New York City reminds us what made America great: immigrants

"American Tragedy" by Philip Evergood

     New York City is crawling with immigrants. My wife and I popped into town for a long Valentine’s Day weekend and let me tell you: foreigners everywhere. From the moment we hopped into a cab at the airport — “I’m a tall man!” the driver laughed, in a thick accent, as I tried to jam myself in the seat behind him — to our last breakfast Monday morning at an Italian bakery on Bleecker Street, the American values that our president lauds and his supporters venerate are corrupted by alien cultures. Thank God.
     Our older son suggested we meed him at Jing Fong — Chinese, don’t you know. The first of 16 eating establishments visited over four days. Of those, 15 were ethnic — French, Jewish, Ukrainian, Georgian, Thai — a whirl of flavors and dishes, from pate to pig’s ears, fare likely to strike terror into certain sheltered red, white and blue hearts.
     While the food at Jing Fong was excellent, the enormous dining room was almost empty. Maybe because it was 3 p.m. But Chinese restaurants and Chinatowns across the country are seeing a drop in business, due to fear of the coronavirus. A laughable concern, but far above most fears related to outsiders, since there actually is a coronavirus. Not a rational reason to avoid a Chinese restaurant, but then I’ve never heard rationality lauded as one of the cherished American ideals we are trying to recover in our return to greatness.
     We slid over to the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. In 1988, a pair of women looking for a building to showcase the torrent of immigrants into New York stumbled upon 97 Orchard Street, an 1863 tenement that had sat empty for more than 50 years; cited for fire code violations in 1935, the owner chose to evict rather than renovate.
     We signed up for the “Hard Times” tour of rooms that belonged to the Gumpertz family, Jews who came here from Prussia in 1873, and the Baldizzis, immigrating from Italy in the 1920s. Neither family were what Donald Trump would call “the best people.” Both received public aid. But they lived and loved and struggled toward middle class comfort, symbolized by the faux broadloom rug in worn linoleum on the Baldizzi kitchen floor. Heartbreaking.

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Manhattan Interlude #5: City's quirky offerings can't be beat

The Strand sells more than books, such as these life-size Trump hands. As to why they come in black, a mystery.

    All good trips must come to an end. We had a blast in NYC, returning late Monday afternoon. I'm going to do a few New York Diaries about some of the (hopefully) more interesting angles of the visit. But rather than try to grind out the first one now, I've got one more chestnut to share, a late '90s shopping spree. A lot has changed since then.  Maxilla & Mandible went out of business in 2011; Balducci's closed their flagship in 2003. Asprey took a bath in their Trump Tower location: having spent $40 million to build their "dream flagship" in 2001, by 2006 they had to pay Trump $25 million to break their lease and flee. The Strand, thank God, is doing better than ever: their "Eight Miles of Books" is now "Eighteen Miles of Books" and the place was jammed when we visited Friday. Forbidden Planet is also still hopping, right next door. And the Firefighter's Friend store changed its name to NY Firestore and moved to 17 Greenwich Ave., and its web site is still up and running.

