Ross sent Luce an advance copy of Gibbs's story, and Luce got so angry he confronted Ross in Ross's apartment and, the way the story was always told, threatened to throw him out the window. seethed secretly over all the visiting Asians who looked him up in New York because he had been born in China, where his parents had been missionaries. he talked jerkily, stuttered, and avoided people's eyes. At Yale he had adopted the mucker pose of going around unshaven and not wearing garters but was actually a puritanical "conformist". "Where it will all end, knows God!"), but the personal details got under Luce's skin. Not only was Gibbs's parody of Time's famous breathless style gorgeous stuff ("Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind". The town, or the part of the town that buzzes, had dined out on that one for a year. One of The New Yorker's greatest coups, under Ross, had been a parody of Time magazine in 1936 in the form of a profile by Wolcott Gibbs of Time's founder and editor, Henry Luce.
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Our idea was to take a page from The New Yorker's early days, back when Ross was running the show and the sheet was alive, and do a parody in the form of a profile of Shawn. The New Yorker had become dull, dull, dull-dull and self-important-under William Shawn, who had succeeded the magazine's founder, Harold Ross, as editor. The magazine was, in fact, so eminent that the usual, predictable tributes to its illustrious traditions and its thises and its thats began effusing in print, like gas inflating a balloon, when the simple truth was that Clay was right. It so happened that 1965 was The New Yorker's fortieth anniversary. You know the current expression, "the buzz"? Well, by late 1964 the Buzz buzzed not for The New Yorker but for us, so much so that The New Yorker began paying us the left-handed compliment of making fun of us, first in items in their Talk of the Town column and then in a full-blown parody that went after Jimmy and me specifically. Sure enough, by mid-1964 our little Sunday supplement, New York, had started making the town take notice. But Clay meant business, and thanks to his Esquire days he managed to persuade some great outside contributors to join Jimmy and me in our brave ride on Rosinante, writers the likes of Peter Maas, Richard Condon, Robert Benton, and David Newman, along with the Trib's own outstanding critics, Walter Kerr, Judith Crist, and Walter Terry.
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Dull or not, The New Yorker was one of the two or three most eminent weekly magazines in the country, certainly in terms of prestige.
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I'd heard of skeleton staffs before, but this one was bones.Īt that moment, I must say it seemed like nothing but talk. In our so-called spare time, Jimmy and I were supposed to turn out a story apiece each week for this new Sunday supplement, New York. Five days a week I worked at the beck and call of the city desk as a general assignment reporter. As editor of New York, Clay had one full-time assistant editor, Walt Stovall, and two part-time staff writers: Jimmy Breslin, whose main task was turning out a column for the Trib five days a week, a column based entirely on reporting (and probably the greatest column in New York newspaper history), and me. In due course New York had a new editor, a young man named Clay Felker, who had come to the Trib from Esquire magazine. Just for the flavor of it, come with me back to the 1960s, to a time when the newspaper wars still raged in New York City to 1963, when the struggling New York Herald Tribune completely transfused its Sunday supplement and changed its name from Today's Living to New York. May I offer you, here at the end, something on the order of those two gold foil-wrapped, silver dollar-sized, chocolate-covered peppermint coins the franchise hotels put on your pillow when they turn down your bed at night?