But Enough About You: Essays (55 page)

If it’s a commercial sort of movie with the obligatory happy ending, this is followed by the loud click of the gun dry-firing. Our hero then pulls
his
gun and says with a smirk, “I took the precaution of removing the firing pin.” And shoots the blighter and finishes his martini.

If it’s a film noir of the kind, say, made from any John le Carré novel or directed by a German who grew up on a diet of too much Brecht, the hero doesn’t remove the firing pin. Trusting fool! And gets blown away. A beautiful death, but a death nonetheless, leaving the audience to wonder whether we can trust anyone, especially those we trust.

A few weeks ago the FBI arrested a dozen deep-cover Russian agents who have been living among their American neighbors in various suburban locales, mowing the lawns, chatting amiably over the fences, exchanging casserole recipes. John le Carré, meet John Cheever.

Most of us probably don’t live next door to Russian sleeper spies, but an episode like this raises the question, in a typically melodramatic American way: Whom—the hell—can we trust? To judge from the number of lawsuits by groups determined to get “In God We Trust” removed from courthouses and other government buildings, some of us aren’t even sure about trusting the Big Guy anymore.

The arrest of the Russians also reminds us that one of the worst aspects of the old Soviet—or any totalitarian—regime is the vacuum of trust, especially familial. In Soviet Russia, children spied on their parents. How many fathers were sent off to die in the Gulag because little Boris was mad at him for making him do his homework and decided
to tell the KGB that he’d made a joke about Comrade Stalin’s mustache? The only witty thing Stalin ever said was “I trust no one, even myself.”

Aeschylus grasped the idea two thousand years before Uncle Joe: “For somehow this is tyranny’s disease, to trust no friends.” In
1984
, Winston Smith aurally hallucinates a song whose lyrics are “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.” As Brecht put it, with Germanic—and Communist—mordancy, “I don’t trust him. We’re friends.”

How grim and sere to contemplate a world in which one lived in constant fear of one’s friends? I’ve lived happily in Washington, D.C., for almost thirty years, but it can at times be a bottle full of scorpions. There’s an old joke we tell here: “What’s the definition of a ‘friend’ in Washington? Someone who stabs you in the chest.” Funny, huh?

A few paragraphs above I deployed the phrase “trusting fool.” I pause to ask: Why should someone who trusts be open to the charge of “fool,” under any circumstances? Does the cliché derive from a quietly understood universal truth that humans are by nature duplicitous? Was Stalin a fool for trusting Hitler? Was Elie Wiesel a fool for trusting his Holocaust foundation funds to Bernard Madoff?

Thirty or forty times a year I board an airplane and buckle myself in, trusting that the pilot has not spent the night doing shots of Jägermeister and snorting lines of cocaine off the breasts of a hooker. Some years ago I read in the news a comical (
sort
of) item about a pilot who, as the plane lumbered down the taxiway, was heard by the tower singing, “Some-
wherrrre
o-ver the rain-
bowwwwww
.” He was blotto. So in the end we’re all trusting fools, one way or another. At the practical level, we don’t really have much choice.

I came of age during (but did not participate in) the war in Vietnam, the great trust-busting event of its day. (Followed by another beaut called Watergate.) Shocking to my then-naïve sensibility were the stories—perhaps overmythologized—of fragging, when disgruntled grunts rolled hand grenades under the bunks of their lieutenants. When soldiers, the ultimate band of brothers, start turning on one another, it’s probably time to fold and go home.

That dismal war produced two memorable utterances on the theme. The first by LBJ, whose war it was: “I never trust a man unless I’ve got his pecker in my pocket.” The second is anonymous but sounds like it sprang from some miserable hooch somewhere in LBJ’s quagmire: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the little bastards aren’t out to get you.”

What a tricky world we live in. Trust me.

—
Forbes
, August 2010

There’s been a lot of
Sturm und Drang
in the American corporate boardroom recently. Carol Bartz, the now former CEO of Yahoo!, was fired by the board’s chairman—by phone. Ms. Bartz thought this was shabby exit etiquette and wasted no time ventilating her displeasure, telling
Fortune
magazine: “These people f— me over.” She described them as “the worst board in the country,” and—for good measure—“doofuses.” As the famous telegram put it:
F— YOU. STRONG LETTER FOLLOWS
.