     NEW YORK—Try buying a human brain in a jar at your local Gap. Or a $75,000 pair of malachite champagne coolers at the corner jewelry store. Or raspberries infused with vodka at the neighborhood White Hen.
     While it is true that some of the excitement of shopping the Big Apple has cooled a bit now that Chicagoans can browse Saks Fifth Avenue or Bloomingdales or Barneys without ever leaving the 312 area code, not every emporium New York offers has found its way west, yet. The visitor to Manhattan should take time to seek out the unique and the extraordinary.
     "New York still has a good selection of weird shops," said Henry Galiano, owner of Maxilla & Mandible Ltd. (451 Columbus Ave.), an Upper West Side boutique offering a human brain in a jar ($495) and other curiosities of the natural world, from a Mars rock ($3,200) to coyote skulls ($75) and human finger bones ($6 apiece).
     The store, whose name means, roughly, "upper and lower jaw," is the brainchild of Galiano, who once worked across the street at the American Museum of Natural History. He opened Maxilla & Mandible 13 years ago and gets a lot of tourists who wander in on their way to the museum. (Most asked question: Where do the human remains come from? Answer: old medical collections and other legal sources).
     "They're usually floored, just by the selection—the strangeness," he said. "Most people never see these things, so they're stunned." 
     If your tastes run more to luxury than to the macabre, you might want to visit Asprey, the British jewelry store and home to swank gifts, located on the ground floor of Trump Tower (725 Fifth Ave.).
     OK, maybe the $115,000 18-karat yellow gold, mother of pearl, jade, sapphire, ruby, emerald and diamond "Tutti Frutti Clock" might blow the old vacation budget for the next century. But it doesn't cost anything to look—and your only other chance is in Beverly Hills or London.
     And if you have to buy something, there are a few lower-end items, such as the sterling silver dog bowls or the popular $65 leather desk signs—Asprey is famous for its leather department, with Trump-like sentiments such as "It CAN Be Done" designed to inspire the corporate titan in your life.
     People used to bring fresh bagels back from New York, back in the dark days when a good bagel was hard to find. Now, with a bagel shop on every corner of Chicago, finding unique New York foodstuffs can be tougher. Unless you go to Balducci's (424 6th Ave. between 9th and 10th), the Italian-accented specialty food store.
     Homemade pastas and breads (try the Napoleon olive bread or the focaccia), calzones, homemade sauces and pastries, fruits packed in liquors from Lombardy (at the holidays) make the Greenwich Village landmark worth a visit.
     "We have tourists who come in all the time, most of time looking for something with the Balducci's label," said Emily Balducci, granddaughter of the original owners. "Mamma Balducci's Balsamic Vinegar. T-shirts, aprons. Useful stuff."
     A brief stroll east is the Strand (828 Broadway), which boasts eight miles of books, both new and used, and across the street from that, Forbidden Planet (821 Broadway), a general comic book/robot/toy store, dwarfs the boutiques to be found in Chicago.
     If you're looking for a souvenir of your trip that is a cut above the typical Times Square bronzed Empire State Building thermometer, go to SoHo and stop by Firefighter's Friend, which offers an array of T-shirts, caps, toys, puzzles, patches and pins, all about fire-fighting. A genuine New York City firefighter's coat costs about $250; a helmet, about $200. But some items only cost a few dollars.
     Of course, the Internet is changing things. There is a Firefighter's Friend Web site if you want to cheat and just pretend you visited New York (www.nyfirestore.com).
     We won't tell.

         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 29, 1998

Flashback 2006: So much presidential trivia, so little time to shop

      
    The grim morning after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I had a thought that is at the same time strange and entirely understandable: "Now he's always going to be on presidential placemats." Meaning the range of comforting, familiar faces will be joined by a man vastly below them, a weird and loathsome figure. Will Donald Trump ruin presidential trivia? Will history soften his stark reality? Maybe that depends on whether Trump is a sui generis exception—an outlier, the lone liar, bully and fraud boosted into office by a big push by his Russian pals. Or just the beginning of worse to come. 
     Back in 2006, before we knew what lay ahead, good and bad, I had fun splashing around in presidential history. Back then, my column was an entire page, ending with a joke, and I've kept that format. 

Happy polidays!

     Today is Presidents Day. Another political holiday (dare we call it a "poliday"?) where people grab the day off but shun the spirit: in this case, to honor the 42 men—alas, only men, so far—who have been president of the United States.
     If you are sharp-eyed, you may have puzzled at the "42" in the paragraph above. Is that right? Isn't George W. Bush the 43rd president? How can he be the 43rd president if we've only had 42 presidents?
     The answer (I apologize to those who already know) is that Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and the 24th president. He was elected in 1884, served a term, lost to Benjamin Harrison, then regained the White House.
     That odd fact notwithstanding, Cleveland is your average, ordinary, send-one-up-from-Central-Casting president. Not great, like Lincoln or FDR, not lousy, like Grant or Harding. Just so-so. But even Cleveland is worth celebrating this Presidents Day, his career offering valuable insights into our own prudish, prying time.
     Cleveland ran for his first term on a platform emphasizing his honesty and integrity. The summer before the election, a Buffalo newspaper accused Cleveland of fathering an illegitimate child, which indeed he had.
     The Republicans, naturally, had a field day; "Ma, ma, where's my pa?" was their memorable chant. But Cleveland, in a move that should be taught in every public relations class, instructed his handlers "Tell the truth," fessed up to the baby, and won the election anyway.
     Does anyone believe that could happen today? Look how John Kerry was battered and brutalized for the crime of serving his country in the Vietnam War.
     The second noteworthy thing about Cleveland (one of two bachelors elected to the White House) was his wedding. Cleveland was 49; his bride, Frances Folsom, was 21, barely; her birthday was the day of the wedding. He had known her since she was an infant—she was the daughter of his late law partner—and was the executor of her father's estate. Practically her uncle. The public was informed of the engagement five days before the wedding.
     Just close your eyes, and imagine the inferno of controversy, the orgy of media attention, the endless speculation and analysis, outrage and ridicule, that the above fact pattern would unleash today. We'd explode.
     We think of the Victorians as moralistic and straight-laced. What we don't realize is that we are far worse.

