Job #16 The Village Voice, Part III,
1979–1986
Early in 1979 I finally become copy chief, and the
next seven years is the longest I’d ever worked in any job to this point. One
reason I decided to take on the job was because historically copy chief had
been a stepping stone to editing (Helena Hacker, M. Mark). The other reason I
took on the job was fear of a new boss; Linda Perney had tried to fire me, and some
new person coming in could be even more unpredictable. Once in the job, I spend
much of my time trying to rationalize the editorial/production interface (a
term not yet in my vocabulary), while simultaneously hating what I have to put
up with, as well as trying to make that leap to editor.
What keeps me at the Voice is something my husband tells
me: I will never have another job like it.
THE LAST OF LINDA...
As 1979 begins, David Schneiderman is the new editor-in-chief at
the Voice as Marianne Partridge becomes executive editor at Look magazine and hires Linda. A month after Linda’s gone, she
still hasn’t cleaned out her desk. I feel oppressed by her belongings and
wonder if it’s intentional—she removes her physical self, but leaves the traces
like a memorial. Finally, Lin Harris, a copyeditor, takes over her desk and
puts all of her books and belongings in a box. Some weeks later I notice that
all her things are packed neatly into plastic shopping bags. Has she been
coming in on weekends and as long as it looks like she hasn’t left, she isn’t
gone? Is she having a hard time leaving? Months later, I find in a drawer a
Guatemalan shawl the dance editor had given her—and I keep it. She never returns
to ask for it.
TRANSITION TO MY NEW JOB
Before Linda quits, I know M. Mark, VLS editor, has been talking me
up with David and Susan Lyne, David's managing editor, and she advises me to continue being my usual cool
self, because David likes calm people around him at work. Linda was usually not
calm. After Linda quits and David says he’d like me to be the new copy chief, I
start to negotiate money. During the six weeks I was doing Linda’s job while
still in the union, my pay with overtime came to an annual salary of $21,000. David
says Linda was making only $17,000.
Meanwhile, everyone keeps asking if I’m the next
copy chief, and I can only reply that I hope so, and it depends on whether they
pay me enough. By afternoon of the day David and I talk, Joanie, in production,
tells me that everyone in the building knows I’ll be the next copy chief. This
makes me realize that in any journalistic enterprise, you have not only
ordinary human nosiness but also professional nosiness, people whose job it is
to find out things they’re not supposed to. So if the money doesn’t work out,
everyone will know I don’t have the job because they won’t pay a decent salary.
On February 2, it’s official, though I’m not on the
masthead for another two weeks. The salary is only $18,000, with possible raise
in six months, if I do well. I’d been hoping for $19,000 or $19,500, and tell
David I’ll start pestering him for more. I will also keep track of my hours to
see how much I’ll be making per hour. The first week I work 50 hours, the
equivalent of $6.99 an hour, 88 cents less than I was getting as a union person
doing this job last fall. That’s like I’m giving Murdoch 88 cents an hour. I’d
also argued to not be management, but no luck.
During my first full official week as copy chief,
the job feels like a dress I’ve wanted for a long time, but feels funny now
that I have it on. I keep catching glimpses of myself in the mirror and don’t
recognize me.
Two years earlier I had thought I might enjoy being
copy chief for a couple of months, then become bored, then crazy. This prediction
turns out to be too true. Soon I am lamenting that I am tired of having every
Tuesday, which is production day at the plant, disappear into some limbo of
high pressure anxiety and exhaustion. I am tired of working 12 hours every
Monday and never seeing Christie, my then seven-year-old, until Tuesday
afternoon when I’m exhausted. I’m tired of not having enough time to be
interested in anything but my work and of not having anything to talk about but
the machinations of getting people to do their jobs and managing others’
craziness. I am appalled at the number of things I am (a) not interested in,
(b) don’t have time to be interested in, (c) don’t know anything about, (d)
don’t have time to read about, (e) don’t have time to do. I hardly go to the
movies anymore, I don’t go to museums, I don’t read book reviews. Over the
seven years I’m copy chief, this lament crops up in my journals, along with my
feelings that I’m doing it all wrong. By 1984 working at the Voice is feeling like
a dead love affair that I refuse to believe is over, because we’re still living
together.
It isn’t all drudgery, though—it is satisfying when
I solve a problem, get a writer to meet his or her deadline, successfully
negotiate a dispute between our libel lawyer and a writer. I do have time for a
longer view of what we’re doing at the Voice. It seems that the work that
everyone I know is passionate about does not have an intrinsic interest, but it
becomes important because everyone we know talks about it. Talking about it, we
make it important—and because we’re at a newspaper we make our interests other
people’s interests. But there are huge numbers of otherwise intelligent people who
don’t care about the ins and outs of rock or movies or opera or New York City.
Upgrading
pay for the job
Six months in, I ask for my raise and get $2,000.
Over the past three years, through M., Linda, and me, the copy chief salary has
gone up more than 50%. Almost three years into being copy chief, I’m making
$25,000 a year, and after the transition to the in-house computer system, I get
a raise to $30,000. By the time I leave, in 1986, I’ve raised the salary to
$34,000, almost double what I made when I started. I am very proud of this.
MY JOB
I’m the liaison between editorial and production,
supervise copyeditors (and fact checkers, once we have some), and my primary
task seems to be to enforce deadlines. Keeping five things in my mind at one
time is a crucial skill I discover I have.
The Village Voice week runs from Wednesday through
Tuesday. Here’s the editorial part of my job. Wednesday starts with the
editorial meeting. At University Place, that meeting is just in the open space
between two rows of editors’ cubicles, but when we move to Broadway, it’s in
the editor-in-chief’s corner office, with people on chairs, a couch, or on the
floor. Arts section editors describe what their reviewers will cover and staff
writers discuss what they are working on. Writers and editors argue for their
story to be the front page, or cover. (The Voice really is a hybrid
newspaper/magazine, on newsprint, but the front page mostly photos, with text
for only two or three stories.) I mostly take notes on regular writers who
won’t be filing, what editors are in charge of what features and their due
days, and anything unusual about the issue, like a supplement or late, meaning
Monday, copy.
After the meeting, I prepare the schedule—what
stories are due on what days—and give a copy to editors and the art department.
Through the week, I attempt to ensure that everyone files when they are
supposed to, and if they can’t, I negotiate between editors and David, who to
my annoyance will sometimes give dispensation for extensions, from Thursday to
Friday, Friday to Monday. Meanwhile, I keep track of when stories go to the
typesetter, when galleys return and go to editors and/or writers; keep art
department informed of changes; make sure the libel lawyer gets the stories he
or she needs to read and their concerns are conveyed to editor and writer, and
satisfactorily settled.
Monday is the big crunch, editorial close. The news
writers who regularly file on Monday must often be reminded that a 6 p.m.
typesetter messenger deadline means their story has to be to the copy department
by 5, so we have time to do our job. Too often Monday is a 12- or 13-hour day
for me. Before I leave, I type up the crucial Watch-for list, every last minute
change or note that must be paid attention to the next day at the plant:
correct spelling of a name in a caption, legal okay for a feature verified,
layout notes for, say, the theater section, among others.
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Because editorial closing is so late on Mondays, it
often happens that writers hand in their stories, then they and their editors
leave for dinner. In the days before cell phones, this means they are
impossible to reach when copy editors or fact checkers have questions, which we
always do. After enough complaints from us, higher-ups decide to order dinner
delivered from a variety of nearby restaurants. Favorites are Veselka, the
Ukrainian place on Second Avenue; the Second Avenue Deli; Mitali East, one of
the numerous Indian places on East 6th Street. Riffing off the silly joke about
Chinese restaurants, I say about Veselka’s food, “Two weeks later, you’re
hungry again.” (In the photo, from right: me, Lisa Bernbach, Tom Allen, Lisa Kennedy(?), Fred McDarrah.)
The production part of my job happens on Tuesday,
production close, when we go to the plant. More about that later.
Here’s a typical Thursday, when I arrive at 10 a.m.
and leave at 7:30 p.m. Does this give an adequate idea of how hectic the job
is?
1. sort galleys in my inbox
2. xerox manuscripts going
out to the typesetter
3. give a package of stories
to the messenger from the typesetter
4. talk to a writer about his
galley, which he doesn’t have
5. call typesetter to find
out where that writer’s galley is
6. search last week’s files
for Hentoff galleys to see when a word was dropped
7. talk to production manager
about that dropped word
8. talk to a copyeditor about
a feature galley, which is a mess
9. interview a couple of people
about the researcher job
10. interview a classified
person for researcher job
11. interview someone else
for researcher job
12. interview someone for
what he thought was a copyediting job
13. get a note from the deputy
classified manager about a friend looking for a job
14. another art assistant
tells me about a friend looking for a job
15. call the music editor at
home about his reviewers’ schedule
16. give a note to an art
assistant about music reviewers’ schedule
17. on the phone with Voice
libel lawyer about his comments on a feature
18. talk to David about phone
call with libel lawyer, which makes me late for lunch
19. lunch with copy
department, David, and managing editor about new typesetter and related
problems
20. at David’s request, type
up libel lawyer’s comments
21. worry about a part-time
proofreader
22. talk to an administrator
about change-of-status form for a proofreader-now-copyeditor
23. go to the bank
24. copy edit column on TV
movies
25. copy edit Andrew Sarris’s
film column
26. check my queries about
Sarris review with film editor
27. copy edit an art review
28. speed-copyedit a theater
review, theater column, and dance review
29. start to copyedit J.
