Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (17 page)

In other words,
Cigar Aficionado
can be seen as
Martha Stewart Living
for males, a guidebook for the man who is not quite secure about whether he has truly become what used to be called in my high school a suave dog (with “suave” pronounced, of course, as if it rhymed with “wave”).

Someone who is analytically inclined, I realize, would maintain that red suspenders and cigars, one formerly associated with firemen and the other with people like fight managers, have a significant connection. Is it an accident, he’d ask, that people who make their living fiddling with money, an enterprise traditionally considered effete
compared with manufacturing a decent American widget, have taken on the symbols of tough guys?

One problem I have with that approach is that the Wall Street types who wear red suspenders and smoke cigars don’t necessarily work on Wall Street; some of them just want to look like Michael Douglas in the movie. Another problem I have with it is that my normal response to hearing the analytically inclined ask whether something is an accident is to say, “Yeah, probably.”

That attitude makes me equally skeptical about the possibility that this all has to do with sex. After all, even Freud may have said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” To which Jung may or may not have added, “Sometimes it’s an affectation.” To which my cousin Sam would have said, “Or a stogie, bozo.”

1996

The way I see it, some enterprising executive who would be willing to work for, say, $10 or $20 million a year might be able to maneuver himself into a position to become CEO of The Walt Disney Company. Of course he’d have to play his cards right.

The thought that the CEO job at Disney might be available first occurred to me in 1988, during a protracted strike of Hollywood screenwriters. One of the issues in contention was the studios’ insistence that, because of the “new, colder realities facing the entertainment industry,” the writers accept a rollback of the residual payments they were receiving.

In an article in
The New Yorker
, Joan Didion pointed out that the total received in residual payments by all nine thousand members of the Writers Guild was $58 million, and that the 1987 compensation of The Walt Disney Company’s CEO, Michael Eisner, was estimated at $63 million.

The juxtaposition of those two figures cried out for a mathematical adjustment. You could almost hear the readers murmuring, “If the studios simply subtracted fifty-eight million dollars from Eisner’s compensation to pay the residuals, the screenwriters would be happy, Eisner would still have five million dollars a year to live on, and everyone could go back to work.”

But Disney’s board of directors couldn’t have simply subtracted $58 million from Eisner’s compensation. That would have indicated a lack of confidence in the CEO, and that, in turn, would have weakened the stock—including the stock of the directors.

So, for the good of the stockholders, it would have been better to replace Eisner than ask him to take a $58 million pay cut. That’s why I thought some ambitious executive might, while having a round of golf with some members of the Disney board, mention that he would, if given Eisner’s job at the same level of compensation, pay screenwriters’ residuals for the entire industry out of his own salary, finance his own car and driver, and never put the National Secretaries Day flowers for his secretary on the expense account.

At the time, after all, there were, as there always are, five hundred executives considered capable of running a Fortune 500 company. As I remember the 1988 figures—
BusinessWeek
’s annual issue on executive compensation has always been the one business publication I don’t miss—people were running some of the top ten American corporations for as little as a few million dollars annually. Some CEOs may be less capable than others, of course, but $55 million a year less capable?

Disney directors apparently thought so. Eisner remained as the CEO who led the company into Euro Disney, which has now piled up debts of $4 billion despite the insistence of the Disney officials that it is attracting as many people as their projections indicated it would draw.

When I read about those projections being on target, I was reminded of a man in Nova Scotia I’ll call Mr. Martin, who used to sell picnic tables for $15 until he discovered, after being urged by a friend to do some calculations, that the materials in each table were costing him $17. So this sort of thing can happen to anyone—although it
should be said that nobody ever thought of paying Mr. Martin $63 million a year.

Now Disney wants to build another theme park, called Disney’s America, near the Civil War battlefields of northern Virginia, and wants the state to pitch in $132 million for the necessary road improvements. Why should that worry a CEO who makes only half that much annually? Because $60 million is no longer Eisner’s salary. The directors, apparently pleased as punch about Euro Disney, last year gave him a compensation package of $202 million.

So Disney, in its public relations battle with opponents of Disney’s America, is faced with another tempting juxtaposition of numbers. Virginians can see that if Eisner himself paid for the roads he’d still have a $70 million annual income—$10 million more than the one he lived perfectly comfortably on as late as 1988.

That is not the only embarrassment. A group of distinguished historians oppose Disney’s America as a project that will “create synthetic history by destroying real history.” The natural way to counterattack is to accuse the historians of being elitists who have lost touch with the common American. And who is the just-folks spokesman for that populist message? A man who pulls down $202 million a year.

Which is why I think this is the time for some wily executive to offer to do Eisner’s job for, say, $10 million a year, enabling Disney to pay for the road improvements and have enough money left over to hire fifteen $4 million-a-year CEOs from other corporations.

After working for $10 million for a few years, the wily executive would be in position to go for the real money.

