The Banker's Red Suspenders: Looking at Yuppie Anti-Yuppie Magazines (Manhattan, inc. and Spy)
Morton, Brian
One morning on Broadway I saw a black man approach three young white men. The white men wore business suits; the black man was wrapped in a blanket. As he approached them he put out his hand....
...But in the mind of mainstream America, life is simpler than ever: there's no event that can't be reduced to the dimension of "personalities...
...but just as hilarious as the linguistic incompetence of Newyoricans, apparently, is the linguistic competence of people who speak a language other than English...
...A friend of mine who reads the magazine says he enjoys it both because it tells him what's going on in the business world, and because it views business as "basically pretty silly...
...From "Saturday Night Live" to Vanity Fair to "Sixty Minutes," gossip about celebrities has taken the place of satire, culture, news...
...But as I spent some time with the magazines, I found that I'd been wrong...
...Barbara Walters, however, works at ABC," comments Spy, a little charmed by the touching ignorance of the lower orders...
...q FALL • 1987 • 579...
...Some of the fatuous "stars" of New York life are ridiculed relentlessly in its pages...
...Spy, at times, is a magazine for those three men I saw on the street...
...This little tiff will earn the departing editorial staff a reputation for boldness, but it's characteristic that it resulted from an article that made fun of the way investment bankers dress...
...And if Manhattan, inc...
...It's easy to "miss Bobby...
...The system works, alas, just the way it's always been meant to work...
...Both Spy and Manhattan, inc...
...may be the most effective cheerleader that business could have...
...is in the news...
...Probably even misses Bobby Kennedy...
...It's true that these pieces were written in that drowsy New Yorker style—with a pen dipped in Valium—but they were far more radical than anything that will ever appear in Spy...
...There's a stifling air of the trust fund about much of Spy...
...But Manhattan, inc.'s reference to Balzac puts me in mind of an earlier attempt to lay siege to society over power lunches...
...In one of his articles Rosenbaum treats us to a brief digression on Balzac, who examined Parisian society with the dispassionate eye of a "physicist" and left us with an incomparable record of his age...
...tells us that "the pleasure this kind of show affords is the right to scorn the masses," who are described as "brainless...
...The three of them seemed so delighted I thought they were about to burst into song...
...On the rare occasions when Manhattan, inc...
...The kind of person who can look a homeless man in the eye and laugh at him...
...I am faulting it for a lack of intelligence...
...The social world has grown so complex that novelists and literary theorists worry that it can no longer be portrayed through stories about representative figures...
...This is the ethos of Spy: not rebellious, just slightly impudent...
...This prompted a thank-you note from an anonymous New Yorker writer, because "most of us had to admit that we didn't know exactly what our co-workers did for a living...
...Some examples of this are mild enough...
...Spy never praises the city for its diversity, but rather for qualities like its "uptown swagger...
...574 • DISSENT THE CULTURE OF THE CITY If this is true, then perhaps Felix is a bit naive...
...It may well be that Sir Thomas More was right to see all commonwealths as conspiracies of the rich to oppress the poor...
...They were radical because they were thoughtful...
...He suspects that Cohn misses the days when he was an outsider, perpetually doing battle against powerful insiders like his archfoe Robert Kennedy...
...If the times were different, he or she might be doing something more public-spirited...
...To stick your neck out when the times are inhospitable and risk being described as a "poker-faced woman with a loud, flat voice" —that's a little harder...
...Both Spy and Manhattan, inc...
...I'd probably think of them as hopeful signs that the values of Reaganism never wholly triumphed...
...One was the Covert Action Information Bulletin, which has a circulation of about ten...
...Manhattan, inc., which made its debut in September 1984, has been described by its owner as "a mix of Forbes, People, and M." Although it does contain a bit of straight business reporting, the heart of it is found in its profiles of prominent figures in the business world of New York...
...This is funny enough . . . but think about that second item...
...When Manhattan, inc...
...Spy is a People magazine from hell: still celebrities, but "served up in a different dish...
...Clearly, Manhattan, inc...
...Manhattan, inc...
