The Right, the Left, the Media: It’s All Fair Game

On Sunday at 6:50 a.m. John Leonard may be one of the few intellectuals in Manhattan on his way to work. Or, perhaps, the only member of the literati even awake at this hour, except, of course, for those who still consider it Saturday night. “In my drinking days, I thought I was a night person,” the 63-year-old Leonard says, walking on an empty West 57th Street to tape his spot as media critic for CBS’ “Sunday Morning.” “But it was just the booze. When I stopped, I realized that I liked going to bed and getting up early.”

The massive CBS Building squats on a long block sloping down toward the Hudson River, gleaming in the bright morning. The writer calls his Sunday critiques, which usually run four to six minutes, “sermonettes.” And he is something of a political chaplain, using wit to put across liberal orthodoxy from his ‘60s active service in the antiwar and civil rights movements. But Leonard can never quite be pigeon-holed, calling down God’s wrath on American magazines, for example, from what seems a conservative pulpit: “Why should we shrug our shoulders at the glossy triumph of the kind of scratch-and-sniff journalism that, between pornographic ads for vodka and dot-coms, postures in front of experience instead of engaging it?”

Or calls for plagues on both political houses by arguing that they have sold out to the ruminations of one man, “the gnome of the Fed, Alan ‘Chuckles’ Greenspan.” And he is the rare intellectual, on the left or the right, who not only admits to watching commercial TV, but enthusiastically praises it as “weirdly democratic, multicultural, utopian, quixotic and rather more welcoming of difference and diversity than the audience watching it.” Leonard is as happy quoting Karl Marx as he is Ed Sullivan.

In his 10th book, a recently published collection of essays titled “Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures” (he’s fond of subtitles; his last book, “When the Kissing Had to Stop,” pulls a rollicking 36-word train behind it), the author describes himself as having once been “the young man from the provinces,” that 19th century avatar of ambition, talent and cunning, who comes up to the Capitol burning to make good. Leonard’s province was postwar Southern California, Lakewood, to be precise, where he grew up “word-drunk and moon-maddened.”

Walking quickly through the narrow CBS corridors, he points out “the Edward R. Murrow Room, the only place we could smoke.” He smiles nostalgically, “Yeah, that was the Black Lung Room.” A locomotive smoker for more than four decades, Leonard, feeling perfectly fine, went for a chest X-ray late last year and in January found himself on an operating table having 40% of his right lung cut out. Practically race-walking though the maze of the building, he talks about the difficulties of working without his beloved Tareytons. “I’ve got to find a new dance at the keyboard.”

Lean, long-faced, terrier-quick and nervous, Leonard responds to questions tentatively at first, searching, like all good writers, for the proper opening. After a false start or two he plunges ahead and speaks the way he writes; intense, amused, full bore.

“I first went on the air back in the ‘70s doing book reviews for local news. But,” he says with a wicked grin, “when I talked about a biography of Leon Trotsky they suddenly didn’t want me anymore.”

More than 40 years ago he arrived and hopped “onto the pogo stick of a New York career,” working for the New York Times for 16 years, including five as editor of the Book Review, which he transformed from the Buckingham Palace of American letters (either you were asked in, turned away, or, with excruciating ceremony, thrown out) to something open and inclusive. He has been literary editor of the Nation, is in his 19th year as the weekly TV critic for New York magazine and has had the CBS gig for 13 years.

In addition to the books (including a novel set in Long Beach, “Crybaby of the Western World”), he’s written for everything from “the old weekly Life before it died for People’s sins,” to Playboy and TV Guide. He describes what he does as “sorting the signals of an overheated publicity culture, manufacturing opinions instead of widgets.”

A subversive with a smile on his face, Leonard lays landmines for sleepwalkers strolling through a book review, a magazine column, a TV appearance. He believes politics and culture are two sides of the corporate coin, and in the Orwellian notion that professing no politics is in itself a political act.

