I finally caught up with The September Issue, R.J. Kutler’s documentary about Anna Wintour and the making of Vogue’s large, vital September issue, this time in 2007. I thought it was great. I loved seeing Anna Wintour–I have never met her, but she reminded me of some of the great editors that I worked for, a person whose insistence on quality was so strong and uncompromising that she is considered tough and unfair and monstrous by the less perceptive, less committed people around her. I thought the movie captured very well the enormous pressures that she alone at the magazine carries on her narrow shoulders–meeting with the designers, the advertisers, the retailers, her publishing colleagues, even as she captains this complex, creative enterprise called Vogue magazine, demanding not only that it produce but lead, not only that it appear but that it astonish. I actually found her a sympathetic and approachable figure. I also loved the film’s depiction of Wintour’s relationship with Creative Director Grace Coddington (pictured left, with Wintour), which is often depicted as tense or testy, but which is clearly one of mutual respect and affection where the tension is a product not of ego (well, not altogether of ego) but of fierce commitments to slightly different imperatives (Coddington’s is to artistic vision, Wintour’s is to the overall success of the enterprise) that are usually but not always in sync. But the film was great–my stomach clenched, my heart raced, and I found myself wishing I had a magazine to go to work for.

Thank goodness for whatever inspired Kurt Andersen to collect all of the covers of the issues of Spy which he edited, and to put them on his website, and to share them with his former colleagues–because now I can share them with you. Here they are, as Tad Friend dubbed them, “the 71 horses of the Apocalypse.”

Many thanks to True/Slant’s senior producer Michael Roston, who came to my class at Marymount Manhatan College last week to talk about what makes an interesting blog, how writers can generate more traffic, and so on. Michael is very big on linking, which is why I’m linking to his True/Slant page here. He didn’t seem to want his photograph taken, but here is, apparently deep in contemplation of something dark and forbidden.

In 2008 a young poet named T.A. Noonan conducted interviews with Stacy Morrison, who is the editor-in-chief of Redbook, and with me, in my capacity as Managing Editor of Playboy, on the topic of fiction in magazines. Ms. Noonan has run the results on her website, which is called Delirious Hem. The results, I think, are pretty funny. I’m glad she picked me, and I thank her.

Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks. I believe this deserves three vas and a voom.

Last Wednesday, the sports pages of The New York Times had two wonderful anecdotes, one about managerial leadership, and one about the art of negotiation. In the first, by William C. Rhoden, Emerson Boozer, a star running back on the Super Bowl II-winning Jets, told a story about the key role played by the team’s owner, Sonny Werblin, in bringing the team together.

“Our core unit had played at least three to four years together,” Boozer said. “We knew each other and trusted each other.” The turning point came as a result of an off-field incident during training camp before the 1967 season. Unresolved racial tensions that had percolated for some time surfaced during an ugly episode at a bar in Peekskill, N.Y., where players congregated after practice. Boozer recalled that one of the Jets’ white players got into a dispute with [running back Matt] Snell, who is black, over the use of the pool table. “It was a ‘we want you darkies off the pool table’ kind of thing,” Boozer said. “It was from one of your teammates. Not a resident, but a teammate.”

News of the incident got back to the Jets’ owner, Sonny Werblin. The next morning, Werblin went to the training facility in a chauffeured limousine. He addressed the entire team, including coaches, at the evening meeting.

“He says: ‘You know, I’ve got fine thoroughbred horses down at Monmouth Park. When those horses train and do not perform well, should I fire my trainer?’ ” Boozer said. “`‘I’ve got this football club here and I’ve got two stars on this club. I’ve got Namath and Snell. The rest of you can pack your things now if what happens at that bar last night ever happens again.’ ” Werblin left the room, got back in his limo and returned to New York.

“Werblin cleaned it up instantly,” Boozer said. “There was not another incident. No more spats, no more backstabbing. Things calmed down. After that, we built a good rapport. ”

In the second article, Richard Sandomir talked about an incident of Congressional horse-trading. After the AFL and the NFL merged, the newly-expanded NFL needed an antitrust exemption to operate. The man who held the key to that exemption was House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, a Louisiana man, and his price was an NFL team in New Orleans.

“Boggs was serious enough about the deal to blow up at [NFL Commissioner Pete] Rozelle before the conference committee’s vote on the legislation, which was one of many riders to an anti-inflation bill that was expected to pass. According to MacCambridge, as Rozelle and Boggs walked to the Capitol Rotunda, Rozelle said he did not know how to thank Boggs. “What do you mean you don’t know how to thank me?” Boggs said. “New Orleans gets an immediate franchise in the N.F.L.”

