Edsel (2 page)

The other truth is I
was
desperate, and fanatically eager to please. Half my life ago I was a journalist, a promising newcomer with his own column and his thumb on the wrist of a wide-open town, confidant of thugs and mayors, political fixers and crib girls, the great unwashed reading public’s direct conduit into the glistening clubs where judges touched elbows with tailgunners on beer trucks, Joe Lunchpail’s engraved invitation into three-hundred-dollar suites at the Book-Cadillac, where Charlie Chaplin sat around with his suspenders down and Herbert Hoover leaned over to touch my knee and tell me how he was going to handle Al Capone once he defeated Franklin Roosevelt for his second term in the White House. I drove a new car, lived in a nice apartment in Mayor Murphy’s neighborhood, dined at the Caucus Club without reservations, and had my picture in the
Literary Digest
with Ruth Chatterton on my arm above the caption: “Detroit’s Connie Minor, the preferred choice of movie stars and underworld luminaries.”

Then came Depression and Repeal. The upstart tabloids folded, one by one at first, then in clusters like dying cells. With them went my syndication, and eventually my job. While I was busy chasing seven-passenger sedans loaded with big men in tugged-down hats and narrow overcoats with bulges under their arms, a new generation of newshawk had sprung up without my notice, a breed that smoked and drank moderately, clubbed not at all, and spent more time gathered around the wire desk studying the reports from overseas than they did shivering on rotting piers waiting for a boat to dock from Canada without running lights. I was a dinosaur at age thirty-five. My name was associated with hip flasks, beaded skirts, and splay-legged dances to tinny jazz music, all the silly hollow detritus of an era that meant as much to what was happening in the world as a beaver hat. I was deader than Ruth Snyder. They didn’t even have to throw a switch.

I’d tried freelancing, with some success.
Liberty
had bought a piece from me comparing the organization of the Nazi Party to the Purple Gang—which had spawned a lot of angry letters, the Purples being predominantly Jewish—and I had written a retrospective column that ran in the
Free Press
Sunday supplement every third week until wartime paper shortages forced it out in favor of the news from Europe. And I had published a book. You could still find it in the ten-cent bin in most used bookstores, which was immortality of a sort. After that I had followed my used-up predecessors to that elephant graveyard, the advertising business.

It’s a hell of an industry, the ad game; possibly the only one you can contribute to in a state of near-coma. While
new
and
fresh
are its two most sacred words, their definitions will clear a room faster than the Red Scare. It fears innovation, celebrates mediocrity, and aims for an intellect that would store a six-month supply of foodstuffs in a bomb shelter for protection against an atomic blast that will poison the air with radiation for six hundred years. As one of a couple of dozen monkeys chained to typewriters at the firm of Slauson & Nichols on West Grand River, I had been writing for so long with my brains in my hip pocket I wasn’t sure if I could still string together a sentence that didn’t contain the words
smooth
,
rich
,
power
,
mild
,
or flame-broiled
.

But today I had my chance to find out. In a fit of halfhearted determination I had for the first time in years sent out my resume to a number of new publications in the area, and I had received one call back, from the publisher of a prospective new picture magazine based in Port Huron. He would be in Detroit on Wednesday for a meeting with his backers, and would I care to meet him for lunch? I rustled some pages on my Nehi calendar with the end of a flyswatter and said it so happened I was free at (noon’s for spinsters and bank clerks, two o’clock’s for drunks who sleep till noon) one-thirty.

“Fine. Where would you recommend for a good old-fashioned lunch?”

More cerebratory acrobatics. The Anchor Bar was a cliché for journalists, located as it was between the
News
and the
Free Press
with the
Times
nearby, and anyway I might run into someone I knew who knew how badly I wanted a real writing job. Anywhere in Greektown was out; parking was handy and if we hit it off my would-be employer might insist upon walking me to my car. Hedge’s Wigwam might give him the impression I was accustomed to cafeteria fare. Capistrano’s might make him think I was putting the arm on him for an expensive meal. The Lafayette Coney Island was right in the middle and downtown, where I could leave the Studebaker with the valets at Hudson’s and out of sight. His reaction when I made the suggestion was so brisk I felt an ass for wasting so much time on it.

“Fine. See you there Wednesday at one-thirty, Mr. Meaner.”

