Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker (Modern Library Paperbacks) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  JOSEPH MITCHELL - MR. HUNTER’S GRAVE

  “AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL ZION.”

  MARK SINGER - SECRETS OF THE MAGUS

  JANET FLANNER - ISADORA

  JOAN ACOCELLA - THE SOLOIST

  WOLCOTT GIBBS - TIME . . . FORTUNE . . . LIFE ... LUCE

  IAN FRAZIER - NOBODY BETTER, BETTER THAN NOBODY

  RICHARD PRESTON - THE MOUNTAINS OF PI

  CALVIN TRILLIN - COVERING THE COPS

  JOHN MCPHEE - TRAVELS IN GEORGIA

  CALVIN TOMKINS - THE MAN WHO WALKS ON AIR

  GEOFFREY HELLMAN - A HOUSE ON GRAMERCY PARK

  LILLIAN ROSS - HOW DO YOU LIKE IT NOW, GENTLEMEN?

  ALVA JOHNSTON - THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE

  HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. - WHITE LIKE ME

  A. J. LIEBLING - WUNDERKIND

  KENNETH TYNAN - FIFTEEN YEARS OF THE SALTO MORTALE

  TRUMAN CAPOTE - THE DUKE IN HIS DOMAIN

  HILTON ALS - A PRYOR LOVE

  ROGER ANGELL - GONE FOR GOOD

  NANCY FRANKLIN - LADY WITH A PENCIL

  JOHN LAHR - DEALING WITH ROSEANNE

  MALCOLM GLADWELL - THE COOLHUNT

  ADAM GOPNIK - MAN GOES TO SEE A DOCTOR

  SUSAN ORLEAN - SHOW DOG

  JANET MALCOLM - FORTY-ONE FALSE STARTS

  NICHOLAS LEMANN - THE REDEMPTION

  NICHOLAS LEMANN - GORE WITHOUT A SCRIPT

  BILL BUFORD - DELTA NIGHTS

  THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Copyright Page

  To Eleanor Gould Packard,

  guardian of the sentence

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Dozens of New Yorker staffers—editors, writers, assistants, fact checkers—gave me lists of their favorite Profiles. I am very grateful for the suggestions. Pamela Maffei McCarthy and Eric Rayman at The New Yorker made the happy arrangement with Daniel Menaker and Ann Godoff at Random House for this volume and for Wonderful Town, a companion collection of short fiction set in New York City. Susan Choi, Dorothy Wickenden, Henry Finder, and Roger Angell worked especially hard in sorting through these Profiles, and Brenda Phipps, Beth Johnson, Chris Shay, and the magazine’s library staff were also of great help to me and to this project.

  INTRODUCTION

  DAVID REMNICK

  It used to be said around the New Yorker offices that our founding editor, Harold Ross, invented the Profile. But if a Profile is a biographical piece—a concise rendering of a life through anecdote, incident, interview, and description (or some ineffable combination thereof)—well, then, it’s a little presumptuous to stick Ross at the front of the queue, ahead of Plutarch, Defoe, Aubrey, Strachey, or even The Saturday Evening Post. And yet in 1925, when Ross launched the magazine he liked to call his “comic weekly,” he wanted something different— something sidelong and ironical, a form that prized intimacy and wit over biographical completeness or, God forbid, unabashed hero worship. Ross told his writers and editors that, above all, he wanted to get away from what he was reading in other magazines—all the “Horatio Alger” stuff.

  James Kevin McGuinness, a staffer in the earliest days of the magazine, suggested the rubric “Profiles” to Ross. By the time the magazine got around to copyrighting the term, it had entered the language of American journalism. Most of the initial Profiles in the magazine were fairly cursory and bland (and not worth anthologizing). The first was a sketch of the Metropolitan Opera’s impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza; it ran just over one page and showed scant evidence of even the most rudimentary reporting. It wasn’t terribly funny, either. By 1927, however, the reporting was getting stronger and the writing more irreverent. John K. Winkler’s Profile of William Randolph Hearst, a five-part piece, was both uproarious and well researched, and Janet Flanner had begun perfecting a shorter form, with a Profile of Edith Wharton.

