Behind the Times (63 page)

In the
Book Review
of March 20, 1988, writer Richard Rhodes reviewed
Claiming the Heavens
, an account of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (the “Star Wars” program.) The book was written by five
Times
reporters, including William J. Broad. The year before, Broad reviewed Rhodes’s
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
, describing it as “a major historical synthesis.” Unsurprisingly, Rhodes liked
Claiming the Heavens
, calling it “instructive” and “trenchant.” In 1991, for another example, when Alex Jones, then the
Times’
press reporter, and his wife, Susan E. Tifft, published
The Patriarch
, an account of the Bingham newspaper family, they garnered two reviews. The daily
Times
used almost a half page to praise
The Patriarch
on April 5, 1991, while the
Book Review
featured it on page one on April 14. Both daily and Sunday reviews were written by
non-Times
people, respected authors in their own right. Both reviewers made clear from the first sentence their high regard for the Jones-Tifft work.
The Patriarch
was a “spacious and richly embroidered chronicle,” according to the daily reviewer Richard Lingeman, while the Sunday reviewer, Richard Kluger, called it “an engrossing social document.”

That same Sunday, the
Book Review
also featured a photograph of
Times
columnist Anna Quindlen inset at the top of the front page, above the Jones-Tifft review. The photograph was a refer—a referral—to the review of Quindlen’s novel
Object Lessons
on page seven.
Times
readers, reviewer Anne Tyler wrote, “will not be surprised to learn that [Quindlen’s] first novel is intelligent, highly entertaining and laced with acute perceptions.…” Nor were readers surprised that the
Book Review
ran such a favorable review.

A Sunday as rewarding as that for
Times
authors would be hard to top. Less than a month later, however, the
Book Review
outdid itself
in the interests of the
Times
family. Eric Lax’s
Woody Allen: A Biography
was prominently played on the front page of the
Book Review
for May 12, 1991. An excerpt from the book had been featured on the cover of the
Times Magazine
a few weeks before the review appeared, and on subsequent Sundays the Lax book received the “Editors’ Choice” recommendation in the
Book Review.
The Sunday reviewer and film critic, Molly Haskell, pointed out that six previous books had been written about Allen; while Lax, she wrote, was not the “authorized biographer, he is certainly the anointed one.” Her judgments were carefully modulated and spoke to the reader as consumer: The biography, although not a work of scholarship, was “addressed to Woody Allen fans, and … should fascinate and delight them.” Haskell’s review provided just what a review editor attuned to the marketplace would want: a long, anecdote-rich read focused on Allen as a New York institution. (A year later, when Allen’s affair with the young daughter of his lover Mia Farrow became public knowledge, the “funny Woody” stories turned sick and sour.) All in all, Haskell and the
Book Review
managed an excellent send-off for a pleasant coffee-table book by the well-mannered, young Lax—who was also the son-in-law of Punch Sulzberger, chairman of the board of the
Times.
“I felt very comfortable with my judgment when we put the book on page one,” Sinkler said when asked about the Lax review. “Woody Allen was someone our readers cared for a lot. There was immense interest in him and his films. I would have put a biography of Allen on the cover
not
written by Lax.”

Rhodes, Lingeman, Kluger, and Haskell were part of a rich tradition at the
Times
, although they may not have fully realized it. In the
Book Review
of August 18, 1946, the entire front page and two inside pages were devoted to a review of An
Honorable Titan: A Biographical Study
of Adolph S. Ochs, the modern
Times’
own patriarch. The author was Gerald Johnson, a well-known newspaperman and a biographer of Woodrow Wilson; the reviewer was Kent Cooper, executive director of the Associated Press; the occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of Ochs’s purchase of the
Times.
Cooper began his review on a refreshingly direct note. He had been both a friend of Ochs’s and a business associate: the AP was then—and remains today—a news-gathering cooperative financed by fees from member newspapers and broadcast outlets. “Lest there be any misunderstanding,” Cooper wrote near the
top of his review, in true, above-board AP style, “let me say on my own behalf that this is not a regular book review. It cannot be for a very honest reason: I treasure an honest bias in favor of Adolph Ochs.… I cannot write objectively about this objective biography.” Cooper’s honesty stopped short of full disclosure; the book and the review made only veiled references to Ochs’s history of severe emotional illnesses.

