Part Five

“I’d Rather You Didn’t”

Inside The New Yorker’s Takeover: 1984—1985

What Robert Caro’s been doing the past fifty years—writing a five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, an American political figure, by traveling to all the places Johnson ever lived, sometimes living there himself, churning out a succession of four-pound volumes, written first by hand, and then again by hand, and then a third time by hand before finally transferring it to a typewriter, usually a thousand pages of typescript, which itself gets sent to a secretary, for digital typing, so that a couple copies can then be printed out for the folks at his publishing house, Knopf, where soon the entire book will be edited by pencil, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a high-ranking editor at the publishing house, who will clear their schedule for the task— cannot ever be accomplished again.

Chris Jones put it this way in Esquire:

The world outside his office has changed in the nearly four decades since he began. Publishers might like to pretend that they’re different from other manufacturers, or at least that they’re farms rather than factories, but they’re not. Books like Caro’s don’t make corporate sense anymore, if they ever did.

If it’s true that such books never made “corporate sense,” it prompts a question of why, at some point, they garnered corporate allowance.

In 1974, at age 37, Robert Caro sold excerpts of his first book, The Power Broker, to The New Yorker magazine, one of the country’s most prestigious journals for literary writing, whose editor in chief, William Shawn, was only the second person to lead the enterprise in its forty-nine-year history, and had already become a legend in his own time. A mythic paternalistic figure to whom staffers pledged lifelong allegiance even though they couldn’t stand some of his editing practices, like the fact that you couldn’t call the thing people piss in a “urinal,” OK so you change it to “pissoir,” which of course only makes him impatient, because it sounds like you're trying to sneak some vulgarity into the magazine, and so the object ends up getting called “a circular curbside construction.”

But he published the likes of Truman Capote and J.D. Salinger. He brought John Updike into the fold. Serialized Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem across five issues. Filled a whole one with John Hersey’s Hiroshima.

He was editor in chief for 35 years. He had eccentricities and gifts and charms and foibles that were unique to him.

Little by little, as time went by, the norms of the publishing world were displaced to accommodate his preferences, his innovations.

This happens at publishing houses too. When Robert Caro’s editor at Knopf, Robert Gottlieb, gave the job over to Sonny Mehta, after two decades on the job, they touched base to see how the transition was going. Mehta told Gottlieb, I spent months trying to figure out the system you used to run this place. Then I realized you were the system.

If it goes on long enough, it cultivates a distinct culture at the publication, or the imprint; if a whole culture is built around the leadership style of one person it means that, when that person goes, they take the era with them.

And Robert Caro, alone, has worked within the reality-distortion fields of all three.

If his books never quite made “corporate sense,” (i.e., designed to optimize profit) and would never now be repeated, we can look back through his career, the different reigns under which he published, and find the point where Robert Caro’s all-consuming project went from being a feature of its publishing landscape, to a relic.

It’s 1984 and The New Yorker’s editor in chief, William Shawn, is sharing an apartment with one of his staff writers, Lillian Ross, who’s also his mistress of nearly four decades, the two of them living in an apartment “about a half mile south of the one he lives in with his wife,” Cecille.

The details here come from Lillian Ross’s 1998 memoir, Here But Not Here: A Love Story, which is beautifully written, effectively elegiac, absorbing. It’s also kinda shady. Fixed on settling scores. A scrupulous reader won’t get more than a few pages deep without their eyes getting squinty about things like her description of Shawn himself; withdrawn, shy, softspoken and monosyllabic in the many memoirs in which he’s remembered, the William Shawn of Ross’s memoir is almost incontinent with angst and confessions, telling her he feels like a “ghost,” that he feels, in his marriage, both “there and not there.” He describes his job, in the largest office of the most respected magazine in America, as “the ultimate cell.” He asks her, “who has blotted me out?” She describes him as a “tormented man…[with] the desires of a poet but the duties of a caretaker.” Says his editorial duties siphoned his “genius” into other people’s work—to their constant credit. Bill, she says, “poured his gifts into others” and “found ways of concealing himself in them.”

Their affair is weird, as she tells it, and so is the book. Ross was known, in editor Robert Gottlieb’s words, for a “golly-gee, naive-girl-reporter manner,” like when she tells us at the beginning that Bill Shawn “longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventure. He was, as I said, a romantic.”

She gives us scenes from when she was a young reporter at the magazine, and it goes like this:

One time Bill and Cecille invited me to come up to their apartment on East Ninety-sixth Street; they had heard it was my birthday, and they wanted to celebrate it with a birthday cake. Cecille made a big effort to make the occasion seem natural, but the atmosphere was one of tension and nervousness. It made me wonder what I was doing there.

A threesome? That’s what comes to mind. And she probably wants a reader to think it.

But note what an eye she has for nuance, for suggestion; if she was getting threesome vibes she would almost certainly have ladled it on a bit thicker. This is a journalist’s skill: take a few benign details, measure the dispensation, and let a narrative take shape between the lines.

Earlier she says that Bill came to her and said that Cecille had said that she and Lillian had “lookalike faces.” Lillian is then distressed to cross a mirror and see that it’s true.

I used to meet Cecille occasionally at parties, where she would do a mean Charleston. I found her to be sensitive and likeable and intelligent, with resolute views.

A little while later Ross tells us that “One night when we were working on editing…in his office, Bill suddenly blurted out awkwardly that he was in love with me.”

When the big thing happens, she tells it to us straight. Better yet, consider this:

One day I was in my office, reading my New York Daily News, when Bill appeared. We looked at each other. It was late morning. Neither of us spoke. We went outside, got into a taxi, and, still without a word, went directly to the Plaza Hotel, got a pretty room, went to bed and stayed there for the rest of the day and evening.

How is it possible that she can lock eyes with her boss and understand, intuitively, that he’s leading her downstairs, into a taxi, a few blocks over to the Plaza Hotel where he’ll reserve a pretty room and invite her up to its bed to pursue “the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventure,” but she can’t understand the tension of being invited alone, as an attractive young woman, into her boss’s apartment for an evening birthday celebration between him and his wife?

Roger Angell, who would himself serve as The New Yorker fiction editor for nearly 50 years, regarded Shawn as a paternal figure, adored him, stood up for him when corporate powers tried to force him out and yet, in hindsight, would describe Shawn, in his final era, as “a Lear in his old age, wishing obsessively to hold the magazine in his hands forever.”

But he loses it. Media moguls Samuel Irving (“Si”) Newhouse, Jr. will buy the magazine in a sale that Lillian Ross will characterize as a knifing, a scheme conducted behind Shawn’s back, arguing that he couldn’t have known it was happening, she contends, because Shawn was completely estranged from the business side of the magazine. He was too busy slaving over his editorial tasks and, apart from that, he’d sold off his stake in the New Yorker years ago to avoid (she claims) any impressions of personal interest in what he did or did not publish.

She resents those who learned, in 1987, of Shawn’s abrupt replacement and did not quit their jobs in protest; “a token gesture of solidarity,” she calls it, “after so many decades of [Bill] giving so much to so many people”; yes she’s wounded, in other words, by the fact that more people did not destroy their career at the most prestigious magazine on Earth as a “token gesture of solidarity” to the octogenarian—now being “forced” into the retirement she claims he wanted all along—who’d hired them in the first place.

She’s wounded, too, by the corporate partners who sold their shares in what she presents as a hostile takeover of the company, namely by that rat, Peter Fleischmann. Bigshot son of New Yorker co-founder Raoul Fleischmann. His family owned 32% of the magazine but Peter and his wife Jeanne controlled only 25%. Those other two major investors (Philip Messinger had just under 20%, depending on your source; William Reik had about 5%) were whatever, capitalist nobodies. You couldn’t expect loyalty from them.

Fleischmann, on the other hand, had stakes here. The New Yorker only got off the ground because of his father’s $750,000 investment.

This magazine was his father’s legacy, just as it was Shawn’s.

That he should have allowed the sale to happen was a betrayal.

First point of rebuttal: the reason the sale of the New Yorker might have blindsided William Shawn is that he banished all business dealings to a different floor of the building. “So [resolutely] had that wall between church and state [been set] that Fleischmann was not allowed to step foot on the editorial floor, and the magazine designated its in-house lawyer…as the sole liaison between the editorial and business department of the magazine.”

It’s easy to be blindsided when you put on a blindfold.

Another reason it’s hard to believe Lillian’s contention that Bill knew nothing about the sale is that, as Thomas Maier depicts so well in his biography Newhouse (1994), all of the millionaires and billionaires who adhere to this narrative are, at the time, running in the same circles; vast corporate convulsions will stem, if you trace them back far enough, to three billionaires literally physically bumping into each other at a fundraiser.

That’s what happened with Si Newhouse. People know he had his eye on the New Yorker (though they aren’t exactly sure why) and so it’s fortuitous when, at a Sotheby’s art auction, he runs into Donald Marron, a high-finance guy at the investment/brokerage firm Paine Webber. Marron doesn’t own any shares of the magazine. He’s out here schmoozing. But he knows a guy who does own a block of the New Yorker: William Reik. Another investment manager at the firm. Reik had been buying stock in the magazine “for himself and his clients” for years. “Attracted to the debt-free and family-run aspects of the company,” Maier writes, “Reik was also [like Newhouse] enamored with the prestige associated with the magazine.”

Aren’t we all. Newhouse certainly is.

And that’s why he wants that stock. But he doesn’t make a fuss about William Reik, doesn’t ask for the guy’s number, try to lean on him. No need! He sits here, instead, getting friendly with Donald Marron as priceless art gets sold all around them.

Donald Marron is more valuable to him than William Reik.

Donald Marron is William Reik’s boss.

One thing Lillian Ross neglects to mention about Peter Fleischmann—the honest broker with a 32% stake in the magazine, family blood mixed into the ink on every page—is that he’s all fucked-up healthwise. Cancer of the larynx. He just had an invasive surgery on his throat. Grueling. Long recovery. Once he’s all healed up, quality of life having plummeted to a new low, he lays down on a table and says, Alright I’m ready, and they wheel him in for another.

The way he talks in 1984 is by lifting this buzzy little taser-like device to his neck. It shoots a current that jiggles his vocal cords and then, by moving his lips, he can speak with a halting, patchy, robotic voice. Apart from his lawyer Ted Clark he also brings his wife Jeanne into the more delicate business meetings so she can translate his gravelphonics. As Thomas Maier writes, based on interviews with the man himself in ‘92, the need for a voicebox put limitations on Peter’s negotiations. The ability to speak quickly, with a strong voice, and have every word understood by the people you’re dealing with—it’s taken for granted.

To be deprived of those faculties was especially limiting in conversation with someone like Si Newhouse.

Among New York City billionaires in the 1980s, Si Newhouse is probably the most discreet. And not only cuz he’s five-foot-two. Although that’s according to a previous biographer. Newhouse takes issue. Whenever he overhears someone mention “five-foot-two” he throws them a squinty look like pinstripe homicide and tells em no, he tells em listen up, he tells em: “five-foot-three.”

Newhouse is sorta like William Shawn, actually: awkward, short, self-conscious, not that great with emotions. He has a capacity for tremendously single-minded focus when he wants something, he’s got at least the strategic resolve of a natural leader, plus he’s low to the ground which is a proven advantage in most forms of combat. He is co-owner, along with his younger brother Donald, of a media company called Advance Publications and they’re making a fortune right now off the relatively new advent of cable television, one of the medium’s top ten operators by 1981.1

His father was a newspaper mogul. The newspapers he ran were small, very ‘umble, but they earned a great fortune. 1983 was not itself the best year ever for Newhouse, in terms of PR. The IRS opened up a $900 million lawsuit against the father’s estate: $610 million for back taxes, another $305 million for fraud. Court records reveal that the company was valued at $1.5 billion.

But frankly he’s got more important things on his plate: in 1980, a year after his father’s death, Si Newhouse bought Random House for $70 million.

Of all available publishing houses, he didn’t go for one of the money makers; Simon & Schuster, for instance, is characterized by one of his biographers as having the sort of in-house culture that would have been better-aligned with a profit-minded course of action. They were more business-friendly. Random House, on the other hand, had a reputation for serious literature; it had, under its umbrella, the crowning imprint for literary prestige: Knopf.

Simon & Schuster was The Joy of Sex, it was Woodward and Bernstein, it was scandal and energy and lights.

Random House was not. It was tradition, ambition, prestige; it was Knopf.

And Knopf, in essence, was Robert Caro.

Si’s acquisition of Random House wouldn’t have been so remarkable if it he wasn’t also doubling down on one of his “glossy” properties: Conde Nast, a more luxurious brand today than it was at the time, with titles like Vogue and Glamour and Mademoiselle and Home & Garden—“chickens,” is how he characterized the many women’s magazines he owned over a business lunch, “only [other] chickens can tell them apart.” He hired a caffeinated young Brit, , to resurrect a retired monthly called Vanity Fair, which originally ran from 1913 to 1936; that she took as much heat for being a foreigner as for being celebrity-focused as for being a woman (really mostly just being a woman) without Newhouse ever flinching in his support attests to a longterm strategy on the owner’s part.

Put the it all together: Random House, the revivifying of Conde Nast, and now he’s chasing The New Yorker — this guy isn’t buying companies to switch up their image; he’s buying up companies to consolidate his own.

Operating at roughly the same authority as William Shawn, except it’s on the business side of the magazine, is the “president” or “publisher,” a guy named George Green. He’s friendly. Leave him alone. To his own devices. He knows the business. He can make inroads with advertisers, goose a magazine’s sales, its distribution, its “centrality to the conversation.” He can get eyeballs and ad dollars if you give him the space to operate.

Everybody knows about the church v. state separation that Shawn enforces at the magazine. So whenever the New Yorker does something innovative or ballsy with respect to marketing, or advertising, it’s likely that industry folk will point to it and say, “Look what George did,” and, “I wonder if Shawn knows about this.”

William Shawn has it easier than George does. His performance isn’t so quantifiable. If the New Yorker runs a poem and someone says it sucks and then Shawn says, “It does not,” well that person might be given a moment’s pause, doubting their own refinement; or, if they aren’t, then onlookers might.

