IT HAD NOT BEEN MY FIRST OR LAST NIGHT IN PARIS BY ANY MEANS.
I was a lifer, one of those expatriates from Hoboken, New Jersey, or Missoula, Montana, who stay too long and have no home to go back to in the USA and fall for the myth that Paris is the new New York; that the French like the Yanks because Lafayette preferred them to the British in 1776, because we liberated them from the Germans; that somehow we own Paris because we have shared so much of its history and slept with so many of its women, just as their men have cavorted with so many of ours.
I counted my time at the Star in decades and dated my adventures to the days when the dollar ruled and there were no farmed oysters on sale in the off-season and writers really did hang out at Le Dôme waiting for the ghost of Hemingway or Miller to settle on their slumped shoulders and whisper inspiration into their jaded ears.
I was the honeyed voice calling on unreliable phone lines to foreign correspondents in Rangoon or Rio to cajole and flatter them into filing early, promising that I would not change their deathless prose so long as they made their deadlines and thus enabled me to put the pages to bed in time to climb into my buzzy red open-top Alfa Romeo sports car and head out around the Étoile, bouncing along the cobbles of the Champs-Élysées, down the Rue des Saints-Pères, toward the bars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Shelby and I traced our memories to the golden age when you could eat truffles and drink wine and still have cash in your pocket to take a special friend to Claridge’s in London for the weekend. I had been promoted early and had clung to the masthead ever since, even as the boisterous tides and treacherous eddies of layoffs rose about me, raising up and then dumping a host of top editors. My favorite among them all was a man who filled his morning coffee mug with cognac, never read the paper, and was known as Two-Jackets Johnson because he always kept a sport coat draped over his office chair to give the impression of proximity to the coalface while he wore a second jacket in some distant brasserie, bar, or boîte. (The operative jacket was distinguished by a fresh-cut carnation in the buttonhole—a signal known only to the few who would never betray him.)
With just one jacket, no buttonhole, and the cognac reserved (mostly) for after hours, I had survived them all.
But these days, the barbarians were at the gate.
The divine beast of Print to which we had bowed throughout our professional lives, to which we had made our offerings of articles and news and all too transient prose, was expiring. If we had imagined that our words alone could sustain it, we were wrong. Deprived of the advertising lifeblood they craved, newspapers were foundering. Like misguided skippers on the bridges of so many stricken vessels, newsmen and newswomen were going down with the ships on which they had once sailed the kindly oceans of expense-account lunches, five-star hotels, and mortal peril.
It was the end of the era that spooled back to the presses of Gutenberg and Caxton.
Print—that great, gorgeous, messy alchemy of ink and hot type and whirring reels of paper and working stiffs in stained coveralls—was expiring but not quite finished. Its digital heir, the Internet, with its rapid-fire news and needle-sharp technology, was already muscling in, even though, like some itinerant prodigal, some down-at-heel pretender, it could not pay its way. But the days were long gone when those huge newspaper ads from Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue financed all our free lunches.
Maybe it was easier for the big boys, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, with their deep pockets and long lines of credit. But we had always been number three, the little kid brother scrambling to keep up, trying to do the same job with a fifth of the bureaus, a quarter of the ads, and half the circulation. Of course, we punched above our weight. We moved quick and nimble. We were hungry to bring the giants down a peg or two. We had our scoops and knockouts. But financially, we had no backup; no passing benefactor; no generous, kind family to sustain us—only the cruel mistress of the marketplace.
There were moments when I almost sympathized with Marcel Duffie—almost. If you thought about it rationally, he had a point. We needed ads to finance the way we had always run things. But the ads weren’t there anymore. While we were looking the other way, a whole new generation had arisen, believing that the Internet somehow suspended the first rule of business, that you get what you pay for. These days, with their tablets and smartphones and laptops, everyone seemed to believe news was free; that it didn’t cost money to send Shelby & Co. hurtling across the planet to feed at humanity’s latest kill, to pay people like me to process the news. But the irreducible core was simple: news comes with a serious price. And whatever the citizen journalists with their cell phone cameras might tell you, that price is worth paying.
