When the going was good, p.10
When the Going Was Good, page 10
The core group of editors would meet in our conference room for a lunch-cum-editorial-meeting once a week. Most of the men wore jackets and ties and the women wore tailored pants or skirts. Our tacit bond was the idea that revolutionary writing would have more weight if you didn’t look like a ruffian. Kurt sat at one end of the long table, and I sat at the other. We had all carved our initials into it.
There was SM for Susan Morrison, who had worked on one of Lorne Michaels’s shows and had done a stint at Vanity Fair. She was the only one with a proper Rolodex and was our outreach to established writers. She was funny and quick and edited or wrote much of the copy that Kurt and I didn’t get around to. We thought of Susan as a true sophisticate, an impression that was ever so slightly tarnished one day when she told me excitedly that a herd of elephants had just come through one of the tunnels into New York.
“They do it every year,” I told her.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s for the circus,” I said. “They even have a name for it: ‘Elephant Walk.’ ”
Forever after, I’d torture her with the expression any time she suggested something that was painfully obvious or well-known.
There was BH for Bruce Handy, a lanky, good-looking Californian who had gone to Stanford and had the slyest of wits. GK stood for George Kalogerakis, the only native New Yorker, who had come from a dead-end job at The Times. His application arrived on Drones Club stationery—something he had had printed up based on the club frequented by Bertie Wooster and Gussie Fink-Nottle in the P. G. Wodehouse novels. He had a wry signature style that we called on when we later published a history-cum-anthology of Spy. JM was Jamie Malanowski, a cheerful veteran from the political world whom Scanlon had sent our way. He was there from the beginning too. Jamie’s chief asset, he said when we interviewed him, was that he had “a lead ass”—the inference being that he was a worker. And he was. Joining us later were TF—Tad Friend, just out of Harvard, who looked like an extra from one of those old MGM Andy Hardy movies—and JC for Jim Collins, a tall, funny Harvard alum who had more talent than ambition. PS, Paul Simms, yet another Harvard grad and later a hugely successful showrunner, joined us as well.
The outside world thought of the Spy creators as miserable misfits. In fact, they were incredibly sociable, well-dressed, and balanced. They knew their Negronis from their stingers. They knew Wodehouse and Perelman and Waugh. And they were as versed in funny stories from the old National Lampoon as they were in high-minded criticism in The New York Review of Books. It was positively Hellenic. What set them all apart were their brains and wit. A whole generation of gifted writers flew through our offices, some staying for years, before heading off for the more lucrative playing fields, writing for The Simpsons or Late Night with David Letterman. It’s rare for me to watch an episode of The Simpsons and not see a name in the credits that had once been on the Spy masthead. They all wrote beautifully, but Kurt was the best of the lot. He composed the funny, lyrical essays that opened each issue. He was able to thread two or three storylines of the previous month’s news into a seamless, exquisitely written piece of journalism that just bowled me over.
* * *
Life at Spy was by and large a collegial, convivial affair. There wasn’t drinking during office hours. But alcohol did lubricate things once the whistle blew. We assumed that many of the younger members of the staff, who would gather at bars in the neighborhood after work, were seeing each other in a manner that can only be described as nonprofessional. One such couple, Aimée Bell and David Kamp, who both started as interns at the magazine, got married and are still happily together. (I am godfather to their son Henry.) Word of the sheer fun we were all having spread quickly, and in no time, I was getting calls from people at Condé Nast and Hearst desperate to come over. Our pay rates dimmed their appetite for working at a scrappy downtown magazine considerably, and all pretty much stayed at their stations. Other magazine editors, desperate to get “edgier” writing, whatever that meant, into their pages, sent emissaries looking to lure our writers for freelance assignments. We had a rotating cast of receptionists, many of them actors and performance artists and all of them more colorful than the people they were answering the phones for.