To be perceived, in that manner, as someone who’s cultured or refined is invaluable in that 1980s culture of New York’s high society; it lifts you from the numbers bracket, which fluctuates so violently, depending on the markets, other variables.

The one signifier of status that doesn’t fluctuate, however, is your class. Whether people think you’re interesting, cultured, refined.

Plus William Shawn likes the fact that 75% of New Yorker readers have some college under their belt, and 25% have some post-graduate education too. These were the elite. His job was to make a magazine those people wanted to read—and he was doing it.

If he had his druthers, they’d be the only ones who did read the magazine.

George Green, on the other hand, had to show results.

What Shawn refuses to acknowledge, c. 1984, is that even those elite readers, the sophisticates to whom he imagined himself catering, are getting wary of his approach. The most-cited instance of his slipping curatorial judgement is greenlighting multi-part articles about corn.

As Tina Brown put it, when her own name got dragged into the decade’s magazine wars for being too young or unserious or girly:

Once in a while…I run into a flabby old cliche about what constitutes a “serious” magazine. It’s the mealymouthed idea that visual excitement is somehow at odds with intellectual content, that [a magazine] can be deemed worthwhile only if it is presented as a wad of impenetrable text with a staple through the side.

You didn’t need the title to know which magazine she was talking about.

So here’s George Green, he’s doing his job, he’s “aggressively courting” advertisers, he’s pitching ideas to Shawn about what they can do to make the magazine more popular, more profitable—and Shawn keeps shooting him down.

One of those ideas was to invest in a new English-language version of the French fashion magazine Elle.

Shawn said a fashion magazine was beneath them.

Of course, Elle comes out and it’s an explosively popular hit, bright and tall and colorful with lots of smiles inside. Who’da thought! Green just has to chew his knuckle about it, like everything else.

Eventually Green snaps after Shawn denied an “advertorial” (where a full-page ad, dense with copy, is disguised as an article) because he thought it was “beneath” the magazine’s “dignity.” When Peter Fleischmann then agreed with him (reluctantly, it seems), Green said fuck this, and quit, They don’t want to make money? Fine.

So he did a quick jump over to Hearst Communications. Started publishing two magazines.

Turns out those Hearst people love money.

Well, some of the leadership would like to see growth, and Green’s departure is an eye-opener on that front. Specifically for Philip Messinger. Sitting on major stake in a company run by what seems like an increasingly hermetic, erratic, Lear-like editor in chief—but it’s hard to prosecute a case against Shawn on that front because you couldn’t always tell which qualities were fiscally ruinous and which qualities were, like, the eccentric byproduct of genius.

What’s clear is that Shawn is buying into his own mythos, as he’d been doing to some extent over the past twenty years or so, going back at least to 1965 when Tom Wolfe wrote a takedown of the magazine called “Tiny Mummies,” which of course has a fourteen-word subtitle, leaden and stony and chucked directly from the porch of Wolfe’s own glass house, describing Bill Shawn as “the museum curator, the mummifier, the preserver-in-amber, the smiling embalmer,” plus a few other things.

Shawn read an early copy and lost his mind. Called Wolfe’s editor and said the article had to be withdrawn, for the good of everyone involved, called it “a vicious, murderous attack on me and the magazine I work for.”

But really what had put Messinger on alert was this: he was at a party that year and ran into a New Yorker staffer, Nat Hentoff, who vented about a popular lament at the office: writers were spending months (in some cases years) reporting a story, revising it, getting editorial input, bringing it up to standard. Then Shawn would read it. He’d be pleased. He’d buy the thing. Thousands of dollars, usually—and then he’d never print it.

And now, with the Elle thing, it wasn’t just Shawn’s judgement he had to worry about, but Fleischmann’s too.

Messinger’s thinking about jumping ship from The New Yorker.

So Si Newhouse pays him a visit.

There are several books on several subjects that all tell this next part of the story with different points of emphasis, different readings and details, so this is the best reconstruction I can figure:

It’s 1984. Newhouse isn’t likely to succeed in buying the magazine if he goes directly to the major shareholders and makes them an offer. In fact that would only make them suspicious. Like maybe he knows something they don’t know. Or maybe it just signals how badly he wants it.

So his strategy appears to be this: show the major shareholders (Fleischmann, Messinger, and Reik) that you’ve gone ahead and done some legwork and acquired a sizeable portion of the company on your own. Then show up, present them with your own holdings, and tell them they’re either gonna have to contend with you as a major force on the board, implementing such changes, challenging norms, creating such a ruckus that this not-so-lucrative holding in their portfolio is suddenly demanding huge amounts of their time and attention, tell them they can either do that…or they can let you just take the burden off their hands altogether. Buy them out right now. At a 50% premium. Paid over the course of a year.

So Newhouse does some research. He learns that, back in the 1920s and ‘30s, the New Yorker sometimes paid its writers with stock shares.

Some of those writers sold it off, or they died and passed it on to their kids, and then the kids either sold it or kept it languishing in some corner of their portfolio.

Newhouse tracks it all down.

He buys a few shares here and a few shares there, generational degrees of separation from the writer to whom they were first paid out. A hundred shares from James Thurber’s godson’s mistress’s cat. He piles block upon block and yes these are private transactions, very lock-and-key hush-hush, but the fact nobody likes to acknowledge is this: stock brokers, at around 5 p.m., get up from their desks and push their office windows open and scrabble down the sides of their buildings, suitcoats bundling down like capes over their heads, backbending down onto 5th Avenue or wherever and then hey, guess what, they go and they have drinks with their friends just like the rest of us. And after a chalice or two the shoptalk turns to gossip.

Word gets around: Si Newhouse is orchestrating a takeover.

All through the summer, said Fleischmann, “the stock was jiggling around and I knew that something was going on. I thought it might be Newhouse but there was no way I could trace anything.”

Si Newhouse buys out Philip Messinger.

Si Newhouse buys roughly 2% from William Reik, over at Paine Webber.

Word keeps spreading.

The stock keeps jiggling.

Ken Bosee, the magazine’s treasurer, had just recently estimated the stock’s value at roughly $90/share, according to Carol Felsenthal, and now, as the summer of ‘84 gives way to the fall, it’s ticking past $120.

By November 14, the New Yorker is trading at $140.

He calls Peter Fleischmann: “I would like to make an offer to buy some stock in the magazine.”

Fleischmann with his voicebox croaks back sotto roboto: “I’d rather you didn’t.”

As Jeanne Fleischmann would recall, after sitting in on all those meetings: “Peter was a gentleman. When he said, ‘I’d rather you didn’t’...that meant, ‘Please don’t.’”

Newhouse tells him, “It’s only for investment purchases.” Advance Publications puts out a press release saying they’ve got “no plans to seek control of The New Yorker or to influence its management.”

Yeah yeah, tell that to Fleischmann, he’s home in his wood-paneled office, watching the stock of a weekly culture magazine nearly double for no discernible reason except there’s a very small man in his apartment, staring at him, talking in circles, something about “chickens.”

“[Newhouse] offered to buy just a block, but I knew he wanted the whole goddamn thing.”

So does everyone. What’s more important is the other thing he knows.

“I knew he would never stop until he had the whole thing.”

But the real question for Peter Fleischmann isn’t strategic, it’s not when or how or where the final Newhouse thrust will come; the question is this: why fight it?

He’s 63. Guys his age are already thinking about retirement. He’s got money. Family. If things were different he’d probably go on like his father, working into his eighties, til he absolutely physically couldn’t do it, so ardently did he care about the magazine.

But look at him. The cancer, the surgeries. The voicebox. It feels undignified, kowtowing to a takeover, especially to someone you’ve politely rebuffed. Like a gentleman. Someone who’s dismissed your preference and gone around your back to take the thing he knows you care so much about.

It kills him. His pride.

On the other hand: he opens his mouth, tells his wife he loves her, it sounds like a Speak & Spell. How can he not be thinking about mortality, the legacy of the magazine? If something were to happen, and a doctor tells him tomorrow that he’s got six weeks to live…does he really want to spend that time in meetings, scavenging for the right owners, who in any case are gonna take advantage of his eagerness, his illness, buy it for some low-low price probably just to wait til he’s dead and then flip it for a profit, or turn it into something unrecognizable?

The answer’s no. He doesn’t want that.

On the other hand: Newhouse, he realizes, “was worth $5 billion, $10 billion? There was no way I could fight that money.”

So another question: Is Si Newhouse the best person to entrust with The New Yorker so that it’ll go on embodying the values that William Shawn and the Fleischmanns have imbued it with for decades?

Well. Here’s an easier question: What’s the alternative?

“The only thing you can do in that situation is try to get as much money as you can for the sale.”

Carol Felsenthal’s biography, Citizen Newhouse, says it was in their third meeting at Peter Fleischmann’s home office that Si dropped his “investments only” shtick and came clean: he wanted it all. In February 1985 he went to the New Yorker’s board of directors and offered to buy the magazine at $180/share.

The board said no, but Si had the opportunity to go around them and make an offer to the shareholders themselves. It seems the board advised Fleischmann to hold out. This guy wants it bad, and he knows he’s close.

Sure enough, a couple weeks go by, Newhouse circles back: he’ll pay $200/share.

Peter Fleischmann doesn’t want to do it but, again, what’s the alternative? Plus he’s likely got Ken Bosee’s estimate in his head: these shares are worth NINETY DOLLARS.

But Fleischmann has one more tactic to deploy. One more shot at scaring Si Newhouse away from the magazine on the brink of a landmark deal.

He knew only one person who could do it.

Testimonies overlap, they negate the smaller details, but the gist is this: either Warren Buffett or his business partner Charlie Munger took an opportunity, in 1971, to buy up 16% of The New Yorker. Then they were interested in buying the whole thing. About eight years prior Katharine Graham’s husband Phil Graham had started to waver in his position as publisher of The Washington Post. He was bipolar, an alcoholic. He was institutionalized. He got better. They gave him clearance to go home and visit with her for a weekend. They ate lunch. She took a nap. He went to the bathroom downstairs and put a shotgun to his head and woke her with a bang. Katharine Graham stepped into his role as publisher and performed like she was born to it. Became one of the most powerful figures in American media. Tall and kind and elegant but her vibe was the color of fighting and it was Buffett who approached her and said, Let’s form a partnership and buy The New Yorker.

Graham was interested, but it seems only mildly; Buffett went to Peter Fleischmann on behalf of the partnership and did his normal acquisition pitch.

Fleischmann said, It comes with William Shawn.

Buffett said, Great.

Fleischmann said, Yes. Go have lunch with him.

So Warren Buffett goes to lunch with William Shawn. He gave his pitch: I buy a company because I like how it’s operating. I’m not looking to get in there and shake it up. But I would like a more comprehensive idea of how it operates.

Shawn, probably panicked at the prospect of change, starts shifting over his cornflakes. He explains to Buffett how the magazine works. How utterly impossible it is. A precarious balance of extremely volatile elements. Cartoonists and writers. Warren, listen to me: they weep. Memoirs will confirm the bottles of wine and rum they keep in their offices. Others will talk of their emotional collapse under the weight of a story and how they showed up at midnight or 2 a.m. to Bill Shawn’s apartment where he greeted them in a bathrobe while they wept and then, when they apologized, he’d assure them that they were not the first.

Fleischmann later told the New York Times: “They talked for an hour and a half and when [Buffett] came back he said, ‘I’m not terribly interested in buying the magazine.’”

Selling The New Yorker at $200/share, Peter Fleischmann stood to earn $40 million.

And he was resigned: if the sale has to happen, then these are the best possible terms.

Still, he deployed his one remaining deterrent.

He said to Newhouse, Before I can agree, I need you to know what you’re getting into.

Newhouse was 63 inches of attention.

He said to Newhouse, I want you to meet with William Shawn before we sign.

Worried someone from the press would see them together, and jump to conclusions, William Shawn and Si Newhouse met at the apartment of Ted Clark (Fleischmann’s lawyer). Two short men, uncomfortable about such meetings, forced into just such a meeting, a sense of the Rubicon burbling underfoot.

Newhouse invites Shawn to explain the operation, just as Buffett had.

Shawn proceeds to speak from the heart about what the New Yorker means, what it represents, how it operates. That the reason it is such a wonderful magazine is because it has no profit motive. It can’t. They burn through money without a moment’s pause. “We would send a fact checker by the Concorde to London to check on a fact,” he says. “We would make a long-distance telephone call to an author in Los Angeles to ask his permission to change a comma…We publish things that we think should be published, not because we think our readers will like them or even that many will read them, but that they are important. And no businessman would put up with that.”

As Felsenthal explains in her biography: Shawn clearly did not understand who he was meeting with. Newhouse was a businessman, yes, but his purchase of the New Yorker wasn’t about profit. Nobody seems to’ve known what it was about.

Clark, keeping to himself but consecrating every detail to memory, felt the sale solidifying right in front of him. “Every time Shawn said something like, ‘Send the Concorde to England to check a fact,’ you could see Newhouse [thinking], ‘This is even better than I thought.’”

When the sale was announced, in March 1985, the magazine’s staff would convulse with shock, outrage, grief.

They looked to William Shawn, who said little.

But standing behind him was Lillian Ross.

She told them, Let’s stop this from happening.

PS

A Note on Sources

This installment in the ongoing Robert Caro series is informed, primarily, by the following eight books. Each of them tells the same story from a slightly different perspective.

• Year of Change by E.J. Kahn, Jr. (1988)

• Newhouse by Thomas Maier (1994)

• Here But Not Here by Lillian Ross (1998)

• Citizen Newhouse by Carol Felsenthal (1998)

• About Town by Ben Yagoda (2000)

• The Snowball by Alice Schroeder (2008)

• Avid Reader by Robert Gottlieb (2016)

• Empire of the Elite by Michael Grynbaum (2025)

I’ve got a supinated step which means my feet roll slightly outward. On grocery store days I stand or walk for eight hours and with so much bodyweight squared into the corner of my shoesoles they start to dissolve pretty fast.