If you want an objective take on what happens in Afghanistan or Gaza or Cairo or Moscow or Paris, you can’t rely on governments and their flacks and spin doctors to tell you. Tweets can be pretty useful—like signposts on a faint trail, pointing to the right direction, marking the way through the jungles of official obfuscation and the competing lies of war. But in 140 characters they can’t cover the whole story—or explain who’s telling it. Anonymous blogs don’t share their sources, their biases. They might be for real. They might just be rants—or plants. Unpalatable though it might seem, you are stuck with the Shelbys and the Clancys to filter out the dross. And if you are Marcel Duffie, or someone like him, you have to make the judgment calls and decide what’s better—free lunches and business-class tickets for Joe Shelby, or saving enough money to keep on doing what you do best and sending your reporters to cover the news, even if they may no longer do so from those favored old watering holes. Part of me believed the cuts and economies were designed —like curative surgery—to permit the greater organism to survive. Part of me wanted desperately to believe that, when the cuts were done, it would all turn out to have been a beneficial exercise—like a regime of cold baths, small salads, and long runs to make a better person of you.
Then there were the other arguments—the idealists who figured citizen reporters on their cellphones, calling in the news from Tehran to Tuscaloosa, would take up the slack when what they scornfully called the mainstream media collapsed. But who would they call the news in to? Who would keep these breathless messengers honest?
And there had been the occasional bright light, the occasional visionary who believed reports of the death of print had been much exaggerated. People like to quote the example of a big-time Manhattan executive who upped sticks while still in his 50s and headed back out to Minneapolis to rescue The Star Tribune. Sure, he got there after the all-too-familiar cycles of decline—layoffs, cost-cutting, private equity firms loading the title with debt, even bankruptcy. But then people started buying paper again. Circulation crept up. Profits, too. The media pundits in New York began to pay attention: was this the template?
But a big part of me saw it in a different light altogether. Newspapers were dying the death of a thousand cuts. They started off like Shelby—bighearted and slightly crazy—and they ended up like Duffie—small and mean-spirited. So many titles had already disappeared from the newsstands, replaced by websites or not at all. It was the common wisdom that the Internet would take over where newspapers failed as humanity’s mirror, reflecting back the best and the worst, from war zones to concert halls.
And it would perform that function with much greater efficiency. On the web, there were no forests to chop down to make the pulp to make the paper to print the word because there were no printers or paper, only infinite gigavistas stretching to a Big Brother future where the web snared us all 24-7.
And there was another monster out there: the conflation of news and “content.”
News was what really sold newspapers. News was what the reader wanted—hard fact, history’s dawn, truth you could base a judgment on. But when newspapers perished it was because people like Duffie figured that the creation of “content” to separate the ads—in the paper or on the web—was a mechanical process that could be achieved without people like Shelby. Or me.
No news was very bad news indeed.
So, in this penurious interregnum, until someone worked out how to make the Internet pay, the auditors roamed the Star’s gloomy corridors with their clipboards, paring here, trimming there, never quite leaving blood in the corridors, but always nipping and tucking at their twitching victim.
The masthead—the power league of editorial status—shrank as overpaid bosses took monstrous buyouts and were not replaced. With magisterial authority, accountants who had never ventured far from their calculators issued all-points bulletins to those in the quake zones and riots and trenches: each taxi ride must be accounted for individually and only if no public transport is available in your part of the coup-stricken capital; meals with sources (takeout preferred) will not be reimbursed beyond $10; when in war zones please rotate the use of bulletproof vests, helmets, gas masks and suits for use in times of chemical, biological, radiation, and nuclear hazard; the company encourages the purchase of low-budget camping equipment (one-person tents only!) as a substitute for hotel accommodation.
Titanic-style, we plowed the oceans toward our tryst with the iceberg of history that was the World Wide Web.
No truffles now. Brown bag trumped a la carte.
No Claridge’s.
No mistresses—for me, at least.
Over the years I had moved my center of operations from the downtown bustle to the sticks. I had traded the Alfa Romeo for a Jeep and switched my investments, just in time, from stock on the markets to bloodstock. With Shelby, in the old days, I had stolen a few horses. Now I owned a few on a spread outside Paris where Marie-Claire Risen, my first—and hopefully last—wife, ran the equestrian business and waited, so far as I knew, to welcome me home with a modest tipple and an immodest embrace.
The last thing I needed was Shelby on the old rampage, whambo-zambo, with the editor’s squeeze—or anyone else’s for that matter.
In the end, my loyalty to him came under immense and potentially ruinous strain, but in those early days, it was boundless.