Mergers and Acquisitions, page 11
There’s a singular crucial way in which the Times upholds the fairy tale, though: through the Vows column. You know what I’m talking about. Even more important than the announcements at the top of the page, the Vows column has served as the anchor of the pages since 1992, when Lois Smith Brady started writing about love and weddings for the Times. (She’s since abdicated the weekly byline to a roster of freelancers and, every now and again, a Times staffer.) When she first began the column, she looked for artful ways to describe the wedding’s details: the dress, the cake, the first dance. But after a few columns, she said, she realized that people were far more interested in the love story behind the details. And in a way, she became a sought-after expert on love itself, even though she politely protested that she was as mystified by it as anyone else.
“Love will find you,” she assures readers of her 1999 book, Love Lessons: Twelve Real-Life Love Stories, and details how it found her: in a stationery store in East Hampton, New York, where she was searching for a typewriter ribbon and her husband-to-be was scouting out Filofaxes. Their first date lasted nine hours, and they had an odd thing in common: they both believed a heads-up penny meant good luck, and yet were both afraid to pick them up. (If that isn’t a metaphor for love, I don’t know what is.) Anyway, Lois’s own dating experience, and ensuing disastrous wedding, is a blueprint for the classic Vows column: indicative of class and breeding, signals of intellectualism and status, and persevering through even the most challenging of nuptial situations, like a minister who decided the wedding homily was the perfect time to discuss the distresses of menopause.
An optimist could point to the nonwhite, non-upper-middle-class couples profiled in the column. A realist, and that’s me, could point to their very small percentage compared to the luminaries, private and public intellectuals, and members of the upper economic echelon that dominate the announcements and the Vows column. For reference, the people profiled in the column during my first season included a vows renewal for Kirk and Anne Douglas, who had managed to look past Mr. Douglas’s infamous womanizing. The column also recorded the marriage of the socialite Hilary Geary to the industrialist Wilbur Ross, Donald Trump’s octogenarian commerce secretary who slept through cabinet meetings; and Salman Rushdie’s union with Padma Lakshmi, who, in her memoir years later, said he called her a “poor investment.” Shortly after they divorced, three years after their Vows column ran, he told Elle magazine that he didn’t think marriage was necessary, even though he’d been married four times. “Girls like it, especially if they’ve never been married before—it’s the dress. Girls want a wedding, they don’t want a marriage. If only you could have weddings without marriages.” The column also profiled the grown son of a New Yorker cartoonist who, as the lede claimed, “likes food from Ethiopia and Vietnam, which he prefers to call international, rather than ethnic.” That was in the lede.
Here’s the other thing about Four Weddings: Carrie and Hamish’s announcement would have been a slam-dunk candidate for the Vows column. A young glamorous American, former Vogue girl, marries a very much older conservative politician in a stone church in the heathered hills of Scotland. Opposites on first glance, yes, but like draws to like: ambitious, well traveled, moneyed, attractive, and robustly healthy. Hamish might be used to the rough-and-tumble of conservative British politics, but we all need love, after all, and he recognizes the comfort that his American bride can provide. She too isn’t quite what she seems: her Southern roots lend grace and softness to the edge of her big-city life, and she’s also got legs for days, perfect for tramping through the Scottish countryside as well as standing by her man when he’s under political fire. It’s Brigadoon meets Steel Magnolias, culminating in a chic cream silk column dress with a beaded bolero, traditional vows said by candlelight flickering over red roses, and the most energizing of receptions at an actual castle. I mean, the thing practically writes itself:
When Sir Hamish Banks, 69, a firebrand conservative politician, first locked eyes with the glamorous American Judith Caroline Hartnell at a fashionable soiree in Knightsbridge, he thought he’d finally found the perfect love match, not to mention a sparring partner. But Ms. Hartnell, 29, a former editor at British Vogue who is known as Carrie, had other things on her mind, and she was in no mood to joust, romantically or otherwise, with a man twice her age and on the wrong side of politics. But true love brooks no boundaries, and before the end of the evening, not only had Mr. Banks convinced the raven-haired Ms. Hartnell to have a drink with him at his club in Mayfair, she’d persuaded him to donate $1,000 to the Save the Whales fund, one of her many causes. It didn’t matter that she was supposed to board a plane bound for New York in two days. For what is an ocean when true love is to be had?
