Inside the New Yorker: Fear and Trembling

When we learned the other day that the New Yorker magazine was about to be sold, we journeyed over to that venerable institution on West 43rd Street to see how the staff was accepting the prospect of working for the first new owner in the magazine’s 60-year history.

Luckily, the woman who guards the writers, and is referred to privately as the “mother hen,” was away. So, instructed to “look like advertising space buyers,” we toured the murky beige 18th and 19th floors, where writers and editors toil on manual typewriters behind wooden desks in tiny cubicle offices that resemble those in the English department of a land-grant college.

Dress at the New Yorker appears to be run-down preppie; decor is part rummage sale and part stage set. Big glass-fronted bookcases still line linoleum-tiled halls, and light fixtures bought well before Art Deco became fashionable hang from the high ceilings on chains. A framed, Fabian Bachrach black-and-white portrait of the first editor, Harold Ross, dominates one wall, just down the hall from the corner office of his successor, “Mr. Shawn.” The name of the current editor is spoken in reverent tones. . . .

NEW YORK--In the high-tech world of magazines, the New Yorker, proprietary heir to the omniscient “we,” remains a proud anachronism. That is part of the magazine’s charm, but also part of its problem. Suddenly, with its impending sale for $142 million to Samuel I. Newhouse Jr., the New Yorker finds itself the Talk of the Town.

For the New Yorker, that is a distinctly unfamiliar and uncomfortable position. Tensions and tempers have flared. The perennially reserved William Shawn reportedly broke into tears during a staircase address to his editorial staff. Many staff members talked of “betrayal” when they discussed the sale.

The stress has extended to relations between the 77-year-old editor and Peter F. Fleischmann, 63, chairman of the New Yorker, who has not been well after three throat operations that have left him speaking through an electronic device.

Extremely close friends describe the chairman as “crushed” by what they call the “grossly unfair” reaction of Shawn and his staff.

“You’ve got an extraordinarily spoiled group of writers and editors, and it has been brought to their attention that they work for somebody,” one of Fleischmann’s friends said. “They lived in a hothouse created by Raoul Fleischmann and perpetuated by his son. They should have recognized that Peter was not very well. . . . Peter had to think of the succession of the magazine.”

Some staff members liken the upheaval to an earthquake. “People have gone through a lot of emotions: disbelief, dismay, anger,” said a top editor, who asked to remain nameless. “And I think now maybe resignation has set in--resignation and anxiety.”

Over six decades, the pages of the New Yorker have been home to such writers as James Thurber, E. B. White, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, A. J. Liebling, Wolcott Gibbs, J. D. Salinger, S. J. Perelman, John Updike, John Cheever and John Hersey. Truman Capote once worked in the mail room.

But since its inception, the magazine has had just two editors, Harold Ross and William Shawn, and one principal owner, the Fleischmann family, whose millions came from Fleischmann’s Yeast. The family still holds 32% of the company’s shares.

Scholars say that over six decades the New Yorker has both reflected and profoundly influenced American culture.

‘Unique, Eccentric’

“Perhaps the New Yorker, more than any other magazine, raises the question whether a magazine that is unique and even eccentric can remain that way under corporate ownership,” said Ben Bagdikian, media observer and professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

“I think this is probably the last nationally prominent publication of a unique nature that had remained in the hands of the founders, or their heirs, or at least had not been sold to a corporation with many other properties. . . . “

Among staff members and the magazine’s admirers, the fear is that Newhouse will somehow dilute the New Yorker’s unique formula. Newhouse, 57, heads a publishing empire that includes 29 newspapers plus the Conde Nast stable of mass magazines--Vogue, House & Garden, Glamour, Gourmet, Self, Vanity Fair and Gentleman’s Quarterly. He also owns Random House, the New York book publishers.

Even before the New Yorker’s board of directors unanimously voted to recommend the sale to Newhouse, holders of a significant, non-Fleischmann-owned block of stock approached other media companies to discuss the possibility of waging a proxy fight against the Fleischmann family.

Peddled Worldwide

“That 17% was peddled all over the world,” said George J. Green, executive vice president and group publications director of Hearst Magazines, who served as the New Yorker’s president from 1975 until last March.

In addition to wanting to avoid a proxy fight, corporate executives viewed the New Yorker as “a mature” property with declining pages of advertising, relatively flat circulation and subsidiaries that contribute little to profits.

Another essential element in the equation was Shawn’s absolute dominance of the magazine, and the “real wall” that he has maintained between the editorial and business staffs.

