The Rothman Scandal (15 page)

Naturally, Ho Rothman disagreed vociferously with all of these decisions, seeing them simply as a needless loss of revenue. When Ho disagreed with you, he became an outraged prima donna, screaming imprecations, tugging wildly at the wispy fringes of his hair, pounding his fists on his desk top, even hurling breakable objects across the room. “How can you talk this craziness?” he would wail. “You a crazy woman, Alex? Why you trying to ruin me? Why you trying to make me crazy? I think you a candidate for nuthouse!” And he would cast his eyes heavenward, and throw his clasped hands in the air, as though beseeching the Old Testament deity for the gift of sanity. “I am surrounded by lunatics!” he would cry.

She had tried explaining that she did not see herself as putting out a magazine that would advertise only expensive products to expensive people. Her own demographic studies showed that many of her readers were far from wealthy. It had more to do with what she called her magazine's “chin-line.” “We're a chin-up publication,” she would say to him. “We try to come to our readers saying we're proud of who we are, and we want our readers to come away from us feeling a little prouder of who
they
are. No publication is worth its salt if it doesn't boost its readers' self-esteem.” Needless to say, this argument made no sense at all to Ho.

She had also tried to point out that advertising money that might be lost in certain advertising categories was more than made up for in others—automotive advertising, for instance. It used to be an article of faith in Detroit that the purchase of the family car was a man's decision, and Detroit refused to advertise in publications that could not deliver a large male readership. Alex had managed to change all that. She produced studies that showed that even in households where the man completely controlled the purse strings, the woman had a great deal to say when it came to choosing a car's make, size, color, and styling. She also showed a study indicating that women were seventy-five percent more willing to finance the purchase of an automobile than men were—an important factor in new car sales. “We women have a reputation for liking to run up bills,” she had told a meeting of potential advertisers at the Detroit Athletic Club, with a wink. “But since, in eighty percent of American households, the wife balances the checkbook, we don't run up bills that we can't pay.” She produced a now-familiar statistic showing that the majority of America's personal wealth was in women's hands—and, finally, a survey showing that American women actually drove more automobile miles than men did, running errands, delivering and picking up children at school, collecting their husbands at commuter trains, and so on. As a result,
Mode
had become a primary medium for automobile advertising. But none of this impressed Ho Rothman, who saw rejected advertising only in terms of disappearing dollars.

Cool, well-reasoned logic got you nowhere with Ho. Neither did carefully fact-supported argument. On the other hand, you could often play successfully on his own irrational fears, prejudices, and superstitions. And it was always important to remember that, in order to sell any idea to Ho Rothman, he had to be persuaded that the idea actually had been his own to begin with.

When he had exploded over her wish to ban cigarette advertising from
Mode
, Alex remembered that Ho was almost obsessive in his dislike of what he called “colletch boys”—or, indeed, of anyone who appeared to be better educated than he was. “Look,” she had said, “cigarette advertising is for college kids. It's for the back pages of college humor magazines, where the tobacco industry hopes it can hook 'em when they're young.”

“Colletch boys,” he fumed. “Is all
momzers
, smart-alecks, wisenheimers. But is millions dollars you are throwing out the window, Alex. Millions dollars!”

Then she remembered how virulently he distrusted doctors, and she pointed to the mandatory surgeon general's warning that had to be displayed prominently in every cigarette ad. “Then we'll have to include that,” she said. “It's a federal regulation.” He read the line slowly, moving his lips.

His fist crashed down on his desk. “Surgeon general!” he shouted. “Who is this surgeon general? Why we plugging him in my book? Why we give him free plug? Doctors is rich enough already, and if this
momzer
was elected surgeon general, he is richest
momzer
of them all! I make a rule for you. No doctors get free plugs in my book. Doctors get rich enough from killing sick pipple.”

Later, when she had rejected an ad for a product that claimed it was “prescribed by most doctors for relief from painful swelling and itching of hemorrhoidal tissue,” he had called her on the carpet again.

