Behind the Times (28 page)

While Rosenthal worried about too many recipes in the
Times
, some members of his staff were skeptical of the overall project. Rosenthal and his deputy, Arthur Gelb, informed midlevel editors that the new Living section would be, to quote from their planning documents, “a cheerful presentation of life-style” and “a glamorous, upbeat overview of living.” The goal would be to tell readers “how to get greater enjoyment out of life.”
Joan Whitman dissented. Whitman, then in her fifties, was married to Alden Whitman, a
Times
man who was ending his career at the paper by turning the dreary routine of the obituary into a minor journalistic art form. In the 1970s, Whitman was one of the very few high-ranking women editors at the
Times
; in fact, she was editor of Family/Style, as the female-oriented pages were called before those pages—and Whitman—became casualties of the sectional revolution. But Whitman, a thin, self-contained woman of high intelligence and experience, did not allow herself to be carried out silently in the tumbrels of the revolutionaries. “I think we should be presenting the news in our fields,” she told Rosenthal. “If it’s glamorous, fine. If it’s cheerful, terrific. But when the news isn’t quite so chic, we should report it. And when goods are shoddy or we’re being
ripped off we should alert readers.” Whitman then offered as an example of the unglamorous and uncheerful, a news story she was planning for the next week. The story asked whether women should have mammograms, given new evidence that there was a risk of breast cancer from the radiation. “That’s on the news,” Whitman said. “It’s the best service possible, and it’s solid. But it sure isn’t trendy.”

Rosenthal did not have to win over the Whitmans on his staff; Punch Sulzberger was the one whose approval counted. And Sulzberger had his own recurring worries about the sections. In particular, he dreaded the possibility of too much “sociology”—a label he used for all those topics that made him feel uncomfortable. Rosenthal had to hold Sulzberger’s hand and reassure him about Home. “I am absolutely
not contemplating a heavy section full of sociological pieces,” the editor told the publisher. “Quite the contrary, we are contemplating a section that is intimate, helpful, and service-oriented.” Whitman ran a feature story about the efforts of women who lived together to raise children on their own, either through adoption or artificial insemination. The story became a kind of shorthand for what Rosenthal wasn’t planning to do. Not every subject in Home will be “frothy,” Rosenthal assured Sulzberger. “But it will definitely not be a section devoted to lesbian mothers.”

Sulzberger wanted not just light materials but marketable ones. Thus, the big Fashion-Science battle of the mid-1970s. The business side’s interest in expanded fashion coverage, with its potential for readily available advertising, dated back almost a decade. The idea had been pressed on Punch Sulzberger by a number of outsiders, including Charles H. Revson, chairman and CEO of Revlon Inc., the cosmetics company. Sulzberger had invited Revson for one of the periodic “publisher’s lunches” with
Times
executives in the private fourteenth-floor dining room. Rosenthal was traveling and missed the meeting. Waiting for him when he returned was a note from one of his associates, Seymour Topping, who apprised Rosenthal of the thrust of the cosmetics king’s remarks. According to Topping, “
Mr. Revson strongly urged that the
Times
give more space to fashion and beauty news” (including presumably news of Revlon’s products). Sulzberger himself followed up with his own memo about the lunch discussion to Rosenthal, noting that “there was some truth in Mr. Revson’s statement that we are not handling enough fashion news.”

Sulzberger took up Revson’s idea in character: the publisher ordered
an in-house study of the subject. A grandly named task force, “involving all the necessary departments,” was told to review past studies and take “a new look at what we might do for the future.” The task force produced no discernible decisions over the next eight years. By 1978 the time for more studies had past; the four-section paper forced the issue. Weekend, Sports Monday, Home, and Living were in place, and Rosenthal was being pushed to create the final daily magazine for Tuesdays. “Fashion interested me,” he remembered. “But I felt that three consumer sections in a row—Home, Living, and now Fashion—would tip the paper.” As it was, he said, “Women were saying to me that the
Times
was looking down on them. My friends were kidding me about the paper.” Equally to the point, Rosenthal’s enemies also were making jokes at the expense of Living and Home; the critics passed around stories about the paper’s investigative report on the best rigatoni in town and about the competition between two hotshot reporters for the job of
Times
restaurant critic, with the loser exiled in disgrace … to be the
Times
chief of bureau in Moscow. Always impassioned when it came to public perceptions of the paper, Rosenthal grimly informed Sulzberger and Mattson in a confidential memo dated January, 11, 1978: “What we select as the topics for Tuesday will affect not only Tuesday, but the totality of the image of the paper.”

