When the Going Was Good, page 11
“What do you think we should do?” I asked.
“Fold it,” he said. “It’s not going to work. You’re not going to get the readers you want. It’s just not going to work.”
Fold it? I thought he was kidding at first. But he wasn’t. I was completely numb.
Just then he got a phone call. Clay said, “Hi, Herb.” Now the only Herb I knew of was Herb Lipson, who owned a number of city magazines. He had founded Manhattan, inc., a smart monthly edited by the truly gifted Jane Amsterdam that studied New York through its various industries. We were big fans of it at Spy and considered it high-level competition. Based on my hearing only one end of the conversation, I could tell that Clay and this Herb were agreeing to something—I just wasn’t sure what. That evening, I went with some friends to Elaine’s, the Upper East–side canteen for the literary and show business set. We were sitting at one of the round tables along the right wall that Elaine set aside for writers and friends.
Clay and Gail came in. As they made their way through the restaurant, I could see that he was being congratulated for something. We said hello and he continued on, shaking hands and basking in the glow of the attention. I turned to the Vienna-born historian (and later Vanity Fair colleague) Frederic Morton, who was sitting at the next table: “Hey, Fred, what’s this all about?” Fred just looked at me and said, “You haven’t heard? Clay was just made editor of Manhattan, inc.!” I was dumbfounded. He’d taken a job at one of our competitors on the same day that he’d told me to fold our magazine. I never spoke to him again.
Clay’s warning notwithstanding, Spy was a local hit, then a national hit, and then an international one. Not a week went by when a print reporter or a news crew didn’t shimmy into the office for a story on this cheeky New York monthly. To some degree, it gave news organizations cover to repeat some of the outrageous things we wrote about our subjects without having any ownership themselves. One time I was on MTV News with Kurt Loder, which was very much the voice of the new generation. DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince (Will Smith, as he is now called) were also on the show that day. As we were leaving the studio after the taping, they came up to me and asked where I got my overcoat—a Chesterfield in fawn-colored whipcord with a muddy-green velvet collar.
“At Anderson & Sheppard,” I said.
They asked who to contact there. I said, “Ask for Mr. Halsey.”
Now, Mr. Halsey was, as noted, Norman Halsey, one of the chief tailors at the firm and a throwback to the Edwardian era, both in dress and demeanor. I was more than prepared to hear from him with a query along the lines of Mr. Carter, we have a Mr. DJ Jazzy Jeff and a Mr. Fresh Prince here and they are inquiring about that Chesterfield coat we made for you a few years ago. I shuddered with happiness.
At Spy, we wrote and produced a number of half-hour comedy shows for NBC, one hosted by Jerry Seinfeld and the other by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and these were done before they started working on Seinfeld. At one point we thought it might be good to get a professional agent. Nancy Josephson, who would one day run ICM, suggested Sam Cohn. Now, Sam was truly a legend in the business. He handled much of the big-name New York talent of the time, including Woody Allen, Mike Nichols, Paul Newman, and Meryl Streep. He was famous for his regular booth at the Russian Tea Room, for his habit of eating paper to ease his nerves, and for not returning phone calls. He took us on. After a year or more of complete inaction on his part, we decided to look for another agent. We thought it polite to tell him this before we made any change. The problem was, we couldn’t get him on the phone. After months of trying, we just threw up our hands. He stayed our agent, and we never produced another TV show again.
* * *
Kurt, Tom, and I paid ourselves $37,500 that first year. I had two sons, Ash and Max, by the time we launched, and Cynthia stayed home to take care of them. We were blessed by having a rent-stabilized apartment. It had high ceilings, a small library, a living room with a fireplace, French pocket doors, a dining room, and a second bedroom. I paid $280 a month for it. A different time. Today, the apartment would probably rent for twenty-five times as much. Even so, I constantly had to figure out ways to earn extra money. I began drawing a monthly caricature for Emma Soames when she became the editor of Tatler in London. They were nothing to write home about—and indeed few subjects or readers did. Emma was a spirited and lively editor. But her magazine was considered too astringent for the Sloane Square set Tatler aspired to. That Emma was the granddaughter of Winston Churchill only made the class betrayal sting more.