We strong-armed a number of friends who were proper writers to contribute—Roy Blount Jr., Walter Kirn, Andrew Sullivan, Holly Brubach, Bruce Feirstein, David Owen, Ellis Weiner, Paul Rudnick, and John Heilpern, among others. I approached both Christopher Hitchens and the illustrator Bruce McCall to contribute, but both turned me down. They loved the idea of Spy; not so much our pay rates. Young writers like David Kamp, Ted Heller, Nell Scovell, and Henry Alford, all of whom went on to illustrious careers, got their start scribbling away on Spy stories.
At one point, the staff writers announced that they were going on strike. They were all getting about $100 a week and wanted something in the region of $125. Kurt and I both hated the idea of an organized protest in the office. Eric Kaplan, yet another brilliant young Harvard grad who went on to a celebrated career writing for television, was working as an intern at $50 a week. He joined the writers in protest. One day he was listlessly sweeping the floor outside Kurt’s and my offices, and I started humming “The Internationale.” He picked up his pace a bit. Rather than confront the writers as a group—there were only five—we met with them individually. In each case, I would push a piece of paper across the desk with a single name on it: McLean Stevenson. In each instance, the writer asked who that was. And in each case, I said, “Exactly.” I told them that he was a cast member who left the hit television show M*A*S*H after the early seasons and was never heard from again. In the end, we raised their salaries commensurate with their worth and talents. And so ended the period of labor unrest at Spy.
Spy’s art direction received almost as much attention as its writing. We had a series of art directors, including Stephen Doyle, B.W. Honeycutt, Alex Isley, and Christiaan Kuypers, all of whom added their own embellishments to the look of the magazine. We wanted elegance in our typefaces, not the goofy fonts so often associated with humor magazines. Our editorial and photo budgets were minimal. We developed a look that included floating heads. These came from public relations photos—which were free to use. We then silhouetted them by hand and used them on a regular basis. They helped give the magazine its distinctive look—a look that has been copied by more established publications for years.
Its sheer shock value made Spy an early hit. We wrote about and lampooned everybody who was part of New York’s social and professional life, and circulation soared. There had been nothing really like it before, and it caught the city by surprise. In truth, Kurt and I just wanted to come up with story ideas that would make the other one laugh. Tad Friend and Paul Simms spent almost half a year working on Spy Notes, our parody of CliffsNotes, the collegiate study guides for great literature, with plot summary, major characters, and themes. We applied them to Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis and the rest of the literary brat pack of the ’80s and their books Bright Lights, Big City; Less Than Zero; Slaves of New York; and The Rules of Attraction. “Even funnier than the originals,” we said on the cover. CliffsNotes sued our book publisher for trademark infringement. The case went to court and we won, resulting in a landmark verdict. A feature on mob restaurants and residences in the city was either daring or foolhardy, given the fact that many of them were located perilously close to our offices in the Puck Building, which was on the edge of what could still legitimately be called Little Italy. The Gambino family’s Ravenite Social Club was only a couple of blocks away, on Mulberry Street, and John Gotti, the head of the Gambino family before he was sent to prison, where he died, was a common sight in the neighborhood. Lisa Lampugnale, one of our fact-checkers, who went on to a successful career in stand-up comedy, remembered, “I’m walking near the offices and John Gotti walks by and I think it’s because of the mob address map and Gotti is mad and I’m going to get killed.”
Instead of trying to cover the entire media landscape in our magazine, Jann Wenner gave me the idea of just concentrating on The New York Times—then a Kremlin-like fortress of inscrutability and intrigue. To write about The Times in anything other than groveling praise was to court certain career death. Our monthly column by J.J. Hunsecker regularly poked fun at the editors of the paper. The day the column came out, work would all but shut down at The Times while the reporter-level hands photocopied and passed it around. We did a similar column on the then most powerful talent agency in Hollywood, Creative Artists Agency. This one was also written under a pseudonym—Celia Brady, a bastardization of the name of the narrator in Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon.