Now, grasping the door handle at precisely one thirty-five, I glimpsed my reflection in the glass—and all my confidence drained out the soles of my shoes. I looked like an old Greek. In my youth I had sometimes been taken for Italian, and once or twice for American Indian, but that was forty pounds ago, and my ears and nose had not stopped growing. Put me in a cloth cap and loose sport coat and I could be any one of those short, fat grouches you saw hanging around in front of the Grecian Gardens, drinking ouzo out of bottles wrapped in brown paper bags and cursing tourists in the old tongue. I belonged in a fluorescent-lit magazine office the way a clay pot belonged with the fine silver.

Fuck it. I’d been through a machine-gun battle on the ice of Lake Erie. Who else could say that? I squared my shoulders and went in.

“Good of you to come, Mr. Meaner. I’m Seabrook Hall.”

I had trusses older than Hall. He was slender, a breath over my height, and wore a sleeveless argyle pullover on top of a pink shirt and a clip-on tie shaped like a butterfly if Lockheed designed butterflies, green with square black dots. His pegtops, which didn’t go with anything, were tan poplin. He had red hair, clipped short to disguise the fact it was thinning in front, and eyeglasses whose heavy square black frames made me think of scuba diving. His skin was astonishingly pale, blue-white like skim milk, and his eyes behind the thick lenses had a slightly pinkish cast. They looked weak and possibly unable to distinguish colors, which I thought might help explain his clothes. I didn’t know it then, but I was seeing the ivy league look in its earliest incarnation. It would get worse, much worse. Suit coats would grow another button, lapels and neckties would wither, shoulders would disappear and the brims of hats recede until you felt raindrops on your nose before you heard them strike the crown.

His handshake was strong enough, his smile firm and white and unstudied behind a moustache that looked like cinnamon caught in cobwebs. I gave back as much, maybe too much in the grip, and then I made it worse.

“Minor.”

The pinkish eyes flickered. “I’m sorry?”

“You said Meaner. It’s pronounced Minor. It’s an impossible name,” I added.

“Nonsense. It’s real. All the names around here are real: Gunsberg and Butsikitis and Skjaerlund and Washington and Brennan. Where I come from they all sound like brands of English beer. I was born in Southampton, Long Island.”

“I used to know a woman from Southampton.”

“What’s her name? I might know the family.”

“Probably not. She married a Jewish gangster here and dropped out of sight after he got shot to pieces.”

“Sit down, Mr. Minor. What’s good here?”

I recommended the Reuben, and of course it was bad that day. I was losing track of just how many ways a man can screw up when he’s playing with scared money. Hall had tea, I had coffee. As he bobbed the bag up and down inside his cup I noticed he wore a Princeton ring on his index finger, of all places. I twisted my worn U of D ring and wondered if we were going to be able to stand each other’s society.

“My partner recognized your name,” he said. “He started as a copy boy for the
Times.
You left shortly after he came on.”

“Friendly divorce. Mr. Hearst took a personal interest back then and it was tough writing around all those pictures of Marion Davies.”

His expression was uncomprehending. The name meant nothing to him. I was beginning to wonder how young he was.

“Anyway, your familiarity with this area is important. I’d expect you to know all the best photo opportunities.”

I lifted my eyebrows, making an eager sponge of my face. I’d never heard the term before.

“Have you seen our magazine?” he asked.

“No. I didn’t know you’d published.”

“We sent out a trial run of six thousand copies.” He lifted the flap of a tan leather briefcase with a sling handle that reminded me too much of a ladies’ shoulder bag and withdrew a slick rectangle the size of a placemat, laying it on my side of the table.

The cover was glossy, saddle-stapled, and consisted entirely of a black-and-white photo of Ava Gardner, who seemed to be having difficulty keeping both straps on her shoulders. It was the tightest, largest close-up I’d ever seen. Her lips were the size of brass knuckles; you could have inserted a quarter in either one of her nostrils. The only printing, aside from the month and year and the twenty-five-cent price, was the magazine’s title,
PIX!,
in letters two inches high, each one a different primary color.

“I thought it was a local publication. What’s Ava Gardner got to do with the Great Lakes?”

“My partner wanted to run a picture of Tahquamenon Falls, but I vetoed it. What is journalism’s first responsibility, Mr. Minor?”

“To make money.”