Emma was let go a few years after taking over and her replacement was a woman named Jane Procter. She wasn’t a popular figure in the office, and one of her first directives upon taking over—and a wise one at that—was to rid herself of my wretched drawings. Which she did by fax.
I also wrote a semi-regular column on the comings and goings in New York for the Evening Standard, London’s then widely read afternoon paper. The column was on a par with my Tatler caricatures, and once the paper was taken over by Paul Dacre—a legend for his furies and rudely picturesque language—he got rid of me too. Again, by fax. I then wrote occasional columns for the Daily Mail, which Dacre himself had graduated to. Fortunately for him they were rarities, so no need for him to get rid of me in any sort of formal manner.
Though the Spy staff itself was paid a pittance (half of them were $50-a-week interns), we arranged for a series of barter deals to help compensate them. One was with a dental office, Lowenberg and Lituchy. They got advertising pages, and the staff got free dental care. They are still my dentists. A number of barter arrangements were with restaurants—most of them in Greenwich Village or farther downtown. They got advertising pages, and we got credit for the amount of the contract at the restaurants. At the end of every issue, we used our barter money to take over one of the spots and have what we called “Closing Dinners.” They were raucous, liquid affairs that left most of us straggling late into the night. I don’t know of another magazine that did this. Those nights were important. They brought the staff together on a regular basis, and like so much of a journalist’s life in those days, they were just plain fun. At Christmas, I would put on a Santa costume and hand out Secret Santa gifts to the staff, who would come up one by one and sit on my lap. Kurt and Tom included. I stole a sort of guttural wolf-growl, faux-licentious style from the old Bob Hope movies. It was the kind of thing that would give HR departments conniptions today.
* * *
Editorially, we had a hoot. Henry Alford compared Elvis’s weights on other planets. The New Yorker didn’t accept letters to the editor, so we reached out and ran them ourselves. The New Yorker didn’t have a masthead either, so we spent six months assembling one. We ran a story on Anne Bass, Mercedes Kellogg, Nan Kempner, and the sleek chatelaines then running the salons of the Upper East Side. The story, written by Nell Scovell, then married to one of the lower-ranking members of the Tisch family, was called “Too Rich and Too Thin.” This was her first sentence: “In New York there is an inverse relationship between a woman’s dress size and the size of her apartment. A size 2 gets a 14-room apartment. A size 14 gets a two-room apartment.”
Back in the day, when books mattered more than they do now, certain books could make a certain segment of the city stop. People just sat down and read them—in part so they wouldn’t be left out of the conversation. William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice was like that. So were David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be, Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, and David McClintick’s Indecent Exposure. In 1989, The Andy Warhol Diaries was published. The book didn’t have a narrative beyond the detailing of what Warhol had done every night over the past few decades, including the people he ran into. He had plenty of catty comments. It was a doorstop of a book, coming in at just under nine hundred pages. Everybody was reading it. But it didn’t have an index. This was driving both subjects and readers slightly batty. So we decided to produce one. For the next three weeks, a dozen or so interns pored over the book, creating an index that was true both to the diaries and to the voice of Spy. We bound it into the next issue. A sample entry:
Taylor, Elizabeth, mysterious trips to the bathroom with Halston, 49
resemblance to “fat little Kewpie doll,” 115
“Very fat, but very beautiful,” 177
“John Warner wasn’t fucking her,” given cocaine by Halston, 178
We devoted an inordinate amount of time creating a “Celebrity Pro-Am Ironman Nightlife Decathlon.” This involved sending two interns, John Brodie and Bob Mack, into the night to track and record the activities of British journalist Anthony Haden-Guest, Carl Bernstein, and publisher Morgan Entrekin. Brodie and Mack followed each of the contestants as they made their ways through the pleasures of New York’s evening demimonde. An important note: the contestants were blissfully unaware that they were participants in the Ironman Nightlife Decathlon. Our reporters produced detailed accounts of their activities in ten categories, including “hours spent out, number of celebrities seen, number of drinks drunk, and so forth.”