In the
Book Review
’s defense, other
non-Times
reviews of the Jones-Tifft book and the Quindlen novel were mild to positive. Also, Jones and Quindlen were among the star journalists in their fields; they had earned the attention. Jones in particular steered a judicious course during the decade he reported on the American press for the
Times
, and on some of the
Times’
negotiations with its unions. It would have been wrong of the
Times
to penalize Jones or Quindlen for their
Times
connection by ignoring their books. By the same standard, however, did the
Times
connection require a reward so prominently placed?

Careful readers of the
Book Review
noted an exception to the care extended to family.
Times
reporter Richard Severo was coauthor of
The Wages of War
, a journalistic history covering two centuries of U.S. government neglect of veterans (Severo’s coauthor, Lewis Milford, a lawyer, represented Vietnam veterans in the Agent Orange cases).
The Wages of War
came out in the spring of 1989. The reviewer for the
Washington Post
called the book “a vivid, factual picture” of the way veterans had been treated; the
Houston Chronicle
described it as “the definitive work” on the subject. The
New York Review of Books
judged it “powerful.” Only the
Book Review
among major publications managed a negative note. The
Book Review
assigned
The Wages of War
to Michael S. Sherry, a professor of history at Northwestern, who criticized the authors’ “overwrought style of storytelling” and their “shock value” approach. Severo, of course, was the
Times’
hard case, sentenced to duty on the obit desk after his well-publicized conflicts with senior management. He regarded the Sherry review as one more payback for his intransigence. One need not be a paranoid to suspect that when the assigning editors gave
the Severo book to an academic historian, they could well have guessed he would turn up his doctoral nose at a journalistic effort to write history. Again, though, nothing can be proved in court.

Some outcomes are much easier to forecast. In September 1992, Alex Jones resigned from the
Times
in order to work with Susan Tifft on an authorized history of the Ochs-Sulzberger family for Little,
Brown & Company. A short article in the
Times
reported that Jones and Tifft had been granted “complete, exclusive, and unconditional access to family members and archives … the first time the family had granted such access.” The book is scheduled for publication in the summer of 1996, to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Ochs’s purchase of the
Times.
It takes no great powers of prediction to envision the
Book Review
of August 18, 1996: The front page and two inside pages are devoted to a review of the Jones-Tifft book; the photograph shows Punch and Arthur Sulzberger standing in the
Times
boardroom with the oil painting of Adolph Ochs behind them. The reviewer is a tenured professor of history whose name is familiar to
Times
readers; his own books have been well received by the
Times.
The reviewer thinks the Ochs-Sulzberger family book is an engrossing social document, and entertaining as well, a great American success story.

If one feature of the
Book Review
could be taken as representative of the
Times’
self-regard and incorruptible “standards,” it is the
Times
Best Sellers list. Actually there are six such lists—for hardcover fiction, hardcover non-fiction, hardcover “advice, how to and miscellaneous,” paperback fiction, paperback nonfiction, and paperback “advice, how to and miscellaneous.” The best-seller lists stand at that dizzying freeway interchange of art and commerce, journalism and public opinion polling. The lists were checked out by readers—curious about how their tastes might match those of the vox populi—and they were avidly studied by people in the book business. A mention on the
Times
list, wrote the novelist William Peter
Blatty, means “discounts and displays of your book and free hype.” Blatty was the author of
The Exorcist
, a mega-seller of the 1970s (made into a motion picture). He also wrote a novel called
Legion
, which didn’t make the
Times
Best Sellers list in the early summer of 1983, when Blatty first checked. He had expected to see it there because Michael Korda, his editor at Simon & Schuster, assured him that
Legion
was selling at the rate of fifteen thousand books a week. Indeed, it sold more books than another S&S book that
was
on the
Times
list. According to Blatty, Korda also told him that the
Times’
“computerized system” for determining its best-seller lists had some very human and self-fulfilling features.