I ride the slant for two or three months until my ankles get swollen and I start stumbling. Sometimes I'll collapse on the bed after work and Marie will give my foot a massage but the massages are brief because I make noises like sex and cattle.

A manager once gave me a look like I was drunk, stumbling around at the register, so I explained the issue.

He said, “Then get new shoes.”

I said, “You got the money?”

He clicked his tongue and walked away as if I'd complained he doesn't look at me the way he used to.

The ankle pain climbs the rungs of each leg, knees to glutes to hips, til finally I will come home angry and limping one night as though I've been wronged and I will light a match and tell Marie it is time for new shoes and she will say, “Yes,” supportive when I decide to quit impeding myself, “it is.”

2.

There’s a Skechers on Lincoln Road and they boast that their extra-padded nonslip workshoes are favored by nurses. They cost $109 retail. If I wear my uniform into the store they give me a discount for “working in the neighborhood” but I don’t like shopping in the actual Skechers store because I believe that if a child were given ecstasy and glitterpens the thing it would create is a Skechers store.

Instead I order a pair of padded nonslip workshoes online, and check a box for “local pickup.” If I do this two hours before work I can pick them up en route.

At the “checkout” page on Skechers dot com I will be asked if I have any coupon codes and this is when I remember to Google “skechers coupon codes.”

By the time I’ve scavenged four coupons and winnowed the price from $109 to $79 I am thinking of the shoe as a triumph.

This is before they're even on my feet.

The most sustainable business is one that sells a feeling, then throws in a product to signify that feeling.

3.

The heels on Hoka sneakers will last twice as long as Skechers’, but they're double the price. $150.

I make $23/hr which after taxes and wet willies is more like $19/hr.

There’s a Hoka store on Lincoln Road, just a block down from Skechers. I went there to browse sneakers. The prices are not displayed anywhere. When I asked the price of one shoe or another there was nothing cheaper than double the price of a Skechers sneaker.

If you ask the salesman about coupon codes he will give you the same expression a sex worker gives when you bring out ketchup or so I am told by friends.

4.

Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles founded the Heaven’s Gate cult on a promise that aliens would soon come and rapture them into a higher state of being. Bonnie died of cancer in ‘85 so then it was just Marshall til the end. Followers joined him on a ranch and prepared for the visitation. One day Marshall came home and said, “Hey fellas,” clapping some shopping bags on the kitchen island, “get a loada these:”

Sweatpants and black tees for everyone. But the real highlight was sneakers: Nike Decades.

Soon after they died by mass suicide (applesauce, phenobarbital), Americans saw footage of police walking through a house where thirty-nine corpses lay on bunkbeds, covered in sheets or towels, death-purpled fists and Nike Decades jutting.

Nike stopped making the sneaker soon after that.

This article from Vice shows that some still collect it, and that

Heaven’s Gate founder Marshall Applewhite purchased the sneakers primarily because he liked their look and was “able to get a good deal” on them by buying in bulk[.]

My colleague Brian worked at the Nike store on Lincoln Road for three years before switching over here. When I told him the Heaven's Gate story he said “that's craaayzeee…” eyes wide, “that's saaaaad…” but after sitting with it for a while he balked. “Tell me how thirty-nine grown people fall for that.”

I said I don't know but it still happens.

He was done with his sandwich at that point. Lips puckered as he opened his yogurt. He wears a wooden cross on a long beaded necklace that pools in his lap. “I wouldna bought nunna that.”

5.

The Hoka store is just a block away from the Skechers store on Lincoln Road (which is a block away from the Nike store) and its design style is abduction chic, with sneakers mounted on floating shelves, but there are no pairs in sight, just singular shoes that can be taken down and modeled like a single gorgeous unit. The lighting is weirdly celestial and the floors are post-murder spotless and when I walked inside there were zero customers but five employees standing just inside the door as if waiting for me, hands clasped, positioned in a deliberate-seeming formation that was not unlike a pentagram and they were smiling like those people on sidewalks who ask if you’d like a movie ticket for your blood.

A man led me to a wall with shoes on it. He picked up a sneaker and explained: “This line has multiple layers in the sole and heel, and is specially designed to alleviate pronation and super-pronation.”

I said, “Well,” not realizing he had misheard the script he was told to recite, “I’ve got pretty bad soup-ination…” sounding sad like I’d been left out of a club.

He blinked and looked at the shoe and wagged it and nodded. He said, “This line has multiple layers in the sole and heel,” gesturing with the toe at his own chest and then mine, “and is specially designed to alleviate pronation and super-pronation.” Confident.

I asked a question about the shoe. He nodded. He looked over his shoulder at a poster on the wall that showed the multiple layers comprising the sole and heel. He blinked like he was paging through mental notes. He said something about “foam technologies.”

It occurred to me that the worst thing I could do to this man was ask him more questions about shoes but if I stayed quiet he started to riff. Clicking into salesman mode he told me some common misconceptions about footwear, touching his chest with the sneaker, “I was a professional triathlete, thirty years,” drawing three hashes in the air with the sneakertoe, “pro,” and he said, “what happens to your feet over time…” and he said, “what people don't realize…” gesticulating, rolling his shoulders, poor-yoricking with a sky-blue sneaker that is ugly, very ugly, but reader, Brian:

I bought it.

When James Ellroy submitted his novel LA Confidential to Nat Sobel, his agent, it was 800 pages long.

Sobel called an editor at Warner Books, Nancy Nieman, and told her Ellroy’s manuscript was ready and that it was 800 pages.

Nieman said absolutely fucking not. No. Reduce that by a quarter.

Ellroy was in his early 40s. He’d had a big success with The Black Dahlia (1987), the first volume in a quartet, and then the second one did well and they had high hopes for this third one—nobody was questioning his abilities.

If you want to sell books and make a living, if you want other serious people to take financial risks on your work, then look at the numbers and act accordingly.

2.

Stephen Powell’s 2023 biography of Ellroy, Love Me Fierce in Danger, recounts how Nat Sobel came up with a solution:

I had the manuscript on the desk in front of me, and as a joke I said to James, “Well, maybe we could cut out a few small words.” I meant it entirely as a joke. But I [went through a page and] cut out about a dozen words… James said, “Give me that.” […]When he was done with the page, it looked like a redacted piece from the CIA…It was terrific…He took the whole manuscript back and cut hundreds of pages from the book [that way]…

Nancy Nieman’s refusal, he said, “forced” Ellroy into cultivating the distinctive prose style.

“It came from her, sight unseen, saying, ‘Cut 25 percent of the book.’”

3.

LA Confidential comes out, critics rave, but it comes from a smallish imprint, Mystery Books, and critics are divided somewhat on the slightly “telegraphy” prose style.

Jack walked up and kicked the door in. The arclight snapped on, a living room caught flush: Christmas tree, two kids necking in their undies. Jack shouted “Police!”; the love-birds froze; light on a fat bag of weed on the couch. The girl started bawling; the boy reached for his trousers. Jack put a foot on his chest. “The hands, slow.” The boy pressed his wrists together; Jack cuffed him one-handed.

Ellroy knows he’s onto something.

4.

So does Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief at Knopf, born in New Delhi and raised in Cambridge, a fairly-recent transplant to New York from the world of UK publishing. He was well-known and widely respected in publishing by the time his name exploded into the press, in 1990, for purchasing Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial American Psycho within 48 hours of Simon & Schuster cancelling the book.

Mehta invites Ellroy to lunch at the Four Seasons. Mehta chainsmoked over several glasses of wine and ended with scotch. Ellroy was maybe a dozen years sober. Mehta stayed quiet, with a “fixed stare,” as Ellroy, nervous, started talking faster.

A pivotal moment came halfway through the meeting. Ellroy had wolfed down his meal whereas Mehta’s hamburger patty sat untouched on his plate. By now, Ellroy had developed his own fixed stare on the hamburger which was distracting him from conversation.

“James,” Mehta said. “Do you want to eat that hamburger patty?”

“Yes,” Ellroy replied, taking the hamburger off Mehta’s plate

So began their partnership.

5.

Mehta buys his already-completed novel White Jazz off of his publisher at Warner Books. It’ll be Ellroy’s debut under Knopf’s imprint.

Except he’s got issues with it. Invites Ellroy to his apartment and says, I think you leaned too hard into the telegraphing style. He demonstrated a few small insertions to the prose that made it easier to read.

Ellroy, without any apparent protest or distress, went home and made the changes.

As Powell puts it, “He spent twenty days reworking the manuscript at a rate of forty pages a day.” An old friend, from the library he used to visit, describes Ellroy’s working method from his early career:

He would take one bottle of instant coffee and he would pour it into a cup and then he would take it to the sink, and I never would have believed this unless I had seen it myself, he would pour hot water straight from the faucet into the cup, stir it up, drink it down and then he would sit and write for hours.

6.

White Jazz comes out, September ‘92, and Powell describes how it’s “a minor commercial disappointment” for Knopf. Reviews were strong, but discouraged readers with remarks about the difficulty of the prose. Plus he contends that it was vying for public attention at the peak of a presidential election season.

Ellroy’s in his 40s now, he’s onboard with a venerated publishing house, and they just took a risk on his first book under their imprint—and it underperformed.

He’s just finished a years-long project with the LA Quartet. He wants to try something new. Something BIG.

He moves into the way more chaotic and colorful ‘60s with a new trilogy. Calls it Underworld USA. The first installment, American Tabloid, is a sprawling story that, as he first dreams it up, will involve a nexus of crime surrounding John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, then culminate in the murder of Marilyn Monroe, disguised as suicide.

He writes a big outline and submits it to Sonny Mehta.

Mehta calls him in for a meeting. Lays it on him gently: This doesn’t work. Points out the similarity to a recent Michael Korda novel about Marilyn Monroe.

Mehta tells him, Go home, re-work this.

Ellroy goes home. He re-works it.

The book is a smash. A bestseller. Time magazine’s best book of 1995.

7.

He follows it with The Cold Six Thousand which is way more divisive and controversial because he’s taken the clipped and beyond-minimalist prose style of LA Confidential, put it on a spoon, and held it over a lighter.

A TV sat on a table. A barman goosed the sound. Moore shoved up to a phone booth. Wayne scoped the TV out. […]

The picture jumped and settled in. Sound static and confusion. Cops. A thin punk. Words: "Oswald"/"weapon"/"Red sympath-"

A guy waved a rifle. Newsmen pressed in. A camera panned.

Check out Goodreads and you’ll see a lot of people just trash it, fuck this, unreadable—and I felt the same way in the first five pages but it culminates into something amazing. His most complex and gutting novel yet.

8.

The trilogy’s third novel, Blood’s a Rover comes out in 2009. Mehta thinks it’s Ellroy’s best novel yet. Critics are less convinced. The protagonists of those first two volumes are dead or retired and it feels only loosely connected. The book is inventive, propulsive, funny and shocking—it’s more technically impressive than its predecessors.

But it feels less like art than craft. Ron Howard. Like he’s gone from making weird, huge, baroque grandfather clocks to fancier, sleeker, high-tech wristwatches.

It feels like he got bored.

When it was over, Ellroy decided he wanted to write a memoir about his sex life.

Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief, suggested this wasn’t a great idea.

Ellroy did it anyway.

The Hilliker Curse (2010) is named after his mother Joan Hilliker, whose promiscuity, abusiveness, and 1958 murder Ellroy considers the catalyst for his lifelong obsession with sex, women, and crime.

The memoir was lurid and over-indulged in alliteration. What he calls “scandal rag” or “tabloid” language.

Reviews were overwhelmingly negative. The book sold poorly. His editor’s tempering advice had been right. The book embarrassed him.

As Ellroy would later concede about the book, “I’ll be happy to see it go out of print.”

9.

So what’s next?

He’s in his early 60s, operating at the height of his powers (and if you don’t believe that Ellroy is operating at the height of his powers—just ask him).

He’s got clout and know-how, he can get away with things, he needs to do something BIG, something NEW…

He decides to do a second LA Quartet. Except this one will be a prequel. Set in the 1940s, eve of Pearl Harbor, then it’ll run through the whole war.

A proper follow-up, a proper challenge.

The first volume is called Perfidia. It comes out in 2014.

It is 720 pages long.

Just 80 pages shy of the length that Nancy Nieman told him, fifteen years prior, had warned him against.

“I had my eyes set on a 700 page hardback,” Ellroy told The Quietus, “and I got there.”

10.

It’s followed by Volume 2, This Storm (2019), which is nearly as long as Volume 1, just as heavily populated, just as busy and globetrotting...

But this is where the seams begin to show.

Consider this moment where the series villain, LAPD sergeant Dudley Smith, searches the house of murder victims:

He emptied cupboards. He opened canned foodstuffs and dumped the contents. He dumped drawers and examined innocuous glut…He ripped apart stuffed furniture. He unscrewed light fixtures…The walls now. He brought a stethoscope. He attached the earpieces and began downstairs…He tapped the walls and listened. He got all solid thunks.

Dudley’s efforts are rewarded. Here’s what he finds in a hidden compartment:

A swastika flag, a rising-sun flag, a hammer-and-sickle banner. Flags for Franco’s Falange. Ku Klux Klan flags. Redshirt Battalion flags. Flags ablaze with “SQ”s and coiled snakes.

It happens on page 111 of the trade paperback of This Storm.

And it resembles THIS scene from page 115 of Perfidia, in which Dudley’s colleague, LAPD’s forensic expert Hideo Ashida, is re-searching the house of a murdered family for evidence.

He stood in the hallway. He heard Dudley’s boys bullshitting outside. His eyes traveled. He saw dust motes and a bug on the wall….Anomaly. Inconsistency. Red-alert Flaw. Note the ceiling-wood strips, laid in lengthwise…The seams disrupt the wood-grain flow…They form a two-foot square…He hit the middle of the square. The square flew back, off an inside hinge…A room. Less than an attic. More than a crawlspace.

Hideo’s efforts are rewarded. Here’s what he finds:

a shortwave radio and ledger…He turned on the radio…The dial numbers made no sense…A man shrieked in Japanese. He defamed the United States…It was rabid-dog propaganda.

