Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (32 page)

Eventually, of course, the furor died down. The editor of the
States-Item
admitted that Collin had been “indiscreet” and that some of his behavior bordered on “a conflict of interest.” The
Times-Picayune
food writer announced that he would write a rival restaurant guide in which no restaurant would receive an unfavorable rating. Bernstein, not having managed to formulate the spaghetti sauce, moved on to specialize in canneloni. The people of New Orleans settled down to dinner. And Richard Collin learned a lesson. Not the exact lesson he
might have—about the function of a critic, for example, or about the limits of critical involvement, or about the ethics of critical behavior—but he did learn something. “I learned,” he said, “that restaurants have a limited lifespan, and there’s no point in trying to save them.”

September, 1975

You can learn, in your spare time, to write articles for publication, and if you master the art, you can be paid to do it on a full-time basis.

Of course, there are all sorts of writers. There are reporters, for example. Reporters have to learn how to uncover FACTS. This is very difficult to learn in your spare time. There are also serious journalists. But serious journalists have TALENT. There is no way to learn to have talent. There are also fiction writers. But fiction writers need IMAGINATION. Either you have imagination or you don’t. You can’t pick it up in a manual.

But there is one kind of writer you can learn to be and you will not need FACTS, TALENT or IMAGINATION. You can become a newsmagazine cover story writer. Just master the six rules enumerated below and you will know all you need to about how to write a newsmagazine cover story—or at least the kind of newsmagazine cover story dealing with life style, soft news, and cultural figures.

To do this, read with care the following:
Women’s Wear Daily
,
Vogue
, Joyce Haber’s column, Suzy’s column, the “Arts and Leisure” section of the Sunday
New York Times, Rolling Stone
and the movie grosses in
Variety
.

Any name mentioned more than four or five hundred times in the last year is a suitable subject for a newsmagazine cover.

Study the following examples to see how this is done by the experts:

“Today, a few weeks shy of twenty-six, Liza has evolved in her own right into a new Miss Show Biz, a dazzlingly assured and completely rounded performer. The Justice Department should investigate her. She is a mini-conglomerate, an entertainment monopoly” (
Time
on Liza Minnelli, February 28, 1972).

“At thirty-five, Coppola stands alone as a multiple movie talent: a director who can make the blockbuster success and the brilliant, ‘personal’ film” (
Newsweek
on Francis Ford Coppola, November 25, 1974).

“Finally, the film confirms that Robert Altman, the director of
Nashville
, is doing more original, serious—yet entertaining—work than anyone else in American movies” (
Newsweek
on
Nashville
and Robert Altman, June 30, 1975).

“At twenty-nine, salty Lauren Hutton is America’s
most celebrated model of the moment—and the highest-paid in history, as well.… Her extraordinarily expressive face and throwaway sex appeal, captured in the strong, spirited photographs of Richard Avedon, have made Hutton a permanent fixture in the pages of
Vogue
and at least a passing fancy in five movies. And in contrast to the exotic stone-faced beauties of the 1960s, her natural gap-toothed, all-American good looks epitomize the thoroughly capable, canny, contemporary woman of the Seventies” (
Newsweek
on Lauren Hutton, August 26, 1974).

“Margaux is the American Sex Dream incarnate, a prairie Valkyrie, six feet tall and one hundred thirty-eight pounds.… Effortlessly, Margaux stands out in a gallery of fresh young faces, newcomers who are making their names in modeling, movies, ballet and in the exacting art of simply living well. They add up to an exhilarating crop of new beauties who light up the landscape in the U.S. and abroad” (
Time
on Margaux Hemingway and the New Beauties, June 16, 1975).

“Add to all this her beliefs in the trendy cults of mysticism and metaphysics and she becomes thoroughly modern Marisa, aptly crowned by the
International Herald Tribune
’s society chronicler Hebe Dorsey as ‘the girl who has everything plus’ ” (
Newsweek
on Marisa Berenson, August 27, 1973).

“ ‘This event is the biggest thing of its kind in the history of show business,’ modestly declared David Geffen, the thirty-year-old human dynamo, ‘Record Executive of the Year,’ chairman of the board of Elektra/Asylum Records, who just pulled off one of the great coups in the music business—signing Dylan away from Columbia Records” (
Newsweek
on Bob Dylan’s concert tour, January 14, 1974).

“This is Roy Halston Frowick … known simply as Halston—the premier fashion designer of all America.… Halston’s creative strength derives from personally dressing the most famous and fashionable women in the world, and while his name is not yet a household word, his impact on fashion trend setters is considerable. ‘Halston is the hottest American designer of the moment,’ says James Brady, the former publisher of
Women’s Wear Daily
and now publisher of
Harper’s Bazaar
. Fashion consultant Eleanor Lambert goes even further. ‘Along with Yves St. Laurent,’ says Miss Lambert, ‘Halston is the most influential designer—not only in America, but in the world’ ” (
Newsweek
on Halston, August 21, 1972).

“On the one hand she is very American, with deep roots in the South and an almost apple-pie adolescence (from cheerleader to campus queen). There is about her a touching innocence, openness, expansiveness and vulnerability. But at the same time she is no bright-eyed
square. She breathes sophistication, elegance, grace, passion, experience. Dunaway has become more than a star—she is a style and a symbol” (
Newsweek
on Faye Dunaway, March 4, 1968).

“She is the rural neophyte waiting in a subway, a free spirit drinking Greek wine in the moonlight, an organic Earth Mother dispensing fresh bread and herb tea, and the reticent feminist who by trial and error has charted the male as well as the female ego” (
Time
on Joni Mitchell, December 16, 1974).

