THE WEEK BEFORE LA FOLDED, Gay Talese came to the Other Bob Sherrill’s house for drinks. Bob invited me and other reporters from the paper over to meet him. Vodka and tonic was what we all drank then. Gay drank martinis, but he wasn’t drinking that night because he was on his way to work, which Sherrill had told us was managing an all-night massage parlor in the San Fernando Valley, or maybe going to an orgy in Malibu. It was reporting for his next book, Thy Neighbor’s Wife. We were in awe. Gay said he thought we were brave the way we were facing almost certain unemployment.
When we were out of work a few days later, Sherrill told me he wasn’t worried about any of us, that most would wind up at the Los Angeles Times, which is what happened. He also said that this was not going to happen to him and probably not to me, either.
“The more places you work,” he added conspiringly, to emphasize his subtext, “the more places you work.”
He was developing a theory around what he later called “the accidental life.” He said the lives of most reporters and editors at big papers followed a straight line from story to story, beat to beat—a path with small detours as distractions—“as lost to history as any hamster on a wheel.” I didn’t want that. Plus, no one was offering. I started a novel and hustled photography assignments and documentary film work. No paycheck. That part of the accidental life was already mine.
When I finally got a magazine job, it was thanks to the production director of LA, who had become the editor in chief of San Francisco Magazine and hired me as a combination writer and editor. Michael Parrish had started as an intern fact-checker at I. F. Stone’s Weekly, the revered investigative newsletter, and was as reliable a journalist as I worked with anywhere. When he left San Francisco for City magazine, I went with him, but we began to lose touch after Warren Hinckle replaced him as editor in chief. I thought Michael would be bitter about losing his job to Hinckle, because he had brought Warren in as a “guest editor,” but he was graceful about it and moved back to Los Angeles, where he lived for the next thirty-seven years.
His obituary in the Los Angeles Times in 2013 described how he discovered that he had been laid off from that paper in 1995, after a long and solid career there. He had taken a source to lunch and tried to pay the bill with his company credit card, which had been canceled. The obit also said he later put his research and reporting skills to use as a private investigator.
I wondered if he had thought about looking into the murder of Las Vegas mob daughter and journalist Susan Berman, who had been Hinckle’s girlfriend when Hinckle had grabbed his job at City. I remembered sitting next to her in the City newsroom, and the two tiny dogs she leashed under her desk when she was writing a story. Listening to them yip as she banged away on her IBM Selectric, I was far from imagining I would ever become what I thought of as a real editor, like Sherrill, let alone work at his hallowed Esquire and edit him and Gay Talese there.
But that’s what happened, and I met new writers and worked with them and all of our stories changed. Everyone kept moving. I got married, had two sons, got divorced and married again. My life seemed normal except that it was very different every day, which I knew was what Sherrill loved most about his editing life. His accidental life. It wasn’t always easy. Ideas got broken and jobs didn’t work out. Friends faded. Love failed. But the thing was, no matter how strange or rocky it got, there was redemption in the work. That was not accidental. Journalism, editing and writing filled the days and nights.
It was a way to live. Don’t get locked in. Take life as it comes—the future and past together in the same moment. Mortality becomes a gyroscope, the wheels within wheels of growing older. Expect angels pulling chariots across the sky. Enjoy the ironies. The Other Bob Sherrill was right about letting life happen to you, regardless of the pain and so on but with its soaring joy. The accidental life was good that way. There was something edifying in the randomness of the people you met and worked with who then passed on, sometimes to stranger connections or unforetold madness.
I thought about that again early in 2015 when Susan Berman’s death became the focus of HBO’s true-crime documentary series The Jinx, and her friend the troubled New York real estate heir Robert Durst was arrested in New Orleans on a murder warrant issued in Los Angeles on the eve of the final episode. The episode where he accidentally admitted to killing her. More accidental lives, marbles rolling around in an old cigar box.
FOR ALL MAGAZINE EDITORS, there are exhilarating moments that no one else can know, like when you start reading and you know just from the first sentence that it will make your mix and give your issue a subtext that will echo how smart you want it to be. I have been able to recite Rian Malan’s opening line of My Traitor’s Heart since I first read the galleys to excerpt it in Smart:
I’m burned out and starving to death, so I’m just going to lay this all upon you and trust that you’re a visionary reader, because the grand design, such as it is, is going to be hard for you to see.
