A Living Legend

A friend who just spent a week at the New Yorker, now celebrating its 75th anniversary, shares the following story about recent meetings in the magazine’s Times Square offices several days before a new issue was put to bed:

“What do you think?” asks editor David Remnick, frowning at a scribbled list of essays, short stories and nonfiction pieces.

“I don’t know,” sighs executive editor Dorothy Wickenden, her face showing the pressures of a difficult week. “Somehow the mix here is not . . . quite . . . right.”

Hours earlier, waves of boisterous laughter filled Remnick’s office as staffers wisecracked their way through the weekly cartoon meeting, sifting scores of submissions.

“I like some of them,” says Remnick, forming a messy pile. “But the others here are not . . . quite . . . right.”

Consciously or not, the editors had struck an essential New Yorker tone. Getting things right has been a passion (some would say, an obsession) at the magazine, ever since Harold Ross launched his sassy Jazz Age weekly in 1925 as an antidote to stuffy journals that were long on sanctimony and short on wit. While other general-interest publications have flourished and faded, the New Yorker has been a fairly steady bellwether of American culture, a home to some of the nation’s most celebrated authors and a weekly reminder that writing matters.

Now, a rare glimpse behind the scenes shows the New Yorker to be a landmark in transition--a magazine reconnecting with tradition, yet also embracing change. It’s guided by a young, energetic editor who is thoroughly unlike his legendary predecessors but determined to keep his venerable weekly at the center of the nation’s conversation.

“Today, the magazine is a good mixture of old and new, and Remnick is swinging the pendulum back to the middle,” says Ben Yagoda, author of “About Town,” a newly published history of the New Yorker. But the publication may never play the central role in readers’ lives that it once did, he added. While it once had upscale subscribers to itself, the weekly now competes with rival magazines, cable TV, the Internet and other entertainment sources. “Finding its way in this competition is the crucial issue facing the New Yorker,” Yagoda says.

Remnick, 41, a former Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Lenin’s Tomb,” has continued to write books and articles, even as he edits the magazine. He’s not part of the glitterati like Brown, who brought a provocative yet controversial edge to the graying magazine before Remnick succeeded her in 1998, nor is he a quirky recluse like the revered William Shawn, who presided over the New Yorker’s Golden Age from 1952 to 1987. Sober and intense one minute, Remnick can break up meetings with cutting humor the next. Many writers praise him for steadying the magazine with a calm, collegial style.

But changes are on the way, says the editor, promising a return of the multi-part series that distinguished the magazine under Shawn, as well as more timely cultural reporting, more humor and a tweaked layout that makes the magazine easier to read. The New Yorker has reflected American history and culture, he added, but it unaccountably missed the Beatles phenomenon in the early ‘60s as well as the eruption of the civil-rights movement, and he has no intention of ignoring such seismic events on his watch.

One graphic change is already in play--a first-ever photo illustration on the cover of the anniversary issue. It features a William Wegman Weimaraner posing as Eustace Tilley, the monocled dandy who traditionally adorns anniversary covers. Some may be shocked and wonder if Madonna is next, Remnick says, “but this is not a religion. It’s a magazine.”

It’s also a business that no longer generates the fat profits it once did. The privately held New Yorker lost $60 million between 1994 and 1998, according to Fortune magazine, even though its circulation of 844,175 has soared from 506,000 in 1984. While the historic weekly is undoubtedly the crown jewel in the Conde Nast magazine empire, owner S.I. Newhouse Jr. is notoriously impatient with money-losing ventures.

Longtime fans are even less patient. As a literary and journalistic lodestar, the New Yorker has been vilified in recent years by a host of writers, critics and loyal readers, many of whom believe the magazine has descended into a pop-culture morass, especially under Brown. Indeed, no less than seven books have been published to coincide with the magazine’s anniversary, and some are acidulous in the extreme.

“As I write this, the New Yorker is dead,” says Renata Adler, a former contributor, in the preface to “Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker,” a scathing account of what she describes as the magazine’s decline and a depressing window into its cloistered office politics.

Yet many modern-day critics seem to miss the historically protean essence of the New Yorker: At frequent intervals, the weekly has shed its skin, discarding old customs and exploring new ideas. That spirit is alive and well, as shown during a recent week in which finishing touches were put on a 300-page anniversary edition along with the March 3 issue.

