Behind the Times (17 page)

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No sooner had the suburban target audience been captured than the
Times
found it had to cast its net still wider. By the late 1980s, the desired pickings to be found in the city and in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut had been thinned out. Television, cable channels, and special-interest magazines were attracting the younger, upmarket men and women who, in an earlier time, would have been regular newspaper readers. Six months after the chairman’s optimistic report to the stockholders in the Grace Rainey Rogers auditorium, Sulzberger used his “chairman’s corner” in the December 1988 issue of
presstime
to worry about newspapers’ “readership and marketing problems.” “Business was lousy,” he wrote. Worse, “Too many future readers (if one listens to the portenders of doom) are either illiterate, lazy or both.” The doom-sayers, several of them on the executive floor of the
Times
, were especially pessimistic about further circulation growth in New York and the Northeast. In early 1989, Sulzberger began addressing the
Times’
own “readership and marketing problems” by creating a new national
Times
intended to attract an audience beyond the city
and
its suburbs.

It helped that Sulzberger’s homey concerns were like those of the upper-middle-class business and professional people who were a prime part of the national target audience. As the paper had progressively less to do with New York City, its new community of interests increasingly centered on social and economic identities. The
Times
reader could live in Manhattan, or Highland Park, Illinois, or Santa Monica, California—wherever educated, affluent people resided. Sulzberger expected the prototypical
Times
reader to worry about awnings, area rugs, and storage for the home fire extinguisher, and about how the president and the secretary of state were addressing the great issues of the day. These were his interests too.

Sulzberger’s public manner masked the extent that the
Times
took its cues from him. Strong-willed owners often cast long shadows through their publications, for good or bad. But few people have bothered to group the “diffident” Punch Sulzberger with larger-than-life figures like Luce, Hearst, or McCormick. While Sulzberger claimed not to know about great art (or any other speciality), he knew what he liked. Perhaps it was just serendipity, but the interests he promoted through the decades were just the kind that
Times
readers might find congenial. In the 1960s, Sulzberger let Turner Catledge, his executive editor, know the publisher’s likes and dislikes. One note protested a photographic
spread in the
Times Magazine
showing what Sulzberger called “
absolutely way-out crazy furniture.” He suggested to Catledge that he replace the home furnishings editor with “someone who has more traditional taste. I would be happy to help with the selection.”

Sulzberger sent similar complaints to Rosenthal, when he was the executive editor. At one point, the work of a
Times
music critic, Edward Rothstein, annoyed Sulzberger. Reviewing a recital of the mezzo D’Anna Fortunato, Rothstein wrote that the singer had a “sonorous power [that] was not intrinsically sensuous.” Sulzberger pounced on that phrase, as well as a passage in which Rothstein reported that “each song had a distinct after-breath, extending into the silences.” Sulzberger’s memo to Rosenthal began,
“I am not an expert, to say the least, on singing, but I think I do know something about the use of the English language. Mr. Rothstein, on the other hand, is, apparently, an expert on singing, but should go back to school to relearn the use of his mother tongue.” Rothstein left the
Times
shortly afterward; he continued to write criticism for the
New Republic
and other magazines. Occasionally he contributed free-lance pieces to the
Times
, and in mid-1991, a decade later, he was rehired; the statute of limitations had run out.

Sulzberger’s preferences in literature were no more highfalutin than the tastes he brought with him when he became chairman at the Met. He wasn’t an art patron, and he didn’t accumulate a lot of books, either. John Leonard, editor of the
Book Review
from 1971 to 1975, recalls that Sulzberger would drop by the
Review
offices just before his vacation trips to Europe or the Caribbean and ask for extra copies of the latest whodunits and spy novels—“the kind of books I can toss overboard.” Leonard obliged, with regret. “
Just once,” Leonard says, “I wished he had asked for one of the books we had chosen for major treatment on page one of his own
Book Review.
”