Hoberman’s film review, but realize it’s too long and messy (by now it’s 7:15
p.m.)
30. clean up my desk, staple
and file manuscript copies
Then there’s the administrative tasks, keeping on
top of my department’s staff vacations, sick days, and problems. Not to mention
conversations with editors and writers about problems professional and
personal, including, of course, gossip.
Two decisions I make early on
1. Almost as soon as I’m copy chief, there’s a big
Wayne Barrett piece in February, a follow-up to his big January piece on Fred
and Donald Trump. Linda is editing it as a free-lancer, and she’s told me it
will still need cutting in galleys, which means Monday work. David has told our
libel lawyer, Victor Kovner, that he doesn’t want it running this week unless
it’s absolutely ready before Monday. David asks me what I think, and I say that
if we don’t need it, we can do it the following week. We don’t have to have a
blockbuster story every week, especially if the cost is horrendous hours on
Monday. So we agree to hold it a week.
2. The Voice is going to put out an antinuke
supplement. A week before, I realize stories aren’t moving through as they
should and we need a meeting with edit, art, and production to discuss how
everything will get put together. It becomes clear that none of us has ever
worked on a supplement before. I try to remember what I noticed with
supplements as a copyeditor and make up a tentative schedule. Stories come in
late, but I hound the editor in charge about where they are, and he later
thanks me for keeping him on top of things. One of the copyeditors who had
worked on supplements gives me a “you’ve done a marvelous job and I’m not just
saying that because you’re my boss” speech, which embarrasses me, but I know I
created order out of chaos.
By October, I am finally thinking of the job as “my
job,” not “Linda’s job” or “M.’s job.” But this is scary, because if it’s my
job, I’m making it up as I go along.
Feelings about this new job
Despite people telling me I am blossoming and doing
great as I start my second year as copy chief, I’m still feeling full of
insecurities. At a party many people tell me I’m looking very good, very happy,
calm, relaxed. I wonder why, since I’m not feeling any of those things. Early
on, I feel crazy and anxious worrying that David will fire me because I’m not a
good administrator. Three years in, I think, I’ve outlived the job, it’s become
mechanical and uninteresting, just as I anticipated. By 1985, I think David
will never see me as anyone other than a cracker-jack copy chief.
My therapist suggests that I’m accepting only the
responsibilities of my position, not the privileges, like a private office. A
private office has its benefits—privacy, quiet—but also downsides, insulation
from what’s going on with other people. In fact, very few staff have offices.
At University Place, no one has an enclosed office on the editorial/art floor,
even the editor-in-chief; everyone is in not very private cubicles, and the
copy editors have desks clustered near each other. Only some of the writers, on
the fourth floor, have offices with doors that close. Once we move to Broadway,
we have much more space, but even fewer offices. Who has an office? Editor-in-chief,
managing editor, Nat Hentoff, Wayne Barrett, Howard Smith, and Richard
Goldstein and Karen Durbin, who share an office. Most editors and writers have
cubicles with higher walls than at University Place. The copy department is two
rows of desks where we can talk to each other. I do have big windows behind me
facing the Cat Club and a wall where I post an accumulating mix of New Yorker
cartoons, photos, and the weekly schedule. I love my space—lots of light, I can
turn my back on everyone else and see the East 13th Street part of the world,
yet turn back and feel like I’m in touch with everything happening at the paper.
Waiting to
pick up a rental car late on a Monday, I feel a powerful urge to quit, I can’t
take it anymore, I don’t feel like a real person, too overwhelmed by the job I
hate. I’m doing it better now, too, which feels even more self-hateful. David
meets with the copy department while I’m on summer vacation, and I don’t even
think to ask why he’s undercutting my authority.
I’m still angling to become an editor and have
lunch with David to talk about my future. David says he hates his job every
Sunday night and if someone offered him another job on Sunday, he’d take it in
a flash. Is he telling me that hating my job is part of the job?
After managing editor Cynthia leaves the Voice,
David promotes one of my copy editors into a new position, deputy managing
editor, and gives me the same title. Is that a sop for my ego? As long as I
don’t act as though I’ve lost prestige, then I haven’t.
I can’t honestly say I regret deciding to be copy
chief, though. Jack says he’d rather kowtow to superiors than coddle subordinates,
but, boy, have I kowtowed—and I’d rather coddle subordinates.
COPY DEPARTMENT STAFF
About those subordinates. There are copyeditors, sometimes
proofreaders, and eventually fact-checkers. Lillian Blake is a one-day-a-week
proofreader, a dumpy older woman with very thick glasses. After I’m made copy
chief, she congratulates me and says how good it is I’m not in the union
anymore. Does she think this will ingratiate her with me? I’d like to get rid
of her, but don’t like the idea of firing her. In reordering schedules, however,
I realize she would fit better on another day, and when I tell her, she says
she only wants to work on Fridays and quits. Problem solved.
Early on, I notice one of the proofreaders is
questioning some of my decisions, just as I had questioned some of Linda’s. I
don’t take her disagreement personally, whereas I think Linda felt that my disagreeing
with her meant I thought she was a fool.
In March 1980, a proofreader takes a vacation to
Indonesia. When she’s late coming back to work by more than a week, I begin to
worry; she’s young, maybe careless in her judgment? I actually call the State
Department to say that I haven’t heard from one of my employees who’s overdue
back at work more than a week. Two Marines find her in Bali on a beach with a
young man in a vacation romance. Did I overreact? Had I put myself in
“mommy-mode” too easily? She didn’t seem angry at me, and afterward it felt
like an adventure at both ends.
Ron P., a stocky
copyeditor about my age, needs special coddling. One dayhe says he needs to
talk to me privately about some things. Since I have no office, we go to the
stairwell, which feels a little creepy. At first he has some work complaints,
but his real problem? What’s the significance of a New Yorker cartoon over my desk that includes his name. What is he
talking about? Then I remember one of many New
Yorker cartoons tacked up around my cubicle by Jack Ziegler showing some
’60s characters reciting the lyrics to the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron.” I’m not
sure I convince him there’s no hidden message there.
Ron continues to be a problem. He’s turned himself
into Alexander Cockburn’s editor for Press Clips, and when I tell him he should
prioritize copyediting over editing when there’s a time crunch, since that’s
what he’s paid for, he explodes, yelling that I don’t respect his talent. David
says he’ll talk to Ron, who later apologizes, but doesn’t change his behavior. Managing
editor Susan says I should say, if you ever do that again, you’ll be fired, but
I don’t want to do that because I know I’ll have to follow through, and I don’t
want to fire anyone. Taking away someone’s job feels like the worst thing I
could do.
Eventually, he leaves the copy department to become
editor for the Letters section, as well as for Alexander Cockburn and Nat
Hentoff. I’m both relieved and annoyed: it doesn’t seem fair that he gets to be
an editor, and I don’t.
One Monday, a temp copyeditor leaves for lunch and never
comes back. Another day, another temp copyeditor leaves at 5:30 and says she’ll
be back in an hour. Three hours later she calls to say she might be gone
another couple of hours—and she never comes back. She’s never copy edited
before, but has written books and has a master’s in linguistics, so I thought,
she can’t be too bad. Why didn’t she just tell me she was overwhelmed?
Budget
As supervisor,
I need to control my department’s budget, and overtime causes the copy
department to be over budget (I don’t even know what that term means at first).
I never ask what my department’s budget is, probably don’t even want to know. I’m
not an administrator, David suggests, which is absolutely true and why I didn’t
want to be management.
Then I have
to talk to copyeditors about new hours and how cutbacks will affect us, but
David doesn’t want me to use the word “cutbacks” or even put the word on paper.
However, I am allowed to hire a researcher and later a legal researcher, so
there will be people dedicated to fact-checking. Hurray!
Grievances
I’m now on the other side of union grievances. Thulani
Davis has been promoted out of the copy department to become an editor. Sally
O’Driscoll, a drummer in a band, and Susan Jaffe, who writes about nuclear
issues (both white women), divide the job, along with Luis Francia (Filipino)—in
essence, I’m giving them tryouts. Sally is much better than Luis and Susan, so
I hire her, as well as Pat Wagner (a Black woman). A year later Luis files a
grievance with the city Human Rights Commission, claiming that I’ve
discriminated against him because he’s a man. After a hearing at the American
Arbitration Association, the grievance goes no further.
Sally files a grievance over what she thinks is a
consistent policy not to replace copy editors who are sick or on vacation, which
“constitutes an unreasonable speedup for the remaining copyeditors.” I say, “I didn’t
know there was a problem because stories aren’t piling up in the inbox.”
Sally says, “That’s
because I’m working superfast so work doesn’t pile up.”
I say, “That’s
the wrong thing to do. If I as supervisor don’t see there’s a problem, I don’t
know something has to be fixed.” I look at Sally sympathetically. “I know it’s
hard to leave work undone, but that’s the only way to show management”—pointing
to myself—“that it can’t be done.”
“That’s what the union told me,” Sally says with a
sigh, “but it’s hard to do.”
I hope I don’t sound condescending when I say, “The
union is right.” And I hope no senior management person hears me, either.
This kind of difficulty becomes an issue during
contract negotiations when union members bring up individual work problems that
I think should have been dealt with at the time rather than cluttering up
contract discussions that are on broader issues. But I’m not in the union
anymore, so have no say.
