Avid Reader by Robert Gottlieb

Author:Robert Gottlieb
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374713904
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

WORKING

The New Yorker

THE NEWS that I was going to replace William Shawn at The New Yorker was front-page news—in fact, it appeared on the front page of The New York Times, along with my picture. Even so, as was the case when I went to Knopf, I wasn’t the story—the story was about the fate of the magazine that to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people was an essential part of their lives. I was one of them, and had been since I first started scanning the cartoons when I was about twelve, the way so many readers have been drawn into the magazine. First the cartoons (what could be more sophisticated for a precocious kid than “getting” Addams, Arno, Hokinson, and Thurber); then the humor pieces; then on to the fiction. By 1946, when Harold Ross, the founder, devoted an entire issue to John Hersey’s Hiroshima, I was religiously reading every word he chose to run.

William Shawn, Ross’s successor, was as highly regarded as Ross had been. He was a sacrosanct figure, despite Tom Wolfe’s notorious 1965 attack on him, “Tiny Mummies!,” in New York. He had carried the magazine to amazing success, both literary and financial. But by 1987, when I took over, the magazine had become less vital. All too often I found myself turning its pages rather than reading them.

I had understood that my appointment would be greeted with a blast of speculation and/or resentment, although I hoped there would also be a degree of goodwill—I wasn’t, at least in my estimation, a barbarian at the gates. But the circumstances of Shawn’s departure were so shrouded in confusion and obscurity, aggravated by deliberate obfuscation, that what in an ideal world would have been an orderly and polite transfer of authority became a scandal. To begin with, when Si Newhouse bought the magazine he had assured the staff that he would consult with them when the time came to replace Shawn. This he failed to do—partly, I suspect, because he didn’t know the people there, but also because he didn’t want to. He wasn’t used to being second-guessed, let alone first-guessed. It was his magazine, and he would do what he wanted to with it. But he took the responsibility seriously. He venerated The New Yorker, which is why he overpaid for it, and whenever we had talked about it over the previous several years it was evident to me that if Shawn had proposed a plausible candidate to replace himself and a reasonable timetable for his departure, Si would have been relieved. Given Shawn’s nature, however, that was an impossibility, and Si, extremely impatient by temperament, erupted when Shawn, without knowing he was doing it, gave him the opening.

The staff and the writers at The New Yorker were shocked, dismayed, and scared when the news broke, and who could blame them? They were also angry, since Shawn let it be known that he had been abruptly fired. Lillian Ross, Shawn’s mistress of many years, stoked

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