First, the
Times
mailed report sheets to its sample of two thousand bookstores across the country. The sheets had an introduction that
stated: “Below are listed 36 titles which, on the basis of our most recent information, are contenders for the Best Sellers list.” The bookstores were then supposed to provide the sales figures for each title. The report forms allowed space at the bottom for “write-ins”—books that eventually could be contenders and then actual best-sellers. Blatty took this thirty-six title format to mean that the
Times
data collectors were prompting the stores. He was implying that the
Times
was tilting in the interests of one book, rather than just behaving as bureaucrats (the prompts, it would be argued, sped the preparation of the lists and made the paperwork more efficient). Second, and equally upsetting to Blatty and Korda, the
Book Review
pollers—members of the same
Times
desk that managed the paper’s political surveys—“scientifically weighted” the raw figures to adjust for underepresented parts of the survey “universe” (just as they did with various demographic groups when polling voters during presidential campaigns).

Blatty also disclosed that Korda and Richard Snyder, president of S&S at the time, took the extraordinary step of calling on the
Book Review
editors, and showing them the sales figures for
Legion.
According to Blatty, he was warned by Korda: “The
Times
can be very vindictive, don’t tell anyone we have had this conversation.” The S&S people had to deal with the
Book Review
regularly; Blatty had less interest in accommodation. He sued the
Times
in the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles (where he resided). The suit accused the
Book Review
of false and misleading advertising—calling its list “scientific.” Blatty asked for $3 million in damages. The depositions and court documents still make engrossing reading today, a decade later. Blatty wanted the court to compel the
Times
to provide the raw sales figures that were the starting point for the weighing. The
Times
attorneys, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, argued that the procedures of the list makers constituted “a trade secret.” Moreover, the
Times
lawyers called the suit “frivolous” and spoke of its chilling effect on the first amendment (in the Pentagon Papers case, the
Times
lawyers had argued for publication of “trade secrets”). The lawyers suggested Blatty cooked up the suit to get publicity for
Legion.
Beyond the name-calling, some revealing information came out. The court depositions pointed to a process that gave more weight to sales at independent (privately owned) bookstores than to the big chains such as B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. And Blatty testified that Korda told him no one at Simon & Schuster would talk about their contacts with the
Times
“on the subject of
Legion’s
exclusion from the Best Sellers list unless they were subpoenaed.”

In August 1984, the superior court judge in Santa Monica dismissed the suit. Blatty, however, savored a minor victory in the pages of the
Book Review.
The tiny type under the names of the best-sellers explained that the list was based on “computer-processed sales figures.” After the Santa Monica case, the
Times
inserted the phrase “statistically adjusted” just in front of the word “sales.”

There were other changes in the years since Blatty’s lawsuit. By the summer of 1992, the best-seller universe had been increased to encompass 3,050 bookstores, as well as “representative wholesalers with more than 28,000 other retail outlets, including variety stores and supermarkets.” The list of bookstores and wholesalers was still classified as a trade secret, as was the weighting process and the data collectors’ method of “balancing” chains and independents. Inquiring reporters from time to time breached the wall of secrecy. The writer David Blum reported that some of his publishing sources “think they have a pretty good idea which independent bookstores the
Times
weights most heavily.” Blum’s list included Endicott Booksellers and the two Shakespeare & Co. stores in New York, the Harvard Co-op in Boston, Kramerbooks in Washington, D.C., The Tattered Cover in Denver, Cody’s in Berkeley, Powell’s in Portland, and Oxford Books in Atlanta. These would be the stores to start with “if you’re thinking of outfoxing the
Times
best-seller system,” Blum offered lightly. Blum’s investigation was prompted in part by the best-sellerdom of Allan Bloom’s gloomy 1988 tract,
The Closing of the American Mind.
The initial printing was only ten thousand books, and many of those books were not yet in bookstores when Christopher Lehmann-Haupt gave Bloom a good review in the daily
Times.
“The strangest thing happened: All of a sudden
The Closing of the American Mind
showed up on the
New York Times
best-seller list.” Blum was mystified by Bloom. “The only logical explanation” Blum could find was that the book had done “incredibly well at a few bookstores that the
New York Times
weighs heavily in its survey.”