Even for all the scrutiny it endures each week, the Vows columns were always entertaining, and Ira knew it. He took special care with editing them, twisting and turning each phrase and thought until it fit the mold that Lois had created in 1992. Ira and Lois had more or less developed the column together, and he felt particularly proud and protective of it; he understood in his bones its prominence and its reach, and knew that of all the announcements he would edit each week, even with the big names and the tiny details that could go awry, Vows was the most important. He didn’t trust writing them to just anyone either. So when I found a story that was primed, I tell you, just absolutely primed for Vows, I felt like I needed a stiff drink before I opened my mouth to tell him about it.
“I’ve got one for you, Ira,” I said one Monday morning not long after I’d been introduced to Michael’s penis. “This could be a Vows.”
My stomach quaked a little as I said it. This was swinging for the fences. Because if getting your wedding announcement into the Times is akin to getting into Harvard, then being chosen for the Vows column is like winning the race for class president, or beating the Yankees for the World Series, or whatever impossible simile you want. The point is, many, many people think their love story is worthy of a Vows column, and many reporters think they’ve found a story to fit the mold, and some of them might even be right. But for Ira, only one per week fit.
I looked at the submission in front of me, splattered with Ira’s fact-checking handiwork. He loved including wedding announcements for journalists, and he had a soft spot for service members. That was something he’d inherited from his predecessors, including Charlotte Curtis, the former “women’s pages” editor who placed a premium on public service as entry to the pages. This one was perfect on both counts: a high-profile journalist who had come to Iraq for the second Gulf War, and a Marine with the perfect pedigree: the Naval Academy, Ivy League, Wall Street, Jewish, and built like the Humvee he rode in while marshaling his troops to battle. The bride was the chief producer for a Very Famous TV Personality, and she had seen it all: wars, shootings, presidential campaigns, protests, and political pandering. She was weathered like an old boot and yet still optimistic enough to find love in wartime. For his part, the Marine was gentlemanly and looked good in his field uniform. They were getting married in Washington on a crisp fall day. The leaves would be popping, the ceremony would be peppered with personalities, and I would be there, notebook in hand, to document love in its fullest feathered glory.
“You sure you want to write this? I can find a freelancer down there,” Ira said, after he’d agreed that it was Vows-worthy. My neck prickled.
“No, I’ve already talked to them. I want to do it. I can stay for free at my old roommate’s.” I was not going to give up this opportunity to some freelance features writer in D.C. This was my story.
“OK,” Ira said. “Make sure to talk to as many people as you can. You’ve got to be able to show what makes these people tick, not just that they have a good story. There are lots of good stories.”
What Ira meant was, we needed to understand how these people loved each other. The setup was cis-het perfect: boy meets girl, guns go off, boy proposes to girl, yada yada. But what was the punch line? What was the thing that made them thrill to each other each dawn in the kitchen, unkempt with morning breath, or drew them back to center after a knock-down, drag-out fight that made the neighbors worried? That was the meat of a Vows column. And the longer I worked on the Weddings desk, the more I began to realize: that was the whole damn point.
