Read Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble Online
Authors: Nora Ephron
Tags: #Biographical, #Essays, #Nonfiction, #Retail
Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (35 page)
Because my outrage was confined to such a narrow part of the event, I was quite surprised a few days later when I began to read some of the letters the
Times
received about the dinner. There were eventually some five hundred in all, four to one against Claiborne, and the general tenor of them related to the total vulgarity of spending four thousand dollars on a dinner when millions were starving. Knee-jerk liberalism is apparently alive and well after all. There were references to Nero and Marie Antoinette, and there were also a few media-wise letter writers who chose to object not to the article itself but to the
Times
’s decision to run it on the front page. The
Times
printed a short and rather plaintive
reply from Claiborne, who said that he could not see how anyone could claim that the meal had “deprived one human being of one mouthful of food.”
All of this raised some interesting questions. For openers, how much money did Claiborne have to spend to cross the line into wretched excess? Would five hundred dollars have done it? A thousand dollars? Had he spent two thousand dollars, would the
Times
have received only three hundred letters? Would the objections have been even more intense if he had spent the four thousand dollars but put the tab on his expense account? Then, too, there is the question of editorial play: how much difference would it have made if the
Times
had run the article inside the newspaper? These are obviously unanswerable, almost existential questions, and a bit frivolous to boot—but there is something more serious underlying this whole tempest.
Claiborne was clearly puzzled by the reaction to his piece. He had managed to commit a modern atrocity—even if he did rip off American Express, for which he is to be commended—and there is a good reason why it never crossed his mind that he was doing so: except for the price tag, what he did was no more vulgar and tasteless than what he and hundreds of other journalists do every day. Newspapers and magazines are glutted with recipes for truffle soufflés and nit-picking restaurant reviews and paeans to the joys of arugula. Which of us will ever forget the thrilling night that Gael Greene blew five hundred dollars on dinner at the Palace, or that spine-tingling afternoon when Craig and Pierre jumped into the car and drove all the way from East Hampton to Southampton just in time to find the only butcher on
eastern Long Island with a pig’s ear? Or was it pork fat for pâté? God knows what it was, but the point is that it should not have taken a four-thousand-dollar dinner at Chez Denis to remind the readers of the
Times
that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. All of this—let’s face it—is pretty vulgar stuff. It’s also fun to read. But when it’s accompanied by a four-thousand-dollar price tag, it reminds people of something they should have known all along: it’s not about food, it’s about money. Craig Claiborne writes about consuming—which should not be confused with consumerism, or Ralph Nader, or anything of the sort. And in his way, he is representative of one of the major trends in publishing today; he is a purveyor of what I tend to think of as the new porn.
Before going further, I should define what I mean by porn in this context: it’s anything people are ashamed of getting a kick out of. If you want to sell porn to a mass audience, you have to begin by packaging it in a way that’s acceptable; you have to give people an excuse to buy it.
Playboy
’s Hugh Hefner was the first person in publishing to understand this; if he has done nothing else for American culture, he has given it two of the great lies of the twentieth century: “I buy it for the fiction” and “I buy it for the interview.” Of late, Hefner has been hoist with his own petard. He has spent twenty years making the world safe for split beaver, and now he is surprised that magazines that print it are taking circulation away from his own.
The new porn has nothing to do with dirty pictures. It’s simply about money. The new porn is the editorial basis for the rash of city and local magazines that have popped up around the country in the past ten years.
Some of these magazines are first-rate—I am particularly partial to
Texas Monthly
—but generally they are to the traditional shelter magazines what
Playboy
is to
Hustler
: they have taken food and home furnishings and plant care and surrounded them up with just enough political and sociological reporting to give their readers an excuse to buy them. People who would not be caught dead subscribing to
House & Garden
subscribe to
New York
magazine. But whatever the quality, the serious articles in
New York
have nothing whatever to do with what that magazine is about. That magazine is about buying plants, and buying chairs, and buying pastrami sandwiches, and buying wine, and buying ice cream. It is, in short, about buying. And let’s give credit where credit is due: with the possible exception of the Neiman-Marcus catalog, which is probably the granddaddy of this entire trend, no one does buying better than
New York
magazine.