Refreshing as it is to hear straight talk from our captains of industry, these comments may prove costly to Ms. Bartz, inasmuch as she had a “non-disparagement clause” in her contracts. Ten million dollars is a steep price for steam venting.

Then came the “sudden removal” of Hewlett-Packard’s CEO Léo Apotheker, just a year after the untidy firing of his predecessor, Mark Hurd. Mr. Apotheker refrained from dropping the f-bomb or calling the board doofuses, but then he’s German and disciplined. He
was content to walk away with an estimated $28 million to $33 million in separation fees.

The UBS chief Oswald Grübel might have been fired if he hadn’t resigned, following the revelations that one of his thirty-one-year-old traders had managed to hide $2.3 billion in losses. Will Kweku Adoboli be getting severance pay? No? Then how come he’s smiling in those photographs of him in handcuffs?

Firings—or to use the neater British term, sackings—are often occasions of drama. Suddenly protocol, punctilio, and politesse are out the window, leaving Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” But let’s review Ms. Bartz’s messy departure in the larger historical scheme of things: Where does a Silicon Valley bigwig’s sacking by phone rank in the pantheon?

It’s a long, long list, so let’s limit ourselves to: Satan, Adam and Eve, Judas Iscariot, Nicolas Fouquet, Sir John Falstaff, Generals McClellan, Patton, and MacArthur, the Nixon White House, Don Regan, and one or two Hollywood episodes.

Starting at the top (as it were): Satan, Adam and Eve, Judas. We’re
still
dealing with the fallout from their sackings. The former angel Satan, “the brightest in the sky,” attempted a corporate takeover of the heavens. But God, an experienced and canny chairman of the board, managed to hold on to his seat and down went Satan—and no golden parachute for him. Satan, however, was not the kind to go off and write a book about fly-fishing or do some consulting. He’s the Barry Diller of the book of Revelation. He came back with a poison pill, forcing God to fire Adam and Eve. (Maybe He should have offered Satan that parachute after all.)

The Last Supper could be viewed as Jesus’s last meeting with the twelve directors on his board. It was a productive session: Jesus instituted the Eucharist and correctly predicted that his successor would screw up three times before getting his act together. But he had to fire one of the board members, and that led to—well, you know the rest. If Jesus had offered Judas a severance package, how differently things might have turned out.

Skipping ahead to the seventeenth century, we come to Nicolas Fouquet, superintendent of finances under Louis XIV. As the minister in
charge of
le Roi Soleil
’s tax collectors, Fouquet managed to become a very, very wealthy public servant. Perhaps you’ve visited his modest country home, Vaux-le-Vicomte. It’s
good
to be the superintendent of finances. His mistake was inviting the king to Vaux-le-Vicomte for a fête that made Stephen Schwarzman’s birthday parties look like beggars’ banquets. Louis, whose motto was
L’etat c’est moi, pas vous
—tossed Fouquet into jail, where he died nineteen years later.

Shakespeare is full of sackings. The ones that come most vividly to mind are Hamlet’s (unauthorized and messy) firing of Polonius, Elsinore’s chief of staff; and Henry V’s dismissal of his old mentor and drinking buddy, Sir John Falstaff. Polonius’s severance consisted of a sword through the arras. Henry terminated Falstaff with less prejudice: “I banish thee, on pain of death . . . not to come near our person by ten mile”—a fifteenth-century restraining order. Kings didn’t bother much with nondisparagement clauses. Would Carol Bartz have called Henry a doofus? Methinks not.

Reviewing an abbreviated roster of American military sackees, two common denominators stick out: disrespect and an excess of initiative. The Civil War general George McClellan was always going on about what a dolt President Lincoln was. (He was the General Stanley McChrystal of his day, not to equate President Lincoln and Vice President Joe Biden). Patton and MacArthur were angrily dismissed by their commanders in chief, but getting the heave-ho added a certain luster to their legends.

Nixon’s White House was white, but what a lot of red blood was left on those walls. Watergate was a Death by a Hundred Cuts
and
a Night of the Long Knives, the latter being the Saturday Night Massacre. Archibald Cox, Elliot Richardson, and William Ruckelshaus—trifecta. A year later, Richard Nixon, facing the presidential version of being fired, wisely took early retirement.