PRESIDENTIAL CRADLE ROBBING

     The other bachelor was James Buchanan. I add that because readers will ask. There's something addictive about presidential trivia. For example, I can't tell the Cleveland story without pointing out he was neither the first nor the last president to get married in office; the first was John Tyler, the last was Woodrow Wilson, both widowers. There was even a bigger gap between Tyler and his bride: he was 53, she was 23. And Tyler was even more secretive—the public wasn't notified until after the ceremony.
     Some trivia is more trivial than other trivia. The mark of good trivia is the surprise factor. For example: "Richard Nixon was a Quaker" is far better than, say, "Calvin Coolidge was the only president born on the Fourth of July" because the image we have of Quakerism (oatmeal, homespun, plain speaking) is at such odds with the oily image we have of Nixon (shifty eyes, rumpled suit, lies). The date of Coolidge's birth doesn't really tell us anything, except perhaps to introduce the neat fact of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both dying on the same day: July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after the birth of the country.

37 OF THE 42 ARE DEAD

     Four out of our 42 presidents were assassinated; nearly 10 percent. You probably can name them: Kennedy, Lincoln, McKinley and . . . always takes a moment to get that last one . . . Garfield.
     Assassins came close to taking the lives of five more presidents. Ronald Reagan, of course, and Gerald Ford, twice. Truman was attacked by gun-wielding Puerto Rican nationalists. An anarchist fired at president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt and hit Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead.
     One president was shot after he left office: Teddy Roosevelt, campaigning outside the Hotel Gilpatrick in Milwaukee in 1912.
     "Any man looking for a third term ought to be shot," said his assailant, John Schrank. Roosevelt, slightly wounded, went ahead and gave his speech anyway.

DONKEY VS. ELEPHANT

     Perhaps inspired by the Winter Olympic medal counts, I thought to tally up which party is more successful at getting presidents into the Oval Office. The Republicans lead, 18 to 15.
     Republicans are also far better at running streaks of presidents. Twice they had a string of three presidents in a row, once four in a row. In 1989, when George Bush took over after Reagan left office, the Republicans accomplished something the Democrats haven't done since 1857: replace a president with somebody else from their own party without the first one dying in office.

JUST MY LUCK

     I only got a chance to meet one president, personally, and talk with him at length and that president—lucky me—was Jimmy Carter. He had been out of office a few years, was flogging a book, and a magazine sent me to Los Angeles to meet him.
     We spoke about half an hour and, frankly, I didn't like Carter. He was sour and grumpy and he did something that really annoyed me. His wife, Rosalynn, his supposed co-author, was there too, but whenever she tried to say anything, Carter would talk right over her, and while, yes, he had been president, it was still rude.
     Carter only brightened once. The interview was over, and the magazine photographer was setting him up for a portrait. I had run through my questions, but wanted to make use of the time, and was searching for something to say that wasn't, "I always thought you were driven insane by the hostage crisis." Suddenly I remembered that the great New Yorker writer, John McPhee, had once included Carter in one of his finely crafted articles.
     "You went canoeing with John McPhee!" I blurted out. "What's he like?"
     Carter broke into his big, famous smile.
     "Yes, that's riiiight!" he said, beaming, either because it was a happy memory, or he was amused at the awestruck tone of the question.

