I read The National Enquirer when I want to feel exhilarated about life’s possibilities. It tells me of a world where miracles still occur. In the world of The National Enquirer, UFOs flash over the Bermuda Triangle, cancer cures are imminent, ancient film stars at last find love that is for keeps. Reached on The Other Side by spiritualists, Clark Gable urges America to keep its chin up. Of all possible worlds, I like the world of The National Enquirer best.
Not that the world of People isn’t a pretty gosh-darn wonderful place, too. Life may not be very exhilarating in the world of People, but it is beautiful. There I meet Prince Charles, who has no problems, and Erica Jong, who has fame, beauty and success. And J. Paul Getty, the richest man in the world! I learn that Catherine Deneuve is beautiful and Liza Minnelli is talented and Mikhail Baryshnikov is happy. What a sweet world. It is what the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald would have been if Fitzgerald had been ghostwritten by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale.
Sometimes, of course, I sneak into the world of Playboy for a wallow in hedonism. In the world of Playboy, Ernest Hemingway wears a silk union suit in a sleeping bag at a Holiday Inn. It is a world in which Henry VIII is played by John Travolta and Oedipus tears out his eyes because the tone arm on his record changer is not properly balanced.
So much less fearsome than the world of Esquire, where Dante Gabriel Rossetti always seems to be jogging with Muhammad Ali while Norman Mailer is on a pub crawl with Vergil.
After so much rich masculinity, one needs repose. There are several possible worlds for this. The world of Foreign Affairs, for example, where the Harvard faculty assembles to administer a high colonic to Anwar Sadat. Or the world of U.S. News & World Report where deep slumber can be enjoyed in the complete text of Ronald Reagan’s declaration of faith in the American marketplace.
I tread cautiously whenever I stumble into the world of Ms. As I tiptoe about, looking for an exit, I hear Mark Antony declaring over the corpse of Brutus, “This was a person.” In my panic I will take any exit at all. Once, I dashed out of the world of Ms. and found myself right in the middle of the world of Psychology Today—a convention of embalmers arguing how to proceed with Mickey Mouse’s synapses.
Another time, I stumbled into the world of The New York Review of Books. Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn were dueling for Olivia de Havilland. Rathbone won, provoking Olivia to a brilliant denunciation of his footwork, which so enraged Rathbone that he promptly rowed back to his ship and composed a 12,000-word rebuttal of Olivia’s criticism, in the course of which he revealed that as a student at Smith she had ranked only ninety-seventh in épée and seventy-third in saber, and furthermore had taken a morally weak position on William Howard Taft’s 1908 campaign.
Whenever I need a complete change of worlds, as I did then, I run to the newsstand for Cosmopolitan. What a flattering world it is for a man. Not a man in the place, and all these women sitting around studying techniques for trapping one. I always consult my horoscope there because I know that in the world of Cosmopolitan it will declare me a first-rate subject for love in the coming month. The women giggle when they see me and try to lure me with frozen-food dinners by candlelight and with artfully constructed foundation garments, but I pay them no heed, for I know they only wish to practice their lessons in how to steal a husband on a working girl’s budget.
How do I know such things? Because I spend part of every week in the world of New York magazine, a world that trains you for survival. As a regular denizen of the world of New York magazine, I can instantly identify the owners of the ten most expensive brass beds in Manhattan and tell you which new cheeses are chic. There I have learned how to exude power through my necktie and how to buy a subway token. I know the fifteen best places for rape in the Wall Street district and how to come in from the rain.
This is different from the world of The New York Times, where life seems so gravely beset by imminent catastrophe that it is useless to study survival. The only hope in the world of The New York Times is Professor Kissinger, who is constantly taking me aside at 35,000 feet for private assurances that things are not as desperate as the riots at the last airport might suggest. I tire of these constant reassurances. They are, after all, only reminders that the world will continue to be a place where no miracles are possible.
So I whoop with glee when a new edition of The National Enquirer hits the newsstands and step into the world where Gable can cheer me up from The Other Side.