A family is murdered. The cops are flummoxed. One of them returns solo. It’s dark. They toss the place. They press at the walls. They find a secret stash of SUBVERSIVE MATERIAL.

11.

Ellroy announced, in 2023, that the Second LA Quartet was CANCELLED.

Or not really “cancelled,” per se.

“The Enchanters came in so strong,” he told Michael Connelly on-stage at an LA Times event, “[my publisher] Alfred A. Knopf, my editor…and agent, were so high on it…that I ditched my idea for the second LA Quartet after two volumes…and turned it into a quintet.”

The quartet was aborted in favor of a new trilogy; but the trilogy and the half-finished quartet come together as a quintet, which is a prequel to the ORIGINAL Quartet, which is followed by the Underworld USA trilogy…

12.

The Enchanters comes out in 2023 and it’s the proper launch of the new trilogy. Its narrator is a lewd dude named Freddy Otash. He’s a legbreaker and gossip hawk for tabloids. Disgraced former LAPD officer and private detective.

It’s a chunky ambitious sprawling complicated murder mystery surrounding the death of Marilyn Monroe. 448 pages.

It starts with Freddy Otash learning Marilyn Monroe is dead and being asked, by an old friend on the force, to go in and get forensic details on the scene before anyone goes in and mucks about.

“She was dead,” Freddy tells us when he gets there. “I felt her and smelled her all over me.”

He searches her bedroom by flashlight. He breaks open a drawer. Here’s what he finds:

Fuckee-suckee pix. Four in all. Black-and-white Polaroids. The nude Marilyn Monroe and a cruel stud with a big pompadour. There’s whiteout strips over his eyes…They’re fucking, sucking, going 69…Dried jizz crusts. Some perf spritzed all four pix.

When the book was released, there was a consensus on the subreddit, summed up well-enough by a recent comment: once you hit page 140 the thing really FLIES.

13.

I thought The Enchanters was boring, but better than the last two novels. There was hope.

Knopf was kind enough to send me a review copy for Red Sheet. The first page blurbs a review of his previous novel that appeared in The New Yorker:

James Ellroy, the neo-noir eminence of L.A. crime fiction, is back, with his favorite snake, Fred Otash, in tow…And he sure can shoulder a novel.

It does not quote from the latter part of that same review:

It’s perplexing to see Ellroy let his story go so slack, to see the tension flatlining, resistant even to the defibrillations of jokey, jittery tabloid-speak.

14.

Red Sheet is quicker, right away, and busier and more enjoyable and atmospheric than Enchanters.

But then Ellroy catapults us into a brick wall of exposition, about 20 pages deep, talking about what a “red sheet” is (something about the files kept by law enforcement and intel services to keep tabs on suspected communists).

I gave up. Quit reading.

Then I started seeing reviews. They were glowing. So I tried again. Picked up where I left off and by the end of a twenty-minute sitting I was hooked again because Ellroy’s finally writing Richard Nixon and it’s wonderful. He wrote Nixon’s voice once before, in Blood’s a Rover, but we only get transcripts of his phonecalls with an enforcer named Dwight Holly:

RMN: You’re not taping this, are you, Dwight?

DH: No, Sir. Are you?

RMN: Yes, I am.

Nixon, in that book, is losing it, pre-Watergate. Can’t stay on topic. Tries to talk like the kids. Confiding to his enforcer that he enjoys their conversations.

DH: Sir, I enjoy our chats very much.

RMN: That Irish cocksucker Jack Kennedy stole the 1960 election from me.

DH: Yes, Sir.

RMN: The cocksucker is dead and I’m the president of the United States.

DH: Yes, Sir.

RMN: Keep tabs on you-know-who for me.

But that Nixon is a pure caricature. Comic relief.

In Red Sheet we see Otash tailing a Nixon who’s a bit more textured, broken. He’s lost his presidential bid against John F. Kennedy, he’s working at a law firm, and tonight (Halloween) he’s headed to a bar, having a couple drinks, engaging polite small talk with regulars, and then getting up. Places to be! But hey where’s he headed?

[Nixon] turned east on Packard. This was mixed-race turf. The restricted-covenant line blurred at Pico. We passed a run of bungalow pads with RE-ELECT BROWN signs staked on the lawns. Nixon eyeballed them and made some sort of hex sign.

Another bar, that’s where. And he sits alone. Sips two drinks. Hunts for small talk.

Ellroy has discovered the way to make Richard Nixon sympathetic: from a distance.

15.

Late at night, Otash breaks into the office of Nixon’s psychiatrist, Douglas Kallman. Tosses the place, in the dark, with a flashlight and assorted tools. “I packed my deep-dial microscope to surmount document-study contingencies.” He finds Kallman’s notes about Nixon’s therapy sessions and here’s what they say:

“BRUTALLY BITTER LONELINESS.”

“WALKABOUTS.”

“FRIENDSHIP HOTEL SUITE AND FRIENDSHIP PHONE.”

“ENJOYS GIVING MONEY AWAY.”

“BEREFT OVER THE DEATH OF WHITTAKER CHAMBERS, LAST YEAR.”

“LONELY”

“LONELY”

“LONELY”

Ellroy pulls it off. Makes Nixon more pathetic than contemptible. The ending might be intended to subvert that feeling but I can’t be sure because I was once again confused as I presume to be the point by now.

Guess what else Freddy finds in Kallman’s office, searching it in the dark with a penlight:

A fat stack of smut mags: Rogue, Gent, Swank, Knave, For Studs Only, Beaveroo, Beaverama, For Bushmen Only, Volumes I, II, III, IV, V, VI. Three illustrated eugenics textbooks. In German and unreadable. Nazi-era vintage.

Sounds familiar but here I am, smirking.

16.

Nearly 100 pages deep we see Freddy Otash stumble upon a murder scene. It’s a private residence, 5 a.m., he’s been up all night and there’s a woman with her throat slashed. He employs his trinkets. Dons his gloves. Performs a forensic inspection. And guess what he finds when applying a revealing substance to the body’s hand:

The tattoo raised. Fresh scald marks emerged…I saw this: An upside-down crucifix. The words Los Intrusos above the bottom of the cross.

Los Intrusos means “The Intruders,” which I’m guessing was maybe the original title for this novel, considering how it plays off of Enchanters and the whole novel is about communist insurgency.

In other words, the murder victim harbors evidence of POLITICAL SUBVERSION.

17.

The novel is fantastic but, at 515 pages, it is at least 100 pages too long. The plot is absurdly complex. There’s a murder mystery at the center (the one Freddy Otash stumbles upon), but it’s connected with a double homicide from years prior. A married couple was torture-murdered at home. That murder is connected with a double homicide of two young women from a few years prior to that…I think. Or they might’ve just disappeared but there was blood at the place where they vanished, something to do with a payphone, and the consensus is they’re gone and won’t be found…

At the end of the novel, Ellroy does his job, and ties it all up. The culprit(s) are identified. I just couldn’t parse the motives or how one murder was connected to another.

I flagged a five-page section, pp.215—220, in which various characters sit down and explain the plot. Who did what to whom and where it happened and why—except it isn’t just the why, it’s the speculative why.

Ellroy (via Otash) pitches the various possible explanations of who did what to whom and where it happened and why.

The reason I flagged it is because it happens over and over. The author trying to bring the reader up to speed.

It never worked.

What it did was stop the story.

18.

And the story is a lark! Hugh Hefner is skinny and stupid and drug-addled. He’s being conned into buying a bunch of motels along a strip and turning them into Playboy City. Ellroy gets to talk about giant penises as he does in all of his later fiction. In Red Sheet alone we get reference to a “monster schlong” and “John Dillinger’s gigantic schvartze” and several others.

It might be a Freud thing. Ellroy’s into Freud! He says so in conversation with Jeremy Paxman BBC’s Hardtalk, citing his mother’s 1958 murder as the catalyst for his interest in crime fiction and also tall redheads:

Here’s a newsflash to our British viewers, et al: young males are introduced to the idea of female sexuality within the home and their mother is the first archetype. This is basic Freud. And with me it went a little bit beyond the basic.

Interviewed for a French program in 1989, Ellroy covered the same ground; though his tongue slipped, briefly, when saying the killer picked her up at a bar, strangled her, and “dumped her bushes in her body.”

Hence we find, in Red Sheet, yet another Ellroy motif: promiscuous mothers.

Red Sheet introduces a kind of anti-Mary Magdalene: Otash is pursuing a gang of killers, four brothers, called “red diapers,” meaning they’re the offspring of a woman who, in the 1930s, was coerced by radical communists into bearing multiple children, with multiple fathers, and then raising those kids off-the-grid, indoctrinating them with commie ideology, turning them into killers for the cause.

Part of Freddy’s goal is to make that mother CONFESS.

19.

The whole novel is built on Ellroy’s Christian convictions without being preachy. There’s a motif of sleepfulness and wakefulness that I’m guessing this trilogy/quintet will culminate, in the next/final installment, with some symbolic AWAKENING.

And that’ll be nice. I’ll read it. Because Red Sheet, for all its flaws, is a fantastic story. Extremely hindered by its length and complexity. But I sympathize with the editor who perhaps can’t broach the issue anymore, and I sympathize with Ellroy, who’s playing the hand he was dealt.

More importantly, as the author would have it, I forgive.

I was working at the grocery store early on Sunday afternoon when a very famous political figure came in and did five minutes of shopping. She wore a white outfit and a white cap and her face was very red. She wore her hair in a ponytail. She was trailed by four men with guns but still she walked quickly through the aisles as if there were people somewhere who would not wait for her.

She bought dried fruit and when looking around seemed well-practiced at looking over people’s heads so’s not to react to their sudden reactions at seeing her. She spoke to nobody. When her son used the bathroom she leaned on a nearby shelf with her hatbrim tucked. Her arms were folded. Her phone was up at her nose.

Secret service orbited constantly. If you have ever seen those chicken-shaped weathervanes during a storm, twisting westnorthwestnorthSOUTH, you will know what their heads were doing. It was fascinating to look at them and see how swift and organized and alert they were but sometimes they would look back at me and that was unpleasant.

When I worked at the Cheesecake Factory we had a late-morning regular who was sensitive about feeling looked at. She would get up from her de facto booth and walk to a table across the patio and she would tell young parents that their toddler was looking at her and please make it quit. She had rolling luggage instead of a purse and sometimes she would open it up and bring out a pillow and then lay sideways on the tile waiting wordlessly for a seizure. That’s when I learned to really relax my eyes and focus on my peripherals.

2.

What I’ve learned from this experience is that Secret Service agents like to stand in the place where you did not think a person was standing.

The famous political figure was like the center of an octopus, the brainy part with squinty opinions, and the Secret Service drifted around her like tentacles, omnipresent, moving always in different directions from one another, but always in relation to one another, coordinated, like when you find a strange puddle on the beach and you kneel down to study it, poke it with a stick, but the puddle blinks at you and takes your stick and scuttles with a slur into the sea.

3.

On Tuesday I walked one mile to work under 3 p.m. heat and showed up drenched, clocked in, asked a manager what he needed help with and he asked me what I was doing here. Turns out I wasn’t on the schedule today.

He said, “We had two call-outs. You can stay if you want.”

I said, “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

Then I clocked out and walked home and sat barefoot on the sofa with my dog to finish reading James Ellroy’s new novel Red Sheet.

Five years ago I discovered James Ellroy and read eleven of his novels in a row. I overdosed. It emphasized the seams in each book’s design. The repetition.

I’m still not sure if that’s a fair way of reading someone’s work, its siblings standing anxious in the periphery.

4.

just reviewed Jill Biden’s new memoir about what it was like to be First Lady. Brown did not like the book. She compares it to former-former-former First Lady Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming.

Michelle Obama spoke about how she sobbed uncontrollably for a full thirty minutes on the Air Force jet that carried her and her husband away from the Oval Office for the last time, “because that’s how much we were holding it together for eight years.”

Jill Biden, on the other hand…[,] wrote a departing message with her fingertip in the steam collected on a frosted window in the White House residence. A pity she doesn’t tell us what she wrote, or what she really felt about her four years in the White House

But that reading feels too literal. Almost unfair.

Consider: the thesis of every political memoir is one of three things:

1. “vote for me”

2. “I did good”

3. “they lied!”

What makes these books fun is that there are things a political figure wants to say, but cannot, and so they have to hint at it.

Kamala Harris wrote a memoir called 107 Days about her 2024 presidential campaign. On page 18 she tells us about notifying her allies that she was the presumptive nominee, and asking them for their support. She then prints their responses, as she noted them at the time.

She writes in the book what she noted, at the time, about her call with California Governor Gavin Newsom: “Hiking. Will call back.”

Then, in parenthesis, Harris adds: “(He never did.)”

For me the joy of political memoirs is coming across tiny sentences like that and realizing oh wow she fucking hates him. You decode one memoir by pairing it with others.

None really stand on their own.

But the good ones don’t really crowd you in either.

5.

Last week I wrote a post about a customer at the grocery store who is a disciple of the Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung and makes jewelry about the man. I wrote about how this customer gifted me a $200 book by Carl Jung, along with two volumes of gay erotica.

He’s given me two more books since then. Both about dreams and Carl Jung but he left me a secret message inside the second book. Delivering the book in two plastic bags. I flipped through the book and found a folded-up length of paper towel inside. It dropped out rigid and clacked the floor. Stiff.

I bent down and picked up the folded papertowel. It was stiff in my hand and I said to myself, “Man if there’s semen in this I’m gonna be so upset,” but no it was wrapped around a bi-folded sheaf of four Powerpoint slides. Lots of pictures. Lots of text.

Optic overwhelm.

Took a while to decide where to start but finally the clusters of text and newsprint revealed an apparent conspiracy involving President Eisenhower, extra-terrestrials, and the Foo Fighters.

A reminder that connections, ultimately, are there for those who need them. No one is so interested in siblings as those who have none.

Tuesday afternoon I asked a customer about the strange pendant on his necklace and he said that he made it himself: a star, made of metal, with a gem at each point. “It’s…” he waffled a hand in front of his face like to avoid being a burden, “it’s complicated, it’s based on a guy named Carl Jung.”

