For an editor who occupies what may be the hottest seat in American publishing, Robert Gottlieb looks surprisingly cool and calm, if visibly uncollected. His white shirt is wrinkled, his dark hair long and unruly, his eyes quizzical behind owlish glasses.
His knees propped against his desk to relieve a painful back, Gottlieb is wondering aloud why his cluttered office at the New Yorker has been such a center of ”gossip, malicious envy and unending curiosity” in the nearly two years since he assumed the magazine`s editorship from the elusive and pontifical William Shawn.
Not just literary or professional gossip, the 57-year-old editor notes ruefully, but speculation about his private life, such as published reports that he devotes his hours away from the office to crocheting afghans. Though some of what is written about him is flattering, most is ”nonsense,”
Gottlieb asserts, particularly the afghan story.
Before he got the New Yorker job, displacing Shawn in what may be the most infamous firing since MacArthur was relieved of Korea, Gottlieb spent two decades as the editorial chief of Alfred Knopf, one of the country`s most revered publishing houses. But nothing had quite prepared him for the recording by media seismographers of every shake, rumble and tremor from within the New Yorker. ”Sometimes I think that if I were to sneeze,” he says, ”it would be a major news story somewhere.”
For verification, he recalls the inordinate clamor that arose when he shifted the magazine`s table of contents to a (slightly) more prominent spot. ”A Literary Quake: The New Yorker Turns the Tables” was the headline over the New York Times story the day after the ”remodeled” issue appeared, much to Gottlieb`s consternation. ”It didn`t occur to me that it would cause reverberations throughout the land,” he says.
What confounds Gottlieb is that for all the tumult and the whispering, so little of consequence actually happens at the New Yorker. Sweeping his hand across the manuscripts, memos, letters, proofs and other editorial debris scattered across his desk, Gottlieb says: ”This is steady, never-ending work, but it`s not like publishing, which is punctuated by trauma, frenzy, hysteria and constant day-to-day crises. Here the energy goes into maintaining our standards rather than coping with crises.”
”Listen,” he says, motioning toward the open doorway to his utilitarian office, which except for the riot of paperwork and the pop artifacts might belong to a prison warden. From down the long corridor comes the metallic chatter of a single typewriter. ”You see. It`s calm. Everyone is working. Everything is moving forward. There`s no dramatic story here.”
But try as he might, Gottlieb hasn`t been able to convince hard-core New Yorker watchers of that, thanks in part to the almost mythic inscrutability of the magazine, coupled with the almost equally mythic reticence of his predecessor. And even though he is far more accessible than Shawn, who never granted private audiences to reporters, Gottlieb still hasn`t managed to muffle the reverberations, from within the magazine or without.
”I keep telling myself that this will die down,” says Gottlieb, well aware that he`s indulging in wishful thinking. Besides the constant surveillance by newspapers and other magazines, the New Yorker is the nominal subject of two new books, which provide fitfully provocative glimpses into the inner sanctum.
Of the two, one is an inside job, ”A Year of Change” (Viking, $19.95), by veteran staff correspondent E.J. Kahn. A sequel to his book of 10 years ago, Kahn`s diary has a misleading subtitle, ”More About the New Yorker & Me.” While purporting to offer an intimate view of Gottlieb`s crucial first year as editor, Kahn`s journal is more about ”Me” than it is about the New Yorker, with endless nattering about his wife, ex-wife, children, dog, dreams, anxieties, parties, junkets and other largely irrelevant matters.
Even though he trivializes almost everything he touches, Kahn does pass along intriguing sidelights on Shawn`s occasionally wayward editorial practices, such as his habit of assigning stories that he had no intention of publishing. But by the end of the year in question, 1987, Kahn seems as mystified by Gottlieb as he was by Shawn, concluding that the new editor, while ”no pushover,” may not be ”too different” from the old.
Far more nourishing is Gigi Mahon`s book, ominously called, ”The Last Days of the New Yorker” (McGraw-Hill, $17.95). After a summary history of the magazine, beginning with its founding by Harold Ross and Raoul Fleischmann in 1925, the book concentrates on the backstage events that led to the reluctant sale of the New Yorker to the Newhouse empire 60 years later.
The takeover by Newhouse, whose media holdings include Knopf and Random House as well as such other magazines as Vanity Fair and HG, was what led in turn to Shawn`s brusque dismissal at age 79, after 30 years of benevolent but erratic despotism. His firing and replacement by Gottlieb set off the celebrated but futile protest by New Yorker editors and writers (J.D. Salinger among them) who had been the principal recipients of Shawn`s beneficence.
Along with a multitude of tales about stock maneuvering, nepotism, financial ineptitude and heavy drinking by members of the founding family and their corporate brethren, Mahon also catalogues Shawn`s personal and editorial eccentricities (at one point, he reportedly had a stockpile of articles and cartoons valued at $3.7 million). And in her brief look at Gottlieb`s New Yorker, Mahon also takes note of the new editor`s ”quirks” and hobbies, which include, she insists, crocheting afghans.
As coauthor of a current book about his collection of plastic handbags, Gottlieb makes no secret of his affection for kitsch. His office is stuffed with it, from the ”Mommy Dearest” tapestry to the orange Philco table radio. But he was quick to dispute the afghan allegation. And his denial brought an equally vigorous rebuttal from Mahon, a Manhattan journalist who recently moved to Chicago when her husband, Thomas Theobald, became the chairman of Continental Bank.
