Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (5 page)

“I guess it really doesn’t sound all that interesting,” Becker said. He glanced over at Carol Goodenow. He thought he had seen her lower lip start to quiver, but he might have been imagining it. “I mean, I guess we’re about due for a stocking story,” he went on, trying to make certain Carol didn’t think that he was sounding negative simply because the story had to do with women’s fashions. “I’m just not sure that this is it.”

“Let’s scratch it,” Smithers said.

Marks were made on clipboards. Nobody said anything for a moment or two. Smithers’s desk chair creaked. La Contessa adjusted one of her eyelashes. Keith Johnson, the wire-desk man, looked as if he might fall asleep.

“Then there’s this thirty-liner on obscene topiary that was written last week but didn’t run,” Becker said.

There was another short period of silence. Finally, the voice from behind the desk said, “Obscene topiary?” Smithers, who had scheduled
and edited the story the previous week, had apparently forgotten what it was about.

“Dirty bushes,” Becker said, working on the theory that the simplest explanation was always best for Smithers.

“In the bushes?”

“No, dirty bushes—bushes made into statues with, well, sexual overtones.” Becker looked to see if his careful choice of words had succeeded in refreshing Smithers’s memory without embarrassing Carol Goodenow, who was made uncomfortable by talk of sex in public. Carol was blushing slightly.

“Didn’t we do dirty bushes?” Smithers said. “Genine?”

“Last week we did dirty bushes, but it didn’t run,” Genine said. “A thirty-liner. Spaced out by that piece on grown-ups chewing bubble gum.”

“Put it on the list,” Smithers’s voice said.

“Then Cravens, in Indianapolis, suggests a story on this little town in central Indiana that’s supposed to be the sex-change capital of the world,” Becker said.

“Jesus!” Smithers said. “Dirty bushes. Sex changes. This is getting to be the goddamn Porno section. Isn’t that a Medicine story?”

“Well, Cravens slugged it Lifestyles. He thinks the real story is that this little town that used to be a limestone quarrying town was down on its luck because not many buildings made out of limestone are being built these days. And then this doctor there started doing a lot of sex-change operations and it became a sort of cottage industry—renting out rooms for people to live in while they’re waiting for their breasts to grow, that sort of thing. Kind of put the town on the map again. Now, apparently, other things are happening with their economic development committee, although I notice Cravens doesn’t say exactly what.”

“Jesus!” Smithers said again.

“I hear Medicine’s going to be all taken up this week with this big wrap-up on the pancreas they’re doing,” Becker said, beginning to wonder, despite himself, precisely where the pancreas was. “So maybe we can grab this one.”

Smithers mumbled something that sounded as if it might have been “goddamned queers,” but it was hard to be certain. Carol
Goodenow, her embarrassment over the subject temporarily put aside, leaned forward, apparently at the ready to take down any addition Smithers might provide to a list she kept of remarks he had made that were offensive to one group or another. It was a long list. Many of the remarks sounded rather dated. When stories about homosexuals came up in Lifestyles story conferences, Smithers was likely to become visibly red in the face—visibly, that is, if someone happened to be standing directly in front of his desk, and was thus able to peer down at him through the other end of the gun sight—and mutter something like “pansies” or “goddamned fairies.” At a story conference for Show Business, another section Smithers presided over, a proposed story about a gay production of
Romeo and Juliet
—with Romeo as a bartender in a leather bar and Jules as a swish interior decorator—had brought Smithers forward in his desk chair with a crack so sharp that most of those at the conference dropped their clipboards. “The queers are everywhere!” he had shouted, as he arrived abruptly at a more conventional posture—sitting upright behind his desk, as Bob Bingham, the Show Business writer, later put it, “like a normal human being.”

“Apparently, he isn’t very good at it—the doctor,” Becker went on. “From what Cravens says, it sounds like people are always drifting into Indianapolis for repairs. I don’t know exactly what the problems are. Cravens says something about ‘things not attached as well as they might be.’ ” As he outlined the story to Smithers, Becker began to think that writing it might be only marginally preferable to dealing in detail with the pancreas. “We could get into legal problems, I guess, mentioning that sort of thing,” he added.

Keith Johnson, who had never spoken a word in a story conference, as far as Becker could remember, suddenly blurted out, “I guess that’s why they wear their pants tucked inside their boots out that way,” and started to cackle. Great grunts of laughter came from behind Smithers’s desk. The photo researchers began giggling. Carol Goodenow had turned scarlet. Becker was afraid she might simply bolt from the office, but she seemed to be keeping her chair by an effort of will.

“Pants tucked in!” Smithers yelped from behind the desk. “Put it on the list. Christ knows whether Woody’ll let it in the magazine, but
at least I’ll be able to spend the week reading what Craven files. Is that all?”

“Well, there’s this suggestion about disco banks,” Becker said.

“That’s a Business story,” Smithers said abruptly.

“We did disco banks last March,” La Contessa said.

“It’s still a Business story,” Smithers said. “Jesus! Disco banks! The queers are everywhere.”

1980

It’s time for me to give up on the scheme to launch a 900 number that would tell you who’s dead. The person who actually thought of the scheme was my friend James Edmunds—he introduced what he called the National Deadline to the public in a column that appeared in
The Times of Acadiana
, in Lafayette, Louisiana, about ten years ago—but I was in on the ground floor. I think it’s fair to say that this was the only time I was in on the ground floor, which is one reason I’m so distressed at indications that the National Deadline is, well, dead.

A real estate shark I know once said to me, as a way of explaining the relative poverty of his friends in the scribbling trades, “The trouble with writers is that you’re labor in a labor-intensive industry.” Too true. Writing an article or a book is roughly the equivalent of making a chair—or, even worse, making one chair at a time. In the chair industry, the moneymaker is the guy who presides over the manufacture of chairs, or the guy who sells a chair company short, or the guy who buys a chair company and folds it into the hosiery company he’s about to spin off or—and here’s the richest of them all—the guy who gets in on the ground floor of a chair-selling scheme. That guy doesn’t waste his time sanding.

The National Deadline looked like the sort of enterprise that could transform some humble artisans into entrepreneurs. According to
National Deadline lore, the idea for the project had come to James one evening after he and his wife—Susan Hester, who will often pitch in when a scheme of James’s shows signs of being a real gem—finished watching a late movie on television and Susan said, “Is Fredric March dead?” The rest is history—or would have been, if things had worked out a little differently.

From Susan’s idle question about Fredric March, it was just one step to the name, a telephone number (1-900-WHO-DEAD), and a method of calibrating what you might call certainty of deceasement. Susan works at the public library in New Iberia, so she and James had a leg up on doing the research. It was around that time that I came on board as sort of an informal consultant. Without wanting to claim too much credit for shaping the National Deadline in those early days, I should point out for the record that, on one end of the calibration spectrum, I suggested replacing the phrase “He could be dead, maybe” with the phrase “If he’s not dead, he sure is quiet,” and, on the other end, I counseled against the terms “extremely dead” and “dead as a doornail.” If that isn’t being in on the ground floor, I don’t know what is.

James and Susan and I talked about the National Deadline for a number of years; you might say that we were tweaking it here and there to make sure that there were no kinks in the operation. Yes, I suppose you could also say that we got so caught up in the fine-tuning that we never got around to the start-up. Writers tend to be better at tweaking than at entrepreneurial pursuits. I suppose we should have been talking about capitalization and stock options and what model private jets we were going to buy.

A month or so ago, James sent me an email that said, “Do you know about this:
dpsinfo.com
? Dead People Server. Pretty much what the National Deadline was meant to be.” A website! We had fallen so far behind that we were no longer even working in the right medium. When I got on to Dead People Server, just about the first thing I saw was a description of how it solved those nagging questions about whether someone who played in an old movie was still alive. I went to the alphabetical listing. Fredric March was there. He died April 4, 1975. Yes, poor Fredric March is in his grave, and the people who provide information of that sort on the Internet are probably receiving so many hits that they’re about ready to sell out to
Amazon.com
,
Inc., for four or five hundred million dollars. Meanwhile, James and I are still sanding.

1999

My curiosity about the new
Vanity Fair
has been dominated by one question: Why wasn’t I asked to subscribe? Plenty of people were. I happen to know that one J. E. Corr, Jr., who describes himself as the publisher of
Vanity Fair
, sent letters to any number of people informing them by name (“Dear Mr. Upscale”) that his magazine wasn’t meant for everyone but for “only a handful of bright, literate people.” I’m not saying I look forward to a scene a year or so from now in which some high-powered ad-agency man asks J. E. Corr, Jr., about his circulation and Corr, Jr., says, “Oh, well, about a handful.” That would be sour grapes. I will say that it’s not a lot of fun being among those for whom a new magazine “that captures the sparkle and excitement of our times, our culture” was not meant.