In his memo, Rosenthal proposed that the
Times
“
break new journalistic ground” with a Science and Health section—“an exciting opportunity that seems to coincide with the interests of the kind of readers we are after … young people, more women, more students on the campuses, more professionals in every field.” The new Tuesday section, Rosenthal assured Sulzberger and Mattson, would be “the final piece of the mosaic that will result truly in the new
New York Times.
” As an inducement to get the business side’s approval, Rosenthal promised expanded fashion-news coverage in the back of the new section. He would produce a news report with something for everyone.

While the idea for a special Science and Health section in the
Times
dated from Julie Adler’s memo of 1924, even ignoring that archival record, the proposed coverage didn’t represent new journalistic ground. Beginning in the late 1950s, Walter
Sullivan, the
Times’
star science writer, sent to Turner Catledge a series of proposals to enlarge Sullivan’s column in the Sunday Week in Review into a separate section. Sullivan suggested that the expanded science coverage be packaged with “advertising from the science/technology field.” According to
Sullivan, “Nothing came of the scheme.” The sales staff couldn’t get any ads. Worse, Sullivan remembered, his Sunday science column itself was later eliminated in the aftermath of some since-forgotten study. In the mid-1970s, the old doubts about science remained.

Rosenthal’s attempt to co-opt the business side by adding a fashion-news caboose to his science-health train left the publisher unimpressed. Punch
Sulzberger repeated his “serious reservations as to the viability of such a section.” Sulzberger added: “I don’t think I can go beyond this right now until I get some feedback from Walter on his business perceptions.”
Rosenthal tried once more. He assured Sulzberger that the news department shared the business side’s concerns for “economic viability.” He repeated his arguments about the need to think of the “totality” of the
Times
rather than of its individual parts. Then the editor appeared to signal his withdrawal from the combat; he let the publisher know that the news department was turning its attentions to “expanding and refining” Business Day, the new business/financial section. He said nothing about a fashion-news plan.
“Rosenthal was, as usual, a sore loser,” Donald Nizen, one of Mattson’s associates, later remembered.

Rosenthal was also resourceful. He recognized that “the
Times
didn’t start these sections to lose money.” When the news department and the business side couldn’t come to an agreement, “We left our disagreement at that for a while, at an impasse.” Adolph Ochs’s
Times
devoted major resources to cover science; it provided financial support for Commander Richard E. Byrd’s expedition to Antarctica and later serialized the commander’s account (he returned the favor by naming Antarctic geographic features after the Ochs family). “I loved science. It was timely, and it belonged in the
Times
,” Rosenthal said. He made a calculation based on his years of working for Punch Sulzberger: “I had my own strengths. The publisher wasn’t going to push something down my throat. We were not a paper where someone descends from above and says, ‘We must do this.’ ” Then in the summer of 1978, the pressmen’s union struck the
Times
as well as the other New York papers. It was the last big labor-management dispute at the
Times
over the manning levels of the 43rd Street presses. The
Times
was shut for eighty-eight days. “I had time on my hands, and I wanted something to welcome readers back,” Rosenthal said. “So on my own time, and on my budget … only at the
New York Times
can you talk that way, ‘my budget’ … I worked on a science section.”