He beamed, the proud tutor. “Natural wonders don’t sell magazines.”

“
The National Geographic
will be sorry to hear it.” I turned the slippery pages. The first several were full-page advertisements, Dyna-Flo transmissions and halitosis and Ronald Reagan sucking on a Camel. “National accounts?”

“Actually, we lifted them out of other publications. It makes a better impression and we’re hoping they’ll be grateful for the free ride. The real stuff’s in back.”

I skipped over. Four pages cut into quarters. Milo’s Auto Repair, the Elite Clothiers, a coupon for a free shampoo and set at Dixie’s Beauty Academy. It looked like the back of a high school yearbook.

“We expect to publish at a loss the first two years,” Hall said. “We’ve got enough backing for the first year. By then we should have the circulation numbers to attract the big accounts. That’s why we need talent.”

“There’s not much text.” The bulk of the magazine was devoted to pictures of boats on Lake Huron, a baton-twirling contest in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a two-page spread on the Ford River Rouge plant, a row of cigar-shaped houses under construction in Toledo. The accompanying “articles” ran no longer than a paragraph, isolated in sixteen-point Plantin in the middle of fields of white space a child could draw on.

“The written word can’t hope to compete with television. At one time the human brain was thought capable of taking in only twenty-four pictures per second, the pace of the so-called motion picture. We know now that it can consume more than a hundred. Experiments are being conducted to determine how many more it can gobble up without even being aware of it. Meanwhile its capacity for taking in words has remained a stolid ten. How can Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address aspire to create as strong an impression as Uncle Miltie in an evening gown?”

I lowered
Pix!
’s cover carefully, like a coffin lid. “When I was ten years-old I entered a hot dog eating contest at the state fair. I swallowed eleven dogs in ten minutes. I threw up the whole batch in less than five. Taking in isn’t retaining.”

“All we ask is that they remember the name of the magazine from week to week. It’s a killer schedule and chews up talent. How are you on deadlines, Mr. Minor?”

“I haven’t missed one since nineteen twenty-eight, when Dusty Steinhauser kidnapped me and kept me playing poker behind the Polar Bear Cafe until he won back what he owed me.

“What sort of photographer are you?”

“I’m thinking of getting one of those Polaroids and save paying for developing when I take a picture of my thumb.”

“That won’t do. Right now our photojournalists are using Speed-graphics but we’re switching to those Japanese jobs.”

“What’s a photojournalist?”

“The magazine business is different from most. While everyone else is specializing, we find it more feasible economically to double up. Nobody’s hiring photographers and writers any more. If you want to grow with
Pix!
, you’ll have to become equally proficient with a typewriter and a camera.”

“In other words, two jobs, one salary.”

“To be blunt.”

“Thanks for lunch, Mr. Hall.” I stood.

“You don’t want the job?”

“I’m a good writer. That’s my talent. I’m a great reporter. That’s my skill. I’ll never be anything more than a mediocre photographer and I’m too old for that. Good luck finding your photojournalist. I never met a good button-pusher who could write a caption to save his life.”

“Frankly I’m relieved. This is a job for a young man. You older types are too cynical.”

“I hope I never get so old I wind up as cynical as you.”

Seabrook Hall and I didn’t cross paths again, nor did I ever see another issue of
Pix!
A couple of years later, killing time in a Rexall downtown before another interview, I saw his name on the statement of ownership page of a comic book. The cover featured a gelatinous green mass with eyes and teeth devouring a half-naked woman who looked like Ava Gardner.

O
NE DAY IN 1953, GIVEN
a choice of magazines in a dentist’s waiting room that included
Jack ’n’ Jill
,
Popular Science
, and a fourteen-month-old copy of
Argosy
, I picked up
House Beautiful
to look at the homes shaped like boxes of Fig Newtons with tricky siding in front and as dull as an Eisenhower speech in back, and stopped at a line in the editor’s column: “You will have a greater chance to be yourself than any people in the history of civilization.” That statement remained with me long after I had ceased thinking about two-toned refrigerators and the artist’s conception of a living room with space for the family car. Every now and then I hauled it out like the Riddle of the Sphinx or an elaborately tangled string of Christmas bulbs and tried to make sense of it. I still do, and have come to believe that once I have I will have succeeded in figuring out that whole era. Like the time itself, the line is as simple and diabolical as the mind of a child.