The Times of Their Lives
One with Love, One with Anger -- Two Veterans Look Back
I have a fondness for the stories of the newsrooms of the past, filled with smoke, redolent with the smell of dirty paste pots, the sound of the bulletin bell on the wire service machines. I spent a lot of my childhood in such a place, watching my father edit copy, listening to the competing phone conversations of rough-looking men and neatly dressed women talking to cops and ministers and undertakers, and, later, running election night copy back to the composing room. I was in awe of the Linotype operators turning pots of molten lead into lines of type.
For those who share my weakness, Arthur Gelb’s City Room is a treasure. He was only eighteen years old and expecting to be drafted when he pitched up at the Times looking for a copy boy’s job. A high school teacher had urged him to read The Front Page, and in the Times newsroom he felt as if he had walked onto the set of the play. There was an overwhelming sense of purpose, fire, and life: the clacking of typewriters, the throbbing of great machines in the composing room on the floor above, reporters shouting for copy boys to pick up their stories. He went to work that very night, at a salary of sixteen dollars a week. He worked as hard as he could; sometimes he would simply curl up on a desk in the newsroom and spend the night.
The place was full of characters and eccentrics. Gelb seems to have remembered every one and all the tales that were told about them. These portraits alone make this book a gem. His first managing editor, Edwin L. “Jimmy” James, was as wacky as any of the denizens of the city room — “a cigar-chomping, dyed-in-the-wool newspaperman with a flashy wardrobe and a reputation for gruffness,” Gelb recalls. A keen racehorse gambler, he used his clerks as bookies, as did other reporters on the staff. Once, Gelb writes, James had to hide from the irate wife of a reporter who had lost his salary on the ponies. When the wife called the cops, a copy boy sounded the alarm and the staff bookies took quick leave of the newsroom.
Another character was Meyer Berger, a legend, largely because he was a gifted writer, but also because he was a newsroom cutup with a trademark routine. “I heard a loud whistle,” Gelb remembers. “I spun around in time to see the reporter, lanky, balding, and bespectacled, stand up from his chair, rub his hands together and blow into his closed-knuckled thumbs, again creating the piercing noise. He then leaped onto his desk and began a lap around the city room, jumping from desk to desk.” It was Berger’s way of celebrating the completion of a story. Today, a stunt like that would draw a visit to the HR people.
Women were a rarity in the newsroom then, but there was Rachel Kolloch McDowell, the religion editor, who always wore a feathered hat. She worked in her own office on the tenth floor (the newsroom was on the third) and would visit the city room only on occasion, “eavesdropping for evidence of the foul language against which, as president and founder of the Pure Language League, she waged a ruthless campaign.” She even managed to get permission to distribute anti-profanity literature with the company’s paychecks.
Like many of the newspapermen of his generation, Gelb used journalism as a ladder to climb up and out of the insular and often desperately poor world from which he came. Many of the great Times editors and writers seem to have come from very little. It didn’t take much education and certainly no social status to become a reporter in those days; the pay was absurd, but getting a job was pretty easy, since few respectable people wanted to be reporters. James Reston was an immigrant kid who grew up in Ohio with nothing. Russell Baker came from similarly straitened roots in Baltimore. Max Frankel and his family barely made it out of Germany before World War II. Taken together, their memoirs show The New York Times as a great engine of social mobility and a magic carpet into the wider world of politics, the arts, and people with power. Every one of them loved the Times for what it had given them, but none of them loved the Times more than did Arthur Gelb.
Gelb’s early childhood was spent in East Harlem. He was the son of immigrants from Ukraine who owned a small shop selling the children’s clothes his mother made by hand. The family later moved to the Bronx, a world that Gelb recreates with loving detail: the wonders of Loew’s Paradise Theater, “a beacon for everyone who yearned to escape to a romanticized world”; the Friday night dinners of gefilte fish, chopped chicken liver, chicken soup, roast chicken; the radio shows of Eddie Cantor, Fred Allen, and Jack Benny.
The Great Depression sent well-dressed men into the streets selling apples. Italian men played hurdy-gurdies while monkeys begged for small change. So once Gelb got his foot in the door at the Times, he worked tirelessly to stay there and to move up. Even before he was promoted from copy boy to reporter, he helped create an in-house newsletter that gave him and his collaborators the excuse to interview staff members, and of course to bring themselves to the attention of the people who could promote them. The inaugural edition of Timesweek, Gelb remembers, was July 18, 1944. He also used the excuse of working on the newsletter as a way of staying around beyond his normal working hours as the exciting news of the war in Europe poured into the newsroom. “I hated going home, afraid I’d miss something,” he writes.