He was buying lots of ice cream. “What about him?”

He said with a deep breath that Carl Jung was a —

“I know who Jung is.” Zipped outta me kinda curt. “I mean what’s the thing with the gems.”

He explained that the pendant reflected some theory about the spectrum of masculinity: Postman—Teacher—Gardener—Cop—something else.

I told him the price of his ice cream and I told him that I’d always been curious about Jung’s Big Red Book, a facsimile printing of the oversize diary where Jung sketched his theories about dreams. “I think it’s like $200.”

He nodded, tapping his phone to the console, “It’s pricey. Changed my life, though. Got me into dream therapy, dream journaling. Plus it just changes your relationship to yourself. Like last night: I had a dream about a duck. Well.” He blinked at me. Saucey smile. “What does a duck do…?”

I shook my head.

He waggled his elbows like wings: “A duck navigates the three realms: land, air, and water. It’s very versatile. But it’s not particularly impressive on any of them.”

2.

Thirty minutes later I was there at the register when he came back and handed me a huge J. Crew bag. His posture was stiff and his eyes were wide and he was walking the way I used to walk past cops in college while hiding my drunkenness: straightbacked, dispensing a gallant nod, “Cunstable...”

Like an idiot I took this bag a stranger handed me and held it as my own.

A criminal defense lawyer told me a story: his client is at the airport when a cop walks up, “Hey pal,” nods at his bag, “mind if I look inside?” Guy says sure. Unzips his bag and holds it open: buncha cocaine inside. My friend asked his client, “Why’d you open the bag if you knew it was fulla coke?” Guy shrugged, “I thought I had to.”

Of course once the bag’s in my hand the Jungian taps his jeweled medallion and vanishes.

I looked down into the bag and there were three books inside it.

Two were small and normal.

One was big and red.

3.

I went to the breakroom and hauled the bag up onto a table where people were not eating and I laid it sideways and slipped the book out. It was dressed in library plastic. Pristine. Started paging through it. “Jeebus.” Thick eighteen-inch pages that, when you turn them, say things like schloompf and schlaumf.

Colleagues drifted over, “What’s this…?”

I explained it’s a journal by “a guy named Carl Jung” and talked about the cost and about the friendly philosophical jewelmaker who gave it to me.

My colleague David was there. David is skinny, early 50s, capped teeth. Last year around Christmas I said hello to him and he came and stood close to me and said “I went to see a medium that a friend recommended to me, and we didn’t tell her anything at all about my life, but when she started to do her whole ritual she said, ‘Your father wants you to know that he’s at peace and that he loves you even though you’re working retail.’” I try to stay moving when I greet him.

David sat up over his Tupperware and pointed with his fork: “You manifested that! You made that happen! God is rewarding you for knowing what you want and having the humility to make it known!”

I said thank you David.

He leaned across the gap between tables and wiggled the J. Crew bag. “What else is in there…?” Tipped it upright so that a pair of slim trade paperbacks came sliding out onto the tabletop.

Gay erotica.

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4.

Thursday then. I was sitting in the breakroom on my lunch break with Tracy and Pola.

Pola’s talking about a guy who just got hired. He talks to himself and has a really intense vibe. Someone found his mugshot online. “You know they don’t do background checks here?”

I was surprised but it made sense. A job that starts at a $15 wage, eight-hour shifts at a cash register, is gonna hire from a pool of people with opportunity limits. I said something like, “They kinda need people who are broke.”

Tracy on my right, in her hoodie despite the heat, was eating carrots with her elbows on the table and she did offended shapes with her brow and said “speak for yourself,” chewing in slow arcs now, then Pola broke the tension saying, “I’ve been arrested, too, so I should be grateful.”

Says it happened twice but both got expunged.

First time was for punching her mom. “But she’d broke my tooth out like two weeks before.” Second time was for shoplifting from Urban Outfitters. The store had soft tags on their clothing back then and she would take a pile of tops into the dressing room, remove the tags, then stand on tiptoes and tuck them behind the mirror, fingertips grazing other shoplifters’ tags…

Tracy on my right kinda mellowed and smiled at the story and then told us how she used to shoplift every week from a grocery store in New York City til finally she got caught and arrested over a single banana.

“One day, I wasn’t even hungry, I just said, ‘Hey: lemme go steal something.’ So I went to the grocery store and looked around and just grabbed a banana. Whatever. Started waking out. Then the Loss Prevention guy cuts me off, out in this little lobby area where the carts are. And bro,” she smiled at the ceiling, “when I saw that man’s face,” punching a rhythm into her opposite palm, “I said, ‘This motherfucker does not have banana-justice on his face. This man’s coming after me for two years of shoplifting.’”

She had a wad of cash in her pocket and whipped it out and pressed it “please please please” into Loss Prevention’s chest but he just shook his head. “Nuh-uh.” Pushed her money back. “We’re past that…”

Pola interrupted her: “Lookit Alex’s face,” nodding all squinty, wagging a finger, “judging us…”

5.

That was two Thursdays ago, Shavuot, and customer traffic was slow once the sun went down and I was lost in my head about the conversation during our lunch break. Cusomters came up and I scanned their items on autopilot. Little eye contact. Terse hellos.

A guy came and I scanned his items and told him what he owed and saw it was the guy who’d given me the Big Red Book.

“Hey!” Embarrassed, over-enthused, then remembering the porn. “How’s it going?”

We chit-chatted. He told me about the house he and his husband are renovating. I told him the dollar amount. He tapped his phone on the console. It blooped. Asked for his PIN.

He said, “How ‘bout you?” Typing his PIN with one jabby finger. His whole hand shaking. “Any dreams lately?”

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PS

Thanks for reading! Later this week I’ll be posting the fifth installment in an ongoing series, based on archival reporting, about how Robert Caro’s THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON took shape and unfolded across a literary ecosystem that evolved, over a half century, from resisting his work to revering it.

About half of each essay is paywalled. If you like what you’re reading, I hope you’ll help the effort by upgrading to a paid membership.

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Part Four

No Power to Stop It

The first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, was released on November 12, 1982, with an “unusually large” (USA Today) print run of 100,000 copies on the heels of the controversy that ensued from its four-part run in The Atlantic Monthly earlier that year.

Then it became a main selection for the Book of the Month Club, which printed another 100,000 copies, calling the book “important” and bolstering it with more push and praise than any other title since The Gulag Archipelago.

Gossip columnist Liz Smith claimed, in March of ‘83, that Caro—who’d just sold the TV rights of Path to Power—“has made a third of a million dollars from [the book] and when the work is completed, he will have made a million.” (That number is corroborated nowhere else.) By 1984, according to the Dallas Times Herald, Caro had sold TV rights for the entire trilogy. None of them seem to have been made.

“I lived on airplanes,” he told Newsday about the research for Volume One.

He and his wife/researcher Ina held onto their New York home while renting a place in Austin, where they lived "[on and off]” for three years, and scattered comments suggest that they rented various places in the Hill Country, where interview subjects “weren’t hostile,” Caro said, “but they were reluctant” to tell the story of Johnson City’s most celebrated son with yet another pair of New Yorkers. “What bothered them before was that ever since Johnson was president, reporters and writers would come for a week and leave and say they understood the Hill Country. Well, let me tell you, the Hill Country is a damned hard place to understand.” Especially, they might have guessed, for an outsider like Caro, dressed in what everyone describes as his “Ivy League appearance,” the horn-rimmed glasses and slacks, the yapping sheepdog and beautiful wife with the same cerebral vibe.

So that’s why they needed to live in the Hill Country: they had to understand the soil, the climate, the culture.

The reason they needed the place in Austin is because that’s where the Lyndon Johnson Library is, the locus of his research.

One thing that made the Johnson biography so much more taxing, physically, than his book about Robert Moses is that, in New York, he could dart around conducting two or three different interviews a day; in Texas, however, “Every interview seemed three hundred miles from the others. Over and over.”

Not to mention he was contending with old memories, events that might’ve been foggy before the interview subject considered the blasphemy of denigrating a president (a crime adjacent to blasphemy, for a certain generation).

I’ve mentioned, in this series, the story Caro often tells about tracking down one of Lyndon’s oldest friends, Vernon Whiteside, who had the information to break open the whole story of Johnson's formative years but was, by all accounts, dead—until Caro tracked him down to a trailer park in Florida.

But there are two versions of that story.

In his 2019 memoir, Working, Caro claims that, when he found Whiteside’s whereabouts,

I didn’t ask the [mobile home] court’s operator to bring him to the phone. It’s too easy to say no over the phone and I wasn’t going to give him the chance to say he didn’t want to talk to me[.]

So he boards the soonest flight to the nearest airport, rents a car, drives out to the trailer where Whiteside lives with his wife and gets his interview.

Cracks his story.

But he tells it differently in a Newsday profile from 1982. There, he claims that he did try to speak with Whiteside over the phone, but the woman who answered it wouldn’t allow it, and that’s when he boarded the plane.

Another detail—not explicitly changed from the version presented in Working, but it adds to my point—he didn’t just sit down and collect his facts from Whiteside and go home. Their interview unspooled over three “long afternoons”.

This series is informed so far by roughly 300 articles and 100+ audiovisual interviews. They span roughly 45 years. Caro tells the same stories across those decades. They are almost identical in their rendition, not only the details but the wording, the intonation.

This is the one inconsistency I’ve found in any of his work stories. I’m not sure what to make of it, but nor does it seem irrelevant.

Consider the maneuvering entailed in that story: the ride to the airport, the airfare itself, the rental car, the cost of three days’ lodging.

That excursion to meet Whiteside probably cost several hundred dollars, in the 1970s.

And it was worth it! He got his story.

But such costs would go up with the decades, and Caro would still be chasing leads.

How many times did Caro jump from his desk, chase a promising lead at great expense, driving or flying some drastic length, and the person wouldn’t speak to him, or the document wasn’t there?

Surely, in the 50 years he’s been working on this series, it’s happened once or twice.

How is that accounted for?

Another stream of income, bolstered by the quick success of Path to Power, is Caro’s speaking fee. Lectures around town about Robert Moses (“Can There Be Another?”), about Lyndon Johnson, various aspects of political power.

A reporter named Woodie Fritchette attended one, in the late ‘70s, and wrote it up. A glimpse at Caro in the thick of his work on Volume One. A guy who stands already, at 40, “high in the ranks of America’s latest folk hero, the investigative reporter,” this being, incidentally, the same set of years in which Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were making their fortunes reporting the Watergate scandal. But as Woodie Fritchette reports, from Caro's ‘77 speech at Troy’s Russell Sage College, the reason he left Newsday is he got frustrated with “go-with-what-you’ve-got journalism,” the deadline limitations that forced him to write around what he didn’t know, rather than paint the whole picture.

Caro, whose modesty borders on shyness, is not from the turned-up collar, cigaret-smoking [sic] school of journalism. He is not flashy. He leaves sensation to others. “It’s enough to tell the truth,” he tells his listeners. He appreciates the effect of understatement, and nearly destroys the mystique of the investigative reporter when he says that the tools of the trade are a taste for hard and unglamorous work, patience and attention to detail and accuracy. He adds disarmingly that some of his own best efforts were the result of “dumb luck” as much as anything else.

In response to the biography’s excerpts, which had run in The Atlantic a few months prior, Caro and the magazine’s editor, William Whitworth, were charged by some with occupying an ethical gray area by not citing Caro’s facts as rigorously, throughout the prose, as a reporter might have done. Defenders of Johnson latched onto this and said Caro’s assertions were based on nothing, or he was jumping to conclusions.

“I kept waiting for someone to come to me and tell me to my face and tell me something in the book that wasn’t true,” he told the Dallas Times Herald in ‘84. “But nobody came forward, and I was getting quite angry about the attacks.”

Now that the book was out, anyone questioning the integrity of Caro’s reporting could consult with the 200-volume bibliography that starts with a note to the reader:

A bibliography for this book would be another book in itself, and an exercise in pedantry to boot. The following list includes only those books specifically cited in the notes, and I include it for one purpose alone: so that I can use abbreviations in the Notes.

The gist of his research is conveyed in the observations of reporters who visit his Manhattan office for interviews, always marveling at the “spartan” and “orderly” lack of decor. His writing desk situated under a wall-length corkboard and, on the opposite wall, a bookshelf with pertinent titles about FDR, the New Deal, Texas geology and topography. You’d think a monk works here but reporters are impressed as much by the office as by the man who occupies it, whose outfit is neat and preppy but always plain, a dark blazer with slacks and a “regimental” tie, i.e., the striped ones, with four colors, running upper-left to lower-right.

“Caro,” says a reporter for the Houston Post, “turns out to be an affable, almost chatty person,” but just as he writes of Lyndon Johnson that the man’s life ran along two beams, “a dark side and a light side,” interviewers note the quick shifts in Caro’s own demeanor, his “intensity” and “enthusiasm,” saying that it’s largely characterized by the way he tends to “speak softly” (LA Times) but “with growing intensity,” his “jovial impatience” or “boyish congeniality” (Newsday), or the above-mentioned “humility that borders on shyness.”

“Controlled in his manner, he sometimes finds release in sudden laughter accompanied by a happy, assenting nodding of his head.”

But there’s fairly regular mention, in the coverage of these first two volumes, of “the flash of anger,” steely and quiet, when confronted by coverage that he considers (and the word is repeated through the years) “unfair.”

“The criticism wasn’t fair,” he tells that Newsday reporter, addressing fiery reactions to excerpts printed in the Atlantic. “There’s a book out now, and anyone who reads the book will find it all substantiated.”

Johnson insiders were able to argue, in response to the four excerpts that ran in the Atlantic, that Caro was propelled through seven years of research and travel and writing and rewriting and quarreling with his editor purely because, as the 36th president’s advisor and speechwriter Jack Valenti said, he has “an extraordinary capacity for a vendetta seemingly without origin, unless Princeton offered Caro a special course in the Spanish Inquisition, and he mistook Torquemada for a hill country congressman.”

