Behind the Times (45 page)

The column’s name was changed, to “Patterns.” Gross changed too. He attended a retirement party for a fellow fashion writer, a good
Times
woman. She was sixty-five; she had been at the
Times
forty-one years, and never wanted to work anywhere else. Elsewhere in the room were a half dozen others just like her, except at earlier stages in their
Times
career. Some people, though not Gross, regarded them, uncharitably, as “the coven,” and members of a closed culture. Six months later, he left the
Times.
He has burnished his reputation, and makes a very good living as a magazine writer.

In a notorious passage in his novel
Scoop
, Evelyn Waugh described the offices of the London newspaper
The Beast
, where neurotic men in shirtsleeves and green eyeshades spent their days “insulting and betraying one another in surroundings of unredeemed squalor.” Many
Times
people made the point that the real-life
Times
, albeit in ways more benign than the fictional
Beast
, was a place of high ambition and sharpened rivalries—for stories, for bylines, for play on page one, for new and more glorious assignments. Former
Times
reporter Michael Norman served with the Marines in Vietnam, one of the very few
Times
men with a full tour on the battlefield. No stranger to turmoil, Norman brought a cool eye to the
Times
“experience.” He likened the
Times
newsroom, where he worked from 1981 to 1986, to a kind of department store, say,
Filene’s basement, during a big clearance sale: Reporters were jostling for the top jobs, like a roomful of people grabbing for a few pairs of socks.

In the Catledge era, the newsroom was considered an orderly, even congenial place. Reporters sat according to rank. The best men—Meyer Berger, Peter Kihss, Murray Schumach, later, Homer Bigart (the stars were invariably male then)—occupied the front desks, closest to the city editor and his assistants. The middle-level reporters sat behind the stars; far to the rear of the room were the newest staff members. When Russell Baker first walked into the
Times
newsroom in November 1954, he was shocked by how different it was from the
Baltimore Sun
, where he had worked the previous seven years. At the
Sun
, anyone who had been around five years was considered an old hand; at the
Times
, Baker got the impression that everybody intended to stay “until life’s sunset.” The
Sun
was a rough-and-tumble place; the contented middle-aged
Times
men in business suits, Baker thought, gave the newsroom the aspect of
an insurance office. Darnton the cultural historian filled out Baker’s sketch, describing how clusters of
Times
reporters grouped together according to age, life-style and social background (in his day, Harvard versus City College).
These subgroups held off the copy editors and helped the reporters deal with their own insecurities. Darnton remembered how four or five of his friends, all private-university men, gathered informally to decipher a City Hall document on some newly issued welfare regulations. The man assigned the story by the editors had to do a rush job, but was mystified by the impenetrable bureaucratese in the report (some things never change). The group collectively agreed on what it thought the regulations meant, and the reporter wrote the story accordingly.

The place was tense enough, even in these supposed good old days. “There has always been
‘low morale,’ ” said John Corry, who joined the
Times
in 1956 and stayed until 1988. “There’s no such thing as ‘high morale.’ ” A good
Times
man like Corry, intent on adapting, looked on the bright side. “I liked the old linoleum floors in the newsroom and the sense of one vast space. I liked the pecking order of the reporters, beginning with that front row of talent; the people sitting on each other’s desks, schmoozing.” While Rosenthal stirred up the
newsroom, rewarding the younger, eager hustlers (including Corry), the old habits were hard to break.
Times
men continued to drift into work at 10:00
A.M.
or later. The newsroom emptied around noon, and luncheons sometimes stretched lazily into the mid-afternoon. “
We simply cannot run a newspaper if all the top executives are out to lunch until 3
P.M.
,” Rosenthal complained in a confidential memo to his top deputies after he became executive editor. “Time after time other desk editors look for their superiors and can’t find them.” Five years later, Rosenthal was still unhappy about the length of the lunch hour. “Day after day, top editors and their deputies, sometimes
whole groups of editors, are gone until 3
P.M.
or later.”