He naturally gravitated toward the theater section of the paper, extending the love for the performing arts that had begun at the Paradise. By the mid-1950s, Gelb was working under Brooks Atkinson, the paper’s elegant and powerful chief critic. His ambition then was eventually to succeed Atkinson. That was never to be, but marriage opened an even larger window into the world of the arts. Gelb and Barbara Stone met at the Times and promptly fell in love. She was the niece of the violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz and the stepdaughter of the playwright and New Yorker writer S.N. Behrman. After an embarrassing encounter with his first finger bowl at Barbara’s parents’ apartment, the extended Heifetz family soon made Gelb comfortable spending the evening with giants like Heifetz, Toscanini, Horowitz, and Piatigorsky. With the family connections and eventually his job supervising much of the Times’s coverage of cultural topics, Arthur and Barbara Gelb would become major figures in the world of the arts. Even with a ferociously busy work life, Gelb managed to write with Barbara a major biography of Eugene O’Neill.
This book is as much a history of the city of New York as it is of the city’s leading newspaper. All sorts of politicians and performers and charlatans make walk-on appearances. Arthur Gelb so enjoyed his life at the Times and so reveled in the richness of his home city that he scarcely left out a single detail. He seems to have saved every memo he ever sent or received, remembers every lead that some boneheaded editor ruined, every reporter who ever worked with him or for him, and each winner and loser in every staff shuffle during his long tenure. This is at times excessive and one wants to shout at Gelb, “Editor, edit thyself!”
But wading through the excess is a fair enough price to pay for the pleasure of the more vivid yarns and portraits. And none is more interesting than the accounts of his friend and mentor Abe Rosenthal. The two were so close that they came to be seen as a single persona, “Abe-’n-Artie.”
Rosenthal eventually made Gelb his deputy when Rosenthal took over as metropolitan editor, launching Gelb toward the heights of power on the paper. But Gelb, who came to the Times a year or so after Rosenthal, had spotted Abe long before that and was immediately enthralled. “He was mesmerizing — like a virtuoso pianist or an action painter . . . . His fingers danced over the keys of his typewriter . . . . Those of us who observed Abe were beyond jealousy. He clearly had a gift that could not be duplicated.”
The two men came from similar backgrounds and had similar temperaments and ambitions. Both were hyper-enthusiastic and very emotional. “When Abe cried, I cried,” writes Gelb. They were not, however, completely alike. For one thing, Gelb recalls humorously, Arthur, the son of clothes makers, loved fine fabrics and nice clothes; Abe, when he was young, was a slob. Abe, Gelb says, “looked hip-hop before hip-hop.” He would sneer at Gelb’s habit of shopping at Paul Stuart until Abe became executive editor and decided he needed to look the part and became a Stuart patron himself.
Their friendship had a boisterous, boyish quality about it, until they became two of the most powerful men at the paper. In the early 1950s, for instance, after a good deal of wine, the two continued an argument that had been running for several years about the meaning of an obscure story by J.D. Salinger. The argument escalated until Gelb, in frustration, tossed Rosenthal to the ground and sat on his chest until Abe conceded the point.
Rosenthal was the more powerful of the Abe-’n’-Artie duo; Gelb married his own ambition to Rosenthal’s, becoming his deputy when Abe took his first step up the management ladder as metropolitan editor. Gelb later succeeded Abe in that job, but not before he was forced to serve for a time as “acting” editor. For that disappointment, Gelb blames James B. “Scotty” Reston, the luminously talented Washington bureau chief who was so close to the family that controls the Times that he was often called “the adopted Sulzberger.” Reston, Gelb charges, “had long been uncomfortable with the up-front, spontaneous style Abe and I had initiated, so inimical to the reserved, sedate mode practiced by members of the Washington bureau. And he was doubly uneasy with our close, forceful partnership that had contributed toward moving the paper in new directions, earning the enthusiastic support of [Turner] Catledge and [Clifton] Daniel.”
There is no doubt that Reston didn’t appreciate Abe’s manic and rough-edged style, but Gelb was the least of his concerns. Reston regarded the New York editorial management as rigid and willful, gutting the best writing that his bureau of stars — Anthony Lewis, Tom Wicker, Russell Baker, and Max Frankel — was producing.
Here Gelb, who has not an unkind word for most of the other people he worked with over the years, sails into Reston, carrying Rosenthal’s water in the oft-told story of the struggle between the two giants of the Times. The battle was initiated by Rosenthal, with the assent of Punch Sulzberger. The plan was to replace the Washington bureau chief Tom Wicker, Reston’s man, with Abe’s friend, James Greenfield. Reston objected, and got Sulzberger to reverse the decision. Rosenthal was furious and Sulzberger brought Reston to New York to run the newspaper, and become Rosenthal’s boss.