A few days later, I left work a little early to catch the Acela to D.C., which I was splurging on because I could expense it. On the way down, I ran into Helene, a tall fake blond who had entered the building as a clerk and whose ambitions were known to everyone in the building, from the publisher on down. Clerks with ambition—like ourselves—were seen as amusing by the upper brass, who had worked hard to narrow paths upward for those of us who toiled at the lower levels. Years before, clerks had been allowed to advance slowly through a reporter trainee plan known as the 8i program, 8i being the union pay band for those positions. But in the decade before I arrived, that program had been largely shuttered; the clerical supervisor had decided it wasn’t worth the time or the trouble to train clerks as journalists, and a member of the masthead, whose power and authority over the newsroom was probably as strong as the publisher’s, agreed with her. As far as we could tell, they reasoned that reporting and editing jobs at the Times were at a premium and needed to go to people who had worked their entire careers with a singular purpose, which was to see their byline in those hallowed pages. How dare a young, green clerk think they had the talent to join the editorial staff as anything other than a gopher or phone jockey?
That, of course, didn’t stop the Times from using eager clerks to do freelance reporting, often called “legs,” without any hope or expectation of credit for their work. With the exception of two articles, every single thing I wrote for the Times until I wrote this first Vows column appeared under the byline By The New York Times, giving the credit for my work to the entire institution. My first byline was granted me by a kind sports editor who had commissioned me to write about a Maryland–Florida State football game, which was my first and last experience with a men’s locker room, and the second was given to me by the loveliest man, a bespectacled editor with a walrusian mustache, for a piece I helped assemble in the now-defunct Week in Review section. It was a lesson in humility, I suppose, but what it really did was breed rage among the clerks, all of whom loved the newsroom and the mission with the heat of true believers. We were the least jaded and the most hungry.
The really fun part about this whole thing was that once in a very blue moon, when a reporting trainee slot opened up, one clerk was sometimes pitted against another for the job. This happened far more with women than men, by the way, especially when they loosened the rules and decided to rejuvenate the 8i program. I watched many male clerks shirk their actual jobs as clerks—leaving their deskmates to pick up the slack—and instead use their time to schmooze and slide into reporting gigs. Many talented female journalists in my group of clerks left the newsroom for other places, and I still very much enjoy seeing their bylines in vaunted positions. And if you were a person of color, forget it. I can think of exactly one Black female clerk who was seen as worthy of being elevated to higher editorial rank while I was there, and she eventually left for a masthead position and a giant payday elsewhere.
Helene was one of the clerks being pitted against another for a reporting slot. She was a few years older and had toiled in the trenches longer; none of this, however, relieved my jealousy that she was finally getting a shot at the bigs. If Helene won out, she’d receive a reporting gig on Metro—nothing glamorous like City Hall or Albany, probably more like the cop shop, but there’s no better place to learn reporting. Helene’s carriage, cascading blond curls, and cashmere sweaters indicated that she’d probably prefer a slot on Style or Real Estate, but you had to start somewhere.
I waved at her in the lobby, and we walked out the door together. “Where are you headed?” I asked, noting the tiny edge of fall creeping into the wind blowing down 43rd Street.
“Uptown, Washington Heights,” she said. “I’m going to do a Neediest.”
Each year, starting in the fall, the Times runs a campaign of stories for the Neediest Cases Fund, profiling people and families that their charitable fund has helped over the past year. The Times generally assigned these stories out to clerks hungry for bylines, and the stories were always good. They were light-years from the people I wrote about; no $100,000 Asscher-cut diamond rings for them. The stories were rife with the markers of poverty and loss in New York City: bedbugs, lost homes, lost spouses, lost lives. The story could be about a young man with developmental disabilities who just needed a new pair of nonslip shoes for his new job as a dishwasher, or it could pay the rent for a young mother whose multiple sclerosis kept her at home, in pain and without relief. The assignments were good, and the stories gave you a little room to write.
“How did you get to do that?” I asked.
“Eh, just ask,” she said. “They’ll kind of give them to anybody.” She eyed me and my overnight bag. “Where are you off to?”
“Oh,” I said casually, “just to D.C. for a Vows column.” I almost said No big deal but didn’t.
She arched her well-drawn eyebrows. “So, not a Neediest.”
