A Torch Kept Lit Read online

  “Elvis’s Bad Break”

  Syndicated column, May 22, 2000.

  If you think you were hurt by the market, think what happened to Elvis Presley. So you don’t care what happened to Elvis Presley? You would care if you stopped by at Graceland, which 700,000 people do every year, one-quarter of them foreign-born. So that’s all very interesting, but why the economic blues? Did they cause him to sing a song or whatever about how lonesome he became one day after his market went down?

  Even if you care not at all about Elvis Presley, never listened to one of his songs or, if you did, certainly didn’t intend to listen to another, he was an important musical figure. But he blanked out in the mid-Seventies from drug bloat, so why can’t we get on with somebody else?

  We can and do, but how to account for almost 1 million people going to Graceland every year? And here’s something else. He died on August 16 (1977), and a year after that, a few fans began to congregate on the eve of the anniversary of his death, carrying, each one, just one candle. They would walk up and down in front of Graceland. But in 1981 the property was opened to guided tours, so beginning then, the candlelight vigil makes its way in and around the Graceland preserve, passing by the little graveyard where Elvis is buried.

  Mr. Jack Soden, who is the chief executive officer of the Graceland operation, tried trimming the crowd down, but after a few years had no alternative than to permit the earliest arrivers to begin their walking vigil at five in the afternoon. By dawn the succeeding day the pathways were drenched from the wax of the memorial candles. Are they older people? After all, Elvis was born in 1935, became famous in 1954—are these old baby boomers who come to Graceland? No. There are still many teenagers who come every day. Graceland doesn’t anticipate ending its operation when contemporaries of Elvis die off, which will begin to happen about ten years from now.

  But what was his economic crash, that could distract attention from our own free-fall? The man who managed Elvis’s affairs was a mysterious, assertive marketer who called himself “Colonel” Parker. He was a libidinous patron of the casinos. The speculation is that when he made the proposal to Elvis in 1975, the Colonel terribly needed some cash. He persuaded (or simply instructed) Elvis to sell to RCA all of his recording royalties as of that moment. The deal was $5 million and the Colonel got his customary 50 percent. Well, those royalties now earn $25 million per year. The bummest deal in musical history.

  The same curiosity that brings visitors to Graceland inevitably prompts them to ask to see the second floor, where Elvis lived and died in grisly stupor. The answer is a flat, ingratiating no. That is the deal, imposed unsparingly by Lisa Marie, the daughter and heir. Why should anybody want to visit those quarters and ogle at the seven-foot diameter shower in the bathroom and the voluptuous bedroom, an extension of Elvis’s resoundingly vulgar tastes?

  A silly question: Why do people want to poke into the spot in the warehouse where the killer waited for President Kennedy? Why the allure of the balcony on which Martin Luther King strolled, awaiting the fatal bullet? Elvis Presley is something of a legend, and it is in very full display at Graceland. There is his pink Cadillac, and his motorcycles, and his big jet airplane and his little jet airplane, and the costumes he wore, which would have dazzled the Pharaohs, and the tractors he bought having zero use for them. But there also, in dazzling numbers, are the gold records he won from the industry, authentic memorabilia of a voice and manner and style that dumbfounded, enthralled, and repelled the largest musical audience ever got together by a single musical artist.

  What are they there at Graceland to venerate? An aspect, perhaps, of the spiritual inclination of the American people, who do not require that the memory being venerated should have been a martyr or a prophet. Just someone truly singular and mythogenic, who contributed to his own legend his suicidal ending as a victim of the drugs he inveighed against with the strange, disquieting, appealing innocence that marked his entire life.