And then, of course, there was Donald Trump. In 1983, Art Cooper, the editor of GQ, had asked me if I was interested in writing a story on him for the magazine. I wasn’t, but I needed the money, so I agreed to do it. Trump was at the beginning of his florid tabloid residency, and since this was going to be his first major bit of national exposure, he let me hang around with him for three weeks. He hated the story when it came out. The piece portrayed him as an outer-borough sharpie with taste that veered toward the showy and the vulgar. And worse, I made the observation that his hands were a bit too small for his body. He was on the cover, and as I later discovered, wanted to keep that issue of GQ away from as many of his fellow New Yorkers as possible, so he had his staff go out and buy up copies on the newsstands. (Years later, Si told me that it was the brisk sales of the Trump GQ cover that led him to urge Random House to publish Trump’s ghostwritten The Art of the Deal, which led to the reality TV show The Apprentice, which led to where we are now. As they say, a butterfly’s wings.)
Trump was not a successful real estate developer and bestselling “author” to us at Spy, though. He was a joke. He threatened to sue us and regularly fed rumors of our demise to gossip columnists. At one point we got fed up, and after consulting an actuary—giving him Trump’s physical details, age, eating habits, and whatnot—we began a monthly countdown to his own demise, under the headline “Death Be Not Short-Fingered.”
I regularly called my old friend from Ottawa, Steve Probyn. Steve was by then working in Whitehall on energy policy for Margaret Thatcher, and despite being a serious academic and political savant, he had a wonderful and mischievous sense of humor. One day he said he had a story idea for me. “Why don’t you try to get rich people to endorse really small checks?” I liked it. Kurt did too. And so began a yearlong project of seeing whether we could get rich New Yorkers to go to the trouble of signing and then depositing checks in increasingly insignificant amounts. We set up an account for a company called National Refund Clearinghouse. We had a letterhead made up. And the checkbooks arrived from the bank. We sent checks for $1.11 to the home addresses of fifty-eight well-heeled subjects including Si, Leonard Bernstein, Michael Douglas, Salomon Brothers head John Gutfreund, CBS chairman William S. Paley, and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times. In those days, you had to endorse checks on the back and then someone—presumably an underling—would go to the bank and physically deposit them. Within two months, twenty-six, or almost half, of our subjects had endorsed and deposited the $1.11 checks.
We wanted to see if we could entice the thirty-two people who didn’t sign those checks by upping the ante. We sent them refund checks for $2. Six of them went to the trouble of endorsing and depositing them. This list included Carly Simon, Candice Bergen, and Richard Gere. At the same time, we wanted to see what the threshold was for the ones who had signed the $1.11 checks, so we sent them refunds of $0.64. Over the next few months, thirteen signed and deposited the $0.64 checks. This list included Si, Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kravis, Cher, Adnan Khashoggi, and Donald Trump. We decided to push our luck further, by sending this last group checks in the amount of $0.13.
Now remember, this project had taken almost a year of mailing, waiting, remailing, and so forth. The checks for $0.13 went out, and we continued about our business. Within a few months we had our finalists—two men of wealth who took the time and trouble to endorse and deposit checks for $0.13. One was Khashoggi, at that time the most notorious arms dealer in the world. And the other one was a certain short-fingered vulgarian. One of the few wealthy New Yorkers we didn’t send checks to was Leonard Stern, the owner of the Hartz Mountain pet-food empire. That’s because his son Eddie was the one who did the story—under the pen name Julius Lowenthal.
On the editorial side of things, Kurt and I ran the show, with Susan, George, Tad, Bruce, Jamie, Jim, and Paul as our deputies. Kurt and I ate lunch together, worked a few feet apart, had regular dinners, and even socialized with each other. It was about as close to a marriage as you can get without the touching or taking out the garbage. I wish I could remember a serious disagreement—just for dramatics’ sake—but I can’t. Well, there was a heated discussion with Joanne Gruber, our gifted managing editor, who also handled copyediting duties, over the words careered and careened. But that was about it. And in Tom, we had the most simpatico of business partners. He wasn’t the greatest ad salesman. But he was a clever strategist. And his chief love in the whole enterprise was the writing in Spy.