UNION MATTERS
That pesky union contract minimum
When I need to hire a new copy editor, I’m
confronted with the dilemma I feared when the first contract was presented to
us back in 1977, when the minimum for copy editors was set at $2 an hour less
than what everyone already in the copy department was earning. I hire Cheryll
Greene as a copyeditor, but she stays onlyxs two weeks. The pay isn’t enough
(that pesky minimum)—but I’m told I can only offer her the minimum, even though
she’s very well qualified. She leaves to go to Essence magazine, aimed at
“upscale African American women,” and becomes executive editor. Later she’s managing
editor for the Malcolm X project at Columbia University, a collection of
materials on the life and work of Malcolm X.
I need to tell Burt, management’s lawyer, how bad
the copyeditor minimum part of the current contract is, and that I was the
copyeditor who had been making, as Burt put it, “way more than anyone else in
that department.” I want everyone to be paid more, not that everyone be pulled
down to the lowest paid person.
Union contract negotiations in 1979
The first union contract is expiring, and I go to
an interminable meeting. Pronouns are giving me trouble. I still can’t think of
“management” as “us” rather than “them.” “They” want me to give “them”
counterarguments to union demands, and I can’t because I think those demands
are fair. Some part of me feels that I’m betraying familial tradition, as my
grandfather was a union organizer and then an officer in the Fur & Leather
Workers Union.
David suggests that I be at the negotiating
sessions on copy department issues, and I want to kill him. At one session the
table is so crowded I’m at the very end, almost pushed around to the union
side, and make a joke about it. Eliot Fremont-Smith, book reviews editor,
points and says, “Traitor, traitor.” Nat Hentoff laughs and says, “I didn’t
recognize you on that side of the table.” David says, “We had to sedate her to
get her over here.”
I’m now far enough away from the union to feel annoyed
at their mistakes: not having their own money figures (again!), not making it
clear to new workers that one risk of a strike is that Murdoch will take over
the paper if management can’t put it out on our own (have I finally accepted
the change of pronouns?). One union person thinks the object of a strike is to
shut down the paper and has no idea that might not happen. I want to tell them
what they’re doing wrong, but don’t have the nerve to be a secret adviser.
Union contract negotiations in 1982
Three years later, it’s contract time again. I get
a call from an advertiser who thinks there’s going to be a strike and wonders
if the content of the paper will change. I say there will only be a strike if
no contract is agreed to, and I think there will be a contract. Thank you very
much, she says, that’s all I wanted to know.
One day management meets with the president of
Murdoch’s magazines, who tells us we will be suitably rewarded when this is all
over, and I wonder what that means: a bonus? dinner at Lutece? He then explains
management’s theory of union negotiation, which is that union demands are
infinite and management’s response is zero. This doesn’t feel quite right to
me. Of course the union will demand lots of things they don’t expect to get. Bargaining
involves trading: I’ll give up this demand, but insist on this other one. His
way of saying this feels so dismissive of the union.
I’ve partially accepted the pronoun switch, that I
am part of management and therefore “we.” But talking with an editor, a union
member, I flip into union strategy without even thinking. Intense exposure to “management
thought” has barely helped me begin to see their point of view, let alone
enable me to think like “them” or be comfortable being one of “them.” So
management is still “them” in my unconscious. Not only am I emotionally with
the union, I am with them intellectually.
I find myself with no one to talk to while management
waits during negotiations, except M., the Voice Literary Supplement editor. I
can’t talk honestly with David because every time I start to, he puts on his
management voice and talks to me as though I’m a union person—probably because
when I talk to him I’ve put on my union voice.
After proposing a deadline extension, to which the
union agrees, Burt launches into a bizarre harangue, followed by heated
exchanges, a concession from the union, nothing from management, more heated
exchanges, and a move to caucus. I have no idea what’s going on; it feels like
both sides are reciting lines from different plays. When I relate events to my
husband, who had belonged to the Newspaper Guild at the New York Post, he says
the union is weak, and Burt is showing he knows it. Strong unions risk a
strike, while weak ones avoid one. And Burt hasn’t told management his strategy
because he doesn’t trust some of us not to tell the union.
Management’s presence at negotiations is now limited
to the white male caucus (i.e., department heads and lawyer). Even though I
hate them and don’t feel part of them, I am angry at being excluded. When talks
are getting “serious,” the “women and children” (non-department head management)
are put ashore. If they want our loyalty, they should treat us seriously, and
if we’ve been in on so much of the dirty work, why send us away?
Finally, a contract is accepted, though there’s a
lot of bitterness over it, only 62% of union members voting for it. And we’ll
have to do this all over again in two years.
And day-to-day...
The film editor is fired. Management has been told
a senior editor has to be laid off, and letting go either of the two who do the
least work (one a longtime Voice person from the Wolf/Fancher days, the other
the only Black editor) would be too awkward. Meanwhile, a production person has
his pay cut, but the union can’t help him; he made his own deal with
management, forgetting that they have the power to revoke it. While union
members are busy discussing all these problems, I feel isolated because I can’t
be part of the conversation.
PRODUCTION
Liaison with production is the other big part of my
job, and we are still working with paper manuscripts. Copyedited stories are put
in a package for daily messenger to the typesetter, who returns galleys of
typeset stories for editors to read and return to copy department, where we
check them and put them in a package to go back to the typesetter. I keep track
of every story to make sure gets through for final correx (corrections).
Tuesday is production day at the plant, and we are
still in the age of pasteup, described in Part 2 of this Village Voice saga. From
editorial, I, the managing editor, and proofreaders are at there to read page
proofs, make sure all final legal corrections are made, and sign off on pages.
Move to a new typesetter
Soon after I become copy chief, I’m told the Voice
is changing typesetters, again, this time to a place in Hackensack, N. J.,
called Colormasters. Neither the production manager nor David like it, it’s
outside the city and not easy to get to. David says he’ll insist that the Voice
spend whatever money is necessary to make the move convenient and comfortable
for those who suffer the most from it—managing editor, me, proofreaders, maybe
a copyeditor—who will have to go there. Motel rooms will have to be rented for
overnight proofreaders. I’d like to have a car every week, but don’t relish
driving across the George Washington Bridge with only five hours of sleep.
On our first issue out of Colormasters. I drive to
Hackensack and back with David, who gives me an F for taking the lower level of
the George Washington Bridge. He’s right—the lower level is oppressive, while
the upper level has the magnificent view—and I never do that again.
At a meeting at Colormasters, we’re sitting around
a table in a room that’s bare room, but at least has windows. I ask the type
consultant how the computer systems work. “We work with algorithms,” he
replies, and he might as well have been speaking Martian. I don’t want to ask
what an algorithm is, and maybe he’s testing me to see how much I know.
J.B., the new production manager, is skinny, medium
height, with a thin mustache. At first he’s dismissive when I ask about some
problem at Colormasters (“Don’t worry about it”) or rude if I wonder where a
particular story is (“I don’t know and there’s no way to find out until
tomorrow”) However, other people in production get answers quickly. I tell J.B.,
“We need to get things straight between us since I’m liaison between editorial
and production,” and he stops trying to push me around.
One spring day at Colormasters, I am stabbed in the
hip by an art director’s Exacto knife. It hurts! It bleeds! Everyone is upset.
Someone calls an ambulance, and I sit inside it while an EMT wipes away the
blood, gives me a tetanus shot, and tapes me up. Still, this doesn’t discourage
me from continuing to go to the plant. Neither does the blizzard that hits the
city on baseball opening day of 1982. I drive home from the plant through the
aftermath, with barely plowed highways and cars still stuck in the far-left
lane. I’m nervous and drive slowly while crazy people whiz past me, but I am
relieved and proud to have made it, even though it took an hour rather than the
usual 20 minutes.
Another move, this one of the Voice office
The Voice moves from University Place to Broadway
and 13th Street in 1980, a large, old office building (now the Regal Union
Square multiplex). We still put out the paper around packing up and having a
farewell party on Thursday. On Friday I feel thoroughly disoriented because
nothing is where it used to be, or yet where it will be, and we aren’t yet in
the New World, as Eve, a proofreader, calls it.
Atex transition
It has been
suggested that things might be simpler if the Voice did its own typesetting,
and now that’s happening. The Voice is getting a system called Atex, with VDTs,
or video-display terminals, and a main-frame computer onsite. I am interested
in, if a little scared of, the VDT transition. Maybe writers and editors will
have more control over their work, but I worry that copyeditors’ jobs might be
eliminated. I’ve heard of something called “spellcheck” and wonder if higher
management will think that’s all we do, and we’ll be dispensed with. As it
happens, my husband is now a part-time copyeditor at Business Week magazine,
which uses the Atex system. So I pump him for information about how their
systems work.
The Accident
A year into preliminary planning, I face a personal
upheaval: my 10-year-old daughter is hit by a car, has broken bones, and is in
a coma for a week and a half. This is unspeakably harrowing, yet somehow, I
don’t know how, I manage to maintain an equilibrium. Our friends mobilize to
help us, and after several weeks, David suggests I go on medical leave, both to
take care of Christie and to focus on the Atex transition. So I’m on leave for
six weeks. (Christie takes a few years to recover, and is now a functioning
adult and has been a public librarian for many years.)
I must be one of those people who sees the glass
half-full because I find a positive outcome from the accident: I finally learn
how to use lists: who visits Christie, her medical appointments, who’s called
that I need to return the calls, but also lists of questions about the Atex
conversion, possible ways to organize the copy department, and also how to reorganize
how editors and writers will use the new system.