Polonius who? “I have read a good many hatchet jobs,” Valenti continues, but when it comes to character assassination Robert Caro is “the literary equivalent of Charles Manson.”

Not to mention the divide that Caro himself would attest: he is, as Johnson’s aunt would call him, “a city boy,” possessed of the unshakeable Ivy League poise and braininess that earned sneers at Newsday (colleagues would claim to remember, 35 years later, Caro coming to work in bespoke suits that the biographer claims he could not possibly have afforded; they remember that he kept to himself, with an air of superiority, and never joined them at the local watering hole, Lou’s, even though, according to Caro, he was in fact standing right there).

But now that the book was released, and everyone could see how presumably unhinged this elite city boy really was, they cracked the book to find that, beyond a slim introduction, Lyndon Johnson himself does not appear for nearly 100 pages.

In a Washington Post profile, Curt Suplee peppers readers with the highs and lows of critics’ responses, from “repetetive and fiercely polemical” (New York Times) to “a monumental political saga” (also the Times), and funnels the whirlwind back to

The object of this monsoon of controversy, munching placidly on a room-service sandwich at the Mayflower, seems an unlikely target. At 47, Caro…has the mild voice and pedantic poise of a grad-school lifer. After carefully replacing his glasses (removed for photos), he settles into a chair, brings his fingertips together and, with his forefingers, begins obsessively kneading the balls of his thumbs.

The criticisms, he says in his quiet New York consonants, “are not fair. In fact, they’re not true—they’re lies. The documentation is so thorough and complete that no real questions [of their veracity] can exist in the mind of a truthful person.”

Yeah it gets into some gossipy elements, like Johnson’s affair with the tall and beautiful Alice Glass. “It takes up fifteen pages in a 900-page book,” he told the Houston Post, “but that’s what everybody jumped on immediately.”

Not to mention that the number of people who read an 800-page biography, and see the truth for themselves, will never come close to the number that skims this 500-word rebuke over their coffee, calling him the Charlie Manson of literature.

It wasn’t fair.

He had no power to stop it.

Others, taking issue with the book, seem to find the artistry of Caro’s prose and the rigor of his reporting hard to refute, and there’s hardly a review that doesn’t bow to it; if, however, the reporter’s not keen on where Caro takes it, the praise is voiced with reticence, suspicion, like the good prose and thorough research comprise a Trojan horse for the types of “vicious canards” Robert Moses once accused.

Another reviewer, Kemper Diehl, goes into the weeds on Caro being a great prose stylist but ultimately, when it comes to his topic, an outsider.

“Caro provides a number of interpretations…that simply miss the mark…Politics in Bexar County in the 1930s divided along reform vs. machine lines, not so much on the liberal-conservative lines that obsess Caro.”

Dr. Betty Sue Flowers, Director of the Lyndon Johnson Library (2002—2009), elaborated on that point in a Zoom call this month.

A fan of the series, and a native of Texas, Flowers emphasizes that Caro’s “description of the Hill Country in the 30s was absolutely brilliant,” but disagrees with his suggestion that Lyndon Johnson was propelled (at least in part) by “a chip on the shoulder because of poverty.

“That was not the case in the south. I find up here in the north that, because it’s more diverse, it is wealth that divides the classes. Growing up in the south, it is not money” that divides the classes, but lineage, “the stock that you come from.” In that respect, she says, “It’s like the old aristocracy,” and Johnson, far from seeing himself through the lens of poverty, would have seen himself as a descendant of “leaders” (both his father and grandfather were popular regional politicians).

The Library’s previous director, Harry Middleton, had been a speechwriter for Johnson, and wrote in the Library’s newsletter that Caro’s Path to Power is motivated by “a loathing so deep it coats a steamy sheen over his prose.”

Middleton later acknowledged it was poor taste, putting those remarks in a public newsletter, but he didn’t apologize. Didn’t change his view.

The closest he might have come to doing so was in 1984. A reporter was writing about the long tail of Caro’s book (occasioned, it seems, by the release of a $9.95 paperback from Vintage). The reporter spoke with Caro about the controversy over the excerpts printed in The Atlantic, which alleged that Lyndon Johnson, in both the Senate and vice presidency, had accepted donations by way of cash-filled envelopes, delivered by hand. As he told the Dallas Times Herald, “Every day I would wake up and find some op-ed column by Jack Valenti or Liz Carpenter [Lady Bird’s press secretary], or some other member of the Johnson Court. And I thought, ‘Well is this going to be the reaction in Texas?’”

But then the book came out and the response was largely positive. It sold almost a half-million copies. It won the Carr P. Collins award, from the Texas Institute of Letters, for best nonfiction—a prize seldom given to non-Texans.

Such was the power of his prose.

Brian Lamb, of C-SPAN’s Booknotes, asked Caro in 1990:

Caro’s response:

“When I look back on The Power Broker, for the first five years or so [before switching publishers] it was just a struggle, from month to month, to keep going. That [book] was not a bestseller at first. But it almost immediately began to be used by really hundreds of colleges, y’know. Different courses. And y’know I won the Pulitzer Prize and other prizes. I was able to get a much better contract for [a biography about] Lyndon Johnson. The first volume of the Johnson [books], of course, was [Caro squirms a bit, laughs, shifts in his seat] a major bestseller or whatever and all the money problems have ceased [cue the restless punctuation Caro often does—shrugging one shoulder, and cocking his head toward it—to signify that he’s reached the decisive end of an awkward topic] and it’s not even a consideration anymore.”

On top of the praise and financial security, the people Caro needed to interview were now, at last, coming to him.

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There’s a customer I dislike who happens also to be elderly, foreign, and confined to a wheelchair that she footpeddles like a Flinstones villain, a frown so steep it seems rendered in crayon, eyebrows funneling down with scorn for things like color, wind, et al.

She is unbearable but she is also those other things and therefore—whenever she barks at someone, or gets impatient that an employee doesn’t speak French, starts THWACKING her armrest with an angry palm because the transaction is taking too long—I’ll turn to the next customer in line, they’ll step forward once she’s gone and they’ll make a comment like, “Must be hard for her,” and I will say, “Yeah…,” pursing my lips and nodding like the feeling she evokes from me is sympathy.

But no the feeling is anger.

This customer’s wheelchair is electric but I only see her use the electric function on the sidewalk or when she wants to URRPPP her way through a cluster of people inside the store, startling them, lurching forward and her head lolling back at the sudden momentum.

She seems like an older ailing person, isolated, doing her grocery shopping because she has to. Nobody in this store wants to be here. Everyone is dragging themselves.

Bagging groceries with my pout and my big sense of self I look over at this Euroscowl on wheels and think, “Can’t you just…?”

2.

Often when customers cannot find what they’re looking for they will look for an employee and I’ll be the first one they find, driving a pallet jack loaded with a thousand pounds for marinara, plastic nametag on my chest and pads on my knees and box cutter jutting off my belt, a fluorescently-colored shirt with the store’s logo arching in huge letters across the front and back.

The customer will wave for my attention and I will stop and turn to them and they will ask, “Do you work here?”

The impulse is always to tell them no. Tell them, “I do not work here.” Tell them, “I am eccentric.”

Instead I smile and fold my hands like a man at an altar: “I do.”

The customer, wincing bashful, “I guess you guys don’t do the chocolate anymore, huh?”

It’s a bizarre question, intentionally, the point being that you respond to their question by asking them what they’re trying to ask.

“I didn’t see it on the shelf. I guess you don’t sell it anymore.”

So effusively nice and accommodating it’s meant to have a bite to it.

3.

If the woman in the wheelchair cannot find something on the shelf she will ask us where it went. If we tell her the item sold out she will ask how that’s possible.

She is here almost every night. She brings her own bags. They are undersized and flimsy but she insists we use them. She asks questions in French but we have only one employee who speaks French. Her name is Jenine and she’s not here right now. She doesn’t work nights.

I wrote about Jenine once before. We were shelving eggs together and she was saying things to me that I didn’t understand. Nonsequitors. Then I realized she was talking to herself. Then she started changing voices and I realized she wasn’t talking to herself but talking with herself.

If Jenine is performing a task, and a manager comes and tells her she’s made a mistake, Jenine will step back from her error like a child from a spill. She will tap her fingertips together and explain to the manager everything she was ever told in her life that led her to believe this was the exact way to perform the task. She’ll sound indignant about it, like she was misled, talking faster and faster with her tone getting HIGH AND RIGHTEOUS but then quickly arching down into panic, fear, shame, apology.

Sometimes management will stay overnight and move the shelves around. Put the candy where the chips go and vice-versa.

When Jenine comes to work and sees the re-arrangement she will spend an entire week grabbing her hair at the roots, eyes welling up, flustered, angry with herself everytime she goes searching for something in the place it was yesterday, not finding it, doing breathless half-turns in the aisles with her arms up, face wrought, grabbing at colleagues:

“Oui doun’t dew the shoquoleyt eyneemour?”

4.

It seems important to the woman in the wheelchair that she demonstrate self-sufficiency.

(The way she can clear a path, etc.)

But if she needed no help, then nobody would look at her, and so what I think she tries to convey, instead, is how self-sufficient she could be…were it not for the incompetence of everyone around her.

Foot-peddling up to an employee, leaning forward, she unspools a long eloquent-sounding braid of French, five or six sentences, and then she’ll end it with a question mark.

The employee she’s talking to will blink. They’ll open their mouth. They’ll look around, “Um…,” eyelid morse saying W-H-E-R-E-S J-E-N-I-N-E, “just a second…”

The customer repeats her question. Enunciating. Not making it clearer so much as sharper. Gesticulating with her long fingers and chewed nails, urgent liquid wrists, like we’re playing charades and her prompt says “car filled with bees”. But it’s no use.

The customer scoffs, exasperated, throws her arms up so they clopple down loud to her thighs like frogs on pavement. A couple weeks ago she shouted so bad that a manager intervened, angry, and led her out to the vestibule. Got down on one knee like a proposal but pulled from her pocket a cell phone, Google translate, locked eyes with the customer and started explaining to her that this staff works hard, and it’s the end of a long day when she comes in, and she needs to be more sympathetic, more understanding.

The customer started crying. Sobbing. Slack in her chair. Gaping and nonverbal for a while. A staffer brought her water and tissues. The manager touched her wrist and spoke softly like how men with sandals talk to their parrots.

They held each other and talked a while. Her groceries were comp’d. The manager saw her out the door after we’d closed and turned the bolt and dragged it open and saw her out into the street, quiet at this hour, traffic lights winking orange and red, orange and red.

Manager locked up, ambled back, slouchy and tired. Locked eyes with the staffer sweeping the front and shook her head. Put her index and thumb together like to voice a profundity:

“It’s amazing “ she said, “how hard it is…to tell an adult to just fuckin be nice.”

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PS

Thanks for reading! Last week I posted the third installment in my series about Robert Caro’s fifty-year-in-the-making five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, and I think it finally hit the right momentum, along with its overall thesis.

I’ve been conducting interviews and assembling a “bible” of roughly 300 articles to inform what’s coming. This series is partially paywalled. If you’re a fan of Caro’s, or want to support this experiment of deep-diving literary reporting on this newsletter, please consider upgrading, with the button above, to a paid subscription.

This post is partly paywalled, and I hope you’ll support the deep research going into this project by upgrading to a paid $5/month (or $50/year) subscription.

If you’re curious, here’s a link to PART ONE and PART TWO of the series.

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Part Three

The First Reactions

In 1974, just before the release of his first book, Robert Caro saw the biggest payday of his career.

William Shawn, editor in chief of The New Yorker magazine, read an early copy of Caro’s forthcoming biography and decided to publish two lengthy excerpts, a total of 50,000 words, just a few months prior to the book’s September release; but then, as Newsday would report, “editors” kept reading and decided “they” wanted to double his original order: two excerpts became four, 50,000 words became 120,000.

The deal was “record breaking,” as several outlets reported, with William Shawn himself seeming to defend the pricey acquisition: “We thought it was irresistible.”

Shawn was only the second editor in the magazine’s history, five-foot-five (and a half), paleskinned; his presence is characterized as sort of a gliding slouch, hands in pockets, bald pate haloed with shine. Blue eyes. Soft handshake. Visitors to his office were not escorted inside, by a secretary, but greeted at the door, by its occupant. Before you get angry, running online searches for one of the few photos of this elvin recluse, finding, instead, unending photos of the popular actor Wallace Shawn—stills from Princess Bride and My Dinner with Andre and Manhattan—it’s worth noting that this actor is the editor’s heir and likeness.

Over daily breakfast at the Algonquin Hotel, across the street from his office, William Shawn would entertain a guest (often authors and editors) with small talk, as former-proofreader Charles McGrath recalls, about virtually any topic; he was, it seems, the sort of ideal, omni-conversant, eternally curious polymath built for helming a general-interest magazine. If you liked politics and dance, fine, he can talk about those. If it’s film and fiction, he can talk film and fiction. If you like late-night TV he can riff about that too because, contrary to the impression you might’ve gleaned from how much work he does, and the hours he keeps at the office, and his virtuosically gnomish ability to hang by the doorway at parties and then vanish before it’s gotten too late, Shawn wasn’t a big sleeper (much like his present-day successor, David Remnick, who terms the task of sleep—this 30% hemisphere of life, taxed each night to the sandman—“an insult”).

Yet neither did the once-young Charles McGrath (presumably over the course of many invites) ever see the great editor indulge a third cup of coffee at the hotel. Shawn was older by the time McGrath had come aboard. Probably quite conscious of the bowels. Though of course he’d never say that. Too crass. Shawn liked elegance. Clarity. He was, as William Maxwell called him, a “compulsive punctuator.”

[Shawn] believed all prose should be punctuated for clarity and logic according to rules that are set forth in Fowler’s Modern English Usage and are as applicable to one piece of writing as to another, this to prevent possible misreading.

Which isn’t to say that he was stodgy or dusty or difficult; “set in his ways” is how folks in his orbit might’ve put it. When the New York Times called him a “despot” in the headline of his obituary, they modified it, first, with, “gentle.” He was controlling, but also generous, as keen to give a fresh writer a shot as a foundering one a job; indeed there could be some ambiguity, in staffers’ accounts, about which of those things he’d given you.