In fact, all the objections the
Times
readers made to Claiborne’s article can be applied to any one of the city and local magazines. How can you write about the perfect ice cream cone or the perfect diet cola or the perfect philodendron when millions of people have never seen a freezer, suffer from sugar deficiencies, and have no home to put potted plants in? How can you publish a magazine whose motto is essentially “Let them eat cheesecake”? Well, you can. And thousands of people will buy it. But don’t make the mistake of giving the game away by going too far. Five extra pages on how to survive in a thirty-thousand-dollar living room, one extra price tag on a true nonessential, and your readers will write in to accuse you of terminal decadence. And when
this happens, what will be truly shocking will not be the accusation—which will be dead on—but the fact that it took them so long to get the point.
Terminal decadence.
Exactly.
March, 1976
I have come to my devotion to the columns of Russell Baker later than most of the people I know, and I’m not sure whether this is because I am slow to catch on, or because Russell Baker is even better than he used to be. The answer, I suspect, is a little of both. In the last year, Baker has moved from Washington to New York, and the column he writes for the
New York Times
and its news service has shifted away from politics and toward urban life in general. I was about to go on to say something or other about that, but I realize that I have already begun to be unfair to Baker. Which is one of the problems of writing about him: as soon as you start to describe what he does, you do him an injustice. Urban life indeed. Baker did a column the other day that began with Franco dying and going straight to the New York Department of Motor Vehicles; it was brilliant, and there is no way to distill or describe it. You had to be there. And in any case, when I went to interview Baker and told him that column was a perfect description of urban life in New York, he assured me it was about urban life in Russia.
Baker is, of course, usually referred to as a humor
columnist and usually lumped together with Art Buchwald, and that, too, is unfair. He is to Buchwald what Saul Steinberg is to Peter Arno: he tends to humor that is abstract, almost flaky, off the wall, cerebral, a bit surrealistic. He almost never writes a column that is a long joke; because of this, and because he builds on mood and nuance, a neat paragraph summary of a typical Baker column doesn’t work at all. So I thought I would just go see him and let him talk, and the hell with anyone who wants a decent description of his writing. I should probably tell you that Baker is fifty, a tall, skinny man who looks a little like a hayseed. He is extremely low-key, terribly nice, and often seems on the verge of being embarrassed, particularly by praise of any sort.
Q:
How did anyone at the
Times
know you would write a funny column?
BAKER:
Nobody knew what the column was going to be. I didn’t, the
Times
didn’t. I was in the
Times
Washington bureau, and I had a reputation for being a “writer” in quotation marks—the quotation marks implied that there were reporters and then there were writers. I did a lot of feature-type stuff. There was no expectation that the column was supposed to be funny. I’d outlined what was essentially an idea for a casual essay column, the sort of thing
The New Yorker
had done in the late forties in “The Talk of the Town.” The style would be casual, monosyllabic, simple sentences, small ideas. I did know at the outset that I was interested in the ironies of the public condition. I was fascinated by irony. But what you project
on a piece of paper and what finally emerges are two wildly different things. When I sat down to write, what came out was what was in me. The first column ever printed was a spoof, a send-up of a Jack Kennedy press conference. Very quickly I began doing basic satires, traditional forms like dialogues, fantasies, hoaxes, parodies, burlesques
.
Q:
Was it difficult?
BAKER:
At the start, yes. I didn’t know what it was going to be. Now it has a rigid identity, and there are days when it writes itself. When you start a column, you’re in a very creative state; you’re building a personality in a piece of writing. It’s a strange kind of business. After a while the column becomes a tyrant. You’ve created a personality that is one aspect of yourself, and it insists on your being true to it every time you sit down to write. As time passes and you change, you may become bored with that old personality. The problem then is how you escape the tyranny of it. In a way, it’s always a struggle between you and this tyrant you’ve created that is a piece of yourself. In the last year I’ve gone back to the essay form and abandoned the satirical form
.
Q:
Is that because of moving to New York?