CLOSING JOKE

     Today's topic seems to call for something presidential.
     One of my favorites involves Calvin Coolidge. "Silent Cal" was the butt of much ridicule for his close-mouthedness.
     Informed that Coolidge was dead, Dorothy Parker supposedly quipped: "How can they tell?"
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 20, 2006

Manhattan Interlude #4: Sacred, profane rituals of the feast

     The conversation was about where we should eat this weekend in New York City. As it drew to a close, I checked the time on the cell phone. An hour and 17 minutes. An hour and 17 minutes of consulting menus, filling every meal time slot. My fault, I'm sure. It must be hereditary, as this column hints. It did my heart good to see the name of Bernie Beck, who I used to refer to as "The fireaxe behind the glass." If you couldn't find a source for a story, if you hit a brick wall after your editor asked for 600 words on the social impact of socks, you'd call Bernie Beck and he'd speak intelligently about it, or anything else. It got so I refused to call him, lest every story feature Bernie Beck. It seemed like cheating. 

     NEW YORK After the plane landed, I met my friend. First we ate, then we drank.
     Next morning: met people I hope to do a bit of business with. First eating. Then drinking.
     Next day: eat, eat, eat. And the last day, Sunday, the highlight of the trip, a pilgrimage to Barney Greengrass ("The Sturgeon King") on Amsterdam Avenue. We stood on the street for an hour, heads bowed like penitents, waiting.
     Nova lox, with fried onions and scrambled eggs. Creamed herring. Sesame bagels. Chive cream cheese. Fresh orange juice. Coffee. Chocolate bobka cake.
     Every so often, particularly at the holidays, when the feasting hits a fevered pitch, almost a mania, I find myself wondering: "Why?" In a culture so abundant as ours, where we can stuff ourselves 365 days a year and often do, why does eating loom so large, especially the last six weeks of the year, when four major holidays unfold? We have barely digested Thanksgiving, and the next round looms. Why don't people ever get together and hike?
     I had an idea, but I sought the opinion of the smartest man in Chicago, Northwestern sociology Professor Bernie Beck.
     "There's nothing new about it," he said. "It goes all the way back. Food is one of the major ways of celebrating; how human beings know they are doing something important. They eat, they drink, get drunk if possible."
     He listed other ways to celebrate—dance, song, and one I hadn't heard of.
   

 "We left out one very important thing: sex," said Beck. "One of the ways non-Judeo-Christian religions celebrate special occasions and honor the gods is through sexual orgies."
     Exactly which religions are those, I wanted to know. Here was something more enticing than Watchtower magazine. But Beck drew a blank.
     Anyway, the most popular is food, particularly huge home-cooked feasts. Food is a way for the moms and grandmothers to gather the clan and collect applause.
     "The making of a feast is one of the symbolic ways women achieve honor in the traditional reading of life," he said.
     And though that traditional reading grows blurrier every year, it is ignored at one's peril. You may think you're turning down slaughtered lamb flesh, or watching your cholesterol. But to mom, it's a personal attack.
     "The Jews, along with all the traditional ethnicities in America, have a whole food thing going on," said Beck. "One of the big dramas around ethnic purity is the parents, particularly the mother, offering food and the kids refusing. There is a real symbolic struggle. The mother is saying: `If you don't eat my food, you're saying that you don't really belong to my world and I don't matter.'
     "(But the child is saying) if you make me eat food, you're trying to undermine my adult authority, to infantalize me."
     A tough call: Eat more than you may want, or flag yourself as standing apart from the tribe by refusing.
     "You not only feel guilty, but forlorn by comparison to those bygone days when family was warm and held together," he said. "Feasts are the things that go down in the family annals."
     That made sense to me. The dinners are what you really remember, as if the food were just a way of searing the occasion into mind.
     "Absolutely right," he said. "Feasting is part of the sacred ritual homage to the family. You are taking the family's location and making it into a sacred space."
     I asked Beck if, knowing as much as he does, he is able to resist the powerful pressures to eat more than is good for him, or does he find himself shrugging and giving into the strong cultural encouragement to dig in?
     "The truth is I decide every moment," he said. "I'm poised on the knife edge. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't."
     Join the club, professor.

            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, December 17, 1998

Manhattan Interlude #3: New York's cross walkers - Pedestrians hopping mad over mayor's crackdown

     This weekend I'm revisiting a few New York bylines over the years. If this seems odd—a fairly ordinary news story from New York City—I believe the explanation is I was in town anyway, for the Toy Fair, and wanted to deliver to my bosses the maximum bang for their buck. 