I’m not mystical, but... the day after the
accident, I’m in the ICU waiting room, standing by the open window with my eyes
closed. I feel this wave of support buoying me up. I think, all of this energy
is coming from people at the Voice (I had just talked to David and to the
publisher), and I will take it in and focus it on Christie and she will get
well.
A few days later Howard Smith, editor of the Scenes
column, calls to report he’s in a deep depression and checking himself into
Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, but he manages to ask about Christie—kids who
come to the office love to hang out in the Scenes office because there’s always
fascinating stuff and Howard can put himself at their level.
Back to work
The Atex conversion is getting underway and I am in in
charge of all day-to-day planning. While the managing editor might logically
have been the person to do this, it seems I am more interested in the
nuts-and-bolts of how the computers work than the current m.e., so she leaves
most of this work to me. Not only do I have my husband to call on for Atex
expertise, my brother is a computer engineer, and my sister is a graphic
designer who’s also started working with computers.
I’m concerned about how Atex will change the Voice.
It will force people to be more regular, less anarchic about when they come to
the office, and it will be harder for freelancers, who mostly won’t learn Atex.
I’m also bothered by J.B.’s insistence that we call the people who type in freelancers’
stories “inputters” instead of “typesetters.” The computers are deskilling and
reskilling people; skills are pulled up the hierarchy to editors and management,
and proofreaders who become typists are not learning a new skill, since they
don’t have to apply composition codes, the computer does that. In a sense they
are learning a new “task,” not a new “skill,” and being demoted. Bob Christgau
thinks this turns editors into typesetters, but the computer will let him know
immediately whether the headline he’s written will fit, and that gives him
control over something that matters to him. Though it’s at the expense of
someone else’s job; the typesetters at Colormasters will no longer be needed by
the Voice. (Below, the proofreading crew at 842 Broadway on a Friday night in February 1984. From left: Bruce Novack, Anita Petraske, Luis Francia (notice his gloves, it was cold in there after 6 p.m.), Loretta Campbell, Daisy Taylor.)
Learning how computers work feels to me like
getting into the mud to make mudpies: I don’t learn it by reading about it, I
have to touch the keyboard and do things and see what happens. I and other
supervisors in production and advertising get a week of training from an Atex
person. Then I boil down my notes into a one-day class, incorporating how the
system will change what people have been doing and what they will do now. Then
I set up training sessions for copyeditors, editors, writers, in manageable
groups, a total of 50 people.
Editors have to learn, whether they like it or not.
We want staff writers, like Nat Hentoff and Jack Newfield, to learn, but we
can’t force them—Nat spends an hour in class poking at keys, but never learns;
Jack sits through a whole class, but never types his own stories into the
system. Freelance writers don’t have to, and since they have to be provided
for—the typists—Luddites among the writers are freed from the pressure to learn
the machine.
This is the first time I’ve ever been a formal teacher
to a group, and I discover that I don’t give identical classes to everyone. My
technique depends on the response I get: enthusiasm and quick pickup encourages
me, hostility or puzzlement or slow response makes me impatient. Surprisingly, I’m
most impatient with the self-proclaimed Luddites. Since I overcame my fear of
and hostility toward the green screen, so can they, I think, and if they don’t,
they simply aren’t trying hard enough, and they’re making my job harder.
I have to distinguish questions that show real
confusion, and questions that take the form of, why does this machine work the
way it does? That’s like, why does a typewriter put words on paper? The only
answer is, that’s what it’s meant to do!
Here’s how Atex works
The
Atex computer system has a mainframe computer in a big room in the Voice office,
and what are called “dumb” terminals—video display terminals, or VDTs—connected
to a keyboard at people’s desks. VDTs do no computing themselves, but save what
is typed to the mainframe. The background screen is green, with light-colored
letters. If you’re writing, you can set up the screen so that it will count the
lines for you and show you where lines will break when the story is printed. Or
you can leave it like a plain piece of paper in a typewriter and apply the line
count format when you’re done. Writers can see immediately how long their story
is and whether they have to cut or have room to write more.
Here’s a fun feature: When you write a headline and
apply the headline format, it will tell you if the head is too short or too
long. And if it fits, it will add three asterisks at the beginning and end
along with some exclamation points, and in all caps, HEAD FITS! It’s like being
patted on the head and congratulated.
Another cute feature: Most printed matter wants
punctuation following italic words, like titles of books or movies or plays,
etc., not to be italic. Most writers pay no attention to that, some not
bothering to ital the titles or if they do, not paying attention to whether
they’ve also italed the punctuation. That’s something copy editors have to look
for. One of the first things I notice is that changing an italic comma to a
roman one makes the comma stand up straight. I love watching that happen.
EDITORS & WRITERS
Early on, I’m talking with Jan, one of the
proofreaders. David comes by and hands her a piece of paper. “Here are the
cover heads. Would you type them up?” he says.
I’m amazed. “Why don’t you type them yourself?” I ask
him.
He says, “I don’t want to type my own heads.”
I say, “You know you should type your own heads.”
He says, “I know, but I don't want to,” and turns
away, laughing.
I laugh, too, but why? I ask Jan if she thinks I
made my point clear, and she says, “Yes, and he’s also made clear that he’s the
boss.” I’m really disappointed. I had thought better of him.
I note in my journal that David is aggressively, if
quietly, charming.
Howard Smith,
creator of the Scenes column, is tall, with a mustache and the bushy hair
sometimes called a Jew-fro. One week, he’s unable to complete his “Scenes”
column by his deadline, so I have to tell him, no Scenes this week. He comes up
to the copy department and I listen to him rant for 45 minutes about all of his
complaints. I cannot make him stop talking so I can do my work, and no one has
any idea yet that he’s suffering from bipolar disorder.
Another week, I have a drink with the managing
editor, and she says I did a good thing to allow Scenes only half a page
because the whole page couldn’t be filed until Monday. Word would get around so
Joe Conason and Wayne Barrett would not feel they are being picked on when
asked to make last-minute cuts on their columns. This is reassuring.
Another fight with Howard Smith and Lin Harris, a
former copyeditor who’s now his assistant, over cuts in a long caption that Lin
agreed to, then later accuses me of manipulating her into accepting. On the
phone I yell at her, “That’s fucking false and I’m not going to take this
bullshit anymore.” A minute later, Bob Christgau comes over and says, “Good for
you.”
The Jules Feiffer cartoon
Jules Feiffer submits a cartoon for the first gay
pride issue in 1979 that he thinks is ironic, yet it plays homophobia off
against racism and feels off for the Pride issue. In a series of panels an
Archie Bunkerish character notes all the homophobic slurs he can’t say anymore,
until the final panel where he says, “Guess I’ll have to go back to saying
‘nigger.’” Richard, editor for the section, asks that the cartoon be held for
the following week; this is interpreted by others as censorship. He and Rudy
Langlais, the only Black editor at the time, circulate a letter, which I among
others sign, dissociating ourselves from the cartoon, which does run in the
issue. Nat writes a column characterizing all of us as censors. When I confront
him for not talking to those of us who signed the letter to find out what we
thought, he claims he was writing opinion, not reporting. This seems to me a
weak defense.
Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines.
What makes my job hardest is writers who do not
understand what a deadline is. My job is easiest when stories come to the copy
department evenly spaced throughout the week, but inevitably some writers will
have problems. Stories due Thursday get pushed to Friday, and too many news
stories that could have been written Friday don’t come in until Monday. Early
on I have a dream about anxiety over my power to kill pieces that miss their
deadline, and anger that a writer doesn’t take this power seriously and thinks
that there will always be excuses to get around me—and by the suspicion that he
might be right. I have to be careful to exercise this power fairly.
Wayne
Barrett is the worst. He’s a preeminant muckraker, exposing politicians and
others, and revealing Donald Trump’s rapacious ways before anyone else. But he
always files his stories at the latest possible moment on Monday night, and I
sometimes become Wayne’s de facto editor. He hates being edited, because he thinks
any change to his writing weakens it. In one story I persuade him to delete a
gratuitous swipe at a New York Times reporter because it has nothing to do with
what he’s writing about, and it detracts from his main points. His worst habit is
using adverbs to tell the reader what to think. I argue over these frequently,
and sometimes he agrees, but more often he doesn’t.
Because he files so late on Mondays and his stories
always have to be read by the Voice’s libel lawyer, he doesn’t get legal
clearance until Tuesday, when we are at the plant. Often I call him Tuesday
morning to make changes the lawyer requires, which makes him angry, and he
yells at me. One Tuesday, when he has to make cuts, he starts giving me cuts
that involve new typesetting, which it’s too late for. He can’t understand
there’s a production schedule that needs to be met, and I finally get so mad, I
say, “I don’t have to listen to this bullshit” and hang up on him. Everyone at
the plant applauds. He calls back and refuses to talk to me; eventually he’s on
the phone with Susie, the production manager, who tells him it’s too late for
cuts. He says he’ll stay on the phone until he can make cuts or someone hangs
up on him, and Susie hangs up on him.
Sometimes we’re on the phone from the plant making
cuts for length. Wayne does not know how to write short. When we’re still
working with paper and typewriters, David tells Wayne to write two pages. So he
writes on two pages of yellow copy paper, with half-inch margins top, bottom,
right and left—and doesn’t understand why he still needs to make cuts. This
prompts me to create a template page, with a blue line for the left margin,
and, for the right margin, a blue line for elite type, and another blue line
for pica type, so everyone can see immediately how many lines he’s written
before the story gets to the typesetter. (Here's what that template looks like.)