Rosenthal thought he knew the secret to win over Sulzberger and Mattson: “I would not add any more staff.” I reminded Rosenthal of Russell Baker’s description of the newsroom in the old days: idling firemen waiting for a Titanic-sized alarm to sound. Mattson, uncomically, had hammered in the same point. The newsroom, he insisted, should do the new sections with existing people. “Perhaps we were overstaffed,” Rosenthal said. “I hired a designer, but that was all. Basically I mined this place for staff.” Then he shuffled his allotment of pages, again staying within the newsprint budget set by the business side. “I took the first six columns of the existing Tuesday space. I added the three or four columns we were doing anyway on science. These were quote my unquote pages. I got another three columns elsewhere. Then I found four more. I put culture in the back and that did it. I went to the publisher with The Science Times.”

Mattson, by Rosenthal’s testimony, was not happy with the section. But Mattson was preoccupied with the byzantine negotiations to end the great strike. Dealing with the fractious New York press unions was draining enough for Mattson; in addition, Rupert Murdoch, the Australian newcomer to the city, broke ranks with the publishers’ association and resumed publication of his
New York Post.
Rosenthal sensed that the business side, already doubly distracted by its dealings with the unions and the renegade Murdoch, could not fight on a third front. Specifically, Mattson would not be able to reverse Rosenthal’s coup if the editors had the new Science Times package ready to greet readers when the
Times
resumed publication. “That was me,” Rosenthal said. “The last of the Red Hot Mamas.”

The first post-strike
Times
was published on Monday, November 6, 1978. Science Times appeared on Tuesday, November 14, 1978. Mattson may have since come to regard it as the section he “owed” Rosenthal; but there was little civility on either side at the time. Rosenthal turned out to be a sore winner as well. Science Times was only two weeks old when Rosenthal complained that Mattson’s people weren’t promoting the section sufficiently. Two weeks later, Chuck Greenburg of the promotion department responded with his own complaints. Science Times was too highbrow, Greenburg declared; it didn’t carry topics that “the average reader could identify with.” Greenburg also announced that his department was going to conduct a telephone survey after the first of the year to collect information from both readers and nonreaders on their “attitudes” toward Science Times. Rosenthal
reacted angrily, dictating a memo to Mattson about the business department’s “very grudging attitude” toward Science Times. “The very idea of promotion people deciding to ‘survey’ the news report … without consulting in advance shows that some of your people simply do not understand their role or the news department’s role on this paper,” Rosenthal said. When the memo was typed for his signature, Rosenthal decided not to send it to Mattson. Relations were bad enough without dispatching the B-52s.

Rosenthal didn’t always behave with such restraint toward Mattson during this period of change at the
Times.
Mattson’s business side, Rosenthal came to believe, was encroaching on the editors’ authority to determine what cultural-news stories were covered. Rosenthal seemed to exempt Mattson from the complaint, excoriating instead some of his “executives who simply [don’t] understand the nature of journalism … or the essence of this paper.” The unnamed “executives” were in the
Times
advertising department. They had done what ad people usually try to do: sell ads—in this case, by proposing that editorial matter for a special issue of the
Times Magazine
be “tied in” to the release of a forthcoming motion picture from one of the major studios. Ads for the picture and related promotions would be inserted throughout the
Magazine
, which would carry stories about the film’s stars and production. The idea was bad enough, Rosenthal told Mattson, but it was made worse by the “effort to keep
pushing it once the editors had said they were not interested.”

The special
Magazine
tied to the film did not appear. But the sales department never gave up on the idea of tie-ins, and a few years later, a more adaptable Rosenthal came around to the ad people’s approach. In the early months of 1982, the Science Times section was almost four years old and it still lacked an advertising base. However, John Pomfret, a former
Times
reporter who went over to the business side to become the chief assistant to Mattson, noticed that a few retail ads offering a newly available product called the personal computer were beginning to
“dribble” into the section. The whole field of small-business technology and home electronics, Pomfret told Rosenthal, “seems to be substantial and growing.” Pomfret included in his list “the business computer, electronic game, data base, cable TV, hi-fi, [and] visual tape business.” Pomfret wasn’t much of an audiophile: in the early 1980s, consumers were buying stereos, not “hi-fi” equipment; and by “visual tape,” he had meant videotape. But Pomfret
understood the advertising market well enough. “There seems to be some affinity between the Science Times audience and this equipment,” he told Rosenthal.