     NEW YORK—Officer Mike Guarriello grabbed Joshua Vasquez by the arm as he tried to slip around a metal barricade and walk west across Fifth Avenue. Vasquez looked startled, as if awakened from a dream. "You scared me," he said.
     "I don't want you to get hit by a truck," said Guarriello, explaining that Vasquez would have to go north across 49th, then cross Fifth at the crosswalk that was open.
     New York is battling jaywalking—specifically, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is battling jaywalking, as part of his quality-of-life approach to solving urban woes; if crime went down after clamping down on the squeegee men, the logic goes, maybe Manhattan's notoriously snarled auto traffic can improve if pedestrians are kept from pouring into the streets and blocking vehicles.
     Jaywalking is a problem few think about in Chicago; there are 10 million fewer people in greater Chicago than in the New York metropolitan area, and Chicago has about half the population density of New York. Chicago police say there are no plans to put barricades across pedestrian crosswalks. And Chicagoans just don't seem to be in the same kind of hurry that New Yorkers are in.
     "I'm sorry, I'm really late," said a New Yorker who was asked about the barricades as she dashed across the street. "It's a pain," she said over her shoulder.
     The fine for jaywalking in New York has just been increased from $2 to $50, and Giuliani wants the city council to increase it to $100. (Chicago has no established fine for jaywalking, which means, according to the municipal code, that the fine would be between $50 and $200, depending on the discretion of a judge, not that many jaywalking tickets are given here.)
     The crackdown on jaywalking is big news in New York, covered almost daily in the newspapers, and some people are outraged.
     "It's ridiculous—this is a walking city," said Vince D'Addona, 40, a financial services executive. "This adds about 50 percent to the walking distance of my day."
New Yorkers have staged protests—one in which a group dressed in cow outfits to object to being herded like cattle. There were several arrests, and much ill will toward the mayor.
     "It's a publicity stunt on the part of the mayor," said a man in a green trench coat, gesturing to the officers at the barricades. "Three cops doing nothing."
     Three officers are assigned to each of the 20 or so intersections that have one of two ; crosswalks closed from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The barricades run from the corners to about 40 feet into the blocks.
     The majority of pedestrians are deterred, and those who slip past, or jaywalk diagonally through the intersection, are ignored by the police.
     "Most cops aren't really into it," said Officer Aaron Jackson, an 11-year veteran of the force.
     And most pedestrians really aren't into it.
     Charles Brown, 25, is a clerk at Saks Fifth Avenue, located on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 50th. To get to work, he has to cross the streets three times—north across 50th, east across Fifth, then south back across 50th. Previously he had to cross only once.
"It's a big, huge pain in the butt," he said.
     For now, police are putting a good face on the policy, which began in December.
     "In theory it does make sense," said Guarriello, a 13-year-veteran of the force. "Cars can make a left and don't have to worry about piling up down the street. It just takes time to get used to it. In the end, I think this is going to make it, because it's important for pedestrian safety and good for traffic in New York."
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 15, 1998

Manhattan Interlude #2: Hard to escape 9/11 no matter how we try

     During the trip below we took the boys to a kiddie show on Broadway called "Fred Garbo's Inflatable Theater," if I remember correctly. Mr. Garbo had a routine where he pretended to walk down a stairway behind a sofa. There was a pratfall and a crash, and my younger boy shouted out, loudly, "Are you okay?!?!" Garbo popped up from behind the couch and waved at us. "Yeah, I'm okay!" he yelled. Hopefully, any theatrics will be on stage at "Hadestown." The other moment of the trip below that comes to mind is walking through the glitz and commotion of Times Square, the older boy's eyes locked on some handheld device. When I urged him to look up and around, he did, for a second, then shrugged and said, "Big deal." Almost needless to say, he lives in Greenwich Village now.