Jacob Brackman, celebrating Shawn in a 1987 New Statesman obituary, remembers meeting a slightly older gentleman who “used to be on staff,” and who told him a little about the environment. A couple years later he runs into that “former” staffer again.

“I’m moving back to my old office.”

Apparently, years ago, this guy’d handed Shawn some exhaustively reported piece. When he ran into Shawn again, he doesn’t ask anything outright, lest the shy captain feel cornered, and so they spoke of other things and finally Shawn asked, “What do you plan on doing next?” The guy figured it was a gentle firing. Like a Hallmark card: Wishing You the Best. So he cleared out his office. Told the switchboard he was leaving and to do what they wanted with his phone number. Years later he runs into Shawn—who asks, again, “What do you plan on doing next? We’ve missed seeing anything from you for a while.” Then turned his palms up, don’t shoot, “not that I mean to put any pressure on you.”

As Shawn continued on down the corridor, the writer realized he’d been rehired or, rather, that he’d never been fired in the first place. Shawn had been evidently unaware of his absence as anything more than a normal delay in handing in a next article.

Stories abound of William Shawn’s 35-year reign at the New Yorker; but he was shy and private, his presence seemingly enjoyed on such a need-to-have basis that most of those stories are told in obituaries, or memoirs written well after his death, at which point the man himself is limned by the legend of his career-long dedication to a single purpose: reshaping the New Yorker from a popular humor magazine into one of the most influential publications in America; a “physically unimposing” man (The New York Times) who “did not change much over the years” (The Observer).

“He disliked crowds, fast driving, air conditioning and self-service elevators. (When the elevators at The New Yorker‘s offices…were automated, one was left in manual operation to accommodate him.)” His quiet glide from task to task, influencing the national discourse as he went, created a sense of disproportion, almost a credibility gap, between the man’s size and his influence.

That’s the gap where legends ferment.

To read about Robert Caro’s fifty-year project of writing his own Life of Johnson is to encounter an extremely focused, consistent, virtuosic writer of near-Pynchonian privacy, glimpsed like some solar event, once every decade, in a glut of publicity during which he tells the same stories, note-for-note, displays the same nervous tics, sits in the same office with the same suits and offers, to his interlocutor, the same humble New York-accented compliment. “Gee,” eyelids flitting, smile attesting the same rigorous dental hygeine, “y’ask cherrific queschins.”

A close examination of Robert Caro’s literary career—characterized by epic-length biographies that are, he says, studies in political power rather than political figures—manifests, itself, a study in power, as cultivated, challenged, and wielded in the world of publishing.

The four existing volumes of his Lyndon Johnson biography have taken, respectively, seven years to complete, eight years, a dozen, and then ten. Roughly a decade on average. (The fifth volume has taken fourteen years, and counting.) His original contract, according to a 1982 remark in Liz Smith’s gossip column and an early press release, was this: a trilogy, completed over the course of five years, for $1 million dollars. When the first volume took two years longer than the trilogy itself, the contract was renegotiated. When a single chapter of Volume Two exploded into a 100,000-word political thriller about Lyndon Johnson stealing an election, the contract was renegotiated again, turning his trilogy into a tetralogy.

And again, and again.

In the course of bringing this project to life he’s worked with the same agent, Lynn Nesbit, who over the course of these fifty years has become one of the most accomplished and famous in her profession.

He’s worked with some of the most venerated editors of his time: William Shawn (The New Yorker), William Whitworth (The Atlantic), Robert Gottlieb (in one capacity, as his book editor at Knopf, and yet another when Gottlieb, in 1987, took over Shawn’s post at the New Yorekr), and to—in a business capacity—with Gottlieb’s own successor as Knopf’s EIC, Sonny Mehta, whose eye for talent, even temper and knack for business, might have played a larger role than any other in shaping the contemporary American canon of the next three decades.

He’s been on seemingly every Sunday-morning news show and, back when they held more sway, evening talk show. He’s riffed with Dick Cavett and Studs Turkel and Fareed Zakaria and Terry Gross and Charlie Rose. In 2012 former President Bill Clinton reviewed Volume Four, The Passage of Power, for the New York Times (a rave).

When asked by Esquire, in 2012, if Robert Caro’s biography series (which had sold, by then, more than a million copies worldwide) was profitable, given how long they take and presumably how much money it costs to keep Caro in hornrims, Mehta answered, famously, with a pause. “They will be,” he said finally, “because there is nothing like them.”

These things aren’t profitable? Fifty years now this guy’s been skating past deadlines, expanding the scope of his project, saying things to reporters like, “I try to slow myself down,” and, “I don’t want to feel rushed,” while also insisting—sometimes with a gratitude that sounds choked-up—that his publisher has never once hassled him about deadlines, never once asked when he’d be finished with the next volume.

That’s power.

Meanwhile Caro seems to have discreetly rubbed shoulders with Hollywood. Another article from the 1990s claims he sold or optioned the film rights to Means of Ascent for $1 million. Famed director Rob Reiner said for years he was trying to adapt that book, but couldn’t, because HBO has full ownership of the series.

Is that true?

It’s not confirmed anywhere else.

One number I could find is that The Power Broker, now 50 years old, continues to sell roughly 40,000 copies a year.

To examine Robert Caro’s career-long exploration of political power, with portraits large and small of some of the 20th centuries greatest practitioners of that craft (the Kennedys, Al Smith, Coke Stevenson, Sam Rayburn), is to see how one of the era’s most powerful authors—commanding large advances, with unchecked freedom of time and scale and scope to tell his story, bowed under the weight of his laurels, securing an almost Pynchonian amount of privacy in all that time—has cultivated and wielded a remarkable amount of power in his own industry, and the luminaries with whom he’s done it.

Charles McGrath, remembering the episode in a 2012 profile of the biographer, describes the unsettling marvel of seeing Robert Caro, after the second of his four-part serial ran in The New Yorker, refuse to go on if the editor in chief was going to keep demanding such radical changes to the work. He was a

38-year-old unknown who hadn’t published a word except in newspapers[,] broke, hardly in a position to turn his back on the biggest payday of his life so far, [who] alone among New Yorker contributors at the time…dared to become a Bartleby and turn his powerlessness into a point of principle.

Bartleby isn’t the most obvious of Melville’s characters that draw closest comparison to Caro (number one is definitely Ahab; after that I guess it’s the whale), but the reference is apt: the young Caro was, at that point, bruised by a year-long editing process at the elbow of Robert Gottlieb, whose gently lacerating pencil had winnowed the book down by nearly half. And so he seems, in this encounter with William Shawn, less bothered by the task of editing than by…well, the thanklessness of the whole thing; and also by encountering, in Shawn, what Melville claims to’ve experienced when he first met Nathaniel Hawthorne, “the shock of recognition.”

Shawn, in spirit if not temperament, was so much like himself, but older; a venerated figure to whom he’d gained access by way of his own hard work and talent; someone who, having acquired Caro’s work and demonstrated its value by paying, most likely, a mid-five-figure sum for it, was refusing to say it was good enough, to let it stand.

It’s not unlike Caro’s relationship with Bob Gottlieb, at Knopf, so often characterized by this quote of elusive origin:

“In all the hours of working on The Power Broker, Bob [Gottlieb] never said one nice thing—never a single complimentary word, either about the book as a whole or about a single portion of the book…When we finished the last page of the last book we worked on, Means of Ascent, he held up the manuscript for a moment and said, slowly, as if he didn’t want to say it, Not bad. Those are the only two complimentary words he has ever said to me, to this day.”

Robert Caro braved unbending challenges to write the book, got it done, and seemed well-assured that he’d written something great. He was wary of how many copies it would sell, but the principle was the point: he’d seen through the veil, gotten his story, learned what needed learning.

What he seems to demand, more than anything, is that his work be taken seriously, accepted as is.

Forgive me as we do the Freud thing for a minute:

Caro has said little about his father, Benjamin Caro, beyond the fact that he was “very silent,” and “wasn’t really a reader.”

“It was an unusual household,” he told Charles McGrath in 2012, “in that I didn’t want to be there too much.”

If Caro’s descriptions of his father seem chilly, especially in old age, they’re more contextualized in his early publicity. He still portrayed his father as reticent but contextualized the man’s quiet with passing remarks about things he had done:

• immigrated to the US from Poland,

• taught himself to read English by copying out The New York Times in longhand,

• honored his commitment to Caro’s mother, Celia, when she requested, on her deathbed, that Caro (eleven years old at the time) receive an education at Horace Mann, an expensive private school in Riverdale1.

While preoccupied, still, in articulating his father’s chilliness, it’s interesting that, when prompted to describe any of his father’s characteristics, the ones he emphasizes are those pertaining to work ethic.

A Newsday profile in 1982 said, of Benjamin Caro, that he

apparently never understood his son’s decision to spend seven years chasing a literary-historical rainbow. Caro said there was no financial support from his father while he was writing The Power Broker. But later, after [Caro] had won the Pulitzer, his father understood. “In 1975, shortly before his death, I took him in the car down to Fifth Avenue, where there were big displays for [the book]. It was a Book-of-the-Month alternative selection. He was very happy.

William Shawn, like Robert Caro, has swelled to the status of a literary monolith by merit of his dedication to a cause; the quiet, contained, forward-marching sense of purpose, of certainty, suggests the sort of faith in one’s cause (and self) encountered mostly in myth. They have each accrued to themselves, as a result of that discretion, a constellation of whispered anecdotes that, taken together, forge not a personality (complicated) but a persona (simple, sellable; the singularity of their purpose suggests a charmingly accessible and understandable self). With Shawn we hear about the shyness, the habits, the sincerity beneath his dark suits and his hats and his oval-shaped blackframe glasses; with Caro, in the same vein, we get his stories of how he stayed the course and earned the trust of reluctant or hostile sources and subjects, the sometimes-cartoonish depiction of a virile young man, ambitious, marching through the doors of a mythically overstuffed library in, of all places, Texas; there were thirty-odd million pages to review in the Lyndon Johnson Library when he started his project, in 1976, and today, after so many declassifications, there are several million more. The young man’s hair has gone grayer, thinner, and his posture has stooped somewhat. But there he is. Walking the same route. Taking the same seat. Performing the same task. Same red sweater. He took his typewriter into the Library a couple times but they asked him to stop because of the noise.

This third installment in the series shows Robert Caro embarking on The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and then stepping away from the scene for a while, working on the book in Texas for four years, then writing it in New York, and finally returning—with excerpts of the completed tome—to the magazine ecosystem with which he’d only had one prior experience, a very fraught and unpromising one; however, as with all of Caro’s books, he returns to his audience in a different decade, presenting his unchanging brand of ambitious storytelling to a readership that keeps evolving.

This week we see the world’s first reaction to The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

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This is the second installment in an ongoing series about Robert Caro’s ongoing biography, THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON. These pieces are partly paywalled. If you’re interested in the topic, and would like to support the ongoing research, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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We pick up with tensions at the launch of Caro’s new project.

You can find the first installment here:

Part Two

“I Think You Should Do It In Volumes”

In 1975, a year after The Power Broker’s release, Robert Caro had a contract with Knopf for two more books: first up was a novel, about an investigative reporter, of which Caro would reveal almost nothing over the next fifty years except to say that it was “enormous” and, still more in-character, “almost finished.” After that he’d be moving onto a biography of Fiorello La Guardia, New York City’s mayor from 1934 to 1946.

A hefty biography of an already-legendary mayor (“a hero in my home growing up,” Caro’s editor Bob Gottlieb would say) would sell more copies by name recognition alone. A cleaner shot at the bestseller list.

But Caro became restless, during preliminary research, to find that so much of this material about La Guardia was familiar already; he and his wife/researcher Ina, while working on the biography of urban planner Robert Moses, had spent several months reading through archives of the four New York City mayors with whom Moses had butted heads.

It was a drag but, on the bright side, there was a chance he could bang this one out quickly.

Robert Caro has forecasted, on-record, that each biography he’s written would be finished within “two years” when really it'd end up taking seven or twelve.

But there are variables here! Yes he’s more ambitious than the typical biographer, looking to write about a political figure as well as the system in which that figure operates, and yes he makes a point of “slowing [himself] down,” writing two or four drafts in longhand, on tall white college-ruled legal pads, and then typing a third on his Smith-Corona. But he writes quickly! So he says. Once he's got five or nine years of research under his belt he can really crank it out. He works seven-day weeks when he’s actually putting down prose, sustaining the same tone or mood like a highwire walk, which means clocking forty to seventy consecutive days at the office, just writing.

When the sections are done, he allows himself some “time off.” In that respect, yes, the reason Robert Caro’s books take so long is, to a large extent, Robert Caro.

But his subjects present distinct obstacles. With Robert Moses—whose biography, Caro said, would take maybe nine months, ten at the most—progress was impeded by a lack of access to his subject. Moses was still alive, “old but mighty,” and had warned people away from cooperating. As a result, the Caros had to approach everything sideways. Unable to walk into an archive, and request a certain document, he had to first figure out how to access the archive and then, once inside, just read everything. That’s what happened when a journalist named Mary Perot Nichols reached out to say she heard he was doing a book on RM, and that he couldn’t access the papers, to which Caro said yeah that’s right, snapping his suspenders, and what’s it to ya?, and so she hooked him up with the key to an archive the Caros hadn’t even heard about. It was two levels underneath the 79th Street Boat Basin. Not really an archive. Just a huge empty white garage, built to house Parks Department trucks, but there were no trucks inside. Just “a couple of bare bulbs,” as he describes it in his memoir Working, “and there against the far wall was this entire row of four-drawer file cabinets containing not just carbons but thirty years of memos, orders, and directives from Robert Moses and the Parks Department.”

