An editor just called me at home to ask where my column was - it was late. She did not offer to take me to the Capital Grille as an incentive for me to write it, nor did she promise me thousands of dollars were I to grace her with my customary 70 lines. It was just: "Where's your column?"
When I asked for 20 minutes to finish it, her response was, "I gotta have it now."In my mind, this makes her a real editor.
The reason I'm bringing this up is there's been a lot of publicity lately about The New Yorker magazine hiring a new editor named Tina Brown, who just finished turning Vanity Fair into a big success.
The stories described how Brown wines and dines her writers at Manhattan's most expensive restaurants and pays up to $20,000 an article. Another columnist recently observed that in newspaperland, most editors don't do it that way.
He got me thinking. About Al, for example. Al Johnson was my first editor at the Providence Journal. I would not put him in the same category as Tina Brown. Al didn't take his favorite writers to parties with Hollywood stars; he spent his evenings as the Journal's city editor by giving orders. Everyone was afraid of Al, at least at first.
He never had time to say goodbye over the telephone. For my first year Al hung up on me every time we talked.
He also had no time for small talk. His vocabulary was basically these phrases: "What do you got?" And "When will you have it?" With me, he'd usually also add: "You buried the lead." That means I put the most important part of the story 12 paragraphs down.
Al never bought me fettucini alfredo, but he was one of the best editors I've known, and, more important, I learned he wasn't mean at all, just shy.
Then there was Don Smith. He scared me, too. He didn't buy you dinner to get you to perform, he gave you the eye. I'd prefer being yelled at by most bosses over Don Smith giving me the eye. Once, though, he did yell. He sent me an hour by car during a rainstorm to a Massachusetts town where a dam was in danger of bursting. I got there, was told it was an iffy situation, but decided I didn't want to wait all night, so I drove back to the newsroom.
Then I called the local police to check it one last time before going home. "I can't talk now," said a sergeant. "The dam just burst."
And I wasn't there to cover it. Don was going to kill me. I walked across the newsroom. "Don," I said. "There's this problem. I think, I mean, the police just . . . The dam broke."
Don gave me the longest eye he'd ever given me. Then, at almost the top of his voice, he called me a name that I don't think is allowed in the newspaper.
There was also Gil Smith, my first boss at my first newspaper in Utica, N.Y. He didn't wine and dine me either. One day, I was told to rewrite a press release about a speaker at the local Rotary Club. It made me mad. I wanted to cover the White House, not rewrite press releases. So I did it quickly and the next day, my published rewrite had switched the names of the Rotary president and the speaker. Gil Smith called me into his office.
"Around here," he said, "we warn 'em once. Then we fire 'em. I'm warning you once." I almost started crying. But it did me good.
There are a few more editors I'd like to tell you about, but there's this particular one who said she had to have this story 20 minutes ago. If I don't make it, I don't think she's going to invite me to a celebrity party to win my loyalty. I think she's going to kill the column.
Which is the main point of this story: In my world, writers don't tell editors to jump. It's the other way around. I think I just buried the lead. Somewhere out there, Al is shaking his head.