His work succeeds because he’s funny and not, like most of his peers, merely clever. Part of his technique is long lists, providing souped-up rhythms with juxtapositions that are revelatory and slapstick at the same time. In “Lonesome Rangers,” names are roller-coastered together to make a point about the absurd, yet age-old, practice of living vicariously through manipulated images of celebrity: Chaucer and Edith Wharton, Helen of Troy and Jodie Foster, Plutarch and Liz Smith. It jolts a reader into the recognition that chronicling celebrities is as old as storytelling, and now American media are perfecting the coverage of personality to the point of deafening overload, drowning out information about the real world.

It’s curious to learn that Leonard began on the opposite pole of politics, working for William Buckley’s National Review. Twenty years old and writing captions for UPI in New York, he got a call out of the blue from Buckley who had seen something Leonard had written for an academic magazine. Soon he was in Havana covering the first weeks of the triumphant revolution, close enough to hear the firing squads in the sports stadium.

Pouring coffee, Leonard remembers, “I was one of what Buckley calls the apostates. He hired Garry Wills, Joan Didion and Renata Adler, and thought the charismatics of his personality would take care of the politics. But he had no illusion about me from the start.” (Reached later, Buckley said, “John was with us a year or two, drank deeply but insubstantially of conservative doctrine, and went off to distinguish himself.” Recalling that in 1975 Leonard went to Moscow, “I think they gave him a potion that put the finishing touches on his apostasy, leaving him otherwise as we found him, a dazzling writer, and a nice man.”)

At the studio, Charles Osgood, the host of “Sunday Morning,” floats in, looking like a benevolent but befuddled country doctor who has lost his way. Asked about Leonard, he takes a second and then, in that rumble of a voice, says, “Very simply, and most importantly, John Leonard elevates the American discussion.”

Leonard goes on the set and sits next to Osgood. He crosses his legs, folds his hands in his lap and is still. One take and he nails it. (“John never misses,” the stage manager says later. “Letter-perfect every time.”)

His piece this day is about the re-release of “ET: The Extraterrestrial.” Twenty years ago seems like a century, he tells his audience, when aliens were “friendly and playful,” seeking communication. Now aliens want to “abduct our children and steal our sperm. It’s as if our imagination of the other has regressed to the darkest days of the Cold War ‘50s, when sci-fi films were full of pods, blobs, body snatchers and collectivized Bolshevik killer ants.”

You can tell America’s mood and prophesize its political future, Leonard goes on, by examining its entertainment. Paranoia in fantasy mirrors something closer to reality in the body politic.

Twenty minutes later he’s walking on a block on the Upper East Side toward a townhouse he shares with his wife, Sue, and “ten [thousand] or twelve thousand books, we’re not really sure.” In an upstairs sitting room he talks of how he was formed by a vanishing act, a central theme of “Lonesome Rangers.” His mother took 8-year-old John and his younger brother from Washington, D.C., to California, leaving behind her husband, “a very gentle Irish drunk. My mother decided she couldn’t stand it anymore and set out to find something, as far away as possible from everything. She’s an extraordinary woman, 82 now, still living in Lakewood on Nixon Street, which, as a lifelong Democrat, has always irritated her.”

Downstairs in his office, he talks of how the process of writing has changed from when he was editor of the student paper at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach.

“My whole writing life they’ve been removing senses. You had ink, you had paper, you had tactility. I was at the [New York] Times when they closed down the linotype machines, put down carpets, took away the sounds of typewriter keys, carriages and bells, and made paper disappear. But once I started with a computer I realized I was back where I began in high school, that it was a doodle until I chose to make it into a sentence. Once that happened, it restored something in me that had been lost. Playing.”

In one essay in “Lonesome Rangers,” Leonard examines Elizabeth Hardwick’s work, but could be writing about himself, creating literature as somehow playing at jujitsu: “We have been thrown by our own weight, tumbled into deeper meanings, rueful reflections, and surprise perspectives.”