These efforts to shape up the staff were paralleled by a succession of “improvements” of the third-floor newsroom. The floors were carpeted to cut down noise; the introduction of computer terminals was accompanied by rearrangements of the news desks. Specialized departments, such as science-technology news, were moved one floor up. The Sunday departments had traditionally been on another floor; but even within the same departments, jurisdictions were carefully demarcated. A former
Chicago Tribune
reporter, Terri Brooks, found work at the
Times
in the mid-1970s in the Sunday Week in Review section. In the next aisle was the Sunday
Book Review
section, Brooks remembered, “but
no one ever talked to you; it was just like an invisible wall ran down the aisle.” Brooks was gone from the
Times
in less than a year. The segregation extended outside the office, to the lunchtime eating places frequented by different groups and specialties. The top editors patronized the Century (a male-only club until the 1980s), Orso’s in the theater district, and sometimes, for dinner, the Russian Tea Room. Younger editors chose inexpensive Greek, Chinese, and Thai restaurants along Eighth Avenue. A floating group of reporters on the arts and cultural desk, led by Richard Shepard and Gerald Gold, had a regular table in the restaurant of the gone-to-seed Edison Hotel a block north of the
Times.
As a good-natured needle to the upscale dining habits of the top editors, Shepard renamed the Edison luncheonette, with its delicatessen-style food, “The Polish Tea Room.”

More managerial layers were added by Max Frankel, when he became editor. By 1992 the number of different news desks had reached twenty-seven … and still counting. The good
Times
man knew how to live in the shadows of this vast bureaucracy. The sports columnist Dave Anderson joined the paper in 1966; after almost three decades,
he accepted, as a fact of
Times
life, his detachment from his fellow workers. “If Vincent Canby or Anna Quindlen got on the elevator with me today,
I wouldn’t recognize either of them,” he said cheerfully. Design consultants, called in to rearrange the workspace to reflect the new editing desks, made separate what had been whole. “They put in clusters, dividers, islands, cubicles, walls,” says John Corry. “We no longer had the old interchange.” He understood how much the newsroom had changed one sour morning in late 1988. “I came in and found a memorandum from the publisher, about the current hard business climate and the need to keep costs down, stuffed in my mailbox. They would never do it that way in the old days.” Frankel also created new supervisory titles, partly for reasons of “affirmative action”—to promote a number of women and minorities—and partly because Frankel, as a colleague put it, “has a Germanic penchant for organizational boxes.” The colleague added: “the place was physically unattractive, crowded, and practically windowless to start with, and as more partitions went up, there was less room, and you were more removed from daylight.”

By the late 1980s, the good
Times
man’s attention had turned inward, to the computer screen of his partitioned work module. Modest cooperation gave way to undisguised careerism. Michael Norman says experience taught him never to leave anything useful out on his desk: Once, someone lifted his dictionary. At one point, Norman was assigned to the metropolitan news desk as a rewrite man, shaping reporters’ work into acceptable
Times
stories. The work excited and energized him—he was on the desk at the time of the explosion of the
Challenger
space shuttle and the U.S. retaliatory stroke against Qaddafi.

The competition to make page one, “P-1,” as they called it, and the “second front,” the front page of the Metro section, was keen—and not only for the reporters. Editors competed for the space as well; metro wanted more “starts” on P-l than national and foreign, and vice versa. The new Metro editor that year was John Vinocur, a hard-driving, often hard-headed former reporter who had covered Europe. Metro controlled the
Times
rewrite desk and Vinocur calculated that one way to wield more influence on the front page was to involve rewrite in as many of the big breaking stories as possible. Sometimes “his” rewrite men—and they were all men—would completely refashion a piece: literally rewrite it and give it the shape Vinocur demanded. This often
infuriated the editors on the other desks; how dare Vinocur rework “their” stories. Frequently, on a big breaking story, Vinocur ordered rewrite simply to take the piece over—the rewrite men did most of the reporting by phone—and thus important stories, such as the Tylenol poisoning or the Liberty Bicentennial, came under Vinocur’s control. None of this, of course, endeared the rewrite men to the rest of the staff, especially, said Norman, “the young ones from the Ivy League, pups with thin skins and literary ambition who hated having their copy touched.” Vinocur’s style of management soon created chaos in the newsroom. To survive, the staff actually drew close. Reporters began to hang together in Dartonian self-selecting groups—by age, by beat, by common gripe and ambition. To Norman, it was like men on the battlefield “looking for a steady hand, someone to keep them from going under.”

