When the going was good, p.9
When the Going Was Good, page 9
In the beginning, when we weren’t discussing the magazine over lunch or playing the video game Gravitar at the Playland arcade off Times Square, Kurt would come up in the late morning to my office at Life and we’d try to figure out our editorial vision. Neither of us had a head for business, and we figured we needed someone who did. As it turned out, Kurt’s wife, Anne, who had gone to Radcliffe, knew a fellow who had gone to Harvard at the same time and who was at the Rothschild bank and looking to get out. This was Tom Phillips, and he was the beau ideal of a young publisher: tall, good-looking, and athletic. He still is. He loved the idea of the magazine. He was bored with his job and said he’d come in with us.
By this time, Kurt and I had all but set up a Spy home base in my office at Life. I have no idea if anyone on the magazine’s staff cottoned on to what I was up to. If they did, they never said a word about a Time writer spending a couple of hours each day in my office. Tom left the bank shortly thereafter and joined us, doing research on his early Macintosh computer and assembling a business plan. (In those days, Macs were the computers favored by business types and IBMs were the computers of the creative class. A decade later, those two allegiances switched completely.) At one point, Tom suggested that we come up with a hundred story ideas for the business plan. Kurt and I went down to the Time Inc. cafeteria with pads and pencils. And we just sat there for what must have been an hour. Finally, Kurt said, “Things Found in the East River.” Hmmm. And then I came up with “The Ten Most Annoying New Yorkers.” Hmmm. And then Kurt came up with another one. And so on. In a week we had our hundred potential story ideas.
We worked on the proposal for months. At one point, Kurt and Anne and Cynthia and I decamped to a beautiful old house in Tyringham, in the Berkshires. It was part of a privately owned Shaker village that belonged to George and Betty Kramer, longtime friends of Cynthia’s parents. George had been an original investor in New York magazine. And Betty’s father-in-law, Hawley Truax, from her previous marriage, had been a chum of Harold Ross and his circle. Hawley invested in The New Yorker when it first launched in 1925, and then served on its board of directors for almost half a century. Kurt and I worked in their library in Tyringham filled with signed copies of the output of the greats of early- and mid-twentieth-century American literature and criticism. In addition to lending us their house, George and Betty would come to invest in Spy, which, given their family history with upstart, New York–focused magazines, we took not only as an act of supreme generosity but as a good omen.
But before that, we had no money and no properly printed prospectus. We had an outline of what Spy would be, the most rudimentary of business plans, and those hundred story ideas, all of which we cheekily had printed at the Time Inc. facility in the building. We put together a couple of dummy covers. I had recently written a profile of the supermodel Paulina Porizkova for GQ magazine, and so when we needed a cover subject for a story on how “anyone can be a fashion designer,” I asked her if she would pose, and she said yes. The other person in the photo was Matt Nelson, acting as the designer to Paulina’s mannequin. He was Ash’s babysitter from across the street. And so we began courting money. In all our lunches, if the potential investor said yes, they picked up the tab in celebration. If they passed, they paid as a sort of consolation prize.
There was no shortage of hiccups along the way. Martin Peretz, the owner of The New Republic, was going to come in with an investment, but backed out because his wife, a Singer sewing machine company heiress, thought we weren’t going to be predictably liberal enough. Which was interesting, because his New Republic was anything but predictable or rote liberal. His partner in this investment was going to be Ivan Boesky, who was married to the daughter of the man who owned the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was also a Wall Street arbitrageur who was later tried and convicted for insider trading. At the time of our investment talks, as we later learned, he had, at the request of the federal government, begun wearing a wire. The year we launched, a talk he delivered at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley reportedly became the basis for the “Greed Is Good” speech Gordon Gekko delivers in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Boesky became a living symbol of the rapacious financial figures of the mid-1980s. A decade after Marty backed out of his investment, his daughter Evgenia came to work at Vanity Fair, first as an intern, then as an assistant, and later as a gifted and highly valued writer.