     NEW YORK--Smith's Restaurant is an old place on Seventh Avenue, just west of Times Square. It looked like a bar, but a sign in the window said "BREAKFAST," so my family crossed the street and hurried to get out of the sharp spring wind.
     Once inside, though, we saw that Smith's looked like a bar because it was a bar, the old-fashioned kind with a dining room through a side door. The bartender pointed the way, and we stepped past the line of early-morning drinkers and headed for a table.
     We ate. The kids scampered around while I finished my coffee. When it came time to leave, I caught up with the kids in the bar, where they were pressing buttons on a video poker game. I bent over to zip up the 4-year-old's green, hooded jacket. Suddenly, a man came rushing over. There was a small flurry of confusion that seemed to center around whether I was OK or not. The bartender was there, too, his face a mask of concern.
Then, they both looked down and saw my boy, and we all realized what had happened. From across the bar, the kid was completely hidden. They had seen me doubled over, struggling, thought I was having a heart attack or something, and were springing to help. We all grinned at each other, relieved and embarrassed, and parted after a few hearty handshakes and smiles.
     There's no way to know if this was part of the fallout of Sept. 11, but it seemed that way. The city overall was just less noisy, less brutish, with not even as much horn-honking. I was with my wife and two boys, ages 4 and 6, and they have a tendency to push buttons in elevators at random floors, pause at the top of escalators, join hands, spread out across the sidewalk and then stop, entranced by a penny in the street.
     Nobody pushed by them. Nobody made nasty comments. Passersby smiled, indulgently.
This isn't just my observation, either. Crime is in a free fall in New York. The murder rate, which everyone thought had bottomed out, dropped 40 percent this year, and nobody knows why. But they have a guess.
     "I can think of many reasons why crime should be going up in New York," an academic told USA Today, "and only one why it should be going down: 9/11."
     I made a conscious decision not to visit Ground Zero while we were here. It's not something I can explain easily, just something visceral. They're still pulling bodies out of there. Going seemed macabre.
     As it turned out, I didn't have to go to Ground Zero, anyway, because Ground Zero kept coming to me. It was there on every street corner, where vendors hawked World Trade Center photographs and statuettes and montages of eagles and the towers and that famous photograph of firemen raising the flag. Every souvenir shop sold all sorts of 9/11 mementos such as snow domes and shot glasses, though why you'd want to drink your whiskey out of a Sept. 11 shot glass is beyond me.
     We took the Staten Island ferry to get a closer look at the Statue of Liberty, but before we could see it--talk about symbolism--we got a good long look at the big empty space of Ground Zero, ringed in powerful lights. You couldn't not look. It was a compelling absence, like a tongue probing the empty spot where a tooth had been.
     And then there were my friends. Their fear seemed to be still very fresh. When we visited one and I admired the view of the Empire State Building from her new office, she said she was worried that it would hit her if it fell over. I said that, at 20 blocks away, the distance was twice the length of the building, but that seemed to offer her scant comfort.
     Another friend, a bank executive, works a block from Ground Zero. She sat in her Upper East Side apartment and described how her staff huddled in the basement, frightened and unsure, for five hours. They ripped up T-shirts for masks, to keep the dust away. I fell into my reporter mode and started quizzing her. Later, as we strolled through Central Park, watching our boys climb trees, I told her husband that I hoped I hadn't been grilling her. He said, no, it was good to get things out, that for the first two weeks afterward he had been frustrated because all she would say was that her feet hurt--she had had to walk the 80 blocks home barefoot, holding her high heels in her hand.
     There was something terribly chilling in that complaint. Its ordinariness emphasized the horror, like Snowden, the dying bombardier in Catch-22, complaining that he's cold.
Our last night in New York, we went to a swank wedding at the Rainbow Room, on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center. After dinner and dancing and drinks, I strolled along the big windows, admiring the New York night skyline, feeling the calm and contentment a man in a tux is supposed to feel.
     Then, I saw it. The two memorial beacons set up at Ground Zero, like a pair of accusing fingers, pointing at heaven. I gasped a quick intake of breath.
     I knew it was there. But seeing it was still a surprise. The wedding hoopla seemed to fade away, and I realized that all the people debating about how to memorialize 9/11 are wasting their time. It will come rushing back, no matter what we do, for a very long time.
—Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 29, 2002

Manhattan Interlude #1: A peek under the cover of Spy

The Puck Building, home of Spy magazine.

     Big time authors of course are obligated to go to New York City to meet with publishers and agents and publicists and such. While lesser lights go to visit their boys in law school and take in a show. So while occupied, I thought I would reach back into the vault and dredge up a few reports from previous bites of the Big Apple. 
     This one sticks in mind because setting it up was something of a scam. First I told my boss that I was visiting New York anyway, and while I was there I might as well pop into the hot new magazine, Spy, which I adored, like every other 20ish wisenheimer at the time. He fell for it. Then I called Spy and told them they were so popular in the Midwest that the Sun-Times was sending me to New York to take their measure. They fell for it. While I was at their offices, reporting this valentine, I also pitched them stories, and got assigned to write the sidebars on a delicious take-down of Bob Greene. Later, I fished for a job. Graydon Carter had an editorial assistant opening that paid a quarter of my salary, and though I begged for it—I remember being on the phone to him, standing in my apartment in Oak Park, feeling my life teetering—he wouldn't give it to me. "You wouldn't be happy," he said. He was probably right.