  The most influential of the early Profiles was Alva Johnston’s delightful dissection, in 1932, of a phony Russian prince named Michael Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff. The prince’s real name was Harry F. Gerguson, late of Illinois. (Like Joseph Mitchell’s great subject, Joe Gould, Gerguson was an irresistible fake. He was so irresistible, in fact, that Ross eventually befriended him and sent him off to Los Angeles, where he could mooch off Dave Chasen, the restaurateur; eventually, Obolensky mooched off enough of Chasen’s customers to open his own place.) While the mainstays of Ross’s New Yorker, E. B. White and James Thurber, did the most to develop the magazine’s urbane tone and sensibility, Johnston, who had won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter at The New York Times in 1923 and later moved to the Herald Tribune, gave the Profile form real literary and journalistic weight. Johnston was the first to combine a natural wit and sense of storytelling with the legwork of a first-class newspaperman. His Profiles, especially those of Obolensky and the Florida architect Addison Mizner, influenced generations of New Yorker writers and Profile masters, from A. J. Liebling to John McPhee to Mark Singer. His obituary in the magazine read, in part, “When The New Yorker in its earliest days was trying to establish the Profile as a new journalistic form, it was Alva Johnston more than anyone else who set the pace, clarified the idea, and produced the pieces. He gathered and assembled facts in such a way as to give a fresh, candid, gay, and occasionally satirical picture of an individual.”

  Ross was a man of enormous social energy and mischief, and he was not reluctant to use pieces in The New Yorker as a means of settling feuds and even starting them. St. Clair McKelway’s Profile of Walter Winchell enumerated hundreds of errors and bogus items in Winchell’s gossip column; the piece was so thorough a trouncing that it provoked Winchell to report in the Mirror that Ross wore no underwear. Evidently, Winchell had erred again; Ross mailed him the very pair of undershorts he was wearing when he read the offending column. Winchell, for his part, demanded that the owner of the Stork Club ban Ross from his tables.

  Wolcott Gibbs’s skewering of Henry Luce in 1936 heightened the rivalry between The New Yorker and the Time-Life empire, a rivalry that had started with a long, nasty, and well-informed piece on Ross and The New Yorker in Fortune by one of Ross’s earliest colleagues, Ralph Ingersoll. Gibbs’s Profile, which enjoyed Luce’s cooperation, made a buffoon of its subject and, even more effectively, undermined “Timespeak,” the queerly stentorian, neologism-studded artificial language of his magazines. (In Gibbs’s devastating summary, “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.”) Leaning heavily on the reporting of his colleague John Bainbridge, Gibbs subjected Luce to a reportorial strip search, detailing his income, the décor of his colossal apartment, his odd habits in the office, his taste for pompous middlebrow journalism, and his megalomania. The Profile ended with a stunning flourish: “Certainly to be taken with seriousness is Luce at thirty-eight, his fellowman already informed up to his ears, his future plans impossible to contemplate. Where it all will end, knows God!”

  When Luce was shown the galleys he was furious and demanded a meeting with Ross. “There’s not a single kind word about me in the whole Profile,” he complained at the late-night summit.

  “That’s what you get for being a baby tycoon,” Ross replied, showing his command of Timespeak.

  “Goddamit, Ross, this whole goddam piece is ma . . . ma . . . malicious, and you know it!”

  Ross hesitated. Finally, he said, “You’ve put your finger on it, Luce. I believe in malice.”

  The New Yorker Profile has
expanded in many ways since Ross’s time. What had been conceived of as a form to describe Manhattan personalities now travels widely in the world and all along the emotional and occupational registers. There are Profiles of malice (Gibbs on Luce) and Profiles of praise (Joan Acocella on Mikhail Baryshnikov). There are Profiles about identity (Gates on Broyard) and Profiles about the strangeness of American fame (Tynan on Carson). One quality that runs through nearly all the best Profiles—the Profiles represented here and the many, many more for which there was, finally, no room this time—is a sense of obsession. So many of these pieces are about people who reveal an obsession with one corner of human experience or another. Richard Preston’s Chudnovsky brothers are obsessed with the number pi and finding the pattern in randomness; Calvin Trillin’s Edna Buchanan is an obsessive crime reporter in Miami who visits the scenes of disaster four, five times a day; Calvin Tomkins’s Philippe Petit has walked from one World Trade Center tower to the other on a tightrope and now wants to walk across the Grand Canyon; Mark Singer’s Ricky Jay is obsessed with magic and the history of magic. In every great Profile, too, the writer is equally obsessed. It’s often the case that a writer will take months, even years, to get to know a subject and bring him or her to life in prose.