We had so much inside information on the goings-on at the agency that its head, Mike Ovitz, reportedly hired a private eye to track down the identity of the writer posing as Ms. Brady. The detective failed in his mission. Celia Brady’s identity, along with Hunsecker’s, remains a secret to this day. Years later, when I was editing Vanity Fair, Si Newhouse and I happened to be in London at the same time and we were both staying at the Connaught. We had dinner with some friends of his at the hotel’s grill, and at one point Si whispered to me, “You know what I always wish you’d done when you were at Spy?” “No,” I replied. “What?” He said, “I wish you’d had a column similar to the Times column, but about Condé Nast.” “Really?” I said. “Why?” He smiled and said, “So I would have known what was going on!”
We had a superb and very diligent lawyer, David Korzenik. I remember once we were arguing a point and I wouldn’t back down from something he wanted removed. I felt he was being overly cautious.
Finally, I said, “What are you going to do if I don’t take this out?”
And he said, “I don’t know, Graydon. I think I might call your parents.”
I thought that was funny, so I made the change.
Our notable scoops often took months to assemble—a whole year in the case of creating the complete client list of Ovitz’s pathologically secretive CAA. Not even the agents knew all the stars, directors, and writers the company represented. The full list encompassed pretty much all the above-the-line talent in Hollywood at that time. Agents were suddenly busy mollifying stars who weren’t getting the scripts they thought they should be after seeing their rivals on the list.
We published a positively groveling letter that Tina Brown had written to Ovitz asking for an interview. Tina had been the editor of Tatler, and then had been brought in to edit Vanity Fair. Bruce Handy provided a spirited annotation to the letter. Among her entreaties, Tina had written: “Right now, the most hackneyed prevailing perception of you is as a ‘packager.’…It seems to me that a better term for your role in the life of Hollywood would be a catalyst: activating creativity by a gifted sense of talent, material, timing and taste, plus, of course, extraordinary business acumen in putting it all together. Probably no one since [Irving] Thalberg has seeded so many creative partnerships or brought so many movies to the screen.” She closed off by saying that, just in the last two months, the following people had written to tell her they read Vanity Fair cover to cover: Henry Kissinger, Calvin Klein, John le Carré, Louis Malle, Brooke Astor, and the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines.
The letter, which we had gotten through somewhat nefarious means, had been kept (I was later to learn) in the offices of Jane Sarkin, the magazine’s emissary to Hollywood. Jane was on her honeymoon with her husband, Martin O’Connor, at the Coral Beach Club in Bermuda when the issue of Spy with the annotated letter was published in the summer of 1990. A call from New York was patched through to her room. Picking up the phone, Jane endured a blistering tirade from Tina. Calls like this persisted for the rest of her honeymoon. I can only imagine Jane’s horror when, two years later, I was appointed to be the editor of Vanity Fair. She was worried that she’d be fired. I, not really having any appreciative juice with Hollywood, worried that she’d quit. In the end, we spent twenty-five incredible years working together. The topic of the letter and dear Jane’s botched honeymoon only came up two or three times a year. It was something we could both, quote-unquote, laugh about.
We didn’t set out for Spy to be mean, but, like Mad magazine, we did want to present what we thought were unvarnished truths about how things worked. What it was like inside the highly secretive Bohemian Grove, for example. It was and is the old-school version of the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference. At Sun Valley, large corporations are traded and fortunes made. At Bohemian Grove, a 2,700-acre campground a couple of hours north of San Francisco, former presidents and establishment elders, who already had their corporations and fortunes, traded nations and engaged in naughty-boy juvenilia, like telling off-color jokes and peeing in the redwood forest. It’s where the Manhattan Project, established to design and build the first atomic bomb, was launched in 1942. The rules held that no talk of business was permitted, but aside from that, some highly strange and puerile rituals took place.