There are frequent Monday and Tuesday mornings when
I cry in the shower worried about what conflict I will have with Wayne. After a
particularly bad run-in, I tell him that we seem to get into a fight whenever I
talk to him, and whatever causes it, I would like it to not happen. He replies
that he doesn’t think that’s possible. I’m stunned. He’s the first person to
ever say right out that he can barely be civil with me. Everyone else I’ve had
problems with I’ve been able to work it out, maybe because they were too polite
to say directly they didn’t like me.
I sometimes hear him in his office yelling on the
phone and realize he’s interviewing someone who he probably thinks of as a
“hostile witness.” And once he and another writer go to a hospital where
someone they’re invesigating is a patient. David is quite angry about this and tells
them never to do that again.
But he is a good dancer, which I notice at our
annual Christmas parties. If only he could be as flexible in the editing
process.
A byzantine
Voice conspiracy
Early in 1985, Newfield and Wayne try an end run
around David, now acting publisher, by claiming to me late on Monday that they
have an emergency item for the NYC column on local politics, implying to me
that David has okayed it. Then Wayne offhandedly says, “Hentoff and Newfield
are signing the item, but Stokes isn’t going along.” Why? He says, “We asked
him to write about it in Press Clips, but
he wouldn’t.” This rings alarm bells.
I call Stokes to ask what’s going on, and he says
David begged them not to write this; it’s idle speculation about who might be
the next Voice editor-in-chief. Newfield and Wayne could certainly have been
fired if they’d gotten me to send the item to print, and would have gotten me
fired, too. “What assholes they are! And what a fool they must think me,” I think.
The next day at the plant, Wayne calls to yell at me:
“You didn’t have the courtesy to let me know my item was killed!” Kit, the
current managing editor, calls to have the item read to him. The item mentions
Murdoch, and production manager Susie asks if David has read it. Does the
publisher get to read anything that mentions Murdoch? Susie says, “Yes,” Kit
says, “No,” and I’m not sure. Kit now says there was a misunderstanding; he
thought David said no to the item, but Newfield and Wayne say he said yes, and
the story will come out in a few days anyway. I tell Kit, “I think you’re being
used, as they tried to use me. “The item doesn’t run, and I think, no one cares
about it except Voice people anyway.
David
Edelstein, staff film reviewer in his 20s, is usually good at meeting his
deadlines until a few months after we switch to the Atex system. Suddenly, he’s
unbelievably late.
“What’s his problem?” I ask his editor.
“His Atex pasword is his girlfriend’s name,” she replies,
“but they just broke up. Whenever he goes to log in, he’s forced to type her
name, and he can’t do it.”
Is that all? “He’s not locked to that password
forever,” I tell her. “We can change it anytime.” Apparently, that never
occurred to them.
Nat Hentoff
is a kingdom of his own. His office is piled high with newspapers and
magazines, and he can often be seen walking down 12th Street with his face
buried in a newspaper—just as people nowadays walk around buried in their
phones. When I first start at the Voice in the mid-1970s, Nat has two-thirds of
a page every week to write whatever he wants, mostly about civil liberties or
politics or free speech, and occasionally jazz. However, in the months before
David replaces Marianne as editor-in-chief, Nat occasionally writes a full
page. So when David comes in, Nat tells him he always has a page. I notice that
when Nat writes a full page, his copy is prone to looseness, too much
digression. His arguments were much tighter when he only had two-thirds of a page.
Anna Mayo,
one of the older writers, teaches me a valuable lesson when we first get the
Atex system. She’s been writing an antinuclear column, “Geiger Counter,” for
the Voice since 1969. Working on paper, I’d sit down with her, as with any
writer, and go over each of my copy editing queries, and we’d have a
conversation if she doesn’t quite get why I’m suggesting a change. When I first
read one of Anna’s stories on the Atex system screen, I simply type, in Notes
mode, the queries I would have asked her if we were sitting side-by-side. The
next day, I learn that Anna feels terrible, thinking I hate her piece and have
all these questions she doesn’t understand. I realize immediately that words on
the screen carry much more authority and weight than words spoken to a writer
sitting next to you. Even though Atex is supposed to speed up the system of
getting out the paper, it still seems important that copy editors talk to
writers face-to-face, which editors still often do, or they have to couch their
questions as tactfully as they can when writing Notes onscreen.
Anna sometimes writes about something other than
the danger of nuclear energy. One day she wanders through the office asking
whoever she sees, “If you had to give up humor or sex, which would it be?” When
she gets to me, I cannot choose. I’d give up everything else except those two.
I copyedit an Andrew
Sarris review of a film I’ve also seen at a screening. Oddly, something he
writes contradicts something that happened in the opening scene. When I speak
to Andrew on the phone in going over my copyedits, he admits that he missed the
very beginning of the movie, and he’s grateful for my explaining what had
happened. How many other films, I wonder, has he reviewed without seeing the opening
scene?
I see one of my jobs as making sure writers’ words
say exactly what they mean and don’t reproduce stereotypes. An example: Stuart Byron writes a column on the
business of Hollywood. One day he refers to studios not wanting to produce
effeminate films. The word “effeminate” strikes me as odd; I’m not at all sure
what it means in this context, so I ask. “It’s films that appeal to women,” he
says. That’s not what “effeminate” means, I tell him, it means “not manly,”
“feminine qualities untypical of a man.” (I should mention that Stuart is gay.)
My suggestion: “Why not just say, ‘films that appeal to women’”? I forget why
he quibbles over this, but eventually he accepts it.
Stanley
Crouch can be obnoxious. He has a screaming fight with Ron, the Letters
editor, calling him “fat faggot.” An art director who’s a Black single mother
sometimes brings one or both of her young sons to the office. Stanley thinks
five-year-old Christopher isn’t tough enough, so one day he locks the boy in an
office. Christopher is of course upset, and Stephanie is furious when she finds
out, roundly denouncing Stanley as a bully.
Deaths
Most people associated with the Voice are not old,
but there are deaths during the years I’m copy chief. Lester Bangs, one of the music reviewers, is one of the nicest
people who writes for the Voice. He treats the copy editors like human beings,
not like enemies to be fought with. He dies in April 1982. I go to a wake for
him at CBGB and write a poem (lost) about the terror of midlife.
Arthur Bell
dies in 1984, from complications related to diabetes. Lionel Mitchell, a Black gay writer, dies, as does a young
photographer, Stephen Crichlow, at
28, from what we learn later was a congenital heart disorder. He biked all over
the city for his assignments.
Legal issues
Of course, all the political and investigative stories
are sent to the Voice’s libel lawyers, Victor Kovner or Harriet Dorsen. Once a
year, Victor comes to the office to give a lecture on the current state of
libel law. Reporting that someone is gay, for instance, in the 1980s is automatically
defamatory unless the person is publicly out. Richard Goldstein writes about
someone in the Republican Party who’s promoting antigay policies, but is gay
himself, and Victor asks, How do you know? Richard tells me, “I slept with him.”
When I report Richard’s answer to Victor, there’s quite a moment of silence on
the phone.
Opinion is usually protected because opinion is not
a matter of fact, but James Wolcott’s TV reviews are always sent to the lawyer
because some of his judgments verge on the defamatory.
Even a sports story might need legal approval. A
freelancer writes a spoof Pete Rose Newsletter, and Victor is not happy with it.
We have to put the word “satire” at the top and bottom of the page, in case any
readers might think it’s a real newsletter written by the real Pete Rose.
A legal success story! I’m given a long piece about
Stanley Fink, a Brooklyn politician and at that moment Speaker of the Assembly
in Albany. David wants it cut considerably, which I do, and he says it’s a good
edit. But the libel lawyer wants the entire section about sex and politics to
be cut. I can see the problem, but the story says Albany is a very sexist and
sexualized place, and this is the only part of the story about women’s issues,
especially abortion. How to describe the atmosphere without actually saying
everyone is fucking like bunnies? I rewrite a section with the modifiers that I
know the lawyer wants, and at first he’s adamant, the section cannot run. I
explain the point the writer is trying to make and read him the two pages I’ve
put together. The intensity of his voice reduces by about half, and he says,
“Well, let me see it in galleys. I think you may have salvaged it.” Hurray!
The Voice was seldom sued, and never successfully,
at least during my years. Here are a couple of cases.
Jack
Newfield writes a long article about John Murphy, a Democratic congressman
from Staten Island. The second graf of the story includes this description:
“...almost every variety of vice, almost every sample of sleaze...” When I see
that the headline on the front page is “Every Variety of Vice, Every Sample of
Sleaze,” I immediately ask the fact-checker, “Did Victor okay these words?” She
says, “Yes.” It turns out he okayed the phrase in the article, but he never saw
the headline. On Wednesday, when the paper comes out, he immediately calls me
and the editor-in-chief. I’m afraid I will be fired, and the congressman
threatens to sue. The Voice agrees to let him have two pages to explain
himself. He produces so many words they have to be set in type so tiny we know
no one will read it, but we run it, and that’s the end of that.
Libel can occur not only in words but in layout. Jan Hoffman writes a story about the
Women Against Pornography tours of Times Square. On the opening page is a large
photo of a man in a security officer’s uniform in front of a mural of a woman
dressed in provocative clothing. The caption under the photo identifies the artist
who’s painted the mural, but not the guard. Beneath the caption is a pullquote
from the story in large type: “The man in the pink shirt followed us,
muttering, ‘I want to fuck you, I want to kill you, I want to fuck you, I want
to kill you.’”
