A Humble Giant of Journalism

It was, perhaps, inevitable. First, the writerly eyeglasses disappeared, then the ties started appearing. Finally, the New York Times began to comment on his haircuts, which the newspaper of record reported as costing $80.

“It meant,” said David Remnick, whose sartorial tinkering had become the object of investigative reporting, “that I had to give the guy a $65 tip because I get a $15 haircut and I wanted my wife’s newspaper, the New York Times, to be right.”

All of a sudden, David Remnick had become the most watched man in American journalism. For Remnick--a former star Moscow correspondent whose first book won a Pulitzer Prize for its lapidary account of the fall of Communism--becoming the fifth editor of the New Yorker in the magazine’s 73-year history last summer after spending a career watching other people meant that he was now on the other side of the microscope.

“Being a writer, unless you’re one of those freakishly famous ones, and I certainly wasn’t, is a pretty private, obsessive existence,” he said recently on a trip to San Francisco before giving a talk across the bay at UC Berkeley. “You’re in a little room hoping words are accumulating on the page and you aren’t bonkers. Your book appears. Maybe you go on a television show or radio, but most of your days are in a little room. This is completely different. Now it’s people all day long.”

Not that Remnick wasn’t planning to come out of that little room right about now anyway. After all, he recently published another gloriously reviewed book, “King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero” (Random House, 1998), which he had completed before he was named editor of the New Yorker in July.

Remnick certainly seems more at ease talking about his book, which explores the way Cassius Clay reinvented himself as Muhammad Ali amid the swirling background of civil rights and antiwar activism, than himself.

“It’s an amazing theme,” Remnick said of his subject, “making yourself.”

“He hit people for a living,” Remnick writes, “and yet by middle age he would be a symbol not merely of courage, but of love, of decency, even a kind of wisdom.”

For Remnick, Ali’s early career--and the intersecting stories of fellow but very different fighters Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston--represented an “American myth” that had fascinated him since he was a high school senior who saw Ali box in 1976.

“The book has the components of a traditional novel,” he explained. “It has a main character who finds himself and changes, and two supporting characters in contrast and a fantastically fascinating time. It’s like the god of nonfiction smiled down on me, whether you like the book or not.”

So far, Remnick has not had any problem getting critics to swoon over his work.

“A member of that dying species,” the San Francisco Chronicle raved in a typical review of “King of the World,” “the must-read book.” The Los Angeles Times used such words as “fascinating,” “balanced” and “eloquent” in its review.

Such praise--four glowingly reviewed books and the editorship of one of the most prestigious magazines in America, all by his 40th birthday--might turn some people into overbearing Media Figures. But Remnick, youthful and trim, manages to be both self-effacing about himself and enthusiastic about his work at the same time.

“David has had the best press of any national figure I’ve seen in a long time,” noted his friend Eric Lewis, a Washington attorney who met Remnick in college. “I think he gets it because he is genuinely very hard-working, really interested in ideas, a mensch. He treats people with compassion. He spends a lot of time at it. He’s ambitious only in the sense that he cares about doing what he does very well. He’s not interested in seeing and hearing his face and voice reflected in the national echo chamber.”

Passion for Journalism Started in High School

Remnick, the son of a dentist and a teacher, grew up in suburban New Jersey. Lots of magazines poured into his father’s office, and some of them eventually made it into the waiting room when Remnick was finished with them. He began reading his future employer mostly for the cartoons (about the stage his two young sons are at now), then dipped into The Talk of the Town pieces before finally diving into the bottomless ocean of the New Yorker’s book-length articles.

In high school, he edited the student newspaper, making up different bylines for himself because the name David Remnick seemed to appear too often.

“I was nutty about journalism,” he said. “I thought I could make a living at it and still be a writer. I was neither rich enough nor courageous enough to call myself a novelist.”

At Princeton, he was a stringer for various small papers, earning $25 for obituaries of people not quite important enough to be covered by staff writers.

But it was New Yorker writer John McPhee’s Literature of Fact course at Princeton that really fired up Remnick--even before he took the class, which sometimes gets five applicants for every seat and admission to which is based on writing samples.

McPhee remembers being in the Princeton bookstore when a student bounded up to him and introduced himself as David Remnick. He said he had waited until he was a senior to take the class so he would get the most out of it.

“I said how do you know you’re going to be in my class?” McPhee recalled. “He said it never crossed his mind that he wouldn’t. That’s just David. It’s not drenched in chutzpah. David is the last person in the world who is full of himself.”