     NEW YORK - Not long ago, E. Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen were just another pair of writers sweating below decks of giant Time magazine, shoveling words into its roaring furnaces, straining to move the behemoth along.
     Like most writers, they felt they knew better than their bosses what kind of publication people wanted to read.They envisioned a wry, witty magazine, poking fun at the hubris-laden egos and Jabba-the-Hutt lifestyles routinely adored in the pages of their employer.
"We both loved magazines," said Carter, relaxing in his small office on the ninth floor of the Puck Building, a whimsical, cherub-studded structure in New York's Soho district. "We loved National Lampoon, Mad and Rolling Stone, and wanted a magazine that affected us like those did."
     Unlike most writers, however, they paused from dreaming and griping long enough to turn their vision into reality. They gathered together investors, raised a few million dollars, and gave birth to the hottest, most cuttingly written new magazine around: Spy.
Since the first issue hit the stands in October, 1986, Spy has provided what had become a rare commodity in American magazines: journalistic satire aimed at the undeservedly rich and the glaringly famous.
     Just a glance at that first cover was enough to show that this would be a different kind of publication.
     "JERKS," it blared, in orange type, accompanied by a photo of David Letterman sidekick Chris Elliot doing a groveling dance. "The Ten Most Embarrassing New Yorkers."
"They move, they shake, they showboat. The rest of us cringe. And you wonder why America hates New York?" the article began, introducing a cast of character—Donald Trump, Rex Reed, Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, Leona Helmsley—that Spy was to revisit, issue after issue, with malicious glee.
     "Most magazines spend their time pumping up those who are already pumped up," said executive editor Susan Morrison. "We try to be an antidote to that, to bite the ankles of the overdog."
     Picking up the long-ignored tradition of Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken that married reporting with rambunctious wit, Andersen and Carter produced a magazine eclectic enough to critique Reagan's presidency and teach readers how to sneak into Ivy League club bathrooms in the same issue.
     It is difficult to categorize a typical Spy article. They tend to be short, broken up into small units, encased in boxes or scrolled down the side of a page. They assume the reader knows a lot—for example, what an arbitrager does—or at least is confident enough to guess.
     They frequently attack in an oblique way. An article titled "How Rich Is That Doggie in the Limo?" never comes out and criticizes giving your dog a face-lift, or a strand of cultured pearls, or an $800 fur coat. But the message gets across.
     "Cindy Hughes takes time out from her very busy career as a designer to cook twice a day for her Shar Pei, Coco Chanel Puppoir," writes Nell Scovell. "She uses recipes from a holistic dog cookbook. `People say I'm crazy,' Hughes says, like a mind reader, `but my sister had two kids at this age, and she cooks for them three times a day.'"
     And then, there is what has made Spy famous: the razors-bared, rabid wolf-pack attacks.
Being foremost a New York magazine, Spy saves its deadliest venom for its favored gang of New York characters: the omnipresent Trump, Mayor Ed Koch, socialites such as Mercedes Kellogg and Jacqueline Onassis, new wave writers Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York, liquor ads) and Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City.)
     "We chose people whose reputations, we feel, are exaggerated," said staff writer Tad Friend. "We don't try to do hatchet jobs. We don't pick on Mother Teresa."
     The people they do pick on are people like Revlon chairman Ron Perelman and his wife, gossip columnist Claudia Cohen, who are assaulted separately (Cohen: "arrogant, insensitive, maniacal." Perelman: a "rapacious," "balding" enigma) and in tandem ("at dinners Claudia would use her fingernails to pry food from between Ron's teeth.")
     "Claudia Cohen made a million phone calls, trying to find out where we got our information on her," said Morrison. (Perelman took a more practical approach, according to Andersen. He had Revlon offer Spy a lucrative advertising contract provided, of course, that the profile was shelved. Andersen turned them down.)
     A Spy trademark is turning the light of analysis onto people who just are not used to being written about. "Review of Reviewers" is a monthly feature taking the entertainment press to task in a way not seen since A. J. Liebling pilloried the media in the '40s and '50s.