At another point, Boggs said, Rozelle sent a note into the committee room telling the elder Boggs that he had polled N.F.L. owners and that they had “approved of New Orleans.”
“And the committee approved the exemption,” said Boggs.”

My friend Steve Lovelady died on January 15. He and I worked together at Time in 1997 and 1998, and although I didn’t have a lot of interaction with him, I found him to smart, decent, tough but low-key, enormously effective, a top-notch editor. And in fact, he was the one who sent me along to Ann Kolson, an editor at the Times who just so happened to be his wife, for whom I wrote about 40 stories. The Philadelphia Inquirer, where Steve worked for 23 years and where he edited stories that won six Pulitzer Prizes (and among the articles he midwifed at Time, two won National magazine Awards), offered him an excellent obituary, which included a sort of toast, if you will. Headlining this “The Lovelady Style”, it quoted the lead that Steve wrote for an installment of the Pulitzer Prize-winning series “The Great Tax Giveaway” by then-Inquirer staff writers Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a tall, bald father of three living in a Northeast Philadelphia rowhouse and selling aluminum siding door-to-door for a living.
Imagine that you go to your congressman and ask him to insert a provision in the federal tax code that exempts tall, bald fathers of three living in Northeast Philadelphia and selling aluminum siding for a living from paying taxes on income from door-to-door sales.
Imagine further that your congressman cooperates, writes that exemption and inserts it into pending legislation. And that Congress then actually passes it into law.
Lots of luck.
The more than 80 million low- and middle-income individuals and families who pay federal taxes just don’t get that kind of personal break. Nor for that matter do most upper-middle-class and affluent Americans.
But some people do.

A terrific intro, colloquial and light, the perfect way to ease a reader into a complicated and important subject, an excellent example of the editor’s art. Here’s to you, Big Fella.

Many years ago, Walter Kirn worked in the cubicle next to me at Spy, and he was a most entertaining neighbor (in fact, Walter was succeeded by Jim Collins and then by Larry Doyle. On the other side, I had Joanne Gruber. Spy provided me with tremendous neighbors.) During Walter’s short tenure, we spent pretty much the first half hour of every day talking over the wall, and because Walter lived a very different life than mine–he was literary, and a drinker, and a midwestern Mormon Princetonian, and in the process of divorcing his pretty English wife–I found him endlessly fascinating. Plus he always had interesting stuff to say, like whether everybody in the world could be divided into digital and analog camps. There was a day, or maybe more than one day, when Walter came in and expounded on airport life, on how all the things you do there are different than what you do in real life. You eat food you never eat anywhere else and read USA Today, which you never read anywhere else, and read novels that you don’t read anywhere else. He went on and on. I Wish I remembered his riffs more exactly, because they were so smart and funny, and because this one, no doubt, became his novel Up in the Air. Which, I confess, I have not read, but which inspired a movie that I saw last night, and which I admired very much (even though the movie does not contain the novel’s best line, “Fast friends aren’t my only friends, but they’re my best friends.” There was much to like, mostly the rather sad and unsparing ending to which the film builds. My favorite moment, though, came in a scene that takes place at a meeting. All of the road warriors, of which George Clooney is one of the best, have been gathered by their boss Jason Bateman, and there, sitting at table next to George, playing one of the road warriors, is Walter. They are watching video of someone being fired, and the person doing the firing says to the displaced worker “Anybody who ever built an empire or changed the world sat where you are now. And it’s because they sat there that they were able to do it.” It’s a line George spoke earlier in the film, and at that moment, a disgruntled George turns to Walter and says “That’s my line! I came up with that!” or words to that effect. I like that–the actor telling the original writer “That’s my line! I came up with that!” I know for a fact where the whole thing originated. Congratulations, Walter!

From Art Director Richard Weigand, a love letter to writers on the cover of Esquire’s 40th anniversary issue in October 1973, showing contributors John Kenneth Galbraith, Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Alan Arthur, Murray Kempton, John Updike, William Styron, Gay Talese, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Philip Roth, Dwight Macdonald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, John O’Hara, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Irwin Shaw, Richard H. Rovere, Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov, Peter Bogdanovich, Garry Wills, Richard Joseph, Leon Trotsky, Ralph Ellison, Tennessee Williams, Malcolm Muggeridge, Sinclair Lewis, Gore Vidal, John Sack, Arnold Gingrich, John Dos Passos, Thomas Berger, John Cheever, Laurence Stallings. My heroes, more or less.