Gelb makes Rosenthal’s argument that the move was necessary because the Washington bureau’s performance was subpar. But in fact, the scheme was nothing more than a power play by Rosenthal designed to reduce Reston’s huge authority.
Reston failed as the top editor and headed back to Washington, with Rosenthal named to replace him. Gelb was bitterly disappointed that he was not named as the paper’s number two man, continuing his role as Abe’s backup. Instead, as Gelb tells it, Rosenthal was forced by Sulzberger to name Seymour Topping as his deputy, leaving Gelb as metropolitan editor. Gelb sees Reston as again the cause of his frustration, and certainly Reston had tried hard to derail Rosenthal as his successor and then to insert his own man, Anthony Lewis, by then London bureau chief, as Abe’s deputy. Sulzberger, it would seem, wisely split the difference, giving Rosenthal the top job, but, apparently thinking Abe-’n-Artie were too much of good thing, preventing Abe from taking Gelb as number two.
A few years later, Frankel, a true-blue Reston man, was made Sunday editor, again disappointing Gelb — who had been so sure that his friend Rosenthal would prevail in giving him the post that he had already begun making plans to change the Sunday paper. Again, Gelb blames Reston.
Gelb is as ungenerous to Frankel as he is to Reston, pointing out that it was during Frankel’s tenure as Washington bureau chief that The Washington Post started to run away with the Watergate story, and charging that since Frankel had little experience with cultural coverage he was not a successful Sunday editor. But when Gelb does finally become the number two editor on the paper, he seems more disappointed than pleased in this account, apparently because it is Frankel, the Reston loyalist, who gives him the job.
It is not surprising that a man who was virtually joined at the hip to Abe Rosenthal would take his side in retelling the great fight with Reston. Still, one would expect that a man of Gelb’s talent and news savvy would have brought a bit more perspective to this story. In fact, Reston’s total contribution to the Times and to journalism in general deserves a better accounting than the grudging Gelb can manage. Indeed, the one failure of this book is that for all of Gelb’s appealing story-telling, for all the precise and detailed research and recollection, he draws very few lessons from his long life in the trade and his privileged position near the top of the masthead. Gelb mentored scores of talented reporters and was, and remains, a fountain of story ideas. His take on the political battles at the paper, however, make him seem more a lackey than a leader.
Nonetheless, City Room is a wonderful account of life at the world’s greatest newspaper. Gelb’s love for the institution is well placed. “Can you imagine what it was like for an editor to arrive at work each morning, to look up from his desk at a sea of the most talented reporters in the newspaper world,” Gelb asks. We can all understand why Gelb concludes his book with this simple statement: “Those were the happiest days of my life.”
John L Hess’s memories of his time at the Times could not be more different. His is an odd, disjointed book, but is also an amusing screed aimed at the Times itself, its greatest stars, and many of the conventions and hypocrisies of journalism. Here is his basic conclusion about the newspaper where he spent his professional life from 1954 to 1978 serving as reporter and editor:
“Quality is there, to be sure, and it is visible every morning, like raisins in oatmeal, though one should examine each one before swallowing. Some of the Pulitzer awards were deserved, some were appalling. Talent is constantly attracted by the Times’s aura, its clout, and its money, but for a recruit to sustain individuality and idealism in that mill of mediocrity is exhausting.”
That last sentence seems autobiographical, and much of this pastiche of a book seems designed to show Hess’s own brilliance in contrast to the numbing constraints of organized journalism. Like Gelb, he whacks away at Scotty Reston, but he spreads his scorn more widely. Hess is actually fairly charitable toward Gelb, for whom he wrote an investigative series about the awful state of New York nursing homes. Gelb, Hess says, “shared Abe’s [Rosenthal’s] enthusiasm without the meanness.”
Hess is of that generation that often wandered into journalism for the lack of anything better to do. Although this book is not systematic enough to give a real sense of who Hess is, he does say he had been a merchant seaman until his back gave out and he went to work for The Bisbee Daily Review in Arizona. “I’d never been a reporter before, but I’d never been a seaman before I boarded my first ship,” Hess writes. “Actually, it requires more craftsmanship to qualify as an able-bodied seaman than as a journeyman reporter.”
Hess seems to have been happiest as a Paris correspondent and then later as food critic for the Times but he always struggled against the system. He says he was once so frustrated with the editing of one of his pieces that he shouted across the newsroom at the offending editor: “My name was on that story. You made me look as stupid as you are!”
Much of this book is highly entertaining and all of it is brightly written. But if Gelb’s book needs some pruning, Hess’s needs some structuring and narrative line. Together, however, the two memoirs form a complementary pair of portraits, one loving, one angry, of life at The New York Times.
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