When CNN ushered in the 24/7 news cycle, the joke around the White House—not thigh-slapping but funny in a grim kind of way—was that you might very well learn that you’d been fired by hearing it on TV. The sacking of Don Regan, grumpy chief of staff in the Reagan Götterdämmerung, is the stuff of high comedy (see Richard Reeves’s excellent
President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination
):

“As Regan calmed down, [Vice President] Bush asked him about the President’s schedule . . .

“ ‘That’s in the hands of an astrologer in San Francisco, George.’

“The Vice President looked mystified. Regan poured out his frustrations about the woman Mrs. Reagan called ‘My friend,’ Joan Quigley. ‘Good God,’ said Bush.”

Moving now to Hollywood: David O. Selznick famously fired the director George Cukor from
Gone With the Wind
after only three weeks of shooting. More recently, Walt Disney’s chairman, Michael Eisner, fired his president, Michael Ovitz, after only a year on the job. It was nasty, but Ovitz landed softly, and who wouldn’t, with a parachute worth an estimated $170 million. (By my math, it worked out to $465,000 of severance for every day.) Later on, Eisner sacked Jeffrey Katzenberg with a package valued at an estimated quarter billion. Eisner may have been the Boss from Hell, but he didn’t stint on the severances. This generosity was not popular among Disney’s shareholders.

The 2009 movie
Up in the Air
starred George Clooney as a corporate downsizer who flies around the country sacking entire companies at a time. In the midst of filming, the director, Jason Reitman, decided to cast instead of actors actual people who had been fired by this brutal, impersonal process.

There’s a term used in kayaking when you capsize and can’t upright yourself—a “wet exit.” Ms. Bartz’s departure from Yahoo was an example of the wet exit. A dry exit is generally preferable, especially if it comes with $10 million.

—
Bloomberg BusinessWeek,
2011

In one of the many, many scenes in
Mad Men
having to do with drinking, Roger Sterling, played to perfection by John Slattery, goes mano a mano with Don Draper over oysters and martinis. Roger instructs the waiter, “And don’t let me see the bottom of this glass.”

At the end of this ethyl alcoholic orgy, they walk up the stairs and Roger casually vomits. Oh, for the early 1960s, when America ruled the world and its captains of industry drank three martinis for lunch. Now, in our decline, they drink fizzy water.

I was about ten then, still virginal in matters alcoholic, but already aware that the word
martini
had iconic—or
hic
-onic—resonance. Does not the very shape of the martini glass connote cocktail?

My parents did not drink them. It was bourbon for my mother, scotch for my father; but it seemed that all the other grown-ups did. Once I tagged along to the Oak Room at the old Plaza Hotel. In my memory, everyone ordered them, which made the Oak Room seem not so much a bar as a church in which the martini was the sacrament served to the congregation.

At about this time the first James Bond movie appeared, in which Sean Connery memorably orders the barman: “Vodka martini. Shaken, not stirred.”

“Shaken, not stirred” entered the language as the sine qua non of sophistication. (Or affectation.) Years later, reading one of the Ian Fleming novels, I came across Bond’s actual formula: “Medium vodka dry martini, shaken not stirred.” It was not only the method of preparation, but also the vodka by which Fleming was signaling us that Bond was exotic, a rebel, an iconoclast, a man apart from the herd. Most self-respecting Brits or Americans of the day considered a proper martini to be made from gin.

According to my friend Barnaby Conrad III, who wrote the book on the martini (literally), its origins are obscure and much debated. He posits, however, that the likeliest first recipe for this holy grail
was in an 1896 manual by Thomas Stuart titled
Stuart’s Fancy Drinks and How to Mix Them
. It was called a “Marguerite Cocktail,” and into it went one dash of orange bitters, two-thirds Plymouth gin, and one-third French vermouth. “By 1900,” Barnaby writes, “the word Martini was in common usage among bartenders on both sides of the Atlantic.”

The martini is to modern American literature and lore what mead wine was to Norse sagas or claret to eighteenth-century English literature. Dorothy Parker remains its leading laureate, having given us the imperishable quatrain:

I like to drink a Martini

But only two at the most.

Three I’m under the table,

Four I’m under the host.