Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Will Leitch, erstwhile prime mover of the very funny and wildly popular Deadspin blog, once and eternally the target of Buzz Bissinger‘s bizarre and overbearing anti-sports blog blast on Bob Costas‘s HBO show, and now Contributing Editor to New York magazine, where he lends his elegant stylings mostly but not exclusively to sports topics. We talked at the blonde piney and micro beery Downtown Bar and Grill on Court Street in beautifully gentrified Bourem Hill, which looks vastly more prosperous since I last stomped its sidewalks some decades ago. A very pleasant afternoon indeed.

Simon Doonan had a wonderful article in Slate last week about his experience designing the installation for the auction of Marilyn Monroe‘s effects for Christie’s in 1999. Doonan says the process of cataloging her belongings took months, but “Right away, I discovered that Marilyn was shockingly and unimaginably slender. She was sort of like Kate Moss but fleshier on top. Didn’t see that coming, did you? When it came to finding mannequins to fit her dresses, I simply couldn’t. M.M.’s drag was too small for the average window dummy.” Doonan says he developed alternate ways to show Monroe’s famous dresses, with the lone exception of the famous Jean Louis number Marilyn wore for JFK’s birthday, for which a custom Lucite mannequin was made. Says Doonan, “When you look at Marilyn on-screen and . . .realize that the busty, ample gal brimming over Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot is literally one-third your size, you have every right to become suicidal.”

Doonan’s second great observation was that Monroe was not materialistic. “Marilyn Monroe. . .owned diddly-squat. . . . There were no Renoirs or Picassos. Her knickknacks were pedestrian. Her cookware was greasy. Her spatulas were bent. Even her Golden Globe was broken. The majority of her clothing showed surprising wear and tear. She had worn it all repeatedly and there just wasn’t that much of it. Her jewelry? With the exception of her DiMaggio wedding ring it was a bunch of paste danglers and costume crap. Shoes? Yes, there were several pairs of black suede Ferragamo stilettos with worn heels. But Marilyn—brace yourself for another shocker—was more into books than shoes. Her poignant desire to cultivate her mind and give herself an education resulted in an extensive library of first editions.”

I love that!

In one of those bits of harmonic convergence that we used to call coincidence, on the same day I read Doonan’s article, I read that Eve Arnold had died. The brilliant photographer had created many stunning images of celebrities and nobodies alike, but she was perhaps best known for her pictures of Monroe. You can see why.

The peerless Ronald Searle has died in his sleep in France at the age of 91. Best known for a manically gothic style that invigorated his illustrations of the frantically anarchic schoolgirls of St. Trinian’s, the grinning, lustful oenophiles in The Illustrated Winespeak, the Molesworth series, The Rake’s Progress, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen, and his prolific magazine work, Searle’s subjects always seemed to be on the verge of exploding off the page. It was, in a phrase, a lively and comic style, which seems somewhat ironic, given that during World War II, Searle spent three years suffering as a prisoner of the Japanese Imperial Army. Captured during the fall of Singapore in 1942, Searle was among 3270 men selected to work on the Burma-Siam railway, the experience which provided the real-life basis for TheBridge on the River Kwai. “My friends and I, we all signed up together,” he told an interviewer. “We had grown up together, we went to school together … Basically all the people we loved and knew and grew up with simply became fertiliser for the nearest bamboo.” Underfed and undernourished, suffering from tropical diseases and other infections, and subjected to harsh labor and sadistic brutality, Searle not only survived, but he bore witness to the horrific experience with a group
of sketches of his comrades and captors. The miracle is that both the artist and his works survived; the double miracle is that the artist managed to return with a joie de vivre and a comic zest that constituted a triumph of his spirit. I would like to have known him.

At The Annual White House Correspondents Dinner In Washington DC, May 1, 1999. By Karin Cooper/Getty Images.

Via The New York Daily News, Richard Corkery‘s 1978 photograph of Truman Capote.

