Crazy Salad (20 page)

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.

In the course of that first meeting, I asked Mrs. Schiff a question, and her answer to it probably sums her up better than anything else she ever said to me. The newspaper strike was still on—she had walked out of the Publishers’ Association a few weeks before and had resumed publication—and I was immensely curious about what went on during labor negotiations. I didn’t
know if the antagonists were rude or polite to one another. I didn’t know if they said things like “I’ll give you Mesopotamia if you’ll give me Abyssinia.” I asked her what it had been like. She thought for a moment and then answered. “Twenty-eight men,” she said. “All on my side.” She paused. “Well,” she said, “I just ran out of things to wear.”

That was Mrs. Schiff on the 114-day newspaper strike. She took everything personally, and at the most skittishly feminine personal level. There was always debate over what made her change her endorsement from Averell Harriman to Nelson Rockefeller in the 1958 gubernatorial election, but the only explanation I ever heard that made any sense was that a few days before the election, she went to a Harriman dinner and was left off the dais. She was obsessed with personal details, particularly with the medical histories of famous persons and the family lives of Jews who intermarried. I once spent two days on the telephone trying to check out a story she heard about Madame Nhu and a nervous breakdown ten years before, and I was constantly being ordered to call back people I had written profiles on in order to insert information about whether they were raising their children as Jews or Episcopalians or whatever.

Every little whim she had was catered to. Her yellow onionskin memos would come down from the fifteenth floor, and her editors, who operated under the delusion that their balls were in escrow, would dispatch reporters. In 1965, during the New York water shortage, she sent the one about Otto and the sauna. “Otto Preminger has added two floors to his house under my bedroom window,” she wrote. “One, I understand, is for a movie projection room and the other, a sauna bath. Frequently, I hear water running for hours on end, from the direction of the Preminger house. It would be interesting to find out if a substantial amount of water is or is
not required by such luxuries. Please investigate.” The memo was given to me, and I spent the next day writing and then rewriting a memo to Mrs. Schiff explaining that saunas did not use running water. This did not satisfy her. So Joe Kahn, the
Post
’s only investigative reporter, was sent up to Lexington Avenue and Sixty-second Street to find the source of the sound of running water. He found nothing.

—

Ultimately, I discovered what union negotiations were like. I became a member of the grievance committee and the contract committee, and the head of the plant and safety committee. About the plant and safety committee—I was also the only member of it, and I think it is accurate to say that everyone at the
Post
thought I was crazy even to care. It wasn’t precisely a matter of caring, though. I was physically revolted by the conditions at the newspaper, none of which had changed at all since I began there. The entrance to the lobby was still black, Philthy and the dust were still on the door, and there was a slowly accumulating layer of soot all over the city room. Then there were the bathrooms. They were cleaned only once a day and had overflowing wastebaskets and toilets. The men’s room in the entrance hall still had no door, and there was something wrong with the urinals. In the summertime, it was especially unpleasant to walk past it.

I first began to bring up my complaints about plant conditions to management in the grievance committee. Mrs. Schiff was not present. I asked that the hallway be painted. I asked for a snap lock on the men’s room door. I asked for more chairs and phones in the city room. I asked if it were possible to hire a few more maintenance people—there was one poor man whose job consisted of cleaning all the bathrooms and of sweeping out the city room each day. Nothing happened. About a year after I began to complain, I was
summoned to lunch again by Mrs. Schiff because of a memorandum I had written about Betty Friedan. I asked her about the possibility of cleaning the city room and repainting the entrance, and she looked at me as if the idea had never occurred to her. (The next week, the hallway was in fact painted and the city room cleaned for the first time in four years.) Then I mentioned the bathrooms, which she referred to for the rest of the conversation as the commodes. She listened to me—as just about everyone did—as if I were addled, and then said that she didn’t really see the point of keeping the commodes clean because her employees were the kind of people who were incapable of not dirtying them up. I tried to explain to her that if the plant were clean, her employees would not be careless about dirtying it. I suggested that she had exactly the same sort of people working for her as there were at the
Daily News
, and the bathrooms at the
Daily News
looked fine. I don’t think she understood a word I said.

One more thing about that lunch. We were talking about Betty Friedan. I had written a memo about an article she had written for the magazine section of the Sunday
Herald Tribune;
I thought we could develop a series about women in New York from it. The memo had been sent up to Mrs. Schiff, who wanted to talk about it. It turned out that she was upset with Betty Friedan and seemed to think that
The Feminine Mystique
had caused her daughter, a Beverly Hills housewife, to leave her household and spend a lot of money becoming a California politician. Mrs. Schiff thought I wanted to write a putdown of Mrs. Friedan—which was fine with her. I explained that that wasn’t what I had in mind at all; I agreed with Betty Friedan, I said. “For example,” I said, reaching for something I hoped Mrs. Schiff would understand, “Betty Friedan writes that housewives with nothing else to do often put a great deal of
nagging pressure on their husbands to earn more money so they can buy bigger cars and houses.”

