Esquire’s Men: Feelings on the Rampage

Men overboard.

For its issue devoted to “The Passions of Men, 1987,” Esquire recruited scores of the best and brightest wordsmiths of our age--including John Updike, Martin Amis, William Styron, William Kennedy and Tom Robbins.

Editor Lee Eisenberg explains their collective goal: to demonstrate that “the vital organs of the American man--beginning with the heart--are in full throttle.” The issue, he says, is dedicated to the premise that “men have the genetic capacity to feel” and “to live to talk about it later.”

The writers sing the inspirational joys of golf, Porsches, hardware stores, baseball and mountain climbing (former Newsweek editor William Broyles Jr. grippingly tells how and why he tested his 42-year-old acrophobic self by scaling his first mountain, the 23,000-foot Aconcagua in the Andes). They confess their secret loves (Kennedy for Diane Sawyer; Robbins for Diane Keaton) and obsessions. They divulge their abiding pleasures (red meat and sex) and moments to remember (poker bluffs won and fishing trips), and Roy Blount Jr. even whips up a poem, “What Guys Hate!”

Despite a great deal of individual journalistic excellence, however, the cumulative effect of such a rampage of feeling and emoting and warm recalling by mostly over-40 men will turn off many males to the right of Phil Donahue. (The Museum of Modern Male Art includes a long-neck beer bottle and a deck of Tally-Ho playing cards but guns have been banned.) There’s not much for the David Lee Roth party crowd either.

Esquire’s non-hunting gentlemen would surely sicken Thomas Fleming, the editor of the Midwestern conservative culture magazine Chronicles, who isn’t so pleased with the modern American man. In his essay on the qualities of real American men, Fleming stresses the importance of sports in building character before turning to current political events: “The shamelessness and effeminacy of public men,” he says, is “the most salient quality of the latest Iranian fiasco.” Everyone--the President and his men, the press, the Democrats, Robert McFarlane--has behaved disgracefully, says Fleming, who believes that “moral cowardice, the weakness of the American elite class, is a problem that transcends distinctions of liberal and conservative.”

Savage Emperor

Jean-Bedel Bokassa doesn’t look like a monster who could personally club six schoolchildren to death or order his 2-day-old grandson to be poisoned.

But Bokassa--the “leader” of the Central African Republic from 1966 to 1979--committed those atrocities and many other unbelievable acts of personal savagery and greedy excess, as Alex Shoumatoff recounts with much gruesomeness in Vanity Fair’s “Fall of a Savage Emperor.”

Now on trial in his country, Bokassa is officially charged with cannibalism (a misdemeanor), mass murder and the stealing of most of the national treasury (in 1977 he spent $25 million on crowning himself emperor of the former French colony--a third of the national budget).

During his rule he fed his political enemies to lions or had them thrown into a pool filled with crocodiles. He once celebrated Mother’s Day by having everyone in prison for a crime against a woman hanged at dawn. It was only after he jailed a Western journalist and after Amnesty International stirred up international outrage over his massacre of about 150 children, however, that Bokassa’s reign of horror was ended by crack French paratroopers sent by his former buddy, then French Prime Minister Valery Giscard d’Estaing.

Shoumatoff attended Bokassa’s trial, which is still continuing, to try to find out how he became such a monster. He rummages through the wreckage of Bokassa’s rotting empire, assesses the present condition of what at best is a Fourth World country and looks in vain for an answer to the question of how “such an obvious psychotic could have stayed in power for so long.”

Fighting Critics

Balding Gene Siskel and bulging Roger Ebert may seem like they dislike everything about each other. But in her amusing twin profiling of the pioneering TV movie critics in Chicago magazine, Toni Schlesinger suspects--and presents circumstantial evidence that seems to prove--that behind their squabbling media image there “could be more love than hate.”

As part of her effort to prove that their public “ferociousness may now be a finely tuned act,” she cleverly sprung a surprise quiz on the rich and famous Windy City duo. Ostensibly, she was testing their motor skills, drawing ability and general knowledge. Actually, she was hoping to observe how they behaved toward each other when their guards were down.

The two equally “driven, controlling, critical child prodigies who have to be the smartest and the best” both scored pretty miserably. But, just as Schlesinger had presumed, the quiz brought them together. They put aside their intense competition and ganged up on Schlesinger, trying to discredit the test and intimidate her. “If they were ever separated,” she deduces from this and other evidence of their genuine concern for each other’s personal and professional welfare, “they might become despondent and forlorn. Life might lose its meaning.” Not to mention its monetary rewards.

Bits & Pieces

Gary Hart’s quick demise victimized at least one magazine: The Woman of the Week for the current June 1 issue of US magazine is Andrea Hart, 23, who, the headline says, in December will be “Hitting the Campaign Trail With Her Dad.” . . . More natural but equally unplanned-for events caught up with Woody Allen. The father-to-be of longtime companion Mia Farrow’s child-to-come told Tom Shales in the April Esquire that he didn’t “think it was a gift to bring somebody into this world” and that “everyone should stop reproducing for a while and should adopt all the kids that are loose.” . . .

Based on his recent trip to Russia, John Kenneth Galbraith ponders the future of its economic system under glasnost in Harper’s. He is guardedly optimistic that real reform and change are possible and repeats a quote from a major critic of recent trends of socialism a la Soviet: “The section of people, including youth, whose ultimate goal in life was material well-being and gain by any means grew wider. . . . The spread of alcohol and drug abuse and a rise in crime witnessed the decline of social mores. Disregard for laws, report padding, bribe taking, and encouragement of toadyism and adulation had a deleterious effect on the moral atmosphere in society,” the Central Committee of the Communist Party was told in January by Mikhail Gorbachev. . . .

All the data you need to know before you buy your own camcorder--a video camera and VCR all in one--can be found in the June Video Review and Video magazines. Besides their usual array of videocassette movie reviews, equipment tests and entertainment briefs, both magazines offer buyers’ guides to the 75-plus camcorder models available from 30 companies in three confusing formats. Video magazine’s more ample package also includes a field test of nine camcorders (1.6 million of which are expected to be sold in 1987 at around $1,200 each), a how-to article on shooting home movies and advance word on Pixelvision, Fisher-Price’s $150 black-and-white camcorder for kids that’ll be out this fall. . . .

How big is the magazine business? The 3,200 companies that publish about 11,000 U.S. magazines earned revenues of $15.7 billion in 1986. (1986 newspaper revenues were $29 billion and IBM, all by its lonesome, made $14.3 billion before taxes.