if there is anyone who doubts the radical nature of Tina Brown's changes to the New Yorker, here is some advice: Have a peek at some of the magazine's back numbers from the months, early in 1992, just before she replaced editor Robert Gottlieb. Walking into them is like walking into a time warp -- you feel you've been tossed back not five years but 25 or even 50. This was a magazine determined not to call attention to itself except through its writers' prose, and it carried itself with a distinctive, genial aloofness. Bylines were not at the beginning of articles, but at their close. Talk of the Town pieces went unsigned. There was little art, outside of a few spare line drawings, to illustrate articles. There were no chatty subheadlines, or "sells," beneath the modest headlines. There was a feeling, as Louis Menand put it in a 1990 New Republic article, that you were getting "a straight dose of fiction, poetry, reportage, and criticism, without patronizing hype or help."
With a few exceptions, the articles themselves could have been culled from a much earlier era. The long profiles (poet James Laughlin, botanist Richard Evans Schultes) were generally of figures somewhat out of the public eye, and they were not timed to give a boost to anything the subject might be promoting. John McPhee was publishing his three-part "Annals of the Former World" series on geology. The centerpiece of almost every issue was a notebook-emptying report from one of the magazine's "far-flung" correspondents: Stan Sesser on Singapore, Fred C. Shapiro on Mongolia, Robin Wright on Turkestan. The year's biggest controversy was over publisher Stephen T. Florio's announcement that subscribers would no longer receive the magazine in a plain brown wrapper; it would now arrive attached to an eco-friendly peel-off label.
The New Yorker had evolved under Gottlieb. In the fiction department, long a province of suburban-Connecticut minimalism, the former Knopf editor smuggled in some rawer talents such as Robert Stone and Richard Ford. The recently retired Pauline Kael had handed over film reviewing duties to two solid (if less idiosyncratic) writers, Terrence Rafferty and Michael Sragow. And a pre-"Prozac Nation" Elizabeth Wurtzel was writing a pop music column, the New Yorker's first, that was so roundly despised that I sometimes felt like its only friend in the world. Change was coming, but at a glacial pace. This was still William Shawn's magazine.
What the New Yorker needed, if you believe the critic (and occasional New Yorker writer) Stanley Crouch, was a lightning strike -- something to get this monster on its feet again. "Tina Brown was just the person the New Yorker had to have," he says, "because she really is the last great circus master." Brown not only cajoled and tamed the New Yorker's rumbling elephants, Crouch said, but she brought in some much-needed "trick-shooting marksmen, clowns, and women in bikinis" to jazz things up. Crouch declined to speculate on who those "clowns" at the New Yorker might be, but he feels that livening up the magazine does not run counter to its loftier goals. "Shakespeare had jokes in his plays, things to amuse the people in the pits," he says. "Even Duke Ellington had clowns who would perform during his shows in between the great numbers. Tina Brown cares about the weighty things, but listen -- she wasn't hired to help the magazine go out of business."
Brown's first issue of the New Yorker appeared in late September 1992 -- the issue was dated Oct. 5 -- and everything about it signaled her intentions for the magazine. On the cover was an Edward Sorel drawing that depicted a scrawny punk sprawled across the passenger seat of an elegant horse-drawn carriage, much to the driver's chagrin, in Central Park. Most observers assumed that punk was a stand-in for Brown herself. That issue's longest feature story, Mark Singer's profile of a prisoner who claimed to have once sold pot to Dan Quayle (he was lying, Singer discovered much later), was as topical as could be. So was Robert Hughes' meditation, titled "Fetus, Don't Fail Me Now," on the bizarre mascot chosen for Atlanta's Olympic Games. In the Talk of the Town section, James Wolcott -- whom Brown had brought with her from her tenure at Vanity Fair -- wrote a signed piece in which he took a passing jab at gadfly book editor Morgan Entrekin. (Entrekin's motto, Wolcott wrote, is "Speak Softly and Carry a Big Comb.") A friend writes? Not anymore.
Brown's first two years at the New Yorker saw plenty of genuine triumphs: Janet Malcolm's extended meditation on Sylvia Plath; Mark Danner's investigation of genocide in El Salvador, titled "The Truth of El Mozote," which occupied nearly an entire issue; and two remarkable pieces about AIDS -- Ted Conover's report on riding with truckers through the East African AIDS belt and Stan Sesser's piece about why AIDS is such a taboo subject in Japan.
But it was also a turbulent, and slightly surreal, time. The ongoing Janet Malcolm libel case was rubbing some of the mystique from the magazine's vaunted fact-checking department, and it didn't help when the magazine had to admit "errors of reporting, checking and editing" in a Talk of the Town piece on Court TV head Steven Brill. (The Talk section, which seems to go through a new editor every six months, was then the source of almost weekly mini-scandals: a complimentary piece about ex-East German leader Erich Honecker turned out to have been written by his lawyer's wife; John le Carré complained publicly that Talk had attacked a book merely because it was unfavorable to Harry Evans.)