I laughed and shook my head, while noting that she’d chosen to wear for this reporting assignment some designer jeans and a black cashmere sweater and topped it off with a baseball cap. It was a curious nod to the reduced circumstances of whoever she was about to interview—her own way of slumming it, I suppose. The baseball cap was the thing that made me wonder what she was thinking. I didn’t look to see if she’d left her giant Louis Vuitton tote at work.
I headed down to Penn Station, bought a coffee and boarded my train, and settled in to the quiet car. It all felt so luxurious. You have to remember that I arrived in New York on a twelve-dollar bus likely operated on an expired license and had that morning eaten for breakfast a one-dollar sticky bun from the coffee cart by the subway. I always felt wildly unsophisticated walking into the building each day, but I could feel my confidence grow by centimeters. It helped that I was headed back to a city I hated to write about something I was learning to love: love.
The next afternoon, I walked over to the wedding venue from my old apartment on Constitution Avenue, where I’d spent the evening eating takeout and drinking with my best friend from college, Erin. The fall air had blown into Washington overnight and cleared its swampiness. The sky was as brilliant as I’d ever seen it, and a cold snap tossed my hair as I walked down 8th Street. I thought about the cheese people and the fishmonger in Eastern Market, and the Ethiopian restaurant we were going to after the wedding, and I felt lucky to be alive on this day, in this place, doing exactly this. I didn’t love D.C. at all, but I did love my old neighborhood and was glad to be back in it to write what I’d already decided was going to be the best Vows column since Lois Smith Brady filed her first story.
I walked into the venue and introduced myself to someone who looked important, while keeping an eye out for the photographer assigned to the story. “You must be Cate!” It was the groom himself, standing tall and freshly buzzed in his dress blues. “We’re doing shots. Come join us.”
“Um—better not, but I’ll follow you wherever you’d like me to be,” I said, giving what I thought was my most courteous and professional half smile. The groom ducked through a curtain into an anteroom, where the bride, resplendent in a sleek white satin dress, was splashing Johnnie Walker Black into a few highball glasses clearly borrowed from the caterers. “Babe, this is the woman from the Times,” the groom said, pointing in my direction.
She waved me over. “Cate, come have a drink! We’re almost ready to go,” she said, teetering on her heels. She’s super drunk, I thought. This was going to be amusing, at the very least.
I shook my head at the glass and said, “You know the rules,” trying to appeal to her journalistic code of ethics. The Very Famous TV Personality, who was standing next to her, laughed at me. “Oh, come on, Cate, it’s a wedding.”
I was a bit taken aback, not only by his celebrity glow, but his quick familiarity with me. I knew the tactic, though; I’d used it myself on reporting assignments. “Thanks, Peter, thanks,” I said, and shook my head again. “So, tell me, how’s it going?”
The bride and groom were by this point at the end of their Johnnie Walker Black, and I didn’t have the heart to ask them how many they’d had already. “Time to sign the ketubah!” Peter said cheerfully, and pulled out a Montblanc from his suit pocket, waving it first at the bride. She took it and scrawled something that approximated her name on the line where the rabbi had placed his pointer finger, and then waved the pen to the groom, who had poured himself another. The room had started to reek a little of peat.
“Babe, here!” the bride said impatiently. “We have to go soon.” The groom took the pen and scribbled his name, and then threw back the rest of his scotch.
“Ready?” The rabbi smiled at them. He’d obviously seen this before. Peter deposited his Montblanc back into his jacket, adjusted his tie, and offered his arm to the bride. I saw the rapport between them immediately; it had been forged in war zones, late nights in the newsroom with bad coffee, quiet meetings with sources, and screaming matches over what to keep and what to cut. I understood that relationship far better than the one she shared with the groom, who, in our pre-wedding interview, had gushed about her toughness and fairness and was ebullient about the idea of having children with her. But everything he said was just kind of stock. And the bride, for all her journalism skills, couldn’t find much more to say about him than repeating his résumé. “We have fun together,” she said. Well, OK.