1994

ON CEO LLOYD BLANKFEIN’S STATEMENT THAT GOLDMAN SACHS IS “DOING GOD’S WORK”

December 2009

SEC ACCUSES GOLDMAN OF FRAUD IN HOUSING DEAL
—New York Times
headline

May 2010

THE YEARS WITH NAVASKY

“When I was approached about writing a column for
The Nation,
I asked for only one guarantee: Would I be allowed to make fun of the editor? When it comes to civil liberties, we all have our own priorities.”

Looking back, I realize that my first mistake was involving myself with an occasional publication called
Monocle
, a journal of political satire whose editor was the person I came to refer to as the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky. In those days, when we were all young and optimistic, I used to assure Navasky that the lack of a sense of humor was probably not an insurmountable handicap for the editor of a humor magazine. (He always responded with a nervous
chuckle.) As an editor, after all, he was exacting. During the New York newspaper strike of 1963,
Monocle
published a parody edition of the
New York Post
, then as predictable in its liberalism as it was later to become in its sleaziness, and I suggested as the front-page headline
COLD SNAP HITS OUR TOWN; JEWS, NEGROES SUFFER MOST
. Navasky refused to use the headline merely because there was no story inside the paper to go with it—a situation that a less precise thinker might have considered part of the parody.

Even then, I must say, Navasky’s hiring policies seemed erratic—particularly his appointing as advertising manager a high-minded young man who found advertising so loathsome and disgusting that, as a matter of principle, he refused to discuss the subject with anyone. What was most memorable about Victor S. Navasky at
Monocle
, though, was his system of payment to contributors—a system derived, according to my research, from a 1938 chart listing county-by-county mean weekly wages for hospital Gray Ladies. My strongest memory of
Monocle
is receiving a bill from Navasky for a piece of mine the magazine had published—along with a note explaining that the office expenses for processing the piece exceeded what he had intended to pay me for it.

In the late sixties,
Monocle
folded. I wasn’t surprised. My assurances to Navasky about his not needing a sense of humor had been quite insincere. Also, I had once observed the advertising manager’s reaction to being phoned at the
Monocle
office by a prospective advertiser: “Take a message,” he hissed at the secretary, as he bolted toward the door. “Tell him I’m in the bathroom. Get rid of him.” Then, only about ten years later, Navasky fetched up as the new editor of
The Nation
. It was difficult for me to imagine that he would dare pay Gray Lady rates at a magazine of national reputation—even a money-losing magazine of national reputation. (Historians tell us that
The Nation
was founded many years ago in order to give a long succession of left-wing entrepreneurs the opportunity to lose money in a good cause.)
The Nation
, after all, had always railed against bosses who exploit workers. I thought about Navasky’s stewardship of
Monocle
for a while, and then sat down to write him a letter of congratulations on being named editor of
The Nation
. It said, in its
entirety, “Does money owed writers from
Monocle
carry over?” I received no reply.

I realize that this history with Navasky is one reason for speculation by scholars in the field about the sort of negotiations that could have led to my agreeing to do a column for
The Nation
. (“If he got caught by Navasky twice, he must be soft in the head.”) The entire tale can now be told. The negotiations took place over lunch at a bar in the Village. I picked up the check. I had asked Navasky beforehand if he minded my bringing along my wife, Alice. I figured that she would be a reminder that I was no longer the carefree young bachelor who barely complained about being stiffed regularly by the
Monocle
bookkeepers, but a responsible married man with two daughters and an automatic washer-dryer combination (stack model). Navasky, the cunning beast, said Alice would be most welcome. He knew her to be a sympathetic soul who somehow saw a connection in his saving money on writers and the possibility that he might buy a new suit.

Once we had our food, Navasky made his first wily move. He suggested two very specific ideas for regular columns I might be interested in writing for
The Nation
—both of them of such surpassing dumbness that I long ago forgot precisely what they were. One of them, it seems to me, was on the practical side—a weekly gardening column, maybe, or a column of auto repair hints.

“Those are the silliest ideas I ever heard,” I said, with relief. “The only column I might like to do is so far from Wobbly horticulture, or whatever you have in mind, that I don’t mind mentioning it because you obviously wouldn’t be interested—a thousand words every three weeks for saying whatever’s on my mind, particularly if what’s on my mind is marginally ignoble.” As long as I was safe from an agreement, I thought I might as well take advantage of one of those rare opportunities to say “ignoble” out loud.

“It’s a deal,” the crafty Navasky said, putting down the hamburger I was destined to pay for and holding out his hand to shake on the agreement. Caught again.

“I hate to bring up a subject that may cause you to break out in hives,” I said, “but what were you thinking of paying me for each of these columns?” I reminded him of the responsibilities of fatherhood
and the number of service calls necessary to keep a stack-model washer-dryer in working order.

“We were thinking of something in the high two figures,” Navasky said.

I remained calm. The sort of money we were discussing, after all, was already a step up from
Monocle
rates. The only check I ever received from
Monocle
—for presiding over a panel discussion in an early issue—was for three dollars. (“Well, it’s steady,” I said when Navasky later asked if I would run similar discussions as a monthly feature of
Monocle
. “A person would know that he’s got his thirty-six dollars coming in every year, rain or shine, and he could build his freelance on that.”) Still, I felt a responsibility to do some negotiating.