Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (26 page)

As James turns into a hermaphrodite and then into Jan, the prose in the book, which is cloying enough to begin with, turns into a kind of overembellished, simile-laden verbiage that makes the style of Victorian women novelists seem spare. Exclamation points and italicized words appear with increasing frequency. Everything
blushes. James Morris blushes. His “small breasts blossomed like blushes.” He starts talking to the flowers and wishing them a Happy Easter. He becomes even more devoted to animals. He is able for the first time (“the scales dropped from my eyes”) to look out a plane window and see things on the ground below not as cars and homes seen at a distance but “Lo!… as dolls’ houses and dinky toys.” Shortly before the operation, he and his wife, Elizabeth, whose understanding defies understanding, take a trip, both as women, through Oregon. “How merrily we traveled!” Morris writes. “What fun the Oregonians gave us! How cheerfully we swapped badinage with boatmen and lumberjacks, flirtatious garage hands and hospitable trappers! I never felt so liberated, or more myself, nor was I ever more fond of Elizabeth. ‘Come on in, girls,’ the motel men would say, and childish though I expect it sounds to you, silly in itself, perhaps a little pathetic, possibly grotesque, still if they had touched me with an accolade of nobility, or clad me ceremonially in crimson, I could not have been more flattered.” The only thing Morris neglects to write into this passage is a little face with a smile on it.

Morris is infuriatingly vague about the reactions of her children (she blandly insists they adjusted perfectly) and of Elizabeth (she says they are still the closest of friends). “I am not the first,” Morris writes, “to discover that one recipe for an idyllic marriage is a blend of affection, physical potency and sexual incongruity.” (Idyllic marriage? Where your husband becomes a lady? I suppose we owe this to creeping Harold-and-Vitaism; still, it is one of the more ridiculous trends of recent years to confuse great friendships with great marriages; great marriages are when you have it all.) As for her new sex
life, Jan Morris lyrically trills that her sexuality is now unbounded. But how?

Unfortunately, she is a good deal more explicit about the details of what she refers to as “truly the symptoms of womanhood.” “The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became,” she writes. “I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly, incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.… I discovered that even now men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative, and certainly less self-centered than they are themselves; so I generally obliged them.… I did not particularly want to be good at reversing cars, and did not in the least mind being patronized by illiterate garage-men, if it meant they were going to give me some extra trading stamps.… And when the news agent seems to look at me with approval, or the man in the milk-cart smiles, I feel absurdly elated, as though I have been given a good review in the Sunday
Times
. I know it is nonsense, but I cannot help it.”

The truth, of course, is that Jan Morris does not know it is nonsense. She thinks that is what it is about. And I wonder about all this, wonder how anyone in this day and age can think that this is what being a woman is about. And as I wonder, I find myself thinking a harsh feminist thought. It would be a man, I think. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?

June, 1974

I feel bad about what I’m going to do here. What I’m going to do here is write something about Dorothy Schiff, and the reason I feel bad about it is that a few months ago, I managed to patch things up with her and now I’m going to blow it. She had been irritated with me for several years because I told the story about her and Otto Preminger’s sauna on the radio, but we managed to get through a pleasant dinner recently, which made me happy—not because I care whether or not Dorothy Schiff is irritated with me but simply because I have a book coming out this summer, and if she were speaking to me, I might have a shot at some publicity in the
New York Post
. Ah, well. It’s not easy being a media columnist. The publicity I had in mind, actually, was this little feature the
Post
runs on Saturdays called “At Home With,” where semi-famous people tell their favorite recipes. Mine is beef borscht.

Dorothy Schiff is the publisher, editor and owner of the
New York Post
, America’s largest-selling afternoon newspaper. I used to work there. The
Post
is a tabloid that has a smaller news hole than the New York
Daily News
—five front pages, various parts of which are often
rented out to Chock full o’ Nuts and Lüchow’s. It also has a center magazine section containing mostly
Washington Post
columnists, a first-rate sports section and drama critic, and Rose Franzblau, Earl Wilson and Dear Abby. It takes about eleven minutes to read the
Post
, and there are more than half a million New Yorkers like me who spend twenty cents six days a week to kill eleven minutes reading it. It is probably safe to say that fewer and fewer young people read the
Post
, and that fewer and fewer young people understand why anyone does. It is a terrible newspaper.

The reason it is, of course, is Dorothy Schiff. A great deal has been written about Mrs. Schiff in various places over the past years, and some of it—I’m thinking here of Gail Sheehy’s article in
New York
at the end of 1973—has captured perfectly her coquettish giddiness, her penchant for trivia and her affection for gossip. It is taken for granted in these articles that Dolly Schiff is a very powerful woman—she is in fact very powerful for a woman and not particularly powerful for a newspaper publisher. What is rarely discussed is her product. In Sheehy’s article, I suppose this was partly because Mrs. Schiff had manuscript approval, and partly because the publisher of
New York
, like so many other men Mrs. Schiff toys with, thinks that someday he will buy the
New York Post
from her. But it is a major omission: There is no other big-city newspaper in America that so perfectly reflects the attitudes and weaknesses of its owner. Dorothy Schiff has a right to run her paper any way she likes. She owns it. But it seems never to have crossed her mind that she might have a public obligation to produce a good newspaper. Gail Sheehy quite cleverly compared her with Scheherazade, but it would be more apt,
I think, to compare her with Marie Antoinette. As in let them read schlock.