Sulzberger was especially vigilant about “sexual materials” in the pages of the
Times.
The
Book Review
assigned the free-lance writer Ellen Willis to review two newly published studies of pornography, both written from a feminist point of view. Sulzberger read the
Book Review
carefully enough that week, and bracketed one passage in the Willis review. He had it photocopied, and attached it to a note for Rosenthal. “Every once in a while I get absolutely fascinated at the
incredible goobledegook that finds its way into the pages of the
New York Times
,” the note began. “The attached review by Ellen Willis is
a perfect example. I can only assume that the editor was awed by the selection of her words and felt stupid if he didn’t know what on earth she was talking about.” The bracketed passage read: “The pornographic image, which objectifies and degrades the (usually female) body, represents a ritual in which the (usually male) pornographer or user, playing both killer and victim, reenacts the murder of his bodily self; since the murder can never be truly accomplished, it must be compulsively repeated.” (Willis’s work appeared rarely in the
Times
from then on; she continued to publish her criticism in the
Village Voice
and in magazines, and in 1990 became an associate professor of journalism at New York University.)

If Sulzberger missed some offending materials in the
Times
, he often could count on like-minded readers to alert him. One Sunday, the Fashion section in the
Times Magazine
featured an article by Anne-Marie Schiro. An accompanying photograph showed a model standing to the side of a mirror, her back to the camera; she was wearing two skimpy pieces of lingerie, both on sale at Bloomingdale’s. According to the copy, “The combing jacket gives a little cover to Zandra Rhodes’ breast-baring version of the teddy.” A reader from New Canaan, Connecticut, Isabel Byron of Field Crest Road, wrote Sulzberger to protest what she called “soft porn” in the
Times.
While Byron’s definition of pornography might be debated, her eyesight was unquestionably excellent: When the photo is studied with extra care, it’s possible to see a blurred suggestion of one of the model’s nipples reflected in the mirror. Sulzberger sent a photocopy of the page and the Byron letter to Rosenthal, with his own note: “
You put this bosom in the paper, so I think you should reply to Mrs. Byron. Was this the only picture that we had, and did we have to go so far?” This last phrase was underlined twice in ink; a handwritten sentence added more emphasis, “I don’t like it in the
Times.
”

Similarly, after a straightforward and rather bland feature article on unwed mothers appeared in the
Times
, Sulzberger sent off another memo to Rosenthal: “
So far this morning (11:30
A.M.
) my office has received four calls on the … story on the glorification of having illegitimate children.… Can’t we be a little bit more discriminating about what we run on that page?” One of the women supposedly “glorified” in the article was the singer Lainie Kazan. And one of the readers objecting to the story, a businessman named Franklin Miller of Merrick, on Long Island, claimed that he had known Kazan when
they both went to Hofstra University. As Miller put it, Sulzberger’s memo read, “even then she sang better horizontally than she could vertically.”

Sulzberger was hardly a “typical”
Times
reader. As desirable as their demographics were, the middle- and upper-class professionals in the
Times’
target audience were not all able to live on Fifth Avenue, maintain an apartment in London, winter quarters in Florida, a country estate, and pay themselves $900,000 a year in salary, bonuses, and long-term compensation. Presidential candidates, senators, governors, foreign heads of state, Fortune 500 CEOs and Wall Street financiers didn’t come to lunch in the executive dining room of just any company. But Sulzberger knew his own comfort zone, and he didn’t want the
Times
to venture too far from the middle register in its coverage. When the news department under Rosenthal proposed that one of the new daily-magazine sections be related to “coping with life,” Sulzberger bridled. He told Rosenthal, “I’ve often been unhappy with the way we’ve tackled this generalized idea in the past. I’m left very cold, indeed, by the thought of a section of sociological problem-raising—the article we ran on lesbian mothers coping with raising children inevitably comes to mind.” The proposed section never materialized.