At the plant, the managing editor asks me, “Does it
look like the pullquote is from the man in the photo?
“Of course not,” I say. “He’s obviously not wearing
a pink shirt.”
Silly me. The security guard threatens to sue, but
has things in his background he’d rather not come out during discovery, so the
case is eventually dropped. This teaches me the danger of knowing too much
about a story; if even the managing editor wasn't sure who “the man in the pink
shirt” was, the average reader probably wouldn’t either.
Political endorsements
Written by the political writers, these always come
in late on Monday. This makes no sense to me. Surely the writers and editors
know who they support. Why can’t endorsements be filed on Wednesday, Friday at
the latest? Every election year I make my plea, and every election year I’m
ignored.
The writer’s voice
The Voice is a writers’ paper, which means there’s
no standard “tone” that all writers are held to. Consequently, copy editors can’t
make the kinds of changes to a writer’s story that they might elsewhere to fit
a publication’s writing style. We do follow publication style on issues of
consistency—numbers, capitalization, abbreviations, etc.—but any time we think
a word might not be the best word, we have to query the author. Often we lose
this argument. Once I object to Jack
Newfield saying the city’s hospital budget had been “annihilated,” since
that would mean it had been reduced to zero, which it hadn’t. I suggest
“decimated,” which is closer in meaning to the situation. But Newfield won’t
budge; he likes the word “annihilated.” I mentally shrug and think, his name is
on the story, not mine, so he’s the one who will look like a fool for massively
exaggerating.
In another case, I’m reading a music review by Greg Tate, then using the byline Greg
“Ironman” Tate. With this byline, his voice is very colloquial, very street,
and I’m getting into the rhythm of his sentences and words. In one place,
though, there’s a word of standard English, and it sticks out. Did he do that
on purpose? or is it a mistake? I have to ask the author. Greg is surprised and
thanks me; that’s not the word he meant, and he changes it to maintain his
“Ironman” tone.
Publication Style Guide
In the winter of 1985 I create a style guide for the Voice,
pulling together the various rules we’ve been following for years and going
through the Chicago Manual of Style, Words into Type, Fowler (which years later
I come to treat with much skepticism), as well as consulting M. as a previous
copy chief, and Karen as the best editor. This is when I seriously begin
considering the reasons why I prefer the series comma. The completed style
guide is titled “Small Craft Warnings” and remains the Voice style guide for
years after I leave.
MY OWN EDITING
David knows I want to edit, so when an editor takes
some vacation days, I sometimes get a chance to edit their writers. One time there’s
a furor because during union negotiations the union wanted editors to be
completely replaced, not just have their work spread out among remaining
editors. If I’m going to replace that editor, then someone has to replace me,
which would be a copy editor. By seniority, it would be Sally, but she thinks
the pay differential for doing my work for a week isn’t enough. I ask how much
she wants, but she won’t say. The situation ends with me doing editing in
between my regular copy chief duties. David and Cynthia are so impressed by my
performance they offer me a bonus of $125.
Sometimes David gives me a feature to edit that
he’s assigned. If these are like a tryout, the hoped for promotion never
happens.
Editing Jonathan Schwartz
The pop music expert with a radio show on WNEW, which was then an FM
mixed rock & roll station, writes a regular column for the Voice for about
a year, 1980–1981, and I become his editor.
One day, while talking with him, I sound like
someone having a very pretentious literary conversation, being “articulate” in
the way Karen Durbin is, speaking in complete sentences. At one point he asks,
“What do you think about the relationship of critics to writers?” I say, “Well,
as a sometime critic myself...” and he interrupts, “Oh, where do you write?”
and asks me to send him some of my clips. When I tell this story to my husband,
he says, “Of course you won’t,” thinking that people say this sort of thing
without meaning it. I think, “Of course I will,” why not?
But at the end of 1981, Schwartz fires me as his
editor. He’s written a column about running into his ex-wife, Sara Davidson,
some years earlier, and includes an exchange they have about the memoir she is
then writing, Loose Change. We have
an argument because the way the column is written about his ex-wife means it
has to go to the lawyer for vetting, and the lawyer has many questions, none of
which Jonathan wants to deal with. He insists that not a word be changed, but
the lawyer says it can’t run as is. After reading her memoir, about her and two
of her college friends through the changes of the 1960s, it seems to me that
she and Jonathan deserved each other—and there have to be changes to the column.
Jonathan won’t budge. And I am astonished to get a phone call from Joan Didion,
who has some relationship with Jonathan, and she is urging me not to make any
of the changes I and the lawyer think need to be made.
The following phone conversation takes place the
next Monday, closing day:
Me: Jonathan, everything is
all right with your column...
JS: I am aware of that. I am
aware of everything. I consider this our final conversation. [he hangs up]
MY WRITING
Despite being overwhelmed by work, I manage to
write 10 pieces for the Voice during the seven years I’m copy chief. Most are
short, book reviews and a couple for the Voice’s “fashion section” called
“Getting & Spending,” including a piece on a knockoff Filofax binder (I’ve
kept all my datebooks back to 1963, my personal archive of life).
Book reviews
The Voice Literary Supplement has a feature called
“Save This Book,” reviews of out-of-print works that need to be revived. In
1981, I see Warren Beatty’s movie “Reds,” about John Reed, Louise Bryant, and
the Russian Revolution. Despite being a “red-diaper baby,” I know almost nothing
about the Russian Revolution and binge on histories, including Leon Trotsky’s
you-are-there version. I frequently come across references to another history
by someone I’ve never heard of, N.N. Sukhanov, and find that he’d also been an
eyewitness and wrote a seven-volume history in Russian, condensed into one
volume in English in 1955. I track it down, and as I read, I remember that
Trotsky wrote about the early days of the 1917 February revolution as though he
had been there, but he didn’t arrive in Petersburg until April. Did he crib
from Sukhanov’s chronicle? Sukhanov’s account is chatty and personal, memoirish
as well as polemical. I write a “Save This Book” review for VLS, and a couple
of years later, Princeton University Press reissues it; the back of the trade
paper edition includes quotes from my review, along with one from the famed
historian A.J.P. Taylor.
The most fun review is of the Choose Your Own
Adventure series. At nine, my daughter is a huge fan, which presents not one
linear story but the outlines of several, with various points in the story
requiring the reader to decide one course or another, and different stories
spin out depending on the reader’s choices. This may seem elementary to
videogame players today, but in the early ’80s, this was a new version of print
storytelling. I’m put off by the mechanics of the technique and decide to
review the series in the same “choose your own” format: the headline? “Choose
Your Own Book Review.” It begins with “You,” a working mother and occasional
book reviewer, thinking about writing such a review. At the end of the first
graf setting up the situation, the reader has two choices: if you decide to
look into this new storytelling format for kids, you go to paragraph 2; if you
decide not to, go to paragraph 3. Paragraph 2 leads you to more choices, and
the review continues; paragraph 3 explains that you feel overloaded and don’t
have the time, and the review ends. It’s fun to construct the review, and fun
to think through what bothers me about the series. I even include my daughter’s
opinion in the review.
Features
I’m assigned a
feature for an Upper West Side supplement about public school. Days
before it’s due, I have the most massive writer’s block: my daughter doesn’t go
to a public school. How can I write about public schools when I have no
personal experience? I ask my husband for help, and he suggests a screed about
liberal parent guilt over private vs. public schools. He gives me a page of
anecdotes, not the 1,200 words I need, but I see the germ of an idea: I confess
what’s holding me back, and that opens up the piece. The next morning, I type
three pages of general bullshit, call two friends whose daughters are in
different public schools for information, then start reporting. At one point my
husband reads the first page and a half and says, “You know, you’re good. What
I did wouldn’t have worked for 1,200 words, but you’ve taken it and done
something with it.”
On writing
I have lunch with Karen, my usual editor at the
Voice and a friend, and she says what I do well in personal writing is put it
in social and political context (“Is that what I do?”). She adds that I should
continue to keep my journal, which I now see is an aggregate of experience,
with a perspective that isn’t always clear until much later. It’s like I’m
constructing my tools as I go along.
From my journal: “Self-consciousness in writing.
Watching how the words you choose give validity to your ideas, express a
thought you hadn’t known you had until you write the words. Exercising your skill
by writing. The hazards of this self-consciousness: admiring the words you just
wrote so that you are unable to write any more. Afraid your next phrase won’t
be so pure, so golden; it will be flat and off by comparison.”
CHRISTMAS PARTIES
The Voice has its Christmas parties at the hot club
of the year. I love to dance and this is
the era of disco, so I have a great time. Parties are at Heat; Hurrah’s; the
Underground Club; the short-lived Palace, on the site of the former Luchow’s; the
Limelight, a former church in Chelsea (where a
Voice writer is both so drunk and so stoned that he cannot stand); Area
(which may have been the party that was so loud you couldn’t talk to anyone,
and so dark that my date and I never found each other); and the Palladium,
having replaced the Palace.
THE PERSONAL
The new office on Broadway is infested with mice.
One day I bring Christie to work with me. As she’s about to move to a chair
near my desk, I look down and see a mouse stuck to a glue trap, and Christie’s
about to step on it. I manage to edge her away and only tell her why later.