”After I heard he was denying it,” Mahon says, ”I went back to the two people who told me about it, and they both swear that it`s true. It`s a perfect example of New Yorker nitpicking, if you`ll pardon the expression, that he`d take something like that and use it to dismiss a whole book.”
As should be perfectly clear, the disclosures in Mahon`s book don`t exactly add up to New Yorkergate. But she knows from her experience working on the book that she can expect repercussions. ”The New Yorker doesn`t like it when anybody writes about it, not just outsiders but anybody,” Mahon says.
”James Thurber was vilified for his book. Tom Wolfe was castigated for his famous Herald Tribune story in the `60s. And Brendan Gill (then the magazine`s theater critic) was denounced for his benign book. So I keep telling myself I`m in good company.”
In charting the fortunes of the New Yorker over six decades, Mahon takes note of the precipitous decline in circulation, revenues and advertising pages, which she and other critics trace to the late `60s and early `70s, when Shawn waged editorial war against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Despite the shrinkage and other portentous signs, Mahon doesn`t think that these are really the ”last days” of the New Yorker, that it`s a publishing
brontosaurus, as her title seems to imply.
”Thankfully, the magazine`s in the hands of a company with the means to keep it going,” says the youngish Mahon (”just say I`m thirtysomething”), who got hooked on the New Yorker while she was a student at Boston University during the late `60s. ”The number of ad pages is slipping,” she observes,
”it just keeps getting skinnier, and most people in publishing guess that it`s not making money. But I can`t imagine Newhouse folding it.”
Like a lot of other New Yorker addicts, Mahon has failed to detect much change in the magazine since Gottlieb took power. ”The editorial content seems to be business as usual. The biggest criticism is that the stories are so long. But I think the real problem is that they aren`t interesting or timely, though that seems to have gotten a little better under Gottlieb. Elizabeth Drew`s political stories have actually come out during the election, which didn`t necessarily use to happen.”
A former reporter for Barron`s and the author of ”The Company That Bought the Boardwalk,” an expose of dealmaking and gambling in Atlantic City, Mahon says she almost abandoned her New Yorker book because doors would ”keep slamming in my face,” not in corporate but editorial offices. ”The stereotype is that journalists are communicators and businessmen are always trying to hide things. But in this case the businessmen were open and candid, while most of the communicators wouldn`t talk (including Gottlieb), and those who did made me swear their names wouldn`t be used.”
Even though the ”paranoia and animosity were amazing,” Mahon persisted with her research, only to discover: ”There`s nothing terribly mysterious about the New Yorker. There probably wouldn`t be so much curiosity if it wasn`t for all the secrecy.”
On that point, she has not only the tacit agreement of Gottlieb but the hearty endorsement of Brendan Gill, whose notoriously indiscreet, anecdotal history, ”Here at the New Yorker,” has been reissued in paperback by Carroll & Graf with a new introduction that ushers the magazine into the Gottlieb era. ”There never has been any mystery,” says Gill, whose 50 years at the New Yorker have included tours as movie, theater and, currently, architecture critic. ”You`d think from the degree of interest by the outside world that it`s intensely byzantine, that there are thrilling stories always ready to be spilled. But that isn`t the case at all. There`s nothing going on, except for people writing.”
Gill himself doesn`t write at the New Yorker these days, having moved to more spacious quarters in a high-rise on Central Park, where he`s working on a memoir about his life away from the New Yorker. But he hasn`t given up his corner office at the magazine`s illustrious but distinctly modest address, 25 W. 43d St., where he regularly drops by to pick up his mail and occasionally to chat with Gottlieb, whose ”beachcomber” clothes, Gill says, would prevent a Hollywood casting director from assigning him ”the role of editor of the decorous New Yorker.”
For all his casual ways, Gottlieb has brought a ”certain tension and tautness” to the New Yorker`s editorial pages, Gill believes, especially to the Talk of the Town column. And like almost everyone else who watches the magazine closely, Gill anticipates further changes, though none so drastic, he adds hopefully, that they would violate the tone or spirit of the New Yorker. ”We`re living in an exceptionally rotten period, socially, economically, politically and every other way,” Gill says, ”and it would be more honorable in my view for a first-rate magazine to vanish from the face of the Earth than to fumble and stumble about in an attempt to accommodate or to cheapen itself.”
Amid the solitary chaos of his 20th-floor office, Gottlieb hardly behaves as if he were preparing to deliver the last rites to the New Yorker. Despite the inevitable gossip and rumors about him and the magazine, he is not only outwardly relaxed but euphoric. ”Everybody was in a state of distress when I arrived here,” he says. ”But I feel that acceptance, or at least accommodation, came quickly. And as for me, just about every moment here has been a happy one.”
If anything, he maintains, the magazine is ”livelier and stronger” than ever: Circulation is up by 130,000 (to 632,000) since Newhouse acquired the magazine; the cover illustrations and cartoons are more incisive and whimsical; the articles are more judiciously edited. Gottlieb has enlisted lively new writers and critics (Mimi Kramer on drama, Terrence Rafferty on books and movies, and Holly Brubach on fashion). And nobody who`s read the stories by Robert Stone and Richard Ford would argue that the language isn`t stronger.
In his two years as editor, only the third in New Yorker history, Gottlieb has managed to ease fears that he would destroy or pervert the magazine by acting too quickly. Now the criticism comes from those who think he isn`t acting quickly enough. But Gottlieb is obviously in no hurry.
”Things are changing quietly and slowly,” he says. ”I`m not a person for strategies and tactics. I have no agendas. If people really want to know what`s going on at the New Yorker, they`ll just have to read the magazine.”