  The Profile is ubiquitous in modern journalism. We are awash in pieces calling themselves profiles that are about the inner thoughts of some celebrity; more often than not they are based on half-hour interviews and the parameters set down by a vigilant publicist. The New Yorker has not been the only home for better work. But whether it’s in The New Yorker or elsewhere, the Profile is a terribly hard form to get right. Susan Orlean manages it with a subject who can only bark; Nancy Franklin does it with a subject who has been dead for many years. Janet Malcolm, in her piece about the painter David Salle, says a great deal about the difficulty of settling on the right details, the right angle of vision in a Profile that consists, as she says, of “Forty-one False Starts.”

  In trying to assemble a collection of Profiles that would represent, to some degree, the form as it developed over the seventy-five-year history of the magazine, I needed at least a couple of guidelines to limit myself and the book. After gathering suggestions from colleagues on the staff of The New Yorker and from contributors around the country, I discovered that, with the help of our library, I had amassed a box of photocopied Profiles larger than one’s first refrigerator. Rule No. 1 was that no writer could appear more than once. Even more painful, I decided to publish pieces only in full. I wanted the reader to get the real thing—no excerpts, no snippets. As a result the reader will have to go elsewhere for a range of long or multipart Profiles: Dwight MacDonald on the Ford Foundation; John Betjeman’s self-Profile in verse; George W. S. Trow on Ahmet Ertegun; Arlene Croce on Edward Villella; Rachel Carson on the sea; Marshall Frady on Jesse Jackson; Liebling on Earl Long; Susan Sheehan on Carmen Santana; William Whitworth on Roger Miller; Jane Kramer on Allen Ginsberg; Alec Wilkinson on a bounty hunter; Hannah Arendt on Bertolt Brecht; Jervis Anderson on Ralph Ellison; Janet Malcolm on the psychoanalyst “Aaron Green”; S. N. Behrman on Joseph Duveen; Lawrence Weschler on Robert Irwin; Brendan Gill on Tallulah Bankhead; John Bainbridge on Toots Shor; Connie Bruck on Hillary Clinton; St. Clair McKelway on Walter Winchell; Philip Hamburger on John P. Marquand; Richard Rovere on William F. Howe and Abraham H. Hummell; Pauline Kael on Cary Grant; and Joseph Mitchell on Joe Gould. As you can see, the history is rich. Some of these, like Malcolm’s “Psychoanalysis” or McPhee’s many Profiles, are in print and fairly easy to come by in bookstores; some, like Mitchell’s Joe Gould, have recently emerged in new editions; finding many of the others will depend on the industry of the reader, the local library, the serendipity of used-book stores, and the increasing quality and range of the various on-line Web sites for used books.

  Beyond giving pride of place to Joseph Mitchell’s “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (because I love it so), I have arranged the pieces mainly to vary lengths and tone and, sometimes, to compare treatments of a similar theme, as with the two dance pieces and a few of the pieces about public success (Capote on Brando) and public failure (Angell on Blass). The truth is, however, that this is an anthology designed strictly for pleasure. There are no hidden lessons.

