4. Grooming
It’s always gratifying when people seem to take an interest in you for reasons that have nothing to do with sex.
After his confessional phone call, Mr. New Yorker Writer started being very nice to me, very collegial.
He gave me a few books, a couple by him and one by a New Yorker writer from an earlier time, and he began seeking me out in order to respond in person to things I had written. Actually, this was a little odd; because it wasn’t, “Gee that was a good piece,” or “I liked what you wrote about such-and-such.” He was taking me up on specific things I’d said. He would appear with a copy of my galleys or the new issue and read a sentence I’d written aloud and then comment on it. Once it was the statement that some play—actually, it was Measure for Measure—was about how virtuous virtue really is. (He affected a parody of prurient interest in this.) Another time it was a jokey statement about relations between men and women in a review of a pair of one-acts by Mamet and Shel Silverstein. (I can’t remember his response, only that he made some sort of fuss about it.)
He suggested that I move down to the 18th floor, where most of the other writers had their offices, after a creepy experience I’d had up in the tiny isolated newly-built wing to which I had been relegated along with two new staffers who had offices that they used elsewhere. Once or twice Mr. New Yorker Writer showed me pieces by another writer in galleys. It was as though he was drawing me into some boys’ club, and it was all a bit surprising, particularly as there was a huge divide between the “old” New Yorker—people like him who had been there when William Shawn had been editor—and the people like me who had been hired by Bob Gottlieb.
If I was flattered by Mr. New Yorker Writer’s overtures, it was largely because of the extent to which he seemed wreathed in domesticity. It’s always gratifying when people seem to take an interest in you for reasons that have nothing to do with sex. And Mr. New Yorker Writer was very married. The family-man thing, which included a bunch of children, was a big part of his whole persona. So, clearly he wasn’t warming up to hit on me.
Did I imagine developing a social relationship with Mr. New Yorker Writer and his wife? Not really, though I suppose I might have if I’d thought about it much at all: I might have imagined inviting them to a party or taking them to the theater some time. (Actually, he did once ask me to take his family to the Big Apple Circus, but his wife didn’t show up for some reason, and it was awkward and uncomfortable. Another time I took one of his kids to something.)
I think I imagined establishing with Mr. New Yorker Writer the sort of tentative, low-key office relationship that I had with the humorist and fiction editor Veronica Geng.
Veronica wrote sui generis satirical prose and edited the work of other sui generis writers. She and I had bonded over fashion in the 19th-Floor ladies’ room one day. I’d been going in when she was coming out, and she was wearing the swellest leather jacket you ever saw: a real old-fashioned broken-in in a way that was to die for boyfriend bomber jacket. I’d called after her, “I love your jacket,” and as the door closed behind her she’d called back “You have great shoes!”
Later, when Veronica became my editor for a period, we got to know each other better. And much later, after we’d both been fired, we actually became close, albeit in a strange, limited, and rather unhealthy way. But for most of the time we were both at the magazine, our relationship was fairly formal, and it chiefly derived from Veronica’s interest in something I was trying to get Gottlieb’s permission to write a long piece about—a school of acting called The Practical Aesthetics Workshop, founded by David Mamet.
Veronica had decided she wanted to do more public readings of her work and she’d taken some acting classes with Lee Cohn, a former student of Mamet’s and one of the authors of a book based on Mamet’s ideas called A Practical Handbook for the Actor, a copy of which Mamet had sent me when it had come out years before. The approach to acting these folks subscribed to was antithetical to Method Acting in a number of ways, and like me Veronica found it intriguing. In fact, we were both a little obsessed with it because it was so bizarre and so interesting with respect to language and ideas about how one might categorize and define human behavior.
Like other acting approaches, Mamet’s required the actor to analyze a scene in terms of a character’s “action” or objective. According to Mamet, however, an objective had to partake of certain characteristics in order to be “actable.” It had to be something specific. It had to be something that was testable. It had to be something that would be fun to do. There were nine or ten of these rules, the most important of which was that it had to be something that you were going to get from the other actor in the scene. So, most Mamet actions were framed in terms of getting something from someone or getting someone to do something: Get Him to See the Light; Get Her to Play by the Rules; Get Him to Back My Play; Get My Due.
Veronica and I were fascinated by all this, but we also thought it was hilarious—the idea that you could reduce all of drama and morality to these rather stilted-sounding schoolyard terms—and we had a sort of running gag that consisted of analyzing things according to Mamet’s theory of human impulse and endeavor.
We did that with a funny postcard she had tacked up over the desk in her office. We did it with a snatch of dialogue from The Age of Innocence that we both loved and that Scorsese had left out of his screenplay for the movie. We did it with bits of doggerel. We did it with a bunch of things. Veronica was better at it than I was, and I used to bring her artifacts to analyze in this way.
But I wouldn’t have said that Veronica and I were friends. It was only when we were talking about acting that I felt comfortable with her. She could be pretty aloof and stand-offish.
By contrast, Mr. New Yorker Writer was downright ingratiating. All the same, he had a character trait that would come out every now and then which I found off-putting. It had to do with besting people, which was something he liked to do. Or rather, it was more that he liked to establish that he wouldn’t put up with other people besting him. He sometimes told stories of which he was the protagonist, the way one does, only the kind of protagonist he presented himself as was rather unpleasant. One time it was an anecdote the point of which was the way the subject of a profile or piece of reporting he’d written had attempted to hoodwink or cross him in some way. And there was a real nastiness to the satisfaction with which he related getting the better of this person.
A couple of times I detected that nastiness directed toward me. I think the first time was when he came to check out the new office I’d been given. He commented on the fact that it was larger than his own, and though he tried to make it sound like he was kidding, you could tell from something that flashed across his face that he wasn’t kidding at all.
Another time it had to do with my job. He wanted to know how one goes about being a theater critic.
“I mean, how do you know what’s good?” he asked. “How do you decide?” And the questions seemed tinged with a kind of anger and indignation, as though what he really meant was, “Who are you to decide? Who are you to tell people what to like or not like?”
And I remember thinking, this guy really doesn’t like me at all. He doesn’t like the whole idea of me.