“There are many things gorgeous about Robert Redford. The shell, to begin with, is resplendent. The head is classically shaped, the features chiseled to an all-American handsomeness just rugged enough to avoid prettiness, the complexion weather-burnished to a reddish-gold, the body athletically muscled, the aura best described by one female fan who says: ‘He gives you the feeling that even his sweat would smell good’ ” (
Newsweek
on Robert Redford, February 4, 1974).

One example will suffice here:

“[There are] one hundred million dogs and cats in the U.S.… Each day across the nation, dogs deposit an estimated four million tons of feces” (
Time
on the American Pet, December 23, 1974).

Read more newsmagazine cover stories.

Learn to use adjectives like “brilliant,” “gorgeous,” “original,” “serious” and “dazzling” with devil-may-care abandon.

Learn to use clichés with devil-may-care abandon.

Master this technique and you too will be able to get a job writing back-of-the-book cover stories at a newsmagazine. You too will be able to take a subject, any subject, and hype it to the point where it bears no resemblance to reality. Whomever you write about will never be able to live up to what you write about him, but never mind. The important thing is that people will talk about YOUR STORY. They will talk about it for years. They will say how strange it was that the career of whomever you wrote about seemed somehow to slip after the cover
you wrote
appeared. They will allude ominously to the Newsmagazine Cover Curse. But you will know better.

So begin now, before it’s too late. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go work at a fan magazine.

October, 1975

“I made all kinds of pictures because I thought it would be a good rescue shot over the ladder … never dreamed it would be anything else.… I kept having to move around because of the light set. The sky was bright and they were in deep shadow. I was making pictures with a motor drive and he, the fire fighter, was reaching up and, I don’t know, everything started falling. I followed the girl down taking pictures … I made three or four frames. I realized what was going on and I completely turned around, because I didn’t want to see her hit.”

You probably saw the photographs. In most newspapers, there were three of them. The first showed some people on a fire escape—a fireman, a woman and a child. The fireman had a nice strong jaw and looked very brave. The woman was holding the child. Smoke was pouring from the building behind them. A rescue ladder was approaching, just a few feet away, and the fireman had one arm around the woman and one arm reaching out toward the ladder. The second picture showed the fire escape slipping off the building. The child had fallen on the escape and seemed about to slide off the edge. The woman was grasping desperately at the legs of the
fireman, who had managed to grab the ladder. The third picture showed the woman and child in midair, falling to the ground. Their arms and legs were outstretched, horribly distended. A potted plant was falling too. The caption said that the woman, Diana Bryant, nineteen, died in the fall. The child landed on the woman’s body and lived.

The pictures were taken by Stanley Forman, thirty, of the
Boston Herald American
. He used a motor-driven Nikon F set at 1/250, f 5.6–8. Because of the motor, the camera can click off three frames a second. More than four hundred newspapers in the United States alone carried the photographs; the tear sheets from overseas are still coming in. The
New York Times
ran them on the first page of its second section; a paper in south Georgia gave them nineteen columns; the
Chicago Tribune
, the
Washington Post
and the
Washington Star
filled almost half their front pages, the
Star
under a somewhat redundant headline that read:
SENSATIONAL PHOTOS OF RESCUE ATTEMPT THAT FAILED
.

The photographs are indeed sensational. They are pictures of death in action, of that split second when luck runs out, and it is impossible to look at them without feeling their extraordinary impact and remembering, in an almost subconscious way, the morbid fantasy of falling, falling off a building, falling to one’s death. Beyond that, the pictures are classics, old-fashioned but perfect examples of photojournalism at its most spectacular. They’re throwbacks, really, fire pictures, 1930s tabloid shots; at the same time they’re technically superb and thoroughly modern—the sequence could not have been taken at all until the development of the motor-driven camera some sixteen years ago.

Most newspaper editors anticipate some reader reaction to photographs like Forman’s; even so, the response around the country was enormous, and almost all of it was negative. I have read hundreds of the letters that were printed in letters-to-the-editor sections, and they repeat the same points. “Invading the privacy of death.” “Cheap sensationalism.” “I thought I was reading the
National Enquirer
.” “Assigning the agony of a human being in terror of imminent death to the status of a sideshow act.” “A tawdry way to sell newspapers.” The
Seattle Times
received sixty letters and calls; its managing editor even got a couple of them at home. A reader wrote the
Philadelphia Inquirer:
“
Jaws
and
Towering Inferno
are playing downtown; don’t take business away from people who pay good money to advertise in your own paper.” Another reader wrote the
Chicago Sun-Times
: “I shall try to hide my disappointment that Miss Bryant wasn’t wearing a skirt when she fell to her death. You could have had some award-winning photographs of her underpants as her skirt billowed over her head, you voyeurs.” Several newspaper editors wrote columns defending the pictures: Thomas Keevil of the
Costa Mesa
(California)
Daily Pilot
printed a ballot for readers to vote on whether they would have printed the pictures; Marshall L. Stone of Maine’s
Bangor Daily News
, which refused to print the famous assassination picture of the Vietcong prisoner in Saigon, claimed that the Boston pictures showed the dangers of fire escapes and raised questions about slumlords. (The burning building was a five-story brick apartment house on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay section of Boston.)

For the last five years, the
Washington Post
has employed various journalists as ombudsmen, whose job
is to monitor the paper on behalf of the public. The
Post
’s current ombudsman is Charles Seib, former managing editor of the
Washington Star
; the day the Boston photographs appeared, the paper received over seventy calls in protest. As Seib later wrote in a column about the pictures, it was “the largest reaction to a published item that I have experienced in eight months as the
Post
’s ombudsman.…