I have long admired the critic James Wolcott–his slashing wit, his erudition, his vocabulary, his taste and perception–but although we know many people in common, we have never met. Until I read his new book Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York, his lively memoir of a youth spent in Manhattan during a decadent, fertile decade, I didn’t realize how very much more we had in common. Wolcott, like me, grew up in Maryland, although his home was not Baltimore but Edgewood, where my sister now lives. He, like I, spent afternoons in libraries sopping up Norman Mailer essays and evenings watching Dick Cavett, trying to absorb their teachings of far-off New York. He mentions making exciting visits to Sherman’s newsstand (on Charles Street, was it? Or Cathedral?), just as I did, where under the dusty posters of Yves Montand and Steve McQueen and the gnarled supervision of the proprietor, Abe Sherman, he eyeballed exotic publications like Ramparts and The Nation and tasted an intellectual world far away. Later, his Old Line State roots served him well when he was able to decode the Baltimore Colt references in Diner for the New Yorker‘s Pauline Kael. Wolcott is a coupla-three years older than I, knew what he wanted earlier than I, moved to New York several years before I, and made important connections sooner; in reading his memoir, I felt like I was being caught up on what I’d missed about scenes that I had entered a few years later in their lives–garbagy, crime-ridden Manhattan, porny Times Square (“Wanna go out?”), punky Greenwich Village, the fesity, glamorous Village Voice and New York magazine, the city’s whole collapsing, Bronx-Is-Burning era. Those were different days,as Wolcott points out, when people didn’t spend much thinking about real estate or their salaries; when the city, as Christine Baranski recently pointed out, was governed by creative people who cared about the arts, not by financiers. It was a city that writers found it worth fighting to get into; now I wonder if it still a city worth fighting to hold onto. In one of the most valuable moments in the book, Wolcott shares the lessons he learned from his days working the front desk at the Voice, taking in over-the-transom submissions from optimistic freelance writers. “Avoid parody, which slides too easily into facetiousness. Avoid political satire, which has the shelf life of a sneeze. Avoid preamble–flip on the switch in the first sentence. Find a focal point for your nervous energy, assume a forward offensive stance, and drive to the finish line, even if it’s only a five hundred word slot: no matter how short a piece, there has to be a sense of momentum and travel, rather than just allotted space being texted in. . . Writing that was too talky lacked the third rail below the surface that suggested untapped power reserves, an extra store of ammo.” And danger, I might add. Thank you, maestro, for the lesson, and for the recollections.

The great reporter and columnist Tom Wicker of The New York Times, died on Friday at the age of 85. In a long and distinguished career, he stood out for his clear thinking, probity, and ethical courage. The defining moment of his career was his performance covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which was described beautifully by Gay Talese in The Kingdom and The Power, his amazing book about The New York Times. On the scene in Dallas, Wicker “scribbled his observations and facts across the back of a mimeographed itinerary of Kennedy’s two-day tour of Texas,” wrote Talese. “It was a remarkable achievement in reporting and writing, in collecting facts out of confusion, in reconstructing the most deranged day in his life, the despair and bitterness and disbelief, and then getting on a telephone to New York and dictating the story in a voice that only rarely cracked with emotion.” To read Wicker’s report, click here. Talk about grace under pressure.

Thanks to the Millennium Art Academy High School in the Bronx for inviting me to speak at the Career Day event on Wednesday. My co=presenter Kathleen Cushman spoke about being a writer. Thanks very much to my old friends and new friends of friends who donated magazines to be distributed to the students attending the session: Bob Love of The Week; Belinda Luscombe of Time; Jess Cagle of Entertainment Weekly; Matt DeMazza and Ken Derry of Yankees Magazine; Ryan D’Agostino and Lauren Drucker of Hearst magazines; and Frank Rich and Lauren Starke of New York magazine.

Last year, Mike Bloomberg was my hero. The way he stood up to the opponents of the lower Manhattan Islamic cultural center was eloquent, and courageous, and in the greatest traditions of New York and America. But this year, Bloomie is blowing it. His annoyed, prickly, dismissive, contentious treatment of the Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park seems almost personal, and is exposing the plutocrat that the billionaire probably is at heart.

“It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis,” he said the other day.“It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not saying I’m sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t have gotten them without that.”

Well that’s just silly. Anyone who has read Reckless Endangerment by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, or All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera knows that Congressional policy played a role, as did the policy of the Clinton and Bush administrations, as did the corrupt and foolish practices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as did the wholly dishonest and completely negligent practices of the ratings agencies. But to downplay or soft-peddle the role of the banks? Come on, Mike! The whole thing blew up because of the alchemical financial innovations that purported to turn crap loans into AAA-rated securities. And the banks are the ones who turned around and peddled hundreds and millions of dollars worth of that worthless paper to pension funds and retirement programs.

Mike obviously needs Wall Street, needs the jobs it provides and the taxes it pays in order to keep the city’s streets cleaned and its police on the beat and its teachers in the classroom. A little home town protection is in order. But Bloomberg should take a page from Vikram Pandit, the chairman of Citicorp, who has offered a statesmanlike response. Calling Occupy Wall Street’s complaints “completely understandable,” Pandit accepted the responsibility for the crisis. “I would also corroborate that trust has been broken between financial institutions and the citizens of the U.S. and that it’s Wall Street’s job to reach out to Main Street and rebuild that trust. . . .They should hold Citi and the financial institutions accountable for practicing responsible finance.”

Bloomberg needs to remember that he’s the protesters’ mayor, too.

In his very good new book The Fall of the House of Forbes: The Inside Story of the Collapse of a Media Empire, former Forbes editor Stewart Pinkerton describes the decline of the publication’s significance, and along the way champions the noble tradition of magazine journalism. “There’s an important distinction between one hundred people using their cell phones to record an event and real journalism, calcified as some of its traditions and procedures may be,’’ he says. “What’s missing from the raw footage . . . is the authoritative voice, the result of years of source cultivation, the building up of levels of trust that allow a reporter to put something into context. It’s something only established news outlets can do . . . .Most people need an expert to filter, prioritize, and context information. A fire hose of information without that is useless.’’ To rad my review of Pinkerton’s book in The Washington Monthly, click here.