BAKER:
I’m not so aware of that. The change is the subject matter. It’s so easy to do Washington. You have nothing but subject matter. But what happens in New York? Who, after all, knows
who Abe Beame is, or Hugh Carey? I’ve had to work a lot harder, to take special subject matter and make it mean something to people outside New York
.
Q:
Someone once said something to the effect that he’d never known a writer who had a happy childhood
.
BAKER:
I’ve had an unhappy life, thank God. I suspect all childhoods are unhappy. My father died when I was five—it’s my first memory—and I was lugged off from Virginia to New Jersey to live with a brother of my mother. He was the only member of the family who was employed, and he was making thirty-five dollars a week. He was married to a lovely Irishwoman who ran the household. My mother had a job where she sewed smocks for twelve dollars a week, and I was raised in a matriarchy. I was imbued with the business that you’ve got to get ahead. I always had a job, an awful job, usually selling
Saturday Evening Posts.
I was just terrible at it. They’d open the door and I’d say, “Well, I guess you don’t want to buy a
Saturday Evening Post
,” and they’d slam the door in my face
.
Q:
How did you get into journalism?
BAKER:
I’d always been a drifter. When I was at Johns Hopkins, I was the only guy on the campus who didn’t know what he wanted to be. Everyone wanted to be a doctor or a scientist or an engineer. It was very depressing. In a vague
way I wanted to be Ernest Hemingway—that was in the days when he was still read. There was a guy on the faculty who lectured on T. S. Eliot and also wrote for the
Sun
, and he told me about this job. I went to see the managing editor, and he offered me a job, and I thought, It’s a good way to kill time until I get around to writing a novel someone can publish. It was 1947 and I did police reporting at night. I never went to the office, never wrote anything. I drifted from police station to police station, hung around hospitals listening to people die, and phoned in police-blotter stuff. I did that for two years. I was in love at the time; I was leading this strange upside-down existence, hanging out with raffish characters all night and sleeping till one or two in the afternoon. I kind of liked it. I was getting an education. But after a year, I decided to go ahead and write a novel. I spent a summer and wrote a ninety-thousand-word novel in three months. You know Capote’s famous comment on Kerouac—“That’s not writing, it’s typing.” That’s what the novel was. I was a self-taught typist, and I was combining the typing exercises with the writing of a novel. It was very valuable to me later. I’m a very fast typist
.
Q:
And what happened to the novel?
BAKER:
Shipped it around a few places and then I put it in the attic. It was about what it was like to be twenty-three years old. I discovered then that the world I was living in was so
much more interesting than the world I was capable of conceiving. I was hooked on journalism. That was the end of it. I never went back to writing fiction
.
Q:
How did you get to the
Times
?
BAKER:
The
Sun
sent me to London as its correspondent. I was twenty-seven, very young to be in London, but very adventurous. Things were very difficult in England then, and most of the American reporters went to the PX for food. I didn’t. I lived like an Englishman off the English economy, and I lost a lot of weight. I was hungry all the time. I cut myself off from the American community. Most of the reporters hung around the foreign office to get the diplomatic poop. I felt the AP would provide that. I went to Parliament and wrote about the nature of British political debate. I wrote about what Sunday afternoon was like, and British eccentrics. I was really a kind of travel writer. Everybody was writing about the British economy and taxes except me. So I began to attract some attention. Scotty Reston was head of the
Times
Washington bureau, and he wrote and asked me to come work there. I said no. I was happy—the
Sun
was about to bring me back to be White House correspondent, and that was my idea of paradise. I mean, what more was there? I came back, and after two weeks I realized I had made the worst decision of my life. I’d given up London for this pocket of tedium. I was sitting in this awful lobby waiting for Jim
Hagerty to come out with a handout. At one point I was vacationing in Denver—when you covered Eisenhower you were always vacationing in Denver, writing stories on how many fish he had caught that day, or what he’d said at the first tee. Reston came through and offered me the job again. So I came to the
Times
on the condition I get off the White House. I went up to the Hill for a while, and the following year I was back at the White House. I got to Denver in time to cover Eisenhower’s first heart attack. I handled the first Presidential bowel movement in the history of the
New York Times.