“It (the wall) does exist. It is respected. It goes further than normal, way beyond the call of reason,” said Green. “ . . . It can be overdone. It can be overemphasized.”

“People in editorial aren’t allowed to make even eye contact with people in advertising,” said novelist Jay McInerney, a former fact checker at the New Yorker. “It’s a lower realm. Editorial is rarefied, not to be polluted with the crass commercialism of selling the magazine.”

Tale of the Telephones

There is the tale of the telephones. “Up until a few years ago, we had one of the world’s worst telephone systems,” Green remembered. “You had to ask for an outside line. Even the advertising department had to ask for an outside line,” and both had separate numbers. The phone system, Green realized, had to be improved. In the course of negotiations, however, “it became obvious that what concerned them most in editorial was that they have two systems. They were fearful the business department was going to listen in on the phone calls. They thought those business characters were willing to sell their souls, that they lived differently and were somehow less moral.”

Finally, Green resolved the dispute by placing the switchboard on the editorial floor.

As for the problem of installing a modern accounting system, “It took less than five years,” Green said dryly.

Green was asked if Shawn’s personality had been “an inhibiting force” to other potential buyers of the New Yorker over the years. “Oh, definitely,” he said. He remembered that some years back “a major stockholder” acquired about 20% of the magazine’s stock, with hopes of purchasing more shares. After conversations with Shawn, the stockholder abandoned his efforts, feeling that he had met a stone wall, Green said.

“Mr. Shawn essentially said he liked it the way it was and he didn’t intend to change it,” Green explained.

Principal Force

The investor was Warren E. Buffett, the principal force behind Capital Cities Communications’ acquisition of ABC. After he was rebuffed at the New Yorker, “Mr. Buffett said he would not go anywhere where he wasn’t wanted,” Green said.

Asked about the transaction, a spokesman for Buffett said: “We never comment on anything we hold or held in the past.”

For all his frustrations, the New Yorker’s former president speaks glowingly of Shawn, praising him as “the most intelligent human being I have ever met.

“He’s just better than we are, and anybody I know who has ever dealt with him feels that way,” Green said.

Shawn’s admirers are legion, and his image is at once inscrutable, untouchable and, at times, intimidating. Some, like former fact checker McInerney, compare him to “a mandarin, the perfect Chinese sage.” One novelist, a frequent New Yorker contributor who did not want to be identified, describes Shawn as a “Zen archer,” and explained: “I think Mr. Shawn has a Zen side. He fosters a climate, but runs it so absolutely, you find that without any force in the brutality sense, the man runs the place. With Shawn, there is steel, but you don’t see it openly.

Protective Feelings

” . . . There is a feeling the man is so gentle,” this writer added, “that you have to protect the man. But it is part of his genius. He fosters those protective feelings, but it is a marvelous style of management.”

And, said one of his senior editors of the experience of working with Shawn, “It’s a relationship such as you don’t have with anyone else. Everything is conducted in an atmosphere of trust and seriousness and faith. It brings out the best in you. To have someone taking you and your ideas that seriously is an amazing thing.”

In fact, said this staff member, for many New Yorker writers and editors, “their relationship with Shawn is as important as their relationship to their wives and children.”

Those who have had even tangential contact with Shawn praise his courtliness and his impeccable manners, so much so that, as Bagdikian put it, “he seems to be something out of the 19th Century.”

Shawn is small and balding, with a tendency to flush easily. His conservative shirt-and-tie uniform only enhances a personal style that many dub “Dickensian.” Shawn can be intimidating, it is said, but always in a quiet, almost invisible fashion. “If you are in an elevator, and there are three people and Shawn,” McInerney said, “you may feel that there are only three people.”

Magazine’s Conscience

To a one, they equate Shawn’s personality--his discipline, his precision and his depth of interests--with that of the magazine. “He is very much the magazine’s conscience and collective memory,” Pulitzer Prize winner and frequent New Yorker contributor Frances Fitzgerald said. “History,” said New Yorker staff writer Calvin Trillin, “will remember Shawn almost indistinguishably from the way history remembers the New Yorker.”

For that matter, Shawn’s entire life seems to be his magazine. He reads every word, every single word of editorial copy that ends up in the publication. Every piece of punctuation is checked, so that by the time an article appears, said frequent short-story contributor Alice Adams, “there are no surprises. You’ve argued every comma.”

Every “drawing,” as the magazine’s trademark cartoons are known, must meet Shawn’s approval. The New Yorker’s editor usually arrives at his office by 11 a.m., associates say, and usually he works “quite late.” Said Trillin: “I guess he doesn’t take vacations.”

