I Remember Nothing Read Free Page B

check. We checked a story by referring to whatever factual material existed; occasionally we made a phone call or did some minor reporting. Newsmagazine writers in those days were famous for using the expression “tk,” which stood for “to come”; they were always writing sentences like, “There are tk lightbulbs in the chandelier in the chamber of the House of Representatives,” and part of your job as a researcher was to find out just how many lightbulbs there were. These tidbits were not so much facts as factoids, but they were the way newsmagazines separated themselves from daily newspapers; the style reached an apotheosis in the work of Theodore H.White, a former
Time
writer, whose
Making of the President
books were filled with information about things like President Kennedy’s favorite soup. (Tomato, with a glop of sour cream.) (I ate it for years, as a result.)
    At
Newsweek
, when you had checked the facts and were convinced they were accurate, you underlined the sentence. You were done checking a piece when every word in it had been underlined. One Tuesday morning, we all arrived at work and discovered a gigantic crisis: one of the Nation stories in that week’s
Newsweek
had been published with a spelling error—Konrad Adenauer’s first name was spelled with a
C
instead of a
K
. The blame fell not to the writer (male) who had first misspelled the name, or to the many senior editors (male) and copy editors (male) who had edited the story, but to the two researchers (female) who’d checked it. They had been confronted, and were busy having an argument over which of them had underlined the word “Conrad.” “That is not my underlining,” one of them was saying.
    With hindsight, of course, I can see how brilliantly institutionalized the sexism was at
Newsweek
. For every man, an inferior woman. For every male writer, a female drone. For every flamboyant inventor of a meaningless-but-unknown detail, a young drudge who could be counted on to fill it in. For every executive who erred, an underling to pin it on. But it was way too early in the decade for me to notice that, and besides, I was starting to realize that I was probably never going to be promoted to writer at
Newsweek
. And by the way,if I ever had been, I have no reason to think I would have been good at it.
    The famous 114-day newspaper strike (which wasn’t a strike but a lockout) began in December 1962, and one of its side effects was that several journalists who were locked out by their newspapers came to
Newsweek
to be writers, temporarily. One of them was Charles Portis, a reporter from the
New York Herald Tribune
whom I went out with for a while, but that’s not the point (although it’s not entirely beside the point); the point is that Charlie, who was a wonderful writer with a spectacular and entirely eccentric style (he later became a novelist and the author of
True Grit
), was no good at all at writing the formulaic, voiceless, unbylined stories with strict line counts that
Newsweek
printed.
    By then I had become friends with Victor Navasky. He was the editor of a satirical magazine called
Monocle
, and it seemed that he knew everyone. He knew important people, and he knew people he made you think were important simply because he knew them.
Monocle
came out only sporadically, but it hosted a lot of parties, and I met people there who became friends for life, including Victor’s wife, Annie, Calvin Trillin, and John Gregory Dunne. Victor also introduced me to Jane Green, who was an editor at Condé Nast. She was an older woman, about twenty-five, very stylish and sophisticated, and she knew everyone too. She introduced me to my first omelette, my first Brie, and my first vitello tonnato. She used the word “painterly” and tried to explain it to me. She asked me what kind ofJew I was. I had never heard of the concept of what kind of Jew you were. Jane was a German Jew, which was not to say she was from Germany but that her