Bob and Ina spent months down there reading through files, all of it, because there was nobody to tell them where exactly they oughta look, and every day they’d have to lug their own copier along, a technology still noisy and unwieldy, most models made an awful smell when shooting light through one document to burn its image onto a facing page; meanwhile, as they’re doing this, the Parks Dept workers, aka “parkies” in their green uniforms, are giving him and Ina stinkeye, knowing that, whatever these nerds were doing, “it was something that the commissioner” (as Moses liked to be called) “wouldn’t like,” and so these parkie goons started fucking with the lights, such that anytime the Caros went for lunch, or to the bathroom, they’d get back and the lightbulbs would be gone, which meant they’d have to quit their work for the day, Marco Polo'ing through this cavernous empty garage to collect their papers and gigantic portable copier. The consequence being that now, on top of driving all the way out here every morning, towing their copymachine and their notebooks and pertinent documents, Caro had to bring along lightbulbs too.

Would a typical biographer have gone those lengths? Probably not.

But nor would a typical biographical subject pose such obstacles.

So even if the La Guardia book wasn’t riveting for Caro to write, there were upsides.

1. It’d be a poetic counterweight to Power Broker: a portrait of elected versus unelected power.

2. He’d already done a lot of the research.

3. Fiorello La Guardia was dead. His allies and enemies were dead.

And then the untested perk, still hard to measure: Caro had clout this time. A Pulitzer under his belt.

Doors would be opened, resources made available.

Perhaps he really could get this done in a year.

The La Guardia book didn’t happen.

He just wasn’t feeling it.

And Robert Gottlieb probably saw that, since it’s him who cut Caro loose of the project, for reasons he was curiously mum about, the rest of his life; although if Gottlieb was in fact able to see something on Caro’s face (which is pretty emotive, to be fair) that indicated his discomfort with La Guardia as a subject, then he could also probably see that Caro, whatever his day-to-day demeanor, was still upset about how much material had been cut from Power Broker, at Gottlieb’s insistence—all of it good material, as the editor himself would forever maintain, but it simply wouldn’t fit into a single volume.

Faced with cutting his book down by 35%, Caro suggested a neat remedy: break it into two smaller volumes.

Gottlieb told him, “I might be able to get people interested in Robert Moses once. I’ll never get them interested twice.”

To get a sense of the sacrifice, let’s imagine there’s a 1-1 correlation between the seven years of labor that Caro devoted to the Power Broker, and the one million words he produced; that would mean 350,000 words amounts to roughly two and a half years of work. Of being broke. Of losing sleep. Of running around town and conducting interviews and studying bureaucratic arcana and sweating over his legal pads.

Caro might not have complained much about it during publicity for the book, but it almost always came up, and if, at the time, he ever did allow the grief to surface, he might have worn it at least as clearly as he does in the 2023 documentary Turn Every Page, directed by Lizzie Gottlieb (Bob’s daughter), about the two Bobs’ fifty-year relationship. Caro, in his mid-80s at the time of the film, becomes visibly stifled when talking about those days they’d sit editing the Power Broker.

He’s not crying but he’s weary.

So it’s important to remember that Robert Caro and his editor Bob Gottlieb have about 300,000 words of baggage between them when Caro, in a 2016 issue of The Paris Review, tells the story of how he was getting fed up with the La Guardia project, doing a pep talk with Ina one day before heading out to Bob Gottlieb’s office, where the plan was to keep cool, be decisive, tell Bob he’s ditching the La Guardia book in order to write about Lyndon Johnson.

“I expected to have a fight over this, but before I said anything, Bob Gottlieb said to me, I’ve been thinking about you and what you ought to do. I know you want to do the La Guardia biography, but I think what you should do is a biography of Lyndon Johnson. And then he said, And I think you should do it in several volumes. It was really quite startling.”

Gottlieb just quotes that anecdote verbatim in his own 2016 memoir, Avid Reader, saying afterward, “I too was sort of startled at having come up with this idea, since I had no real interest in, or knowledge of, Johnson.”

Yeah. Startling.

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We begin in 1974, with a five-pound book nobody expected to sell.

Part One

The Idealist

Robert Caro’s first book, The Power Broker, is a 1,336-page biography of New York City urban planner Robert Moses, most famous for overseeing the construction of more than 600 miles of highway, and who incidentally was still alive when the book came out, and pissed about it, putting out a 25-page letter to the press in which he accuses Mr. Caro of “mistakes,” “unsupported charges,” “vicious canards” — all in hopes, presumably, of slowing sales, worrying the publisher, scandalizing the author. But reviews were already getting filed, well in advance of publication, and they were glowing. Called the book a “monument.” Gore Vidal in the New York Review of Books would say that The Power Broker “has not only taken me a month to read (there are 1,246 pages) but not once—uniquely—did I find myself glumly riffling the pages still to be read at the back.” If Moses had any influence on the published book, which took seven years to write, it was to release a cry so shrill, snobby, smoky, it could only help sell more copies.

And Power Broker needed the help.

Weighing five pounds, and containing as many pages as bookbinding technology could then accommodate, The Power Broker isn’t just the biography of an obscure city official in the early twentieth century, which would be daunting enough for most readers, but a work of urban history, too, and a study of political power—plus Caro spent a painstaking year, shoulder to shoulder with his editor, whittling it down from roughly one million words to roughly 650,000, meaning it isn’t just lengthy but dense; still more daunting, it came dressed in a fancy white hardcover with a sticker price of $17.95 (roughly $130, in 2026), and it was published under Random House’s most prestigious imprint, Knopf, which for all of its literary cachet and clout could also, for the average reader, carry an eat-your-veggies kind of aura; plus, if you were savvy enough to know who Robert Moses even was, you probably also knew about Robert Gottlieb, Knopf’s bigshot editor in chief, who not too long ago, at Simon & Schuster, had handled Joseph Heller’s blockbuster first novel Catch-22, then a couple years later, at Putnam, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather; plus he was known for what Tina Brown would later describe, in her diary, as “self-consciously idiosyncratic…as if he is working overtime on being famously eccentric,” meaning he knew he had this reputation for reading a book in a night, for never having lunch outside his office, for being disheveled, erratic, working really hard, sitting on floors instead of chairs—and he leaned into it. Michael Korda, fellow editor at Simon & Schuster in the ‘60s, writes of how Gottlieb was constantly folding back the lock of hair that fell across his face, after which it immediately fell back the same way. “His glasses, I noticed, were so smeared with fingerprints that it was a wonder he could see through them.” Colleagues and authors and friends called him a genius (though Tina Brown, in her Vanity Fair Diaries, says the label was forged of “manufactured eccentricity and unassailable self-confidence”), and by the mid-1970s, whatever the label’s legitimacy, Gottlieb had cultivated an author list, across three publishing houses, to back it up; he’d even survived a scandal, a villain label that endured for quite a while in the mid-’60s, after he’d received, at S&S, a manuscript from a young writer out of New Orleans named John Kennedy Toole, a situation that culminated—as Gottlieb says in his memoir Avid Reader—with “the most conspicuous failure” of his career.

Toole’s novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, showed talent, but had a “sophomoric” view of the world, so Gottlieb sent it back with some editorial pointers that Toole accommodated, and returned. Gottlieb saw the changes, suggested more, and sent it back. This went on for two years. Gottlieb invited Toole to visit him at S&S but, on both occasions that Toole showed up, Gottlieb was out, and according to a 40th anniversary retrospective on Toole’s posthumously published novel, the second of those visits prompted a nervous breakdown right there at S&S.

Eventually Gottlieb passed on the book. Toole, back home, connected a garden hose to his car’s exhaust and took the other end inside with him. Afterward his mother, Thelma Tool, pitched the book to a few other imprints. It got published, sold thousands of copies, and won a Pulitzer. Thelma Toole would later describe Gottlieb, in an interview with Horizon, as “a creature…a Jewish creature…Not a man…Not a human being.” Gottlieb considered a lawsuit at the suggestion that he, “as an East Coast Jewish elite…had deliberately destroyed” Toole, “but came to feel that if such inflamed delusions were helping to assuage the grief of an unhinged mother whose son had killed himself, I could afford to swallow my outrage.”

Toole became a kind of martyr figure for undiscovered geniuses who felt chewed up and spat-out by publishing elites, and Gottlieb—for those interested enough to parse details of the story—an image (barring Ms. Toole’s anti-semitic slant) of publishing’s elitism; it was easy to characterize Gottlieb’s two-year correspondence not as a gesture of kindness, of genuine interest, but malice, some extremely elaborate and time-consuming joke.

The Power Broker wasn’t just a ballsy and expensive debut from a nobody reporter at Newsday, it was the closely-tended passion project for one of publishing’s own power brokers.

All to say that, by the time it went on sale in September of 1974, The Power Broker—baubled, on release day, in myriad signifiers of in-house faith and literary prestige—had eaten lots of time, money, and attention from several people whose time, money, and attention were in high demand; none of them, it seemed, having very much reason to think it would actually perform all that well in the market.

Least of all its author, who told Newsday columnist Stan Isaacs that he didn’t expect to sell many copies (the price alone was mentioned, mocked, lamented by a number of critics, almost always in the context of how dramatically it would limit the readership) but that his hope, should the book have “any effect” on the market, it’ll be to “make people stop thinking of public authorities as non-political. We have created a fourth arm of government with public authorities, and people don’t know it.”

How noble. The book’s opening section is called “The Idealist,” in reference to the young Robert Moses as an angry crusader for good government, and it’s not the first note of resemblance between author and subject. If indeed his hopes were so humble then it seemed, from that first tide of critical reception (and the book’s hasty appearance on college curricula), that he’d achieved what he set out to accomplish, even if he was lastingly upset about the 300,000 words Gottlieb had carved from his flank (the length, as Gottlieb would say, of three normal-length books); plus, if you’ve been mired for seven years in tracking down the horror stories about Robert Moses, it was probably gratifying to’ve gotten a rise out of him, to know that this elderly racist, tormented by a sense of public erasure and dwindling power, had devoted several hours to a furious 3,500-word rebuttal that probably nobody read in its entirety; Moses, for whose “genius” Caro had cultivated certain amount of respect (maybe “fascination” is the better word, cuz his conversational treatment is teeming with contempt), had overseen the construction of highways, expressways, parkways that’d displaced hundreds of people, destroyed lives, treated the city of New York as a theater for political gamesmanship.

“It is slightly absurd,” quipped Caro, “but typical of Robert Moses,” rebutting the -buttal, “to label as without documentation a book that has 83 solid pages of single space small type notes and that is based on seven years of research, including 522 separate interviews.” (“I know the number,” he’ll grumble to C-SPAN 52 years later, “because they made me count.”)

Reviewer Justin Kaplan would cite those same metrics (interviews, pagecount, citations) in the Detroit Free Press: “This is the kind of quantification Moses would use to celebrate the completion of one of his highways or bridges. This monument of Caro’s was very much worth building.”

The Power Broker didn’t hit the New York Times bestseller list in the season of its release, where it might’ve made for poetic company alongside Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago), Peter Benchley (Jaws), plus fellow investigative reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward (All the President’s Men), but was “selling well,” as one paper seemed impressed to report, despite the cost; Buffalo News reporting, just one week after its release in September, that Knopf’s first printing, of 35,000 copies was being followed with a second printing of 40,000 more. The Book of the Month Club paid an undisclosed amount in picking The Power Broker for their alternate selection, printing another 10,000 copies for January 1975—the same year it would win a Pulitzer Prize, a Francis Parkman Prize (awarded for works of history), and became a finalist for the National Book Award.

The Pulitzer Prize came with a $1,000 cash component, which probably still meant something for young Caro and his wife Ina (also his sole and full-time researcher), who together had been scuttling around the city on the brink of poverty for seven years, raising their young son Chase, scraping by on virtually no income at all, defaulting on tabs at the butcher shop and dry cleaner, selling their Long Island house at one point, for $25,000 in-hand, to stay afloat another year; but the Caros were also just getting a taste of the lifestyle they’d enjoy the rest of their lives. Not always lavish, but comfortable. In early 1974, prior to the book’s release, they enjoyed a windfall, of sorts, when Lynn Nesbit, Caro’s new agent, sent reams of the book to William Shawn, the New Yorker’s editor in chief. Shawn called the book “irresistible” and decided, quickly, that he wanted to run two excerpts in the magazine, a total of 50,000 words (huge, even at the time); but then, as Newsday would report, “the more the magazine editors read, the more they liked it, and the magazine finally ended up with 120,000 [words].”

Raleigh’s News and Observer lamented, in yet another rave, that The Power Broker’s “unusually high price tag probably will keep it out of the hands of many readers,” but reminds us that “nearly a quarter of the book was excerpted in four consecutive issues of The New Yorker” that summer.

Which is mostly true.

The excerpt was alleged to’ve been acquired for more money than the magazine had ever spent on a piece of reporting, and Caro, years later, would confirm that, at the time, it was the single largest sum of money he’d ever received.

All of which would seem to portend a harmonious relationship, both parties feeling they’d landed on something special; but the whole thing got contentious to a point that—as Charles McGrath, then a proofreader at the magazine, would report in 2012—there came a one-week gap, between the second and third excerpt, where the series was held in suspension, and it seemed the deal might fall apart, that the author would walk.

Caro, it turns out, was pissed about the extent to which Shawn was demanding that his excerpt’s prose conform to the house style; the book’s long multi-clausal sentences, which sometimes ran the length of a paragraph if not half a page, were, in McGrath’s words, “too leggy and indirect” for William Shawn’s taste, for New Yorker standards. It became the burden of a younger editor, William Whitworth, to negotiate the differences with Caro personally. McGrath remembers Whitworth “wearily shuttling back and forth, like some Balkan diplomat,” between Shawn’s office and the office of a vacationing staffer in which Caro’d set himself up, gotten to work at truncating his own prose, and then snapped.

“Here was a 38-year-old unknown who hadn’t published a word except in newspapers,” says McGrath, but he stood up to William Shawn, the most prestigious figure in the most prestigious magazine, until the old man caved, and “agreed to restore all the changes [Caro] cared most deeply about.”

He had worked hard, had employed such time, tenacity, and rigor as to become a source of envy and inspiration to his colleagues; and in the end, when an institution had been too rigid to accommodate him, Caro stood pat, and bent them to his shape.

It would not be the last note of resemblance between the author and his subjects.

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The Very Good Soldier

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