In 1963, when I went to work there as a reporter, the
New York Post
was located in a building on West Street, near the Battery. The first day I went there, I thought I had gotten out of the elevator in the fire exit. The hallway leading to the city room was black. Absolutely black. The smell of urine came wafting out of the men’s room in the middle of the long hallway between the elevator and the city room. The glass door to the city room was filmed with dust, and written on it, with a finger, was the word “Philthy.” The door was cleaned four years later, but the word remained; it had managed to erode itself onto the glass. Then, through the door, was the city room. Rows of desks jammed up against one another, headset phones, manual typewriters, stacks of copy paper, cigarette butts all over the floor—all of it pretty routine for a city room, albeit a city room of the 1920s. The problem was the equipment. The staff of the
Post
was small, but it was too large for the city room and for the number of chairs and desks and telephones in it. If you arrived at the
Post
five minutes late, there were no chairs left. You would go hunt one up elsewhere on the floor, drag it to an empty space, and then set off to find a phone. You cannot be a newspaper reporter without a phone. The phones at the
Post
were the old-fashioned headset type, with an earpiece-mouthpiece part that connected to a wire headpiece. Usually you could find the earpiece-mouthpiece part, but only occasionally was there a headpiece to go with it, which meant that you spent the day with your head cocked at a seventy-degree angle trying to balance this tiny phone against your shoulder as you typed. If you managed to assemble a complete telephone in the
morning, it was necessary to lock it in your desk during lunch, or else it would end up on someone else’s head for the afternoon. The trouble with that was that half the staff did not have desks, much less desk drawers to lock anything in.

None of this was supposed to matter. This was the newspaper business. You want air conditioning, go work at a newsmagazine. You want clean toilets, go work in advertising. Besides, there was still a real element of excitement to working at the
New York Post
in 1963. The paper had been a good paper once, when James Wechsler was the editor, and for a while it was possible to believe that it would be again. Mrs. Schiff had kicked Wechsler upstairs, had changed the focus of the paper from hard-hitting, investigative and left-wing to frothy, gossipy and women-oriented, but we all thought that would change eventually. At some point in the next few years, several New York papers would shut down. None of us really thought the
Post
would. “The most depressing thing about the
Post
,” a reporter who once worked there used to say, “is that it will never shut down.” When the other papers folded, the
Post
would have to get better. It would have to absorb the superior financial-page reporters from the other afternoon papers, the superior columnists from the
Herald Tribune
. It would have to run two more pages of news, enlarge its Washington bureau, beef up its foreign coverage, hire more staff, pay them better, stop skimping on expense accounts. Why I believed this I don’t know, but I believed it for years. The managing editor, Al Davis, who once dumped four gallons of ice water on my head in an attempt to tell me how he felt about the fact that I was leaving the
Post
for a while to go live in Europe, was fired in 1965,
and we all had several months of euphoria thinking his replacement would make a difference. Blair Clark, the former CBS newsman and thread millionaire, came in as Mrs. Schiff’s assistant—he too thought he would be able to buy the
Post
from her—and we all thought he would make a difference. The
Trib
folded, and the
Journal
, and the
World Journal Tribune
, and we all thought that would make a difference. Nothing made a difference.

I first met Mrs. Schiff a few weeks after I started working at the
Post
. I was summoned to lunch in her office, a privilege very few other reporters were granted in those days, and the reason for it had mainly to do with the fact that my parents were friends of her daughter, and I suspect she felt safe with me, thought I was of her class or some such. “You’re so lucky to be working,” she said to me at that meeting. “When I was your age, I never did anything but go to lunch.” Mrs. Schiff’s custom during these lunch meetings—perhaps as a consequence of spending so much of her youth in expensive restaurants at midday—was to serve a sandwich from the fly-strewn luncheonette on the ground floor of the
Post
building. A roast beef sandwich. Everyone who had lunch with her got a roast beef sandwich. Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy and me, to name a few. She thought it was very amusing of her, and I suppose it was. She would sit on one of her couches, looking wonderful-for-her-age—she is seventy-two now, and she still looks wonderful-for-her-age—and talk to whoever was on the other couch. There was, as far as I could tell, almost no way to have an actual conversation with her. She dominated, tantalized, sprinkled in little tidbits, skipped on to another topic. Once, I remember, she told me apropos of nothing
that President Johnson had been up to see her the week before.

“Do you know what he told me?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“He told me that Lady Bird fell down on the floor in a dead faint the other day, with her eyes bulging out of her head.”

“Yes?” I said, thinking the story must go on to make a point, to relate to whatever we’d just been talking about. But that was it.