Pro’s dilemma
Taki
New York
Back in the days before I started writing for the Speccie, I wrote for National Review and for UPI, the worldwide wire service. UPI kept up with late breaking news by using stringers, young men and women who would sit up all night watching the telex machine and, in case of a small earthquake in Chile, would file a story the big boys would pick up and elaborate on once they got rid of their Karamazovian hangovers late the next morning. The word ‘stringer’ derives etymologically from the fact that an editor would take a piece of string, measure the copy and pay the stringer accordingly. I was a stringer, and the fact that English was not my first or second language mattered little. That’s what subs or editors were for.
The reason I write this is that having been a stringer 35 years ago came in handy on Monday night. I had filed a story earlier in the day about how Rupert Murdoch’s News International had paid 3.5 million big ones to O.J. Simpson for a book and two TV appearances in which he explained the way he would have murdered his ex-wife and the man she was walking with had he committed the dastardly act. In other words, he was explaining how hypothetically to commit a murder and not get caught. The trouble is that he did butcher his ex-wife and an innocent friend of hers, and was judged guilty in a civil court of having murdered them. He had previously beaten the charge in a criminal court thanks to a buffoon of a judge, a star-struck police force, inept prosecutors and a black jury that decided it was payback time for past white sins.
I had a good time writing about this. Outrage and anger make for easy writing. I mentioned Gadarene greed giving a bad name to our porcine friends, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, proletarian values and fathomless vulgarity, grotesque venality ... you get the picture. I sure gave it to old Rupert, and then repeated the column for the American Conservative, the organ I founded four years ago, but in a totally different style. Americans do not like brutish language, so I played it cute. I had spent close to four hours writing about O.J. and Murdoch, had filed both stories, and was running out to karate training when, on a whim, I decided to look at my email. Catastrophe. I had not been alone in screaming bloody murder over a murderer being paid a fortune and given a national platform on Murdoch’s network and publishing house. But Murdoch was quicker than old Taki. Just as I finished trashing him, he pulled the plug. There will not be a book on how to murder innocent people, nor a TV show, at least not published by HarperCollins and aired by Fox. Hence Taki had to rewrite...
But there was a problem. And it had to do with the Speccie in a way. The editor who hired me 29 years ago, Alexander Chancellor, was in town, and Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s editor, was giving a small dinner for him. Having introduced them ages ago, my presence was required. Worse, Graydon, a man whose aristocratic contempt for commerce and foul play I admire as much as I delight in his taste, has just opened a restaurant next to his house in Bank Street, in the Village, a street straight out of a Henry James novel. I write this drunk, but never have I had such a pleasant surprise. It’s old New York, old 21 Club without the suits, old-fashioned atmosphere — but full of young and very good-looking people. No freaks, no hedge-fund bores, no Biancas from the Bronx. In fact, no Biancas.
You can guess the rest. Alexander, Lynn, Graydon, the mother of my children and I sat there doing a Tom Jones. Relishing life. The food was out of this world, the wine to die for, and then my old editor told me that I had to go back and write a column ‘like the pro that you are’. The trouble is I am not a pro and never was one, so I had some more to drink, took a taxi home and sat down to write. But my style is self-willed and unnatural, more suited to prep school and — as my friend Norman Mailer said of Jack Kerouac — ‘as sentimental as a lollypop’. But I digress. Time to go to bed.
Previous page