There were other problems. New Republic writer Sidney Blumenthal had replaced Elizabeth Drew as the magazine's chief Washington correspondent, but his pieces were so unabashedly pro-Clinton that they quickly became the butt of countless jokes. (Blumenthal recently, and unsurprisingly, took a job as a Clinton aide.) Suddenly, the magazine's far-flung reporters weren't so far-flung anymore. One bantamweight report, under the heading "Our Far-Flung Correspondents," appeared in March 1993 with the groaning title: "Why 'Northern Exposure' isn't exactly a hit in Roslyn, Washington." Peter J. Boyer was reporting breathlessly on Jay Leno's travails, and Ken Auletta (whose soothing portraits of Hollywood mucky-mucks and media moguls are frequently cited by critics as epitomizing the worst of the buzz-and-power obsession of the Tina Regime) on New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
It was often amusing -- or a little sad, depending on your point of view -- to watch Brown nudge some dawdling party guests out the front door. When she devoted a huge chunk of real estate in 1993 to one of Ved Mehta's meandering reminiscences of Oxford, she broke up Mehta's essay with so many diversions -- a slew of cartoons, two poems, an appraisal of Reggie Jackson by Roger Angell, a column-length Barry Blitt cartoon panel riffing on "Norman Mailer's Picasso," a full-page Roz Chast cartoon and some Sue Coe drawings of scenes from criminal court -- that it was like watching a nervous host rushing to plunk ice in her guest's drinks to distract them from the ramblings of an embarrassing uncle. It felt like short attention span theater.
The New Yorker lost many admirers in those years, and most of them it has not gained back. "There was a time in my life when the New Yorker made a difference," says Barbara Ehrenreich, the journalist and Time magazine essayist. "I can remember, to give just one example, when my father read Frances Fitzgerald's 'Fire in the Lake' in the New Yorker in the 1960s. That writing literally changed his mind about Vietnam. There are no articles like that in the New Yorker today."
Ehrenreich has kept her subscription to the magazine, but says she will not renew it. "There is not enough I care about in it any longer," she says. "As a reader I'm not above trash. But there is so much fashion and celebrity in the New Yorker now, and that's stuff I can get in People magazine or the tabloids." Ehrenreich says, for example, that she tried to read a recent New Yorker memoir about having a beautiful best friend, but it had problems that many of the magazine's articles do now. "That's a great topic, and it could have been a wonderful piece," she says. "But it kept getting lighter and lighter. By the end it was all about famous guys and clothes."
Another writer, a well-known literary journalist, says that he looks forward to the magazine each week -- "You've got to see who's in there, you know" -- but that he deplores the magazine's current tone. "Tina Brown does have a terrific eye for what's interesting about a piece," he said. "But the whole tone tends toward mere journalism now. There is an emphasis on the celebrity profile, on the report that is no more than a report."
More worrisome, this writer said, is that many of the New Yorker writers he knows have begun to censor themselves. "There has been such a loss of reflectiveness, of meditative prose, and of regard for the turning of a
thought," he said. "Writers have learned to leave such things out of their pieces, because they know the New Yorker editors will cut them. So they try to publish the stray bits and pieces elsewhere -- and they are often the best parts of an article."
Not everyone shares this critic's disdain for the magazine's editing, however. Indeed, according to several current New Yorker writers, the editing is precisely what draws them to the magazine -- not its pay (usually $1.50 or $2 per word, roughly the industry average for glossies) or its prestige.
"People bitch about the editing," says one journalist. "But as exhausting as that kind of word by word editing is, I love it. It's the only place where a group of extremely capable people apply themselves with this amazing force and concentration to something I've written. You have these moments where you realize: This is as good as it gets. Everything else is a come-down."
Other writers, though, say they're lucky to have survived the experience. They claim to have been tortured by multiple, and often contradictory, rewrites. "They've got layers upon layers of editors over there, and they're always second-guessing one another," says a well-known female writer. "Even the shortest pieces I write go through about seven editors, and at the end of all that I can often barely recognize my voice in the article."
The same writer says she was forced to rewrite one article nearly 10 times. "It's not worth it, either emotionally or financially," she said. "You get 10 grand -- but you realize you've lost 10 months in the process." This fact, as well as Brown's penchant for overassigning articles and killing many of them, says another writer, is why "half of the writers in New York want her head on a pike."
For his part, Stanley Crouch says that most of the New Yorker's critics are merely jealous. "If resentment and envy were radioactive," he says, his booming laughter echoing into the telephone, "then New York City would be 500 times worse than Chernobyl!" As for Ehrenreich's remark about Francis Fitzgerald's Vietnam writing, he says: "If there's a great writer out there with something to say, you know the New Yorker will find him or her."
