The Kingdom and the Power (44 page)

Turner Catledge’s desire for a more tightly edited
Times
—a fast-reading newspaper that would report more fully and interpret more trenchantly than television—could not be fulfilled without the aid and guidance of Theodore Bernstein.
And
, if Catledge allowed Bernstein the necessary freedom to achieve the desired goals, it was inevitable, sooner or later, that Bernstein would incur the displeasure of one of the remaining independent dukes, who was used to working unchallenged—the Sunday editor, Lester Markel.

This began to happen when, shortly after Catledge had made Bernstein an assistant managing editor, Bernstein proceeded to appraise in his interoffice periodical,
Winners & Sinners
, not only the work of the daily staff, but also the efforts of Markel’s Sunday department. Markel did not appreciate this. If judgments were to be made on the Sunday department, Markel would make them himself.

It was not strictly a jurisdictional issue with Markel, although that was a factor—Markel was becoming uneasy about the whole
new trend of thinking on the third floor: the advocacy of interpretative reporting (which had long been the specialty of Markel’s “Week in Review” section); the introduction of such daily “background” features as the “Man in the News” profile, the news analyses, the in-depth articles (which had been a function of the Sunday
Magazine
and the “Review”). And there were Bernstein’s various and prissy rules about writing and copyreading that, while perhaps applicable to the regular staff, were not so suitable for the Sunday department as Markel wished to run it. One of Theodore Bernstein’s principles that Markel questioned was that, in the interest of clarity and comprehension, a single sentence in
The Times
should usually not contain more than one idea. After this suggestion appeared in
Winners & Sinners
, Markel dictated a memo:

Markel then had working on his Sunday
Magazine
an urbane and exacting writer named Gilbert Millstein, whose dazzling style was a conspicuous contradiction of nearly every one of Bernstein’s principles. While Bernstein preferred short leads, Millstein wrote long ones; while Bernstein stressed simplicity, Millstein epitomized complexity; while Bernstein wanted one-idea-per-sentence, Millstein often crammed in a half-dozen. And almost every week, it seemed, Lester Markel would publish a Gilbert Millstein article in the
Magazine
or drama section that not only emphasized the individuality of the writer but also emphasized the separate editing standards of the Sunday department; a typical Millstein lead began:

Lester Markel saw himself as one of the great editors of his time; or, now that Harold Ross of
The New Yorker
was dead, perhaps
the
great editor. Markel had joined
The Times
before its peak period of accelerated growth, and he had expanded his Sunday department as the paper itself had expanded, both forces riding the crest of a rising American economy that would produce after World War II a larger, better-educated, more concerned, more prosperous, more acquisitive society—a portion of which would find
The Times
indispensable, particularly on Sundays, when there was more time to spend with it.

The appeal of the Sunday
Times
was due to several factors, some of which Markel had little or nothing to do with—the tremendous volume of advertising, for example, that the aggressive army of admen under Monroe Green brought in and which was read as avidly as was the news; ads for cars, mink coats, motorboats, houses to buy, apartments to rent, secretaries to hire, dresses from Bonwit’s, dresses from Bergdorf’s, dresses from Gimbel’s—no matter what condition the world was in, no matter how many soldiers had just been ambushed, nor who had just been assassinated, nor who was rioting or starving to death, pretty dresses danced next to the gray columns of news in
The Times
every Sunday of every month of every year.

The Sunday
Times
was prosperous, too, because the newspaper’s circulation staff placed it in every major city in the nation, and because the promotion men proclaimed it on billboards, in booklets, in schools, spoon-feeding it to the future affluent society; and it was also successful because the main news section of the Sunday edition, produced under Catledge’s aegis on the third floor, carried more news items than did competing journals—more football scores, more engagement announcements, more dispatches from more cities around the world.

But what really made the Sunday
Times
unique were those features that were completely controlled by Lester Markel—the Sunday
Magazine
, the “Week in Review,” the “Book Review,” the drama section, the travel section; the pages on art, television, music, dance; the garden page, the do-it-yourself page, the various special sections on fashion or home furnishings or children’s books or high-fidelity recordings. Markel inspired many of the ideas for these sections, wrote headlines, scrutinized picture layouts, read every word that his staff or his contributors had written; edited every line before it was set into type. Markel was an indefatigable, driving man who terrorized many members of his staff; and yet, if a person had never seen him before, or was unaware of his reputation, Markel would appear to be a rather unstriking, plaintive individual. He had an angular face that suggested no special vitality; wavy gray-black hair combed tightly back from his high forehead, and soft, timidly inquiring eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. His voice was not strong; it was, in fact, almost high-pitched, wavering and imploring when he spoke normally. But since he so rarely spoke normally in the office, the Markel voice that a stranger might overhear in the lobby of a theater or at a cocktail party was not the voice that was most familiar to
Times
employees in the Sunday department. With them, Markel was more often shrieking with anger. And since he never seemed stationary, but was always moving determinedly about the office in restless pursuit of something or someone, or was frowning at a photograph that had just been shown him, or was dissatisfied with the article that he had just read or the answer that he had just received—since Markel’s physique was so overwhelmed by his emotions, his staff did not know so much how he looked as how he felt, and how he was making
them
feel. The tension within the Sunday department was such, many
Times
men said, that they could sense it even as they rode in an elevator passing by the eighth floor, a claim that was accepted as an exaggeration by almost everyone except those who worked on the eighth floor.