The voice, the challenge, the rhythm, the vulnerability are all there, and what followed paid off the promise. I have been very lucky that way and thought about including an appendix listing the works of all the writers in these pages. It seemed a righteous endeavor but then also felt self-serving, as if taking credit for their work when I had just sometimes been helpful. And what’s the Internet for anyway?
Editors do many different things and with wildly varying styles. The editing jobs I had were never only about the words; and for some brilliant editors, and at some spectacular magazines, it’s not about the words at all, and that’s fine. Wit and clever observation are never enough. You need images that work on more than one level. And real art and fine-tuning and polish and nuance and finish carpentry and sharp display copy and surprising (but readable) typography. In other words, you have to make all those boxes perfect before the monkeys can start jumping out of them.
A useful bit of editorial advice came from Ed Kosner, a one-time editor of Newsweek and New York, who replaced me at Esquire. In his memoir, It’s News to Me, Ed wrote, “No matter what people tell you, many decisions don’t have to be made—and shouldn’t be made—until the last moment. If you wait long enough, many problems solve themselves.” That’s the way I worked too. “Enormous changes at the last minute” would have been my credo had I thought to have one.
At Newsweek, I learned that you can turn on the proverbial dime. “Scrambling the jets” is what Maynard Parker, Newsweek’s editor, called it, reveling in the cliché, and it was thrilling and important at the same time. In the beginning this required nerve. Later on it became second nature. If you wanted to take somebody on, though, you had to make it about something important or your colleagues wouldn’t follow you and there would be mistakes. I had only three rules: Force nothing. Be clear. You can always go deeper.
I loved all the work and every editing job I ever had, but when I was editor in chief of Esquire, it felt like the best job I was ever going to have. The morning I was fired, my boss stood up when I walked into his office and said something about making changes always being difficult for him. That was it. Leaving the building, I tried to reason with my regrets but it was no good. As in love with the work as I was, I had missed all the signals. I had had no fear. I had had no self-defense. Had I gone too far, or not far enough? I had had no idea how my colleagues saw me. That job was suddenly like the girl you loved but never touched in college telling you at a party twenty years later that she wanted you desperately then but not now—You should have just come over.
From Esquire on, I tried to know where I stood, not just with my many bosses but with my colleagues and the writers I edited. Out of that I learned the importance of letting them know where they stood with me. Maybe that made me a better editor; maybe it didn’t. At my last holiday lunch with other Time Inc. editors, John Huey, the wry editor in chief, presented me with a confidential job evaluation form from back in 2003. Under “Areas for Growth/Development” it noted my weakness: “patience with corporate protocol.” We all drank to that. It felt like a quick little victory lap until I thought about it later, sitting alone in my office. If I had been in any number of corporate jobs, I would have pissed me off, too. What an asshole. If I had been even a little savvier, less arrogant about my ideas, I would have gotten more done. I could have learned more from John Huey.
The week I decided to end my career as an editor was the week after Jeremy Lin, the Chinese-American point guard out of Harvard, started a spectacular streak playing for the New York Knicks. The New Yorker ran a series of very small spot drawings sprinkled throughout the issue, as it usually does, depicting Lin rescuing a cat from a tree, helping an elderly woman across a street, delivering a baby, painting the Mona Lisa and so on. Lin was lighting up Madison Square Garden and it seemed like he could do anything and the New Yorker did that. It wasn’t writing but it was narrative and it made me think about how great magazines can be if the editors are agile.
That same week, all the magazines I’d ever edited suddenly looked to me to be better magazines than they had been when I was editing them. Stronger reporting, better service, sharper, funnier. Once, at Sports Afield, I put a dog on every page. At Esquire I ran a white-on-white cover with the hed “White People: The Trouble with America.” I put Howard Stern on the cover three months later in a Barbara Kruger illustration that read across his face in her bold italic sans serif type: I hate myself
What was I thinking?
What I was not thinking was that I would ever write a book about writers and editing them and the good and bad old days in the magazine business, when probably I should have been tracking down all those writers and thanking them directly for their fineness of mind and spirit. For that, and for everything else, too.
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