While on vacation one year, I buy roller-skates.
They’ve become a fad, and a few staffers have worn skates to the new office on
Broadway with its long, open halls. These are roller-skates, not the
roller-blades of later decades.
The fashion page does a story on Crazy Color,
non-hair colors for hair that are vegetable-based. My very dark-brown hair has
been getting more and more gray, and I’m not ready for my hair to become all
light-colored, so I color my bangs blue. Jack doesn’t like the blue, and
neither do the older men at the Voice, but the women and younger people all
think it’s cool. I no longer care that other people may not like something I’ve
done.
April 1981, Bill Ryan, the publisher, leaves to be
head of finance at Ziff-Davis. After his farewell party on Friday, he comes over
to the production department where a few people are working. He’s pretty drunk
and very depressed. He doesn’t want to leave, doesn’t want to go somewhere
where people don’t tell you what they think, or they fawn before power. Of
course, he wants to make more money and climb the corporate ladder, but part of
him really doesn’t want to leave this bizarre newspaper. I realize if I left I
would feel even more like this. It’s not just the Voice. For years I’ve been
wrestling with my marriage, then the job, then marriage, then job, both
relationships that are intensely absorbing, both satisfying and unsatisfying. I
keep searching for an analysis that will bring everything together, but “the
pen in my hand drives all abstraction away.”
In a Fashion Supplement, Alex Cockburn is on the
cover. I tape the cover on the ladies’ room door, and various notes get added,
starting with mine: “What a cutie!”
I start jury duty. This seems to be the media jury
pool, as it includes the writer James Atlas, who spends most of his time
reading galleys, and Nancy Newhouse, a lifestyle editor at the New York Times.
One day I see on the TV near a snack stand that the space shuttle Challenger
has exploded.
Children
Besides my daughter, Christie, some other editorial
staff had kids. The theater editor, Erika Munk, had a daughter, Maja, a year younger
than Christie. They played together under an umbrella during a union meeting.
Stephanie Hill, one of the art directors, sometimes brought her younger son,
Christopher, to the office, but the older one, Nigel, came less often. Proofreader
Anita Petraske’s kids—Sasha, also a year younger than Christie, and Alanna—came often because their school was just a couple of blocks away. The Voice was
basically their after-school site. And finally, there was Sylvia Plachy’s son,
who we all called by his nickname, Mischie (not sure of the spelling here), and
didn’t know his actual name was Adrien until he became the movie star, Adrien
Brody.
Christie, Sasha, and Mischie were around the same
age and sometimes played together. Xeroxing their hands or faces was one of
their favorite games. Once they wrote their own newspaper.
THE WORLD
March 30,
1979, sees the nuclear plant accident at Three Mile Island, south of
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and about 150 crow-flying miles from New York. I’m
panicked because I think a meltdown will lead to a nuclear explosion. What
could happen is still pretty bad. That night Christie wants me to read her
“Hansel and Gretel,” which to me is about adults trying to kill kids, and the
kids emerging victorious.
Two months later, six-year-old Etan Patz
disappears. He lived downstairs from a close friend of ours, who calls to ask Jack
if there’s any way to get the police to do more than just walk around the
neighborhood showing photos of Etan. We have to tell seven-year-old Christie
because she has played with this boy and we can’t prevent her from seeing the
story on the news. Her response: “He wasn’t a smart kid.” I think this is her
effort to reassure herself that this won’t happen to her because she is smart.
1980:
At the end of the year, John Lennon
is murdered in front of the Dakota, where he lived. It’s a Monday night, and I’ve
come home sick with the flu. After Jack tells me what happened, my first
thought is, I should call the Voice to let them know, but Jack assures me that
they must have learned it already. The rest of the week, there’s a lot of
emotion at the Voice, with people saying, this is the end of the ’60s.
Ellen Cantarow’s feature about Gush Emunim, the
radical religious Jews who are setting up illegal settlements on the West Bank,
occupied by Israel since the 1967 war, sensitizes me to the settler problem,
but not to any activism. I’d grown up in a non-Zionist Jewish home, so Israel
was not part of my identity. But the settlements become and remain an issue
lurking at the back of my mind.
There’s another transit strike, and Alexander Cockburn
writes about how to reach the Voice from the Upper West Side. But what he
describes reveals to me that he’s never taken the subway to work, and I have to
correct the route that’s being replaced.
1981:
Several people from the Weathermen, a
1969 offshoot of SDS, and members of the Black Liberation Army are arrested
after attempting to rob a Brinks truck and killing a security guard and two
policemen. I think this was stupid and childishly romantic, and the real end of
the ’60s.
1982:
I take nine-year-old Christie on a
one-day bus ride to Washington and back to protest U.S. involvement in El
Salvador, in March. And in June there’s
a massive march to Central Park, more than half a million people, for nuclear
disarmament. Christie and I meet Voice theater critic Erika Munk and her daughter, Maja, with the Performing Artists for
Nuclear Disarmament, where I see numerous famous people.
LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB
Since I don’t really want to be copy chief, I want
to edit, I “apply” whenever there’s an editor opening at the Voice, but never
make the cut. I even half-heartedly express interest in being managing editor
when Susan Lyne quits to join a movie production company. David says he has
someone else in mind, but this person has a job. When I ask, “What’s the job?”
he says, “Well, it’s something you might be interested in,” and I suggest a
trade. He laughs and says he isn’t sure he want to lose both me and Susan at
the same time. Cynthia Crossen does come from the American Lawyer, for three
years, but there’s no trade. A few years later, though, I apply,
unsuccessfully, for an editor job there.
Meanwhile, I talk to many people about a job
somewhere else, but it takes years for me to grasp that looking for a job is a
job in itself.
1980:
At a party, I meet a woman who’s at
the Daily News—she thinks I could get a job on the copy desk there, which pays
almost 50% more than I am making now, with a lot less agita. But I’m deeply
ambivalent and don’t follow through. Looking for a job not at the Voice means trying
to decide what’s important: working sensible hours, making more money, and not
having to be friendly to people I don’t like (not the Voice) against not having
to dress up every day, not having to argue feminism, seeing my friends every
day (the Voice).
1981:
I have lunch with someone who says I
have to look, can’t wait for a job to come looking for me. I could call all the
people I already know who work at publications, but I don’t. I do imagine my
farewell party, though: what will they get me, how many people will come, whose
shoulder will I cry on?
I call Mother Jones about work as an editor and
they want a list of story ideas and a writer to go with each. I have the ideas
but not the writers, and decide I don’t really want to move to San Francisco. I’m
told Saturday Review and Next magazines are looking for editors. Even if I
don’t want to work at there, I think I ought to have interviews just for
practice, but can’t make myself take that step. Maybe I don’t want to face the
stress of a new job—it’s easier to deal with familiar stress than with strange
stress.
1982: After sending my résumé to
Women’s Day, I hear from the executive editor that they don’t have anything
suitable at the moment, but I should come in for a talk. They seem impressed
and say they’ll keep my letter in an active file in case one of their “primary”
editors leaves, but I never hear from them.
1984:
By now I realize why it’s so hard to
write application letters for jobs: it makes me think about how much I hate my
current job, which depresses me, which makes it harder to write a good letter,
and that depresses me further, which makes me think I’ll never get another job,
and that depresses me even more.
A friend’s sister-in-law has just left the American
Journal of Nursing to be managing editor at Natural History, so AJN needs a
managing editor. I do nothing about this, not really interested in nursing. Another
friend tells me one of the Ziff-Davis magazines in Boston needs a managing
editor and is willing to pay $100,000. I don’t apply for that one either
because I think no one would offer me a job that pays that much.
Since I’ve just finished ferrying the Voice through
the transition to Atex, and we’ve just bought a PCjr computer at home (it comes
with 128K, that’s kilobytes, not
megabytes) of memory, I feel comfortable looking for computer magazine jobs. I
meet with editors at PC Week magazine, who are looking for a staff writer who
can edit, while I’m an editor who can write. I’m told by a freelancer who
writes for PC Week that they liked me and thought one of my story ideas would
make a good column. But it doesn’t work out, because my writing is too “gee
whiz, how great!” and their readers are beyond that. What seems bizarre to me,
though, is that PC Week is still working on hard copy; they aren’t computerized
yet.
I talk with someone in personnel for the computer
magazine division at Ziff-Davis, who wants to know why I want to leave the
Voice (a legitimate question) and what I’ve been doing to look for a job (not a
legitimate question). Basically, she says I can’t write for one of her computer
magazines because I’ve never written for a computer magazine.
I decide to try employment agencies, where I learn
that it’s all a matter of timing, i.e., that there’s an opening just when I cold-call.
It’s useful to learn that trade magazines often pay more than consumer
magazines. It was discouraging that none of the agencies had anything remotely
like what I wanted, but I still got worthwhile information.
1985:
I read a news story about a job-hunting
seminar run by a saleswomen’s group, and I sign up. The instructor is
incredibly good-looking, and I wish I could feel as enthusiastic about looking
for a job as I feel lusting after him. What’s different about this group’s
approach is their alternative to the résumé,
what they call PAR letters. These letters state the Problem, the Action I took
to solve the problem, and the Response to my action. So I have to think of my
work experience in these terms, and if I can show how it saved money or made
money, all the better.