“This publication is as creative as it’s ever been,” Remnick says. “We are deeply committed to preserving its special kind of writing, but we have no intention of running this place as if it were a museum.”

A Flamboyant New Times Square Aerie

The hallways leading to Remnick’s office are lined with totemic reminders of the New Yorker legacy: Rare drawings by James Thurber dominate the entrance, and memorable cartoons dot the walls. The cluster of offices is brightly decorated with some of the magazine’s most famous covers.

Comfortable, yes, but many staffers still miss their former digs on West 43rd Street, which they left behind last summer. Those offices looked out on the quiet refuge of Bryant Park and the New York Public Library. Now, the view from Remnick’s 20th-story window in the new Conde Nast building offers a breathtaking panorama of Times Square, and “it’s everything we’re not, everything we try not to be,” joked editorial director Henry Finder.

“You can’t let it distract you,” added Remnick, staring at a jumbo, eye-level Discover Card billboard that beams slogans such as “Say Goodbye to High Interest” into his office as he ponders some arcane point, or “There’s Always Something to Discover” when he’s stumped for ideas.

He’s got other things to worry about. The anniversary issue is nearing completion and editors bearing a fat, bound copy of the final proofs walk carefully through the halls, as if carrying a glossy Torah. There are also final decisions to be made on the next regular issue, as Remnick’s immediate staff of half a dozen gathers around a table.

“OK, what do we have?” he asks, searching for the right mix of nonfiction, short stories, cartoons, criticism and “Talk of the Town” features that give the magazine its intelligent yet conversational voice.

“We need more gravitas up front,” says Wickenden, mulling over possible combinations of profiles, investigative pieces and other finished stories, jotting them down with a pencil on a changing list. Other editors offer suggestions: a portrait of a candidate’s wife, perhaps, or maybe a literary profile.

What about a look at inner-city life that’s ready to go, asks another staffer? Finder assures Remnick the piece will be rich in detail but also engaging: “It’s urban ethnography, yes, but not in the distancing sense that the writer is too removed from the subject. It has moments of real intimacy, and it’s not like Livingston on safari, either.”

Remnick cracks up the group when an editor says she is confident that a writer who has been assigned to “flesh out” a story written by another contributor will do just fine.

“Oh, yeah?” he says, pounding his chest. “I gotta tell ya, I’m having a Redd Foxx moment here! I’m having some real pains!”

The mood gets zanier when editors gather to consider the cartoons. Remnick calls it his favorite hour of the week, for here there are no holy wars. If a cartoon works, the room knows it immediately.

Robert Mankoff, who runs the cartoon shop, is a Zappa-esque character with curly, shoulder-length hair, cheap drugstore glasses that he breaks for comic relief and a surreal sense of humor. At one point, Mankoff says the punch line in one new cartoon--”I’m as horny as the middle-school band”--is reason enough to run it, even if they don’t get the joke. Remnick asks: “Did you pee in a cup before you got here?” Mankoff next offers a cartoon about the stock market, but nobody likes it. “Send it to the New York Observer,” Remnick says.

As the week ends, the two issues are put to bed, and some people scatter for quick vacations, to catch their breath before the cycle starts all over again. Unlike Shawn, who liked to schedule stories months ahead of time and famously hoarded them for years, Remnick shuffles and reshuffles his nonfiction deck, sometimes right up to deadline.

It’s one more indication of how the New Yorker has become timelier and quicker to respond to events. And this, inevitably, triggers criticism that the magazine has “lost its way,” as longtime contributor Paul Brodeur recently wrote to Remnick.

Staid Yet Also Groundbreaking

Others suggest that the magazine was never all it was cracked up to be, as Tom Wolfe argued in “Tiny Mummies,” his scathing 1965 take on the magazine. In a telling memo written by fiction editor Katherine White to Ross in the ‘40s, White explained that Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner refused to submit pieces to the New Yorker because they objected to the editor’s endless queries and corrections. Yagoda, who is filled with praise for the weekly, concedes that “it was rarely receptive to elliptical, experimental, gritty or subversive artists or to work that came from the margins of society. And it did provide a home to writing that was precious, smug, tiresomely literal, too long or just plain dull.”

But sometimes the magazine made history.