Henry Beard, a Harvard Lampoon alum, introduced us to John Goelet. John’s family, originally French Huguenots, had been figures in New York going back to the middle of the seventeenth century. It was said that at one point, they owned most of the land on the east side of Manhattan from Union Square to 48th Street. John agreed to put in $500,000—which would make him our largest investor. The others were remarkably blue chip given the scrappy nature of the enterprise, not to mention the outsider status of its founders: Kurt (Nebraska) and me (Canada). We had a Washington Post heir. An E.F. Hutton heir, who also happened to be an heir to the Safeway supermarket chain. The CEO of ConAgra, the giant food processor, became an investor. We had a member of the Frelinghuysen family as an investor. Tom’s father was CEO of Raytheon, the giant defense contractor. He came in. So did Kurt’s parents. Nancy Peretsman, at Salomon Brothers, invested. Bob Montgomery, a partner at the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss—and the lawyer for a string of notables including Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, and Cole Porter—served as our counsel. And he invested, along with two of his partners, Jay Topkis and Ernie Rubenstein.
The original plan was to raise $750,000. We went to George Green, the former president of The New Yorker, for advice. He looked at our business plan and said, “Double it.” Then, after a pause, he added, “And then double it again.” We did manage to double the amount we raised before we launched.
About two weeks before closing, John Goelet completely disappeared on us. This was in the days before email and cell phones. To disappear was to disappear. This was not good. And finding $500,000 in half a month was a daunting thought. That week I happened to have lunch with Gary Fisketjon, the editorial director of the Atlantic Monthly Press. Gary was a rising star as an editor of new American fiction, having brought in, among other books, his pal Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. In passing I mentioned the case of the missing Goelet. Gary thought for a moment and then suggested that we should meet Carl Navarre, a champion shot, the owner of Atlantic Monthly Press, and, not incidentally, a Coca-Cola bottling heir. We went to see him, and Carl stepped in and replaced Goelet’s half-million-dollar investment just days before we were due to close.
* * *
With no grand plan to do so, we launched in the fall of 1986 at what seemed like a perfect moment in the never-ending trajectory of New York. The city had recovered from its near bankruptcy in the 1970s. Financiers and the life-forms that had grown around them—investment bankers and lawyers—were awash with money. The downtown art world was booming. Yuppies, in all their young, upwardly mobile professionalness, were cornering the market on BMWs, yellow ties, and high-tech kitchen appliances. Hip-hop culture was exploding around us. New York had become a city of big hair and egos and long stretch limousines. It was the time of the “ladies who lunch” while their husbands were off draining the bank accounts of widows and orphans. At the same time, AIDS was on its long, deadly march through the gay community. Kurt and Tom and I believed that we knew enough to gin up the perfect magazine for ourselves and our friends. And we were foolish enough to think that all this rampaging and bridge burning wouldn’t have an effect later.
In Spy, we wanted a magazine of wit, satire, and what Kurt called literate sensationalism. We wanted humor combined with hard reporting. We wanted the voice to be a mixture of Time-ese from the 1940s, with its dense, fact-filled writing, and the saucy manner of London’s Private Eye. To the best of our knowledge, this hadn’t been done before in the U.S.—a combination of shoe-leather journalism and bracing satire. There were great journalists. And there were great humorists. But we had to find journalists who could get the story and then write it with a dash of distance and irony.
There were writers out there who were both good reporters and funny. The Style section of The Washington Post in those days was particularly fertile ground for writers with a keen, observational eye and a wicked voice. Sally Quinn, Marjorie Williams, and Lloyd Grove were standouts. At The New York Times, Maureen Dowd, William E. Geist, and Alessandra Stanley accomplished the near impossible: getting funny, contemporary writing into the paper’s gray, bloodless pages. We couldn’t afford them, though. Besides, nobody was going to leave a job at one of the nation’s celebrated broadsheets for a risky magazine start-up. We needed to develop our own farm team of Dowds and Quinns.