     "Letters to the Editor of the New Yorker" permits readers to comment on the stuffy publication, which itself does not print letters. (Nor does it print a staff box, which, at a reader's request, Spy printed: a staggering exercise in research and, due to the jarring impact of its sheer size, very funny.)
     Spy prides itself in the accuracy of its reporting, and its Rabelaisian cast of victims tends to respond to questions about the magazine with grim silence.
     Contacted several times for comment, Perelman remained mum. The upper management of the New York Times, excoriated each month in a column devoted exclusively to its ridicule, would not utter a word in its own defense.
     Slightly less reticent are Koch and Trump, who made surprisingly similar contradictory statements, through their spokesmen.
     "He doesn't read it," said a mouthpiece for Koch. "He doesn't take it too seriously."
     "I don't think he's seen it," said Trump's representative, ignoring rumors that Trump personally yanked copies of Spy from Trump Tower's newsstand. "I think he's probably seen an issue or two. I'll ask him."
     In their constant search for egos to puncture, Spy has not overlooked Chicago. In the first issue, "The Illustrated History of Hair, Part I," a wordless series of photographs traced the retreat and sudden, almost magical, re-emergence of nostalgicist Bob Greene's hairline. And last month's issue included a stomach-churning account of Harold Washington's gluttonous habits.
     In addition to jabbing individuals, Spy takes on trends breathlessly trumpeted in the popular press. "Filofax Madness" emphasized the grim desperation of charting one's life in an expensive little book, and "Waspmania" deplored the emotionally hollow worship of the discarded trappings of British aristocracy.
     Spy also has a genius for the unexpected interview. In one issue, a representative of DuPont, the makers of Teflon, was questioned as to whether the conglomerate had considered Ronald Reagan, the Teflon president, as a potential spokesman for their product. ("We negated it a long time ago," said DuPont. "It gives the trademark a bad name.")
     Spy's visual style has received almost as much notice—and imitation—as its writing. Spy's make-up is an explosion of typefaces and visual elements, thin border illustrations snaking across the tops of pages, and spatterings of tiny clip art images.
     "It can't look sober and serious," said Andersen. "So we had to invent a style that's appropriate to a magazine editorially aware of everything from Moby Dick to the Jetsons."
     "Spy has a lot of writing, crammed together," said art director Alexander Isley. "It's kind of like walking down the street in New York, with the signs and everything. It is not meant to be browsed through, it's meant to be read."
     "Waspmania" illustrates another Spy strongpoint: editorial purity. The article ruthlessly degraded designer Ralph Lauren, and while most magazines would think twice about ridiculing such a big-bucks advertiser, Spy didn't hesistate to run the piece.
     "We're not reckless, or self-destructive about it," said Andersen. "But what you see everywhere are editorial decisions that are marketing decisions as well, and you get things like New York Woman putting `Red, White and Bloomingdales' on their cover.
     "Once you say to yourself, `We're not going to truckle to advertisers,' its easier to stay with it," said Friend. "It's something we're proud of here."
     In spite of its cavalier attitude toward advertising, or perhaps because of it, Spy is enjoying soaring success.
     "We have thrillingly good demographics," said Morrison.
     Circulation, which started at 25,000, is now closing in on 100,000 copies a month, with 40 percent of its readers in cities outside the New York area. The magazine is particularly popular in Chicago, although distributors couldn't say how many copies are sold here.
"It's the best-selling magazine we have here," said Patrick Ude, manager of News Two, 2939 N. Broadway, in the Lakeview East neighborhood.
     The magazine is also "perilously close" to turning a profit, something its business plan had not anticipated until 1991.
     "We thought we would be losing $50,000 an issue at this point," said Carter. "We're not losing a fraction of that; in fact, this is as close as you can come to profit and still lose money."
     While making money is certainly important, what particularly gratifies Carter and Andersen is that they, and not someone else, were the people who created Spy.
      "What would have driven us really, really crazy is if one of our friends had done this," said Carter. "We wouldn't be alive."
     "That's what drove us," added Andersen. "What if somebody else had done this? We'd spend our lives in bitterness."

           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 8, 1988