The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to John Hershey’s “Hiroshima,” one of the finest pieces of American nonfiction writing; it published Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Barry Commoner’s “Closing of the Circle” and Jonathan Schell’s “The Fate of the Earth,” all deadly serious investigations that shaped public debate more than responded to it. It printed excerpts from Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” which spawned the nonfiction novel, and it gave longtime staffer Roger Angell the green light to almost single-handedly invent the now popular genre of literary baseball writing.

Shaping such work took special talents, and Ross and Shawn were true eccentrics. The founding editor came off as a slow-witted Western hick to those who didn’t know him, but that mien masked a keen journalistic and literary sense. Brilliant and secretive, Shawn often spoke in a whisper, shunned publicity and, according to Angell, became a complicated “father figure” who “infantilized” many of the gifted writers he nurtured.

That New Yorker was an odd place to work. One writer, Joseph Mitchell, showed up daily but did not have one word published in the weekly for the last 32 years of his life. The magazine had an obsession with accuracy, and when Newhouse began negotiations to purchase the weekly, Shawn boasted to him that, if necessary, he would send a fact-checker to London on the Concorde to verify one detail of an article, if need be.

Remnick is weary of criticism that the current magazine is a shadow of its predecessors, because he believes it remains vital.

“I’ll take the anniversary issue we’ve just done and hold that up to anyone’s scrutiny,” he says. “We’ll put our chips on the table with this one, I think that’s fair.”

Especially if you look more closely at the way the magazine worked in the past. Shawn, for example, was known for his abhorrence of writers who broke news and chased scoops, yet consider the Oct. 26, 1968 edition: The “Talk of the Town” included a bracing story about racial tensions tearing New York City schools apart and a profile of the rock group Country Joe and the Fish. There was a timely report from Prague, in the aftermath of the bloody Soviet invasion, and a lively story about the just-concluded World Series.

Purists sniff that Tina Brown dragged the magazine down the path of sex and celebrity worship. But the Feb. 27, 1926, cover featured an erotic drawing of a topless dancer. Inside, a lengthy profile of French tennis star Suzanne Lengler dwelled on her star power, her travels, her tantrums and her spinsterhood, concluding that “Lengler has personality with quite a big capital P.”

It’s dangerous to pigeonhole the magazine, because at any given point the New Yorker has been capable of surprising. And it was inevitable that a publication so set in its ways would have to change.

“How could we not?” asks Wickenden. “The New Yorker used to live in a world of its own making, and it functioned at its own leisurely pace. We just can’t do that anymore and survive, because the world we live in now is much more news-driven.”

In assembling the 75th anniversary issue, Remnick and others note that, unlike past commemorative editions, this one is filled with new writing. The magazine features Wendy Wasserstein’s dark but wickedly funny account of her prematurely born baby; a short story from Woody Allen, who hasn’t appeared in the magazine for years; a profile of director Mike Nichols by John Lahr; a travelogue and study of Anton Chekhov by Janet Malcolm and a piece on Martha Stewart by Joan Didion. There is fiction by Alice Munro; a look at Fidel Castro and the Elian Gonzales controversy; unpublished cartoons by the late Saul Steinberg, and a moving essay by Angell about his late father.

“Most magazines have a moment in time,” says Remnick, noting the emergence of the Saturday Evening Post in the ‘20s, Life magazine in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, and publications such as Esquire and Rolling Stone during the ‘60s. “But I think our magazine is perennial, that its new moments are going to keep coming--again and again--no matter who is running it.”

Still, at the New Yorker, some things never change. In his anthology of articles written for the magazine, longtime contributor Philip Hamburger tells how he camped outside Shawn’s office for hours one night in 1948, protesting the editor’s decision to put what Hamburger felt was an inappropriate hyphen in the last sentence of his story about Argentine leader Juan Peron. After patient but intensive lobbying, the hyphen was removed.

Half a century later, Remnick and company share the same attention to nit-picking detail. This time, the issue in an afternoon meeting is whether the byline under a poem should run flush left or flush right. Staff members weigh in, some arguing that it should go left, to better complement the text; others push right, saying it looks easier on the eye. It takes nearly 30 minutes before the matter is finally settled: Henceforth, the bylines will run flush right.

“In this place,” Remnick says, “everything matters.”