Mad magazine was a huge influence on us. Both Kurt and I read it all through adolescence. Aside from the jokes and the parodies, it did something that we attempted to do at Spy. It explained things—how things in the adult world worked. It’s where I learned about Madison Avenue, cocktail parties, sororities, movies, TV shows, and all manner of other aspects of American life and industry. Strangely enough, another influence was Looney Tunes, the Warner Bros. cartoon unit. Where Disney animated characters were wholesome and generally uplifting, there was something about Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Marvin the Martian, Foghorn Leghorn, and the rest of the Looney Tunes lot that was darker, more sophisticated, and vaguely anarchic—catnip to young boys of the time. The first images I had ever seen of movie stars like Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, and Charlie Chaplin were in caricature form in Looney Tunes cartoons when I was a preteen. Bugs was downright inspirational—cool, collected, and funny in the face of adversity. We wanted to be outsiders on the ramparts picking off the big shots. We wanted to champion the underdog and bite the ankle of the overdog.
Our first issue had the DNA for much of what would come later. We had a feature on the ten most embarrassing New Yorkers, including the thunderous Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and a certain “short-fingered vulgarian”—a slick developer making his debut in the magazine, Donald Trump. A photo essay on what nightclubs looked like in the morning was shot by Sylvia Plachy, the mother of the then thirteen-year-old future Oscar-winner Adrien Brody. Another story attempted to sort out things that back then got mixed up a lot, like Sakharov and Shcharansky, Euripides and Sophocles, and bathos and pathos. A map of gangland New York pinpointed mob landmarks. We ran unflattering stories on John Lydon (Johnny Rotten), Keith Haring, and the writer Tama Janowitz. And we outlined the dietary requirements in a Beach Boys concert contract.
We held the first of several Spy “balls” in the vast ballroom of the Puck Building at Houston and Lafayette in SoHo and hired the Kit McClure Band, an all-women swing orchestra. We had them kick off the night with “Sing, Sing, Sing (with a Swing),” the 1936 jazz standard composed by Louis Prima. It became the opening song for every Spy event thereafter. Since we had no money for decorations, we made the evening black tie, thinking that the dressed-up guests would be the decor. The turnout was something of a hit with the art, literary, and downtown worlds. A number of bold-faced names, like Andy Warhol and Malcolm Forbes, came to the event, sniffing around to see what all the fuss was about.
We had leased office space on the top floor of the Puck Building. It seemed fitting to us: a century before, the building once housed Puck, America’s first humor magazine. The space had huge windows and arched, brick ceilings. The offices hadn’t been finished when we moved in, and for the first four months construction raged around us. There was no air-conditioning that first summer, and at the end of a day of noise and construction dust we returned home drenched in sweat and looking like we had been working in a chalk mine. We borrowed old desks and chairs from our landlord. A lovely old Austrian man in a military-like uniform operated the cage elevator.
SoHo wasn’t quite SoHo then. The name itself was a recent real estate portmanteau for the area South of Houston. The cast-iron architecture provided the neighborhood with proper bones that in years to come would attract the great fashion houses of Paris and Milan. But before that, the cobblestone streets were quiet and shops were mostly one-off affairs, a lot of them selling vintage clothing and furniture. The Gaseteria, an all-night service station, was across the street. Details and Paper magazines were close by. Mob hangouts were around the corner on Mulberry Street. Clubs like Milk Bar, Area, and Danceteria were nearby and became hangouts as we settled in. Robert Mapplethorpe was a regular at the NoHo Star, the restaurant we went to for lunch most days—which gave it high marks in our books.
SoHo was also rife with the criminal element. One snowy afternoon before Christmas, I bumped into a fellow in the alley at the side of the Puck Building. He asked if I wanted to buy a Sony camcorder. I did. I most certainly did. My second son, Max, had been born, and I desperately wanted to take home movies. But I didn’t have the $300 that camcorders cost. The fellow showed me the box, and it looked like it hadn’t been opened. He said he’d sell it for $125. I went to a nearby ATM and met him back at the appointed time. We made our exchange, and I raced up to the office with my new purchase. The others gathered around as I opened it. As I got further through the unwrapping, my heart began to sink. I pulled away at the paper, and soon all that was left was a small piece of concrete with some wires wrapped around it. Kurt picked up one of the wires and said, “So this would go where?” The dear ones at the office took up a collection and the next day presented me with a certificate that I could redeem for a real camcorder. I was incredibly touched by this gesture. I thanked them, returned the check, and decided to buy my electronics through more traditional channels going forward.