* * *
My schedule was fairly routine in those days. I got into the office around 7:00 and left at 5:30 so I could be home for a family dinner. Once the kids were off to bed, I would edit manuscripts and plan the next day at a small desk in the living room. During the off-school months, I was what was known in New York in the old days as a “summer bachelor.” I would stay in the city during the weekdays while Cynthia, Ash, Max, and our third son, Spike, spent the summer in Washington, Connecticut. We had a two-hundred-year-old colonial on the town green that was always badly in need of something—paint? repair? demolition? I found it a haven and imagined myself living there well into old age.
Our apartment building had an ancient wiring system that caused fuses to break with the addition of any sort of extra electrical device. We had an air conditioner in the bedroom that I could only turn on in the summer months if I unplugged the refrigerator. So, from the end of Memorial Day through Labor Day, I had cool air at night, but absolutely no refrigeration. Our landlord, Sol Haselnuss, was justifiably furious that we had this huge, rent-stabilized apartment in his building. If I was even an hour late in paying the rent, an eviction sign would go up on the door.
We couldn’t afford to send the kids to camp, and besides, we all loved being with each other. So I came up with “Camp Carter”—a loose assembly of activities that included a version of our own Olympics. I even had medals made up for them. I loved fishing, and after an early dinner I would head over to the Shepaug River near our house for an hour with my fly rod before it got dark. Birthday parties in New York were extravaganzas with clowns and magicians and ponies and whatnot. All things that we couldn’t afford. I can juggle and manage a few magic tricks, and so one year I bought a clown costume, figuring that I could use it at my own kids’ birthday parties and amortize it over a few years. The first time I tried it with a few tricks like pouring a pitcher of milk into a rolled-up newspaper or poking a large needle through a balloon or juggling four tennis balls, the five-year-olds were either catcalling me or just bored. I retired the getup after that first performance and stored it at our house in Connecticut.
Brian McNally and his wife, Anne, lived near us. Their son James was with us one year on his birthday. Anne was in Paris and Brian was tied up in New York with a problem at one of his restaurants. We got a cake for James, and Cynthia suggested I do some magic tricks to keep him occupied until Brian arrived. I put on the costume, with its bald head and tufts of hair, big floppy shoes, and a wire around the waist that made me look enormous. I had just entered our kitchen prepared to do my tragic assortment of tricks when Brian walked in. He had a camera in his bag and quickly took a snapshot—a photograph he continues to haunt me with to this day. I look like one of those demented serial killers who chases children through corn fields in horror films. Brian gave the photograph to our friend Mitch Glazer, and when I stayed with him and his wife, Kelly, at the house they rented in Martha’s Vineyard, they had dozens upon dozens of copies of the photograph made up and taped to every conceivable surface, including under the toilet seat. I wish there was a happy ending to this story, but there isn’t. Two of my best friends steadfastly refuse to give up this photo.
* * *
I phoned my parents in Canada every week. They were happy that I was happy, but I don’t think they ever completely understood what I was doing. They certainly never commented on anything in Spy. My mother once said that she couldn’t understand the magazine at all. Her only compliment during those years came after I was named by Maclean’s magazine, the Canadian version of Time, as one of the “10 Sexiest Canadians.” She saw the story and called me to tell me how incredibly proud she was.
In 1989, three years after our launch, Vanity Fair commissioned Annie Leibovitz to take a group photograph celebrating the new magazines on the newsstands: publications with names like Sassy, Wigwag, Taxi, Spin, Model, Egg, and Fame. The ’80s were an explosive time for magazine start-ups in New York, and there were some gifted editors in the picture, including Adam Moss (7 Days), Betsy Carter (New York Woman), Terry McDonell (Smart), Annie Flanders (Details), and Susan Lyne (Premiere). Kurt and I were in the photo, holding copies of Spy. Those titles are all pretty much gone now. Publishing a magazine is a brute when it comes to the finances. You have your staff and rent and electricity, all of which must be paid on a regular schedule. You have to pay the writers, photographers, and illustrators. The magazines are then sent all over the country to wholesalers and then individual retailers. The magazines go on the newsstands for a month. And maybe ninety days later, you get paid for the copies sold. Similarly, advertisers—even the flush ones—only paid after sixty to ninety days. The less-flush ones often didn’t pay at all. This is all to say, the more successful we got, the more strained our cash flow got.
