impression. I don’t. I also realize that I have begun to sound as if I actually read Gourmet, and I’d better correct that impression too. I don’t actually read it. I sort of look at it in a fairly ritualistic manner.

  The first thing I turn to in Gourmet is the centerfold. The centerfold of the magazine contains the Gourmet menu of the month, followed by four color pages of pictures, followed by the recipes. In December the menu is usually for Christmas dinner, in November for Thanksgiving, in July for the Fourth, and in April—when I bought my first Gourmet in four years owing to my marriage that month to a man with a Cuisinart Food Processor—for Easter. The rest of the year there are fall luncheons and spring breakfasts, and so forth. But the point is not the menus but the pictures. The first picture each month is of the table of the month, and it is laid with the china and crystal and silver of the month. That most of the manufacturers of this china and crystal and silver advertise in Gourmet should not concern us now; that comes later in the ritual. The table and all the things on it look remarkably similar every issue: very formal, slightly stuffy, and extremely elegant in a cut-glass, old-moneyed way. The three pages of pictures that follow are of the food, which looks just as stuffy and formal and elegant as the table itself. It would never occur to anyone at Gourmet to take the kind of sleek, witty food photographs I associate with the Life “Great Dinners” series, or the crammed, decadent pictures the women’s magazines specialize in. Gourmet gives you a full-page color picture of an incredibly serious rack of lamb persillé sitting on a somber Blue Canton platter by Mottahedeh Historic Charleston Reproductions sitting on a stiff eighteenth-century English mahogany table from Charles Deacon & Son—and it’s no wonder I never cook anything from this magazine: the pictures are so reverent I almost feel I ought to pray to them.

  After the centerfold I always turn to a section called “Sugar and Spice.” This is the letters-to-the-editor department, and by all rights it should be called just plain “Sugar.” I have never seen a letter in Gourmet that was remotely spicy, much less moderately critical. “I have culled so many fine recipes from your magazine that I feel it’s time to do the sharing.…” “My husband and I have had many pleasant meals from recipes in Gourmet and we hope your readers will enjoy the following.…” Mrs. S. C. Rooney of Vancouver, B.C., writes to say that she and her husband leaf through Gourmet before every trip and would never have seen the Amalfi Drive but for the February, 1972, issue. “It is truly remarkable how you maintain such a high standard for every issue,” she says. Almost every letter then goes on to present the writer’s recipe—brownies Weinstein, piquant mushrooms Potthoff, golden marinade Wyeth, Parmesan puff Jupenlaz. “Sirs,” writes Margy Newman of Beverly Hills, “recently I found myself with two ripe bananas, an upcoming weekend out of town, and an hour until dinnertime. With one eye on my food processor and the other on some prunes, I proceeded to invent Prune Banana Whip Newman.” The recipe for one prune banana whip Newman (April, 1976) followed.

  “You Asked For It” comes next. This is the section where readers write in for recipes from restaurants they have frequented and Gourmet provides them. I look at this section for two reasons: first, on the chance that someone has written in for the recipe for the tarte Tatin at Maxwell’s Plum in New York, which I would like to know how to make, and second, for the puns. “Here is the scoop du jour,” goes the introduction to peach ice cream Jordan Pond House. “We’d be berry happy,” Gourmet writes in the course of delivering a recipe for blueberry blintzes. “Rather than waffling about, here is a recipe for chocolate waffles.” “To satisfy your yen for tempura, here is Hibachi’s shrimp tempura.” I could go on, but I won’t; I do want to mention, though, that the person who writes these also seems to write the headlines on the “Sugar and Spice” column—at least I think I detect the same fine hand in such headlines as “Curry Favor,” “The Berry Best” and “Something Fishy.”

  I skip the travel pieces, many of which are written by ladies with three names. “If Provence did not exist, the poets would be forced to invent it, for it is a
lyrical landscape and to know it is to be its loving captive for life.” Like that. Then I skip the restaurant reviews. Gourmet never prints unfavorable restaurant reviews; in fact, one of its critics is so determined not to find fault anywhere that he recently blamed himself for a bad dish he was served at the Soho Charcuterie: “The potatoes that came with it (savoyarde?—hard to tell) were disappointingly nondescript and cold, but I seemed to be having bad luck with potatoes wherever I went.” Then I skip the special features on eggplant and dill and the like, because I have to get on to the ads.