Kurt and I spent a lot of time in those early months working on the house voice for Spy. We wanted a bemused detachment but witheringly judgmental. As I said, we borrowed heavily from Private Eye and the Time-ese writing of the newsweekly’s earlier days. Time labeled people with unflattering epithets along the lines of “jug-eared lefty” and was famous for its inverted sentences. Wolcott Gibbs published a profile of its founder, Henry Luce, in The New Yorker in the mid-’30s, and wrote the whole thing in an over-egged version of Time’s style back then. “Backward ran sentences till reeled the mind…. Where it all will end, knows God.” We figured that once we got the voice down, the other writers would essentially parody it and then just write like it. Which is precisely what happened.
We made fun of a cast of regular subjects, thinking that the more they were mentioned, the more readers outside the city would care about what we said about them. We also gave them adjective-heavy epithets. Donald Trump was already our “short-fingered vulgarian.” Abe Rosenthal, the successful former executive editor of The New York Times and later a less successful columnist, became “Abe ‘I’m writing as bad as I can’ Rosenthal.” His wife, Shirley Lord, was always the “bosomy dirty book writer Shirley Lord” in the pages of Spy. The poor couple detested us. And with good reason.
One day one of our interns mentioned that he had been at the video store and Abe was in front of him at the cash register. “You didn’t happen to see what he rented, did you?” I asked. He had indeed. And the films were a lot bluer than the sort of fare you’d expect from an esteemed Timesman. A day or two later, I was having lunch with a friend who worked at Vogue, where Shirley was beauty director. In a story meeting the subject of sleep had come up and Shirley described the five-pillow formation—including one between his legs—that Abe assembled prior to nodding off. I combined the video rentals and the intimate details of his sleep choreography and gave the information to our Times columnist, the pseudonymous J. J. Hunsecker, named for the lethal gossip columnist played by Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success. Hunsecker duly put all of this in the next issue. I can only imagine the paranoia this level of domestic intrusion must have set off in the Rosenthal-Lord household.
When Larry Tisch, of the New York Tisch real estate family, bought CBS and began firing hundreds, we ran a column on him and gave Tisch the epithet “churlish dwarf billionaire.” My pal John Scanlon called the day the issue hit the newsstands in something of a rage. “Graydon, you’ve gone too far this time!” he bellowed into the phone. John was working for Tisch, and in the course of our call, he pointed out that, first of all, Larry “is not, technically, medically, a dwarf.” I wrote this down and in the next issue we reported on the call, quoting a CBS factotum as having given us that correction in those very words. I received an even more furious call from John afterward.
The thing is, by and large, we didn’t really know any of the people we were writing about. There was an element of safety in that. It meant that we wouldn’t be bumping into our subjects at night. Editing Spy was like carpet-bombing at twenty-five thousand feet—as opposed to hand-to-hand combat. That’s not to say the subjects didn’t bite back. One month we ran an article called “Gore Vidal’s 8 Bonus Tips on How to Feud.” Tip number eight was “When all else fails, sue.” A few days after the issue hit the newsstands, I got a call from Gore. He said that if we didn’t print a retraction, he’d sue. Years later when we were working together at Vanity Fair, I asked him if he saw the contradiction, or at least the irony, in him threatening to sue over being called litigious, and he said that he didn’t. I left it at that. In the Party Poop section another month we ran a photograph of Jill Krementz, the wife of Kurt Vonnegut, identifying her as “champion namedropper and celebrity photographer.” Vonnegut called me in a fury. He said that his wife did not name-drop—she simply had a lot of famous friends and liked to talk about them. “Let me leave you with this,” Vonnegut said, ending the call, “if you don’t already have cancer, I hope you get it.”