“But, Ho,” she said. “You made a rule. No doctors get plugged in our ad pages.”

“Right,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure you remembered it.”

Alex accepted most liquor advertising, but she had decided to draw the line at beers that were sold in long-necked bottles, and wines that were sold with screw-tops rather than corks. This had produced one of Ho's most violent outbursts. “You are
meshugge
, Alex!” he had roared. “That's the most
meshuggeneh
idea I hear from you! You trying to kill me, or what else?” And he tore at his fringe of hair as though trying to pull it from its roots. “Long necks! Screw-tops! Beer is beer, wine is wine. What is difference in neck, if long neck, short neck, or no neck, or if in cork or no cork? I think you are the screw-top talking long necks and corks. I am hearing true craziness now!”

“Now listen, Ho,” she said. “Beer in long-necked bottles is what hillbillies drink in Appalachia. Wine with screw-caps is what winos drink out of paper bags down on Skid Row—because they don't want to push a cork in and out every time they take a slug. Look at yourself, Ho. Look at yourself and Aunt Lily. You are both ladies and gentlemen. You are people of taste and refinement. You like the finer things of life. Would you ever serve a wine with a screw-top at
your
table? Would you ever offer a guest a beer in a long-necked bottle? Never! You'd be considered crude and uncultivated. Would you even want a magazine that showed pictures of such things in your house?”

“Look,” he shouted immediately. “I make a rule for you. I make a lesson for you. No beer in long-neck bottles. No wines in crew-cut tops. You think we advertise to hillbillies? You think we advertise to Skid Row winos? Not in
my
magazine, you don't! Never! We advertise only to the best!”

There was something in the business world called “factoring,” which was a little like trying to sell postdated checks. A piece of paper, such as an IOU, might be worth nothing today but worth a lot next week. Still, it might be sellable today, if you could find the right buyer, and offered him the right discount, kept sweetening your sales pitch with little concessions and giveaways. Dealing with Ho was a little like that. You had to haggle with his pride, and bargain with his power. Alex called it dealing with the Ho Factor. Oh, Lenny was absolutely right. There would never be another Ho.

There was another thing she had learned about Ho Rothman over the years. His Russian accent came and went. At first, she had thought that his English became fractured—full of Yiddishisms and dropped articles—only when he was angry or excited. Then she saw that he was able to turn the fractured English on and off at will. He used it to befuddle an adversary, to confuse an opponent in an argument or in a deal, to put his opponent at a linguistic disadvantage, and to lure the unsuspecting adversary into supposing that he was dealing with an innocent, a naïf, or a scatterbrain—until Ho Rothman was ready to pounce.

Dealing with his elder son, Herbert Joseph Rothman, was an entirely different matter. The trouble with Herb, Alex decided long ago, was that Herb had hated too many things for too long. He hated being his father's son, hated having to grow up, and live so long, in his tiny father's powerful shadow. His father was always called Ho, but Herb hated the nickname “Ho-Jo” he had been given at college, and flew into a rage whenever a reporter used that name in print.

He hated his height—like his father, he was short in stature, for height had not entered the Rothman family until the third generation, with Steven, and Herb hated watching his son grow seven inches taller than himself. He tried to compensate for the shortness by working on his physique, and there was a fully equipped gym in his apartment at River House. He was proud, at sixty-seven, of his hard, flat belly, and his well-muscled arms, shoulders, and pectorals. His body, he hoped, made him physically attractive to women, but secretly he seemed to know it didn't, and Herb was no Don Juan.

Having gone to Yale, Herb was embarrassed by his parents. He hated his father's fractured, heavily Russian-accented English, and he visibly winced every time either of his parents used a Yiddish word. He hated being Jewish, and once—Steven had told her this—had wanted to change his name, either by dropping the “th” to make it “Roman,” or else changing it to Ross. This proposal had provoked one of his father's most furious tirades. “Change it! Change it!” Ho Rothman had bellowed. “Why don't you change it to Shmuck!”