  Gourmet carries advertisements for a wide array of upper-class consumer goods (Rolls-Royce, De Beers diamonds, Galliano, etc.); the thing is to compare these ads to the editorial content of the magazine. I start by checking out the Gourmet holiday of the month—in May, 1976, for example, it was Helsinki—and then I count the number of ads in the magazine for things Finnish. Then I like to check the restaurants reviewed in the front against the restaurant ads in the back. Then, of course, I compare the china, silver and crystal in the menu of the month against the china, silver and crystal ads. All this is quite satisfying and turns out about the way you might suspect.

  After that, I am pretty much through looking at Gourmet magazine. And where has it gotten me, you may ask. I’ve been trying to figure that out myself. Last April, when I began my second round, I think I expected that this time I would get around to cooking something from it. Then May passed and I failed to make the rhubarb tart pictured in the centerfold and I gave up in the recipe department. At that point, it occurred to me that perhaps I bought Gourmet because I figured it was the closest I would ever get to being a gentile. But that’s not it either. The real reason, I’m afraid, has simply to do with food and life, particularly married life. “Does everyone who gets married talk about furniture?” my friend Bud Trillin once asked. No. Only for a while. After that you talk about pistachio nuts.

  December, 1976

  The Detroit News

  A few months ago, Seth Kantor went and laid an egg. Kantor works in Washington as an investigative reporter for the Detroit News, and in October, 1976, he broke a big one, a scoop on the Michigan Senate race, a front-page story that he clearly thinks ought to have earned him praise, if not prize nominations; instead, it got him nothing but criticism. Two columnists on his own paper attacked him. Mike Royko of the Chicago Daily News suggested that the Detroit News be awarded a large bronze laundry hamper for “the most initiative in poking around in somebody else’s dirty underwear.” Even Kantor’s wife thought he went a little overboard.

  Kantor’s story said that Democrat Don Riegle, a Michigan congressman then running for the Senate, had had an affair in 1969 with a young woman who tape-recorded several of their conversations with his permission. (In 1969 Riegle was married to his first wife; he is now married to his second.) The News printed selected portions of the taped transcripts. Seth Kantor claims that the episode “tells you a lot about a man’s judgment as well as his stability.” A News editorial that endorsed Riegle’s opponent Marvin Esch claimed that the story revealed Riegle’s “arrogance, immaturity, cold-bloodedness and consuming political ambition.”

  The voters of Michigan apparently felt otherwise. The day Kantor’s story appeared, Riegle had slipped to a bare 1 percent edge in the polls; on election day three weeks later he won the Senate seat by a 6 percent margin, and his staff considered sending the News a telegram reading: “Thanks. We couldn’t have done it without you.”

  In the year or so since Fanne Foxe jumped into the Tidal Basin, journalists have begun to debate a number of extremely perplexing questions concerning the private lives of political figures. How much does the public have the right to know? How much does an editor have the right to determine what the public has a right to know? Where do you cross the line into invasion of privacy? Last summer, in the most successful book promotion stunt ever pulled off, Elizabeth Ray brought down Wayne Hays—but she was an editor’s dream, the-mistress-on-the-payroll-who-can’t-type. What about mistresses who can type? Editors justify printing just about anything about a politician on the grounds of character. Are those adequate grounds? These questions are worth thinking about, but they all assume that decisions on what to print will be made by responsible journalists. As it happens, that may not be the correct assumption in the case of the Detroit News.

  The News is the largest afternoon newspaper in America (circulation 613,000), and until last year, when the Detroit Free Press overtook it, it was one of the few big-city afternoon papers that sold more copies than the local morning paper. The decline in News circulation is generally attributed to a number of factors: editorial lethargy, a rising number of white-collar workers within the city as well as overall population decline, and an increased antagonism toward the paper in Detroit’s black community. On the editorial page, the News supports civil rights; but following the 1967 riots, publisher Peter Clark bricked up the first-floor windows of the News building; the paper also began printing a daily roundup of minor crimes, identifying suspects by race. In 1971, under a photograph, the News ran this caption: “Milton B. Allen, fifty-three, of Baltimore, isn’t letting the fact that he’s the city’s first Negro state’s attorney deter him from his crusade against narcotics, crime and corruption.” Last year, Mike McCormick, news editor of the News, sent his staff a memo that leaked to Mayor Coleman Young, who attacked it in a widely reported speech. “We are aiming our product,” McCormick wrote, “at the people who make more than $18,000 a year and are in the twenty-eight to forty group. Keep a lookout for and then play—well—the stories city desk develops and aims at this group. They should be obvious: they won’t have a damn thing to do with Detroit and its internal problems.”