Upon leaving the elevator on the eighth floor and entering the Sunday department, one passed the receptionist, a convivial red-faced gentleman: to his left was a door leading into the Sunday “Book Review”; to his right was a dim corridor that led past the door of Markel’s office, and past the office doors of two senior editors—Daniel Schwarz, a tall man with a fixed smile, and Lewis Bergman, a sensitive man of inner turmoil. At the end of the
corridor, in a very large room that extended the length of the building, and contained sixty or seventy desks arranged in rows or at right angles, sat most of Markel’s staff, usually in various states of distraction or concentration—typing, reading, talking, or staring into space; writing, rewriting; editing, reediting. Since the
Magazine
deadline was Monday, the “Book Review” Wednesday, the drama section Thursday, the “Week in Review” Saturday, there was an uneven distribution of daily pressure within the department: while the
Magazine
people were working furiously with last-minute changes on articles or layouts, the “Week in Review” people were sitting casually on the other side of the room reading newspapers, their deadline being days away. But when Markel, who checked everything and was
always
under deadline pressure, walked into the room, he would immediately transmit an intensity that everyone could feel. He had merely to enter, to stand in the aisle and look around for a few moments, and it was like a hot blazing sun curling caterpillars, legs tucking inward, bodies slowly bending—it was, as Gilbert Millstein might write, an ordeal by fire, an apocalyptic experience.

Many members of the Sunday staff were deep in analysis, and it was their involvement with the psychological, their acute awareness of themselves and their work, their love-hate relationship with Lester Markel—“Markel,” one of them said, “is our great Jewish father-figure, and we are his sons, and he has a way of convincing us that we are always failing him”—that distinguished the Sunday staff from the larger, more impersonal staff that worked in the newsroom on the third floor. Also, the two staffs looked different.

While nearly all the reporters and copyreaders were conventionally dressed, very
bourgeois
in their button-down shirts and ties and suits of unexceptional styling, the Sunday-department employees seemed to express themselves in their clothes—they wore gloomy dark sweaters and black cuffless trousers, brightly colored shirts and black knit ties, loose tweed jackets with patched elbows, casual shoes bought from a creative cobbler in the Village; and there was somehow suggested in all this, and in their manner, the detached air of the
artiste
, the intellectual rebel, the actor, the writer, the whole cultural scene that the Sunday staff covered, cared about, was really a part of—indeed, men had been on the staff when they were writing plays (Harvey Breit), poetry (Harvey Shapiro), novels (Herbert Mitgang)—and two men who had quit Markel’s staff had written novels with characters modeled after
Markel himself. Neither book was very flattering, although one had been written out of spite by an editor who resigned after his boyfriend had been fired by Markel.

The women in the Sunday department were not beautiful but they did seem better-read and better-educated than the females on the third floor, more interesting in a neurotic way, and altogether different from one another. One woman on Markel’s staff was very assertive; it was said that she had “something” on Markel and, as a result, he rarely yelled at her. Another woman, a mysterious type with a small, painted mouth and bobbed hair, sat quietly in a corner all day reading, very quiet, very still, very distant—a snapshot pose from the Café du Dôme in the Twenties.

It was the general consensus on the eighth floor that the news reporters on the third floor, with some exceptions, were artless writers who lacked the organizational ability and reportorial depth to produce
Magazine
articles, and as a result a large percentage of the regular contributors to the Sunday
Magazine
were outsiders, free-lance writers and authors, or politicians and statesmen whose views Markel shared, or whose friendship he was cultivating: in either case, though the politicians and statesmen often required the help of a “ghost” on the Sunday staff, their articles were printed. But the reporters on the third floor who submitted
Magazine
articles received no such assistance or consideration, and those who had difficulty writing the way that Markel wanted them to write, or who would not conform to his viewpoint or approach on a particular subject, either grew to resent him or to merely refuse to accept future assignments from him.

In 1957 Markel was paying only $300 for a full-length
Magazine
article, and the money was not worth the aggravation of his criticism or his continual requests for revision. Meyer Berger refused for years to write for Markel. So did Brooks Atkinson. One reporter, Robert Plumb, who did accept an assignment, had it returned to him five times for rewriting. Finally, Plumb gave up—and, taking a pair of scissors, he cut his article into small strips, tucked them into an envelope, labeled it “The Robert Plumb Do-It-Yourself Kit,” and sent it back to Markel.

Markel was disappointed by this and similar reactions to his demanding nature. He could not understand why some writers
would object to rewriting—after all, he thought, it was for their
own
good as well as the
Magazine
’s. His role, as he saw it, was that of a taskmaster, and they were to meet his standards. If they would follow the outline that he gave to them before beginning to write the article, an outline that set forth the thesis and the points to be covered, there would be little difficulty; but too often, he felt, they did as they pleased, ignored his outline, and then blamed
him
for being too rigid, too systematic. He was systematic, he conceded, but he saw this as a necessity, and he was no less demanding with his gardener at home than he was with his makeup editors at the office. To see one seed sown out of line was intolerable for Markel. He was offended by an overdone piece of toast, a misplaced memo, a slow-moving cab driver, a busy phone when he wanted to reach someone. He demanded aisle seats near the front of all Broadway openings, and refused to wait in line to see a new film, and consequently attended only previews. When there were no reserved seats for the preview of Marilyn Monroe’s
Let’s Make Love
, Twentieth Century-Fox allegedly assigned two office boys to occupy a pair of seats in the Paramount loge from 5 p.m. until the time of Markel’s scheduled arrival at eight-thirty.