At Yale, he was very athletic. He coxed on the crew, was on the golf team, and even played polo—six goals, it was said, before he gave up the sport—but he was not tapped for Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, or any of the other senior societies which he considered his due, and for this slight he blamed anti-Semitism, though there were other obvious reasons. Because of this, he hated Yale and, though he was one of the university's richest alumni, and despite numerous entreaties and inducements, he had never given a penny to his alma mater. He had purposely sent his son to Princeton as the most effective way he could conceive of getting back at Yale.

He was a man totally consumed by hate. He even hated being rich because of the time and trouble it took to turn down endless requests for philanthropy. For the last dozen or so years, for reasons Alex refused to become involved with, Herb also seemed to hate his wife, and he and Pegeen kept separate bedrooms at opposite ends of River House, with separate elevator entrances so that neither would have to encounter the other when they came and went.

He hated his younger brother, Arthur. He hated black people. He probably hated women. And of course he hated Alex. She knew why.

“Let me make a baby for you,” he had said. “My sperm count is exceptionally high. My baby would have the Rothman genes, which is all the family really wants. And after all, Steven is impotent.”

Somehow, if he had tried to seduce her the idea would have seemed more palatable. Even rape would have seemed a lesser violation. Instead, he had offered her a deposit from the Rothman sperm bank. He had offered to empty his seminal vesicle into her. Her refusal—with a roar of angry laughter—was certainly the real reason why he hated her, but she saw no reason to tell Lenny any of that. Hell had no fury like Herb Rothman scorned, she thought.

“Make your peace with him,” Lenny had told her. “Someday that will be very important, Alex.”

Now, apparently, that day had come.

But she would like to ask Lenny this: How—how in the world—how could any woman, any woman in the world—make her peace with a man like that? Was there anything at all you could do with a man like that?

A magazine. What was it, after all? she asked herself as she lay, unable to sleep, in her dark bedroom, listening to the distant river sounds. Of course Mel was right, it was only words and pictures printed on glossy paper. She was under no illusions about what her creation was.
Mode
was not the Sistine ceiling. It was not immortal, it was not even art. Readers might save back issues for a while, but eventually they were thrown out, out with the garbage, out with the dusty and mildewed contents of attics, cellars, and garages. A magazine was nothing but a piece of show business. Like a Broadway musical, it had its run, then closed, and was replaced by something else. After a while, you even forgot the words to the songs.

But words were living things created by living people, and so were pictures, and the words and pictures had to be gathered and assembled and arranged with faith and love. That's it! Bingo! And she was back to love again. A magazine must enter into a long-distance love affair—millions of love affairs—with its readers. Like a clever lover, it must flirt. It must seduce. It must conspire and share little special secrets. It must whisper, stroke, inspire, thrill, and amuse, at exactly the right times and places. Like the perfect lover, it must feel needed. Like the perfect lover or perfect love affair, it should never seem boring, or settle into a routine, or be predictable, or take itself for granted. Like the perfect lover, it should never be cold, or unresponsive, or forgetful, or unfaithful. The perfect lover should always be surprising. The perfect lover should never grow old or fretful or cranky and complaining. On the other hand, the perfect lover should never be complacent. The perfect lover is strong, with a point of view, and a willingness to argue that point of view, defend it—even fight for it—for love is no lotus land, no Capri, but a stern landscape of precipices and perilous mountain steeps. Love was work, perhaps the hardest work of all, but between the lover and her beloved there always had to be, at the very bottom of everything, a profound and enduring respect and trust.

Of course there were no perfect lovers, and no perfect love affairs, and there were no perfect magazines—never would be, Alex Rothman would be the first to admit—but one had to keep pushing, striving, climbing, working toward that impossible goal.

And how many people truly loved the work they did? Damned few, Alex would reckon. That would make a good subject for a survey, a good question for a Harris Poll: How many people truly loved their work? Sometimes it seemed as though there were no more than one or two.