Writing in Depth

When Trillin first came to the New Yorker, Shawn explained to him that all editing is done “as a suggestion.” Shawn’s philosophy that editors should help writers say what they want to say permeates the magazine. Although he wears a hearing aid these days, writers agree that one of Shawn’s great strengths is that he listens, and gives the feeling that he’s considered similar situations before and has given them deep thought.

Depth is clearly one of the New Yorker’s major strengths. The magazine “established a model of popular journalism that made it acceptable to write in depth,” Bagdikian said.

Over the years, the magazine has published such landmark works as John Hersey’s conscience-raising “Hiroshima,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.”

“It gave writers extraordinary freedom to take time and effort to become extremely knowledgeable in their research and gave them time to say what they wanted to say,” Bagdikian continued.

But the same quality also is a weakness, critics charge. They say the New Yorker’s long gray sprawls of type often ramble, irrelevant and pompous.

“I think most professionals who read the magazine wish some articles were not so long,” Bagdikian said. “But as soon as you begin making rules that hamper a brilliant and eccentric editor, you are in danger of turning him into an ordinary editor.”

The Wages of Secrecy

To be sure, he added, “One hears criticism. But maybe that is like criticizing Michelangelo for his reds.”

Critics, however, do charge that Shawn can be petty. Astonishingly, he works without a budget and feels no need to explain his complex manner of rewarding writers. Rates vary, and payment schedules are shrouded in secrecy.

The New Yorker, said McInerney, “is kind of like an Eastern European country. It’s secret and labyrinthine and has murky corridors of power and influence. Such a veil of reticence is thrown over the whole institution. Nobody is supposed to talk about it to others.”

Both Shawn and Fleischmann declined requests for interviews. And many of those who did agree to speak about the New Yorker did so only on the condition that their names not be used.

But one writer who did talk about it was the late John Cheever. “Then I ask Bill for more money, a scene that is embarrassing for both of us,” Cheever wrote in his journal about a meeting with Shawn one year just before Christmas. “ . . . I am accused of improvidence and make several long speeches about how I am harassed by indebtedness.”

On another occasion, Cheever, who had published many pieces in the magazine, approached the New Yorker’s lawyer about co-signing a bank mortgage for some of the $37,500 asking price of a new house. The lawyer refused, expressing the opinion to Cheever’s editor that it was a mistake for free-lance writers to own property. “What makes John think a writer can live in a house like that?” the lawyer asked.

Nobody Getting Rich

Even today, one editor said of New Yorker salaries: “They’re all right. They’re competitive. There’s nobody here who’s getting rich. Money isn’t why you would come to work here.”

Inside the New Yorker family, there is concern that the change in ownership will irreparably change the magazine itself. Despite repeated assurances from Newhouse that he “intends to preserve the quality of the magazine by maintaining its personnel, practices and traditions,” one editor said, the Newhouse purchase has caused “a head-on collision with reality.”

For, said former president Green, “the real world is different from the New Yorker’s world.” The real world, Green said, is one of demographics, “psychographics” and increasing competition for advertising from such magazines as Scientific American, Architectural Digest, Connoisseur and Town & Country, as well as from many high-gloss city and state magazines.

“All these magazines focused on a market that the New Yorker had had to itself until 1965,” Green said.

Advertisers predict that Newhouse’s acquisition will allow his Conde Nast Group to round out its upscale magazine package. Currently, those publications are marketed to advertisers at a special rate. The New Yorker, said Green, for one, “will probably pick up some fashion advertising, some cosmetic business.”

‘Never Messes With Success’

Those who have worked with some other major Newhouse acquisitions dismiss the New Yorker staff’s trepidations about the takeover. Newhouse, said a longtime employee at Random House, “never messes with success.”

But the day the New Yorker’s board of directors announced their decision to sell to Newhouse, an emotional Shawn told his editorial staff, “We were not asked for our approval, and we did not give our approval” to the sale. Friends of Fleischmann strongly dispute Shawn’s account, and Green stresses that he is “sure” the editor was “involved in” the negotiations with Newhouse.

Shawn’s emotional address to his staff, Green said, was consistent with his managerial style. “His staff was upset. He wanted to register that he was one of them. He was speaking as a leader of the assembled individuals. But Shawn’s behavior was incongruent with the facts.”

Green calls the events at the New Yorker “a docudrama of what happened in the financial publishing world.”

Said one of Shawn’s top editors, “We’re just going to have to get used to the idea that there aren’t going to be any answers soon. There’ll be no instant revelations, no instant change.”