  A. M. (“Abe”) Rosenthal was a Pulitzer Prize–winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times who ascended to become managing and executive editor of the paper during its headiest and most tumultuous years, from 1969 to 1986: the era of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and of the Times’s dramatic expansion in editorial scope, circulation, and profitability. After reaching the mandatory retirement age, he became a columnist. As the Times’s own obituary noted, Rosenthal was a notoriously volatile man who assumed leadership of the paper at a time when mass media began devoting greater scrutiny to the top executives of mass media. “Perhaps more than those of any editor in modern times, Mr. Rosenthal’s life and career were chronicled closely,” wrote Times reporter Robert D. McFadden, “and his personal traits and private and professional conduct were dissected and analyzed with fascination in gossip and press columns, in magazines and books, and in the newsrooms and bars where those who had worked for or against him told their tales of admiration and woe.” WFB first became friendly with Rosenthal in New York in the early sixties. While recounting the lone instance in which he felt the lash of Rosenthal’s famous temper, Buckley likened his friend, in historical impact, to William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, calling Rosenthal “the commanding figure in the evolution of serious daily journalism.” Here is another example of one of WFB’s “transideological” friendships—and evidence that the founder of National Review saw no contradiction in being a conservative and loving the New York Times. Indeed, in a 1996 column, Buckley declared the Times “the greatest news institution in the history of the world, in the absence of which many of us would stumble about as if without arms or legs” even as he lamented how often the paper’s editorial board, and venerated Timesmen from Walter Duranty to James Reston, had acted as apologists for the totalitarian regimes in China and the Soviet Union.

  “A. M. Rosenthal, R.I.P.”

  National Review, June 5, 2006.

  Only one in a thousand Americans brushes up against such foreign bodies as newspaper writers and editors. Some bylines become recognizable, but unless the reporters have a life on television, they are sheer palimpsest, and this is the reason for the surprise, here and there registered, at the huge attention given to A. M. Rosenthal, who died on May 10 in New York, age 84. Notwithstanding that his name was not known to the many, what he did touched the lives of everyone who reads newspapers. He was the commanding figure in the evolution of serious daily journalism, which he influenced as decisively as William Randolph Hearst influenced the tabloids, and Henry Luce the weekly newsmagazines. Abe Rosenthal did it through the New York Times, where he worked for fifty-five years, rising from stringer at his college campus to executive editor.

  In twenty years he altered journalism by hugely increasing the range of public notice—everything interested the Canadian-born journalist whose father, an immigrant from Byelorussia, was an indigent fur trapper and house painter. By the time Abe was named executive editor of the most influential newspaper in the world, he had changed not only the purview of the daily press but also the idiom in which it was written. The Times, by general acknowledgment, had become a model for journalists, and Abe did that.

  His obituaries tell that he was often an angry man, that his tempers were violent, his manners often oppressive. We were friends from the time he returned home from Japan, after nine years as a prize-winning correspondent, to begin his administrative career at the Times. He was cofounder of a little club. The reasons for its formation are not chronicled and not known, but the alluvium was a half-dozen New Yorkers, some of them decisive voices in American journalism, meeting for lunch five or six times every year. Only once, that I remember, did we have the flavor of Rosenthal Anger. I myself had it once for a blistering five minutes on the telephone when he accused me of misrepresenting the New York Times in a news story. But that mode of A. M. Rosenthal was all but unknown to most who experienced him as a friend.

  He thought of accredited journalists as something of a priestly order, their incorruptibility to be taken for g
ranted. We met often, at his home and mine, and I once posed a hypothetical question. What would be the discipline, at the New York Times back when he was its boss, against a delinquent reporter? He seemed mystified by the question. He thought he was answering it when he said that no reporter at the Times would be guilty of such an offense as I described—“They are all professionals.” He spoke in such accents as a cardinal might use in referring to men of the cloth. His respect for his profession activated the fury with which he dealt with imperfect performances by postulants.

  When he wrote, he seldom displayed his hot flushes, but he could write scathingly on human rights. He was kicked out of Poland by Gomulka during the Cold War because he filed dispatch after dispatch on Communist-directed censorship and oppression. When he retired as executive editor he undertook to do a column for the Times twice a week. After some years, this was reduced to just once a week, and this saddened many because of his fidelity to the cause of human freedom. Cardinal John O’Connor mourned the revised schedule. The Chinese Communists were at that point bearing down hard on Tibet, bringing on a public reproach by President George H. W. Bush. This the cardinal applauded, adding, “Mr. Rosenthal, however, was writing about the plight of Tibet before many people could even find it on the map. It would not surprise me in the slightest if presidential speechwriters were avid readers of the Rosenthal column.”