I apply to the American Lawyer, where five people I
know from the Voice already work. I’m asked to do a critique of an issue of the
magazine, and it’s harder than I expected. A week later,
after I bring them my critique, I’m told
they hired someone they’ve been interested in for a long time. I’m annoyed
because I’ve done all this work, but also relieved because it’s not my fault I
didn’t get the job. Weeks later the woman who interviewed me at American Lawyer
calls to say she wishes there was some way for me to be there; my comments on
the critique were excellent.
There’s an interview at Working Woman, which I
think went well, though it’s not clear until well into the interview that they
are looking for a managing editor, not an editor.
1986:
One advantage to this process taking
so long is that I’ve had plenty of time to know how I feel about
everything—getting the job, not getting the job, leaving the Voice, doing
something else at the Voice.
MY LAST YEAR
In 1985 Murdoch wants to buy Metromedia,
which includes Channel 5 in New York, but there are legal issues concerning
ownership of too much media in one market. I fantasize that a couple of my friends
will get some of their rich friends to buy the Voice, and I become
editor-in-chief, cut Hentoff back to two-thirds of a page, tell Wayne he has to
meet his deadlines or else—but I’m not
up for telling M. to stop using that ultracondensed font for VLS and having editorial
talks with Hentoff about free speech and censorship.
The union has a committee discussing whether we can
do an employee stock option plan, or ESOP takeover, and votes 24-16 to hire a
lawyer to look into the ESOP. But a month later, rumors are confirmed that the
Voice has been sold to Leonard Stern, owner of the pet supplies company Hartz
Mountain Industries. One joke: we’re going to be paid in bird seed. David is now
publisher and editor-in-chief.
Some
months before I quit, in 1986, a woman in Classified files a grievance against
me because I hire a copyeditor from outside instead of her. If I quit before
the arbitration process starts, will I have to come back to testify, or can I
leave it to my successor?
Editing, writing, or something else?
All these years I’m only thinking about jobs as an
editor or editor/writer. But training all the editors and freelancers in how to
use the new Atex computer system opens up a possibility I’ve never thought
about.
Teaching at the School of Visual Arts
At a Voice Christmas gathering in 1984 I get into
conversation with Jeff Nesin, a freelance music critic who works with the
president of the School of Visual Arts, about copyediting issues, and he
wonders whether I would ever want to teach copy editing. Until the training I’d
done on the Atex system, I had never thought about teaching. But I’ve
discovered that I’m good at explaining what I know, so, sure, why not.
After lunch with Jeff, we agree that I’ll teach a
one-month workshop, four classes, at SVA in June. I break down everything I know about copyediting into four
lectures, create exercises, and it turns out to be fun. I want to do another
workshop in the fall, but David won’t let me make any accommodation to my Voice
job in order to teach. Instead, my husband, who’s been excited about my
teaching, takes over the workshop. (I’ve trained him in copyediting and he’s
been freelancing since his layoff from Murdoch’s New York Post back in 1978.)
Teaching at NYU
In November 1985 Marcia Pally, a Voice free-lance writer,
alerts me to a job that has my name written on it: the Journalism Department at
New York University is looking for someone to teach copy editing and maintain a
VDT system—and it’s tenure track. I immediately apply. In a couple of weeks the
acting chair calls to ask if I can teach a course in the spring on Tuesday
evening because the person whose position is opening up is leaving sooner than
expected. I gulp—Tuesday evening? after a day of editorial close and another
day of production close? But I figure, for four months I can do anything. The
details of this application process will be in Job #17, but for now, know that
I’m interviewed by the search committee in February, my class is observed in
March, I meet with the whole Journalism Department in April and the dean of faculty
in May. And I’m offered the job in late May.
Meanwhile, M. tells me David told her I’d been
doing a much better job lately and maybe he’d give me a promotion. I’m excited
about the possibility of this new job at NYU, and that’s what made David
perceive me as “doing very well lately.”
I FINALLY QUIT!
Of course, it’s not that simple. Later on the day
I’m offered the NYU job, I’m told there’s a glitch and it’s about salary, but see
Job #17 for the details.
For now I tell everyone I have a new job. Robert
Friedman (editor-in-chief since last year, but soon to be fired) is surprised. He’s
sitting at his desk and writing a note as I say, “I’m going to teach
copyediting full-time at NYU in the fall.”
He looks up and says, “What?”
I repeat what I just said, and he says, “What?”
again.
Then he says, “in addition to...?”
And I say, very clearly, “I’m quitting.”
He keeps saying, “I’m surprised,” until I say in
disbelief, “Are you really?”
He says, “Is there anything we can do to...?”
I say, “If you offered me a senior editorship, I
would consider it, but I still think I would go to NYU.”
He says, “Even managing editor?”
“I hate administrative work,” I say, “and I never,
never, never want to do it again.” We then talk about who might replace me,
which as far as I’m concerned is not my job. A woman asked me yesterday if I
had to find my successor, and I wonder if this is some sort of female hangup.
Robert
wants to know if anyone else at the Voice knows, and I say I had to get two
letters of recommendation from people I worked with, but I don’t say who. When
I tell David, I say I’d love to be a substitute editor when others go on
vacation. He says, “I think the people who have the best time here are those
people who are here only a short time. They can shrug off the bullshit because
they don’t have to deal with it.” I think this is an astonishing thing for the publisher to say, since he controls a great
deal of the bullshit and could do something about it.
My last couple of months I’m feeling melancholy
that I’m leaving the Voice—not that I wish I were staying, but sad that this
part of my life is over. I’m also not sure how much people at the Voice like me
as a person, rather than because I make things work.
Last closing
It’s my last Monday. Every now and then it hits me:
I will never have to do this again, never!!! Around 8:30, I go to Robert’s
office to say, “This is my last chance to say, ‘How are cover heds coming?’”
Robert replies, “And this is my last chance to say, ‘Very late!’”
Later I hear Wayne Barrett and Fred McDarrah, photo
editor, almost getting into one of their fights, but Wayne isn’t reciprocating
Fred’s tantrum, and I’m mildly disappointed. Around 11 p.m., Wayne comes by my
desk and yells, “What’s this I just heard? it’s your last Monday?”
“That’s right, and I thought I was going to hear a
classic fight between you and Fred, and you disappointed me.”
He laughs. “You and I haven’t had an argument in
almost a year.”
“We haven’t spoken to each other much in the past
year.”
“That’s why you quit. You missed it.”
“Maybe you could call me once a month, so I can
hang up on you.”
I talk more than I listen now. I used to listen
more than I talked and wished I could talk more, so now I’m so glad I can talk
at all, I talk more perhaps than I should. What do I have to say about the Village Voice? What is our frame of
reference? Who do I want to continue to know after these 11 years of my life?
My farewell party
The big blowout of my party is the day after
Robert’s farewell party. David gives a speech after giving me my present (a
fancy leather satchel). When I tell him I have a little speech of my own, he
laughs and says he’s never had to deal with a response before, and I say he can
have a rebuttal. In his speech he mentions the memorable moments of our seven
years of working together: George stabbing me in the butt at the plant, the
night we all stayed up waiting for the transit strike that started on April 1,
1980. He also says he’s talked to the head of the journalism department and
they’ve arranged for me and Wayne to teach a class on Monday nights titled “The
Copy Chief in Conflict.”
The farewell card is a large poster with photos and
mastheads and lots of comments (it still hangs in my bedroom). Wayne is home
sick; he calls to say good-bye, and I tell him the part of the speech that was
for him, when I thanked the people who gave me bullshit because I learned how
to give it back. He actually asks why I want to leave the Voice, a question I find astonishing. I guess I did my job too well
for other people to realize I hated it, or maybe they were just oblivious.
The party diehards take a tour of the men’s room, whose
walls have become a Karen Finley mural after C. Carr writes a cover story about
Finley’s performance art, which sometimes involved appearing to push cans of
yams up her ass. The ”white boys” are furious about what they consider a
back-of-the-book piece being the cover. They think only political pieces, by
which they mean traditional politics, should be on the cover. This issue
becomes a big controversy in the weeks before I leave.
In the ladies’ room everyone writes and draws all
over those walls as well. The dominant motif is YAMS, but there’s also graffiti
about me. Dave Herndon, sports section editor, writes SONIA RULES, and Doug Simmons
writes something romantic. Anita Petraske writes the names of those of us there
and labels it “the Survivors.” Other names added: Alexander Cockburn, Robert
Friedman, Tom Smucker, James Wolcott. Then we add “yam” to our names (Friedyam,
etc.). Paul Berman adds a huge star. Dave eggs me on, suggesting there’s more I
want to put on the wall. So I write an Atex command — Delete Define — and
attach it to David S., Newfield, Hentoff, Linda P., and Howard Smith and his
assistant, Melik. I also add Howard’s name to the Survivors list for his
concern after Christie’s accident.
I wonder if I’m burning my bridges, that I’m
revealing more than I should. But I don’t need to be timid or afraid, I have a
right to splatter my feelings on the wall, though I write very lightly, in
pencil, and you have to get up close to read it. Maybe I’m thumbing my nose and
not needing to be grateful. I think, “David’s feelings will be hurt, he’ll be
mad, he won’t ask me to be a temp editor, I won’t get away with this”; at the
same time I think, “Don’t be silly, you can’t be fired, David’s ego is big enough
to take this and I don’t have to be afraid of him.” (And I have no camera with
me. When I come back a week or so later to take pictures, the walls have been
washed clean.)
Within days, my name is off the masthead, and I’m
angry because I thought it would be on for one more issue.
NO ONE EVER TRULY LEAVES THE VOICE