  JOSEPH MITCHELL

  MR. HUNTER’S GRAVE

  WHEN things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there. I go to the cemetery of the Woodrow Methodist Church on Woodrow Road in the Woodrow community, or to the cemetery of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on the Arthur Kill Road in the Rossville community, or to one on the Arthur Kill Road on the outskirts of Rossville that isn’t used any longer and is known as the old Rossville burying ground. The South Shore is the most rural part of the island, and all of these cemeteries are bordered on at least two sides by woods. Scrub trees grow on some of the graves, and weeds and wild flowers grow on many of them. Here and there, in order to see the design on a gravestone, it is necessary to pull aside a tangle of vines. The older gravestones are made of slate, brownstone, and marble, and the designs on them—death’s-heads, angels, hourglasses, hands pointing upward, recumbent lambs, anchors, lilies, weeping willows, and roses on broken stems—are beautifully carved. The names on the gravestones are mainly Dutch, such as Winant, Housman, Woglom, Decker, and Van Name, or Huguenot, such as Dissosway, Seguine, De Hart, Manee, and Sharrott, or English, such as Ross, Drake, Bush, Cole, and Clay. All of the old South Shore farming and oyster-planting families are represented, and members of half a dozen generations of some families lie side by side. In St. Luke’s cemetery there is a huge old apple tree that drops a sprinkling of small, wormy, lopsided apples on the graves beneath it every September, and in the Woodrow Methodist cemetery there is a patch of wild strawberries. Invariably, for some reason I don’t know and don’t want to know, after I have spent an hour or so in one of these cemeteries, looking at gravestone designs and reading inscriptions and identifying wild flowers and scaring rabbits out of the weeds and reflecting on the end that awaits me and awaits us all, my spirits lift, I become quite cheerful, and then I go for a long walk. Sometimes I walk along the Arthur Kill, the tidal creek that separates Staten Island from New Jersey; to old-time Staten Islanders, this is “the inside shore.” Sometimes I go over on the ocean side, and walk along Raritan Bay; this is “the outside shore.” The interior of the South Shore is crisscrossed with back roads, and sometimes I walk along one of them, leaving it now and then to explore an old field or a swamp or a stretch of woods or a clay pit or an abandoned farmhouse.

  The back road that I know best is Bloomingdale Road. It is an old oyster-shell road that has been thinly paved with asphalt; the asphalt is cracked and pocked and rutted. It starts at the Arthur Kill, just below Rossville, runs inland for two and a half miles, gently uphill most of the way, and ends at Amboy Road in the Pleasant Plains community. In times past, it was lined with small farms that grew vegetables, berries, and fruit for Washington Market. During the depression, some of the farmers got discouraged and quit. Then, during the war, acid fumes from the stacks of smelting plants on the New Jersey side of the kill began to drift across and ruin crops, and others got discouraged and quit. Only three farms are left, and one of these is a goat farm. Many of the old fields have been taken over by sassafras, gray birch, blackjack oak, sumac, and other wasteland trees, and by reed grass, blue-bent grass, and poison ivy. In several fields, in the midst of this growth, are old woodpecker-ringed apple and pear trees, the remnants of orchards. I have great admiration for one of these trees, a pear of some old-fashioned variety whose name none of the remaining farmers can remember, and every time I go up Bloomingdale Road I jump a ditch and pick my way through a thicket of poison ivy and visit it. Its trunk is hollow and its bark is matted with lichens and it has only three live limbs, but in favorable years it still brings forth a few pears.

&nbs
p; In the space of less than a quarter of a mile, midway in its length, Bloomingdale Road is joined at right angles by three other back roads— Woodrow Road, Clay Pit Road, and Sharrott’s Road. Around the junctions of these roads, and on lanes leading off them, is a community that was something of a mystery to me until quite recently. It is a Negro community, and it consists of forty or fifty Southern-looking frame dwellings and a frame church. The church is painted white, and it has purple, green, and amber windowpanes. A sign over the door says,

  “AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL ZION.”

  On one side of the church steps is a mock-orange bush, and on the other side is a Southern dooryard plant called Spanish bayonet, a kind of yucca. Five cedar trees grow in the churchyard. The majority of the dwellings appear to be between fifty and a hundred years old. Some are long and narrow, with a chimney at each end and a low porch across the front, and some are big and rambling, with wings and ells and lean-tos and front porches and side porches. Good pine lumber and good plain carpentry went into them, and it is obvious that attempts have been made to keep them up. Nevertheless, all but a few are beginning to look dilapidated. Some of the roofs sag, and banisters are missing on some of the porches, and a good many rotted-out clapboards have been replaced with new boards that don’t match, or with strips of tin. The odd thing about the community is it usually has an empty look, as if everybody had locked up and gone off somewhere. In the summer, I have occasionally seen an old man or an old woman sitting on a porch, and I have occasionally seen children playing in a back yard, but I have seldom seen any young or middle-aged men or women around, and I have often walked through the main part of the community, the part that is on Bloomingdale Road, without seeing a single soul.