  A very sad day was not long off, and I had the news of it from him on my cellphone. Abe was communicating to a few friends that he had been told his column would be discontinued. He had been summoned, he said, by the new young publisher (“maybe the second or third time I ever laid eyes on him”) and told simply, “It’s time.”

  This wasn’t arrant cruelty: Publishers make up their own minds, and the decisions they arrive at are sometimes done without due regard for the sensibilities even of great princes, whose time has now gone. Abe Rosenthal went on and wrote elsewhere, but a few years ago he stopped completely, and spent his time reading books and magazines and lightening the days of his friends. A month ago, at lunch, he chuckled that he had lost track of the conversation in which we were engaged. He smiled with the sweetness that marked his affection for his family and friends. We were to have dined, with our wives, two days before his dialogue with all worldly matters finally ended. We profit, endlessly, from his ingenuity and perspective. —WFB

  In today’s media environment, in which the most prestigious outlets struggle to lure clicks from cat videos, younger readers probably cannot grasp how vaunted, how powerful, was the editor in chief of The New Yorker, William Shawn. The New York Times called the mild-mannered, bald-headed Shawn a “gentle despot” of the magazine, where, across a thirty-five-year reign, he edited and catapulted to fame countless literary giants, from J. D. Salinger to Truman Capote to Hannah Arendt. It was three years into the Shawn era when National Review debuted, and as editor of his own fledgling magazine, Buckley revered The New Yorker and understood the special place its editor held in American letters. In the great literary contretemps of 1965, when Tom Wolfe published “TINY MUMMIES! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” in the New York Herald-Tribune—a savage, often hilarious attack on Shawn as a craven and tyrannical creature, so constrained by antiquated proprieties as to have become mummified—WFB, who also admired Wolfe, remained neutral; only cursorily did he treat the affair in The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966), noting Shawn’s refusal to speak to Wolfe as one strategy for dealing with “the tendentious journalist.” In later years, Buckley lamented the arrival of profanity at The New Yorker; Tina Brown, he said, had “let little time go by before pushing to one side the taboos observed by the august William Shawn.” As Shawn had published Buckley’s work so often, WFB wanted this eulogy to be special. It appears here as it did in National Review, uniquely crafted as a letter to WFB’s successor and illustrated by a handwritten note from Shawn, quoted herein.

  “William Shawn, RIP”

  National Review, January 18, 1993.

  MR. JOHN O’SULLIVAN

  National Review

  Dear John:

  You asked me to do an obit on William Shawn, and I replied that I could not write a formal piece about him because of the odd intimacy of my experiences with him. I speak of a man on whom I laid eyes twice in my life. The day the newspapers carried the news of his death a letter from him arrived at the office. It was handwritten and had been mailed the day before he died. I quote it in full:

  Dear Mr. Buckley:

  Thank you for sending me copies of WindFall and In Search of Anti-Semitism. Since you are the author of both books, I am confident that I will not be disappointed. I have not yet read Anti-Semitism, but I’ve read enough of WindFall to see that I can read the rest with confidence. The Buckley style, thank goodness, is Intact, and the humor is undiminished. I’ll go on reading. Meanwhile, I send you warmest regards,

  William Shawn

  Obviously, he was “Mr. Shawn” to me, as he was Mr. Shawn even to authors older than I, who had much closer experiences with him than I. But from the beginning he was in his own way so very courteous to me that I took extravagant pains never to suggest that I was urging on him a familiarity he might have found uncomfortable. With almost anyone else with whom I have fairly extensive personal dealings, as you know, I’d have got around pretty early on, never mind how I addressed him/her, to signing off as “Bill.” Never with Mr. Shawn. Always, “Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.” I can’t help believing that he knew what I was up to, and liked it.