Mrs. Schiff thought it over. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve often thought that was why the men around here ask for raises as much as they do.”

Top pay for reporters at that time was around ten thousand dollars a year. Mrs. Schiff had no idea that it took more than that to raise a family. She had no idea how the people who worked for her lived. She did not know that one hundred dollars was not a generous Christmas bonus. She did not even have a kind of noblesse oblige. She just sat up there serving roast beef sandwiches and being silly.

Jack Newfield, another
New York Post
alumnus, wrote an article about the paper in 1969 for
Harper’s
, and in it he quoted Blair Clark, who was then assistant publisher of the
Post
for a brief interlude. “Dolly’s problem,” said Clark, “is that her formative experience was the brutal competitive situation the
Post
used to be in. She doesn’t know how to make it a class newspaper.” In the lean years, she survived by cutting overhead, keeping the staff small, cutting down on out-of-town assignments, paying her employees as little as possible. And all this still goes on, not just because she still thinks she is in a competitive situation but also because she survived, and she did it her way. She did it by being stingy; and she did it by being frothy and giddy; she was vindicated and she sees no reason to do things differently.

The last time I saw her, she mentioned that she had heard the things I said about her on the radio. “Nora,” she said to me, “you know perfectly well you learned a great deal at the
Post
.” But of course I did. I even loved working there. But that’s not the point. The point is the product.

N
ORA
E
PHRON’S
B
EEF
B
ORSCHT

Put 3 pounds of beef chuck cut for stew and a couple of soup-bones into a large pot. Add 2 onions, quartered, and 6 cups beef broth and bring to a boil, simmering 15 minutes and skimming off the scum. Add 2 cups tomato juice, the juice from a 1-pound can of julienne beets, salt, pepper, the juice of 1 lemon, 1 tablespoon cider vinegar, 2 tablespoons brown sugar, and bring to a boil. Then simmer slowly for 2½ hours until the beef is tender. Add the beets left over from the beet juice, and another can of beets and juice. Serve with huge amounts of sour cream, chopped dill, boiled potatoes and pumpernickel bread. Serves six.

April, 1975

I am sitting here thinking a mundane thought, which is that one picture is worth a thousand words. The reason I am sitting here thinking this is that I am looking at one picture, a picture of someone named Mignon Roscher Gardner on the cover of the
Palm Beach Social Pictorial
, and I cannot think how to describe it to you, how to convey the feeling I get from looking at this picture and in fact every other full-color picture that has ever appeared on the cover of this publication.

The
Palm Beach Social Pictorial
appears weekly throughout the winter season in Palm Beach and I get it in the mail because a friend of mine named Liz Smith writes a column in it and has it sent to me. There are several dozen of us on Liz Smith’s list, and I think it is safe to say that we all believe that the
Palm Beach Social Pictorial
is the most wonderful publication in America. Beyond that, each of us is very nearly obsessed with the people in it. My particular obsession is Mignon Roscher Gardner, but from time to time I am unfaithful to her, and I get involved instead with the life of Anky Von Boythan Revson Johnson, who seems to live in a turban,
or Mrs. Woolworth Donahue, who apparently never goes anywhere without her two Great Danes nuzzling her lap. One friend of mine is so taken with Helene (Mrs. Roy) Tuchbreiter and her goo-goo-googly eyes that he once made an entire collage of pictures of her face.

Mignon Roscher Gardner, who happens to be a painter of indeterminate age and platinum-blond hair, has appeared on the cover of the
Pictorial
twice in the last year, both times decked in ostrich feathers. Anyone who appears on the cover of the
Pictorial
pays a nominal sum to do so; Mrs. Gardner’s appearances usually coincide with an opening of her paintings in Palm Beach, although the last one merely coincided with the completion of her portrait of Dr. Josephine E. Raeppel, librarian emeritus of Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. Most of the painters whose work appears on the cover of the
Pictorial
are referred to as “famed, international” painters, but Mrs. Gardner is a local, and the furthest the
Pictorial
will go in the famed-international department is to call her prominent. “Prominent artist-aviatrix,” for example—that’s what they called her last February, when she appeared on the cover in her hair and turquoise ostrich feathers along with a painting from a new series she called “The Cosmobreds.” The painting was of a naked young man on a flying black horse, and according to the
Pictorial
, it was a departure from her usual work in animals and sailboats and portraits because “Mignon wanted to combine her love for horses and for flying.” In back of the painting of the Cosmo-bred and Mrs. Gardner herself are some curtains, and if you ask me, they’re the highlight of the photograph. They are plain white curtains, but the valances are covered with chintz daisies, and the curtains are trimmed, but heavily trimmed, with yellow and green pompons, the kind drum majorettes trim their skirts and boots with.