  Since 1959, the News has been run by Martin S. Hayden, a conservative who was one of the few editors of a major newspaper to oppose the printing of the Pentagon Papers. Hayden is the last of a breed—a power broker as well as an editor; one News political reporter recalls a recent Detroit mayoral campaign in which Hayden persuaded both candidates to run. In 1969, Hayden and publisher Clark were supporters of the missile program; during the ABM debate in Congress, Hayden sent a memo to the News Washington bureau that read: “The Washington staff should watch our editorial page, know our policy and help support it” by looking for “interpretative pieces and sidebars that help drive home the editorial point of view.” Hayden insists he never asks reporters to slant the news, but several journalists who have been offered jobs in the Washington bureau got the impression that he expected them to investigate Democrats slightly more carefully than Republicans.

  Now sixty-four, Hayden is retiring in June, and in the last year his power has become less than absolute. In 1975, a group of News employees met to discuss ways to improve the paper; they discovered that part of the problem was that the paper was perceived as stodgy and conservative. This group, which subsequently became known as the Kiddie Committee, set to work to hire younger reporters and columnists who were “with it” or “hip” or merely bearded. Meanwhile, publisher Clark offered a column to the News’s most outspoken critic, a local talk-show host named Lou Gordon. Gordon and the new columnists began to snipe regularly at each other and at the way the News handled various stories. Hayden was not amused. “It’s too much of a discussion of the newspaper business,” he says. “I’ve always disliked reporters who make themselves part of the story. It wasn’t the way I was brought up.” Hayden continues to keep a close eye on the Washington bureau, while the other editors deal directly with the local staff; as a result, the paper occasionally seems schizophrenic. During the Riegle-Esch campaign, for instance, two young local political reporters wrote a story saying that Republican Esch had lied about his role in passing a piece of legislation; twelve days later, John Peterson of the Washington bureau wrote a story saying that Esch’s lie was only a little lie.

  Seth Kantor reported directly to Martin Hayden on all three stories he wrote about Don Riegle. The first, which ran in September, said tha
t Riegle had signed his estranged wife’s name to a tax rebate check in 1971 and then failed to give her half the refund. This was followed by a story quoting a Jack Anderson study that called Riegle one of the ten most unpopular members of Congress. Both stories were attacked by Riegle: the first was clearly a shabby episode in an acrimonious divorce, the second a harsh way of describing an unsurprising fact—congressmen who switch parties (as Riegle did, in 1973) are bound to be unpopular. Then Kantor got the tapes story.

  In 1976, following the Elizabeth Ray revelations, a writer named Robin Moore (The Green Berets, The Happy Hooker) came to Washington to write a paperback about congressional sex. He was introduced to one Bette Jane Ackerman, who had had an affair with Riegle in 1969 while she was an unpaid staff worker in his office; during that period, she made some tapes of her conversations with him and supposedly replayed them like love letters while she was home sick. Eventually, the romance ended, Riegle divorced his wife and married another staff member. Last summer, Miss Ackerman accepted five hundred dollars from Robin Moore for her help as a go-between with other Washington women, and she played her tapes for New York Daily News reporter Joe Volz, who was then working with Moore. The tapes are predictably adolescent, childishly dirty and thoroughly egomaniacal. “I’ll always love you,” Riegle tells Miss Ackerman. “I—I—God, I feel such super love for you. By the way, the newsletter should start arriving.”

  Kantor got hold of a transcript of the tapes. He also obtained some love letters Riegle wrote to Miss Ackerman. And at some point, with editor Hayden’s approval, he drew up and signed an agreement with Miss Ackerman’s lawyer, David Taylor, pledging that he would not use her name in the stories. Kantor then flew to Detroit and went to confront Riegle with the story. Kantor’s version will give you an idea of the tenor of the meeting: