Twenty-two years or so ago, I wrote a column for the New York Observer, a weekly paper owned by a tycoon named Arthur Carter, a man who had come up the hard way and had made his fortune on Wall Street, but one who had retained his loathing for those who had made it the old-fashioned way, mainly by inheriting and the old-boy Wasp network.
The reason I was hired was Graydon Carter, no relation, a good friend of mine who went on to become the big Pooh-Bah at Vanity Fair these past 20 years. Mind you, my column made Graydon very nervous. Arthur Carter was climbing the greasy social pole, and complained non-stop to his editor about the cheap shots a columnist of his took at such social icons as Mercedes Bass, Henry Kravis, Michael Bloomberg, and the social moth, one Jerome Zipkin, no longer with us.
Graydon nevertheless stuck by me, even after I committed the greatest of sins — as a joke — writing that Si Newhouse, the honcho of VF, Vogue and every other glossy that counts, was the only man who buys two tickets when he visits a zoo. One to get in, and the other to get out.
Graydon used to have his assistant, a pretty, extremely capable and charming girl called Amy Bell, make sure I was held in check when he was away. The trouble was Amy and I were buddies, and when Graydon left for a brief holiday I wrote that if Abe Rosenthal, the ex-editor of the New York Times and a columnist for the Times after his retirement, made love the way he wrote, I felt very sorry for his wife. (Rosenthal was a terrible writer but a very good editor. He was also the first columnist to be fired by the Times.)
By the time Graydon got back to the Big Bagel, all hell had broken loose. Shirley Lord, Abe’s wife, took it personally, plus I had referred to Abe as Abie, considered anti-Semitic, which was news to me. Yet again Graydon stood up for me, and soon after he was named editor of Vanity Fair. I was fired forthwith. Writing that Arthur Carter — who dyed his hair and eyebrows in the most egregious way — had bought all the shoe polish in the city, preventing me from getting a proper shoeshine, did not help. End of story.
But not quite. Throughout the three years I wrote for the Observer, my column appeared next to one by a woman named Anne Roiphe. She was described as a novelist, which I’m sure she was although I had never met anyone who had read her fiction. I never read her column either. One look had convinced me not to go there, to use a modern Americanism.
Roiphe was a rich Jewish Park Avenue girl who specialised in high art, namely writing about misery, despair, angst, the widespread dismissal of women’s efforts, and how exhilarating it was to find a man absorbed in his work who did not provide the traditional safety the fairer sex looked for in a man. In other words, she was someone spoilt but with enough knowledge and solipsism to be really f***** up. I had forgotten all about Roiphe until this week, when I read a review of her book — a memoir, of course.
She dismisses her first husband as someone who ‘now writes non-fiction’. Ouch. But that’s not all. Her husband turns out to be a great man, a friend of mine, a drunk, a fortune-hunter, a braggart, a phony who seduced her with his perfect upper-class English accent, although Jack Richardson was born in Queens, Noo Yawk. The more she trashes him, the more I love him. Let’s take it from the top:
Roiphe is culture-hungry and reading my bible, Tender is the Night. She meets Richardson aged 12, and they dance the Charleston together. She’s told by an English prof. not to give up the day job in favour of writing. Crushed but determined, she decides to be ‘a muse to a man of great talent’. In reality, she’s fixated on fame and glory, and then my buddy Jack comes back into her life. She revels in musehood, especially when JR tells her, ‘If I am not as famous as Keats by the age of 26, I will kill myself.’ She writes, ‘He wanted to be a giant among men.’ Enter Taki.
Jack was a giant, all right, a giant at Elaine’s, our watering hole, a giant among competitive, hard-drinking writers who under the influence would expound Demosthenian speeches, Periclean in scope, about absolutely nothing. I adored him, and it’s safe to say he loved me too. Roiphe writes how she waited for him to come home, how she typed his manuscripts, how he disappeared for days during their Paris honeymoon looking for women. What a cad! What a bounder! ‘My nerves are shot,’ he told her. ‘I need the comfort of prostitutes.’
Nurturing the fragile male artist is what an older Roiphe is now bitter about. But accepting living off the written words of someone else, as she admits to, is just a youthful mistake. No big deal. She writes quite eloquently about my buddy Jack ‘coming to life, like Dracula, surviving on scotch and bourbon’, and German philosophy — ‘I am a logical positivist’ was his opening line — and how he woke up trembling and bloodshot. Who hasn’t? Cool it, Roiphe, just the thing that Hadley, Pauline, Zelda and Norris could say about their men and their Jack-like shenanigans.
Comments