  I don’t recall what it was that prompted me to send my manuscript, Cruising Speed, to him in 1970. The chances against The New Yorker’s running an intensely personal journal of a single week in the life of a youngish (I was 45) right-wing journalist were overwhelming. We all remember the usual things, the day Kennedy was killed, V-J Day; I remember the afternoon I reached Camden, South Carolina, to visit with my mother. Frances Bronson had left word to call her at the office. I did, of course, and she told me breathlessly that Mr. Shawn had called her up and told her that he very definitely wished to publish “Mr. Buckley’s” book, which, he told her, was “beautifully written and witty” and that he would himself be editing the excerpts run by The New Yorker. No other professional experience in my lifetime has so buoyant a place in my memory.

  He had assigned himself, I gather from reading about him and talking with a few New Yorker professionals, the job of personally editing one book manuscript every year, I think it was, and whether he selected me because, by lot, my manuscript came up at the time his turn had come to serve, or whether, for whatever reason, he selected mine as the book he wished to edit I don’t know. But the experience was unique, a word he would frown upon unless it was used with great precision.

  I use it with great precision. Others have written about it, but it is ever so hard to believe, even having lived through the experience, that the part of your book Mr. Shawn has elected to reproduce arrives one day in galley form. A single column, two inches wide, running down the middle of a long sheet of paper, clipped to the next galley. The appearance is identical to cutting out a column from The New York Times and pasting it on a long sheet of paper eight inches wide. There was no apparent reason at all for the extraordinary extravagance of the procedure: Why did it not come to you typewritten and double-spaced, cheaper to execute (these were the days of Linotype, when any alteration meant replacing an entire line of metal type), and easier to edit? One did not ask.

  In the roomy spaces to the right and to the left appeared Mr. Shawn’s handwritten “queries.” He wondered whether this was the correct spelling of a name, whether, on reflection, one wished to say exactly this, worded exactly so, about that phenomenon, or that statement, by that man or woman. He questioned the use of a comma there, of a paragraph marking somewhere else. The author confronted also the queries of the “fact checker.” No “fact” was ever taken for granted, if it could be independently verified. I remember that in one passage in my book I made a reference
to the speech given by Tom Clark, with whom I was debating before the annual conference of the Chamber of Commerce. I had written that Clark’s opening speech was “a half-hour” long. On the side, a tiny note from the fact-checker. “Listened to tape. He spoke for 22 minutes.”

  But this was the first of three drafts of the 30,000 words The New Yorker published in two installments. The second and the third drafts were completely reset at the printer, assimilating edited alterations; and they arrived with fresh queries, and suggestions. But the great moment came when Frances told me that Mr. Shawn had called her to ask if I would lunch with him at the Plaza Oak Room. He liked to talk to your secretary, much preferred doing this to talking to you; or in any event, that was so in my own case. For every conversation I had with him over the telephone, Frances had a half-dozen. I acknowledge that this probably says something about Mr. Shawn, but conceivably says something about the relative advantages of talking to Frances Bronson instead of to me.

  I went to the Plaza, of course, and we sat behind a small screen. I don’t remember what he ate, but do remember that the waiter knew what to bring him, and I think I read somewhere that he pretty much always ate the same thing. He was genial only in the sense that his courtesy was absolute. There was only the barest amount of small talk. He wished to talk about the book he was editing, and to ask me a question or two concerning this point or the other. In particular I remember his telling me, in the most mild-mannered tones, that on reading the proofs I had returned—in most cases I had stuck by the punctuation I had originally used, rejecting the proffered alternatives—he had concluded that I was given to rather…eccentric uses of the comma. He said this by way of imparting information. It was not a reproach, or, rather, not exactly a reproach: but I could feel the tug of his great prestige, and so told him I would go back and look again at my footloose commas. The lunch ended fairly quickly and most agreeably, and a week or two later he called me, as he did four or five times before the manuscript finally appeared in print, to tell me, “Mr. Buckley, I really do not think that you know the correct use of the comma.” I can’t remember what it was that I replied, but do recall that I resolved not to fight à outrance over the remaining commas in the essay.