The Living and Home sections were the closest Sulzberger’s
Times
came to regular coverage of coping-with-life stories for most of the 1970s and 1980s. When Frankel became editor, and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., began asserting himself, the number of “sociological problem-raising” stories gradually increased—the son differentiating himself from the father, while continuing to assert the power of the publisher to shape the “product.” With both Sulzbergers, influence was
exercised discreetly. It was not the style of either father or son to address lower-ranking editors or reporters directly, unless sorely provoked. One evening Punch Sulzberger picked up the phone shortly after the first edition of the
Times
arrived, called the copy desk and ordered the editor on duty to remove the word “crappy” from an article. The next day, he put his displeasure into writing in a memo addressed to his top editors. “About 99 percent of the time I’ve dealt with the senior editors,” Sulzberger said. “But if I’m home at night and see something in the first edition that I don’t like, I have no difficulty calling the desk and saying, ‘Take that out.’ ”

While Home and Living occupied the attention of Punch Sulzberger, he made relatively fewer suggestions for Weekend, Sports
Monday, and Science Times, the three other daily magazines started in the late 1970s. To some extent, Sulzberger’s attention to Home and Living grew out of personal reference points. He thought like a co-op owner or suburbanite, albeit again a well-connected one. Home particularly appealed to his gadgeteer’s interests. He also, unapologetically, saw these sections in relation to the needs of the
Times’
advertisers. Retail stores, the fashion industry, architects, designers, and home furnishings companies were covered in Home. Food, nutrition, recipes, good eating, supermarket chains, restaurants, and gourmet shops were treated in Living; most of these subjects dealt with, or were of direct interest to, major
Times
advertisers.

Punch Sulzberger was alert to this relationship.
“When the new [furnishings-display] rooms open in the major department stores, let’s be sure to look at them and talk to the designer,” one memo began. Another Sulzberger memo chided editors for being too New York City–oriented, noting that
Times’
furniture and design articles often listed the main Manhattan locations of department stores carrying the merchandise but omitted the addresses of the suburban branches. When
Larry Lachman, then chairman of Bloomingdale’s, announced he was retiring and going into the consulting business, Sulzberger brought the executive’s “availability” to the attention of Rosenthal, not once but twice. “I think he could be helpful to us, particularly in our home furnishings area,” Sulzberger wrote after his first memo received no response. “I would like to suggest that you invite him in to meet with a small group of the editors, to see if this couldn’t be so. I would be happy to absorb the cost of this in my budget and not charge it to the news department, if that is a problem for you.” Sulzberger added: “I am not trying to do him a favor, but ourselves a favor. Larry is an extremely bright retailer and he might be of assistance in helping us define our market place and serve its needs.”

Rosenthal, to his credit, vigorously resisted. He argued that any such arrangement would be “a serious mistake,” and make it look as if the
Times’
integrity were being compromised: There would be “all kinds of journalistic and ethical problems … [for] the Living and Home sections.… Stretching a point—but not too far—it would be almost as if we hired [former New York City mayor] Abe Beame to be a consultant on political affairs.” With that, the Lachman matter was dropped. Unfortunately, Rosenthal would later undercut his principled stands in such matters.

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The publisher constantly searched for ways to improve the
Times’
business affairs. Behind the front page, however, the
Times
seemed to stumble along unresolutely. James Goodale, who joined the
Times
as an in-house lawyer, ended his
Times
career in 1980 as vice chairman of the company, the number-two position after Sulzberger. Goodale, then thirty, arrived at the
Times
in 1963, the year Sulzberger became publisher. The pressures, and the infighting among Sulzberger’s executives, were horrendous: “
I gave my blood there,” Goodale remembers. Goodale believes that his most important contribution was to help take the company public in 1967—“It was the only way to deal with the incredible screwups at the place. Let the world see how the
Times
was run, and then we would have to clean up all of it.”

Naturally enough, Punch Sulzberger has a different recollection, maintaining now that he regarded public ownership as the single best way to insure continued family control of the paper. But Sulzberger acknowledges that he tried to make the
Times
a more efficient place throughout his tenure. In the manner of the gadgeteer, he tried the latest management tools, particularly those sharpened by graduate departments at leading research universities: executives’ seminars, committees on the future, retreats for editors in contemplative settings away from staff and phones. The most elaborate of these efforts, and as it turned out, the one that caused Sulzberger and the
Times
the greatest public embarrassment, involved a management specialist named Chris Argyris. (Eerily, a generation later, in 1992, publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., replicated the Argyris agony, in the son’s case with the theories of a managerial guru named W. Edwards Deming.)