This has happened to me before. A few years ago, a friend of mine phoned and asked, “What are you doing about Robert L. Schwartz’s letter on subscribing to
The Newsletter of the Tarrytown Group
?”

“What letter?” I said.

“You know,” he said. “The one that says, ‘You are cordially invited to join a special, special group of people—the “Creative Minority,” as Toynbee called it—who are stimulated, not threatened, by the changes, upheavals, and discontinuities of modern society. It’s a group of people who won’t settle for the hollow victory of material success—an idealistic, holistic group that seeks totally new perspectives and concepts to bring about a totally new world for everyone.’ ”

“Well,” I said. “Of course the way the mails are these days, you can’t—”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, sorry.”

“Maybe Schwartz knew how I feel about people who refer to anything but holes as holistic,” I said. I shouldn’t have said that. It sounded like sour grapes. Also, I don’t mean to give the impression that I can’t rejoice with my friends when they are among the chosen. I was delighted, for instance, when a woman I know named Millicent Osborn—a woman who lives in one of those rather grand old Park Avenue apartment buildings that must strike people like J. E. Corr, Jr., as the sort of place where the elevator chatter is particularly bright and literate—received an exceedingly complimentary letter from John Fairchild, whose company publishes
Women’s Wear Daily
and W. Fairchild thought Mrs. Osborn might like to subscribe to
W
. “Our compliments, Mrs. Osborn!” he wrote. “For being one of the best-dressed people in New York! For turning 954 Park Avenue into a home that sizzles with decorating excitement! For giving parties that are the talk of the whole state of New York! For getting the fun out of the fashionable living you do!” Fairchild laying it on makes J. E. Corr, Jr., sound practically curt.

I have always liked to think that Fairchild’s letter made Millicent Osborn’s day. I realize that there are residents of 954 Park Avenue who would not be particularly gratified to hear that their parties are being talked about in places like Buffalo and Elmira, but Millicent Osborn has never suffered from that sort of insularity. I like to think that she picked up Fairchild’s letter in the lobby as she was leaving for the supermarket—at a time in her daily routine when she was not feeling her absolutely most stupefyingly glamorous. She opens the letter. John Fairchild is calling her one of the best-dressed people in New York.

“Oh, it’s just a simple little shift I’ve had for years,” she says, causing the doorman to tip his hat. “Do you really like it?”

Then she scurries around to make sure that 954 Park Avenue sizzles with decorating excitement. “The grocery delivery boy told me that the Pearces in 12-D still have that dreadful tapestry of a stag at bay,” she tells her husband. “Maybe you could have a word with them.”

I also do not want to leave the impression that I have never been selected myself. Just two or three years ago, I got a friendly letter from a Nancy L. Halbert informing me that “the family name Trillin has an exclusive and particularly beautiful Coat of Arms.” That was a nice surprise. My grandfather grew up in one of those European towns that
used to change countries every week or ten days, and the only claim to distinction I ever heard him make was that he had deserted two separate armies. My Uncle Benny managed to make it from the Ukraine to Missouri early in the century, but I hadn’t thought of his passage as the stuff coats of arms are made of. At a family gathering when he was eighty-eight, I happened to remark that I was planning to write something about him in a magazine, and his son said, “Don’t mention his name. The Russian army’s still looking for him.”

I couldn’t help but wonder whether these facts were known to the special artist who had, according to Nancy Halbert, already researched and re-created the Trillin Coat of Arms “exactly as the heralds of medieval times did it for the knights and noblemen.” I didn’t send her $19.95 to find out; I was afraid John Fairchild might not agree with Miss Halbert that a coat of arms adds “warmth and refinement” to any living room, and I was beginning to get the feeling that the decisions I made in these matters were not escaping the notice of John Fairchild and other people whose correspondence I valued. I often imagined a few of the letter writers meeting over martinis and mailing lists to discuss my case. “What about Trillin?” I could imagine J. E. Corr, Jr., of
Vanity Fair
saying.