“It breathed something into me,” Remnick recalled of the class. “I got to see how a writer, a real writer, thinks about his craft, his attention to detail, the pencils he used, the structure. For a 20-year-old to encounter that in the flesh is enormously important. It’s been important to a lot of journalists who were lucky enough to stumble into that course. He’s as good a teacher as he is a writer, and that’s the highest compliment I can pay him.”

He Landed a Job as Moscow Correspondent

During summers Remnick began working at newspapers as an intern, twice at the Washington Post, where he landed his first job working the night cops beat. Then he applied for an opening in the sports section.

“It was,” he said, “a way to get off night police. I did boxing because it was low on the totem pole.”

From there Remnick moved to the paper’s Style section, when one day he noticed a posted opening for a second Moscow correspondent.

“My worst subject in high school was Russian,” he said, “which is why I made my living at it. I was interested in it because of the novels. I wanted a great adventure. It was an incredible story. And no one else wanted to go. No one else applied. No one else wanted to live in this vegetable- and fruit-less land.”

For four years Remnick traveled across the vast but crumbling Soviet empire, sometimes filing two to three stories daily, seven days a week.

“We worked all the time, pleasurably,” said Remnick, whose wife, Esther Fein, reported for the New York Times. “Everything you did was part of the story. Going to the opera, reading the papers. It must have been like being one of those guys with the pan before everyone else showed up at the gold rush. It was heaven.”

Remnick’s energetic and creative reporting formed the basis for his first book, “Lenin’s Tomb,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994.

“A great story because a great story was provided,” is how Remnick sums up the book.

After he came back to the United States, it wasn’t long before Remnick was one of the first hires by Tina Brown when the British-born former Vanity Fair editor powerful enough to be known by her first name took over the helm of the New Yorker.

Brown didn’t waste any time shaking up the magazine, dumping longtime contributors, adding photos and four-letter words. According to her critics, Brown either gave a blood transfusion to an ailing and anemic institution or tarted up a regal dame like a cheap streetwalker--or both.

“All of a sudden there are photos in the magazine,” Remnick recalled. “You’d have thought it was Vatican II.”

Last summer Brown, whose tenure had become as watched and puzzled over as that of any Kremlin leader during the Cold War, left the New Yorker to start a new magazine for Miramax Films.

The editorship of the New Yorker, which isn’t even listed in the magazine itself, became a front-page story in newspapers across the country. Remnick, who had distinguished himself as a staff writer but had never been an editor, appeared out of nowhere as a dark horse candidate. Then S.I. Newhouse Jr., the magazine magnate who owns the publication but is reputed to be unhappy with its inability to turn a profit even while circulation has been building, offered the job to Slate editor Michael Kinsley. Then, later in the same day, Newhouse yanked the offer back from Kinsley and appointed Remnick to the position, which, while coveted, also carries the mandate to turn around the finances on a magazine that lost a reported $11 million last year.

“I almost fell out of my house,” said McPhee, whom Remnick called the day he got the job to see what story ideas his old teacher had. “I was so surprised and pleased. I think he’s more constrained by the corporation that owns it than previous editors, but he has the range and interests and taste that a New Yorker editor should have. Everyone was so swept away when he was named.”

‘The Decisions Are Mine to Make,’ Remnick Says

For his part, Remnick says he’s not worried about working for the famously difficult Newhouse.

“The decisions are mine to make,” Remnick said. “I have no illusions who owns the magazine. Mr. Newhouse enjoys enormously owning the New Yorker. But I didn’t give up a writing career to sell out. I don’t think there’s a diminishing audience for the New Yorker. I think it’s expanding. I have every confidence that the New Yorker will turn around.”

Six months into the job, Remnick has hired some new writers and made some slight changes in layout.

“It wouldn’t surprise me in a year if I still don’t have my way,” he said. (Although he’s a little slippery on what exactly “his way” will be.)

He insists the magazine will remain committed to fiction, poetry and foreign reporting.

“These are not things focus groups will ask for,” he noted.

He’s proud of the magazine’s handling of the crisis engulfing President Clinton, particularly the series of short essays by novelists analyzing the Monicagate affair, which included Toni Morrison’s theory that Clinton was America’s first black president.

“If it’s been a bad year for the press in general,” Remnick opined, “it’s been a distinguished one for the New Yorker.”

Hasn’t it been a pretty good year for David Remnick as well?

“I got very, very lucky,” he said. “I’m deeply grateful. I’m a pretty good reporter and writer. Period. If I thought I was even a potentially greater writer, I wouldn’t have stopped for a moment. This is an enormously challenging, important and fun job to do. Terrifically fun.”