The
Times
stirred military images as well for William Serrin, a contemporary of Norman’s. Serrin had been hired in 1979 by the
Times
national desk. While a reporter for the
Detroit Free Press
he had shared in the paper’s award of a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for its coverage of the Detroit ghetto riots. A pleasant, open man, Serrin used to nod good morning to people he passed in the newsroom. He received no response and, after a while, stopped trying to make eye contact. Soon he set his own eyes straight ahead. The gaze of the
Times
staff, he remembered, recalled a passage in one of the World War II novels of James Jones. “Jones wrote about ‘the one-thousand-yard stare’ of combat infantrymen under fire too long,” Serrin says. “That’s the kind of look I was getting.” Serrin adjusted to the
Times
’ ways. During his early years, Serrin convinced himself that he had one of the two or three best jobs in all of journalism. “The editors told me I was being
hired to be a star, that I would have the opportunity to write for the
Times Magazine
, where my articles would be read by the most important opinion makers in the country.” Life at the
Times
dazzled Serrin at first. Detroit was a major media market, and the
Free Press
one of the better papers in the country. But nothing in journalism had prepared Serrin for the
Times
’ expansiveness. “I’m given an out-of-town assignment. An editor asks me, ‘How much do you need for expenses?’ What do I know? I pull out a number: ‘What about $3,000?’ ‘No problem.’ I take the elevator to the eleventh floor, go to the accounting-office window, and put in a chit for $3,000. That’s impressive for a baker’s son from Saginaw, Michigan.”

Serrin picked up on the changes in the newsroom atmosphere—this was the 1980s, high noon of the Rosenthal era, with its emphasis on reporters’ hustle. He joined the Filene’s clearance-sale frenzy. “Ninety-five percent of the stories I did were self-generated. An older
Times
man took me aside and told me, ‘Don’t start too fast.’ That is, don’t burn yourself out. But I thought, I have to. This is the big chance for stardom, to be one of the hot shots.” The older man’s advice proved sound. Serrin began to sense that his editors thought he was “pro-worker” and “too opinionated”—specifically, that his stories were somehow failing to meet the
Times
’ unspoken centrist standards. A top executive admonished Serrin for “quoting too many pro-labor people” in his stories—for example, the writer Michael Harrington. Serrin was reminded by the executive that he was supposed to cover “the workplace in America, not unions.” The editor was a company man, and like a good
Times
man, strove to impress his superiors. Serrin watched and learned. He was invited to present article ideas during a meeting with the editors of the
Times Magazine.
He told them of a story that had fascinated him. It was about “work in America,” in this case focusing on a group of black women who plucked chickens in a Southern factory, and their perseverance despite unspeakable conditions. “As soon as I saw the stricken faces, in a flash I knew what they
didn’t
want.” As the cultural historian Darnton would put it, Serrin was learning “to internalize the norms” of the
Times.

The baker’s boy from Saginaw chose to go along in the part of a good
Times
man; “I took pains to dress like them and act like them. I had my own standards for what I wanted to accomplish.” The editors wanted “trend stories” about the workplace and not stories about the AFL-CIO and working-class people. Such stories had to be done in the field and, says Serrin, “they were time consuming—that bothered editors.” He obliged them to a point, and within the limits of his interests, producing coverage of such big-picture matters as the plight of the American steel industry and changes in the family farms of the Midwest. In early January 1984, he wrote about the
Homestead Works in the Monongahela Valley of Pennsylvania, the center of American steel-making for over a century. The week before—just after the Christmas holidays—U.S. Steel announced the closing of two dozen plants around the country; 3,800 workers in the valley lost their jobs, and Serrin told one part of the story through the remembrances of one family, operators of a candy store in Homestead. Many of the steel workers had
migrated from Europe to America early in the century and were members of the Eastern Orthodox Church; they brought with them their customs, including a taste for hand-dipped candy, fashioned into chocolate rabbits and baskets, at Eastertime. Serrin quoted George Couvaris, owner of the Sweet Shoppe on Eighth Avenue in Homestead; he described how the mill produced rifles for the Union soldiers during the Civil War as well as the rails that railroad workers used to build the West. Now Couvaris’s old customers “can’t afford to buy candy anymore.” Two years later, in July 1986, Serrin returned to the valley to report on the final closing of the Works; he interviewed two of the twenty-three men who had shut off the maintenance equipment for the last time in a plant which, as late as the Second World War, employed twenty thousand people. The story appeared in the
Times
under the headline, “A Chapter of Industrial History Closes with the Homestead Steel Works.”