My brother-in-law Todd Williamson was then working at a restaurant in San Francisco. He told me that the managers at Bohemian Grove were looking for waiters to help out with that year’s reunion. And so with a good deal of advance work and planning, we managed to smuggle the writer Phil Weiss into the Bohemian Grove, posing as a waiter. He got the most extraordinary copy, including overhearing Henry Kissinger (an esteemed foreign policy expert in the pages of Vanity Fair; a “socialite war criminal” in the pages of Spy) telling not particularly funny CIA-KGB jokes. It was seriously good reporting and good writing. And it caused a furor. Three decades later, a member of Bohemian Grove invited me to join him there. I told him that I would dearly like to come, but there was the matter of the story we published way back when. After I recounted some of the details of the report, he thought better of the invitation. “They have long memories,” he said.
It was never great to find yourself in the pages of Spy. But it was worse never to be mentioned. Nora Ephron told me that when Spy came out, she’d rush to the newsstand and leaf through a copy and be relieved when she didn’t see her name in it. And then she’d be slightly miffed. There were enough proper nouns in an issue that not having any purchase in Spy meant you didn’t really matter that much.
* * *
I thought it would be good to have a few advisers for the magazine. So I reached out to Jann, Lorne Michaels, and Clay Felker—all at the top of their various games in the creative-industrial complex. Jann had founded Rolling Stone twenty years before and was still its operating force. Lorne was running Saturday Night Live, the show he had created a decade earlier. And Clay had made a name for himself publishing writers like Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Pete Hamill, and Jimmy Breslin in the weekend magazine of the old Herald Tribune. The newspaper folded in 1966, and out of the ashes, two years later, he created New York magazine. Clay was in a professional limbo at the time, but still a formidable figure in the magazine world.
I had gone to Lorne during our fundraising period. He turned me down in the nicest possible way. His rationale was that creative people don’t invest—others invest in them. To celebrate Spy’s impending launch, he took me to a Yankees game. It was my first trip in a stretch limousine. Also in the car was Keith McNally, a restaurateur and the brother of one of my closest friends, Brian. And Chevy Chase, whose career Lorne had launched on Saturday Night Live. Chevy had just made Fletch and National Lampoon’s European Vacation and at the time was in some ways the biggest male movie star in the world. He was the host of the Academy Awards the next year and the year after that. That day at Yankee Stadium I watched as a line of dozens of fans snaked up the aisle to get Chevy’s autograph.
A quarter of a century later I ran into him at the Chateau Marmont. His career had suffered following far too many confrontations with colleagues and a number of box-office misfires. I was having dinner in the hotel’s lobby with friends. There was a piano beside us, and Chevy came over and asked if we minded if he played. We said not at all. For the next three hours, this former movie star and former host of the most important night in Hollywood played the piano—beautifully, I should add—and not a single person came over to ask for an autograph or say hello. Los Angeles, one of the sunniest of American cities, is also, hands down, the coldest.
When it came to Spy, Clay’s early advice was to run party photos up front so that advertisers had an indication of the sorts of people who were reading the magazine. We did run party photos, but not in the way he suggested. Ours caught the subjects off guard and in their cups, with funny captions written by Susan Morrison. Clay was a complicated figure. A Time magazine story about him in 1977 had this to say: “He is variously described by associates and acquaintances as autocratic, devious, dishonest, rapacious, egotistical, power mad, paranoid, a bully, and a boor.” He had been close to the Spectator columnist Taki and his wife, Alexandra, but after Taki was arrested in 1984 for possession of cocaine and shipped off to Pentonville prison, which once hosted Oscar Wilde, they didn’t hear a thing from Clay. A few weeks after Taki had been jailed, Clay finally called Alexandra—but not to wish Taki well or find out how he was faring. He called to get the name of the chintz they used for their living room curtains.
Still, to me, he was a big, successful editor, and I wanted to get his read on our prospects. About nine months after we launched, I went over to see him at the apartment on East 57th Street that he shared with his wife, Gail Sheehy. The apartment had a double-height ceiling and a Juliet balcony at one end of the living room. I couldn’t believe editors could live on such a level. He told me that he had been studying Spy carefully.