...The March 1987 issue came with a map of Reagan's body ("Hands: These are frequently seen pointing at the ears while Reagan walks to or from a helicopter—a gesture that says, Gee, fellas, I'd love to answer your questions, but I can't hear you 'cause of the noise from that darn chopper...
...In an article in the March 1987 issue two of its editors refer to Spy as an "upstart" magazine...
...The poor of New York, many of whom are black or Hispanic, are of course not "intelligent" in Spy's sense of the word...
...I'm not faulting the magazine for refusing to strike moralistic antibusiness poses...
...Because they weren't focused on personalities...
...Particularly interesting are Spy's running jokes about the New Yorker...
...Business is only a game, it tells us—but it's the only game worth playing...
...He might have told it alongside the story of someone who's never met Trump, but whose life has been touched by him nevertheless...
...Trump is a man obsessed: the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation, as he puts it, "drives me crazy," and he wishes the government would realize that if it wants to work out an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union, it should turn to a tested deal-maker like himself...
...The ideal Manhattan, inc...
...At its best, Spy is very funny...
...when you could have a social conscience and be an insider too...
...This sensibility is the very reverse of cosmopolitan, and it severely limits Spy's appreciation of New York...
...These magazines — Manhattan, inc...
...At the end of the book he makes a vow: Eugene, now wholly alone, took a few steps to gain the highest point in the cemetery, and looked out on Paris winding its length along the two banks of the Seine...
...The two magazines I'm going to write about are produced by people with much more decent impulses...
...Michele Bennet, Spy's "reviewer of reviewers," makes fools of reviewers like John Simon of New York and David Edelstein of the Village Voice—simply by quoting them...
...After Jose Napoleon Duarte was elected president of El Salvador in 1984, and the mainstream media were shuddering with joy about this triumph of democracy, only two magazines, to my knowledge, were willing to mention such facts as that voters had to put their ballots into transparent boxes, while observers from the military looked on...
...As I write, Manhattan, inc...
...His companions brayed with laughter...
...During the Solidarity period in Poland, the New Yorker covered the movement attentively, and took care to stress the point that the Polish opposition was not simply demanding what we have here, in the West...
...Lipson was upset because his son wears red suspenders...
...Balzac loved megalomaniacs, so he probably would have loved Trump...
...Another column provides space for letters to the editor of the New Yorker...
...There's nothing "wrong with the system...
...It was in the collected essays of Christopher Hill, the Oxford historian...
...This informed us that the "sweaty, slangy derivations" of this dialect, which sound "disagreeably like someone talking with his mouth full," are the result of decades of "mongrelizing in Puerto Rico and Manhattan," and betray "incompetence in both languages...
...Your asking me what dialectical materialism is in relationship to my job as a local broadcast journalist in New York, uh, is like, uh, putting Oral Roberts in the Mayo Clinic...
...At their worst, these profiles are pieces of fawning idiocy...
...it's a sort of goodhumored court jester to the business world...
...FALL • 1987 • 575 THE CULTURE OF THE CITY Rosenbaum's profile of Donald Trump is a case in point...
...I particularly liked its list of the ten most embarrassing New Yorkers, which included Donald Trump, Alfonse D'Amato, Midge Decter, George Steinbrenner, and Geraldine Ferraro...
...If any political attitude can be teased out of Spy's repertoire of put-downs, it's a yearning for an aristocracy of the witty and intelligent...
...Several of its editors resigned after an argument with its owner, D. H. Lipson, over one of Rosenbaum's articles...
...His eyes were fixed . . . on the region of that high society in which he had sought to make his way...
...Those fellows don't miss Bobby, they sure as hell don't know who Christopher Hill is, and whether or not they happen to know which side the president is making war on in Nicaragua, they think it's a great little war just the same...
...Still, I decided to begin with the picture of those men anyway—because I want the thought of them to be present as an index to the moral atmosphere of the times...
...In Pere Goriot, Eugene de Rastignac, a young man from the provinces, comes to Paris, and witnesses there every variety of hypocrisy and betrayal...
...For a youngish audience that's gone into business not out of conviction, but simply from a lack of alternatives, Manhattan, inc...
...he sets its tone...
...But most of the profiles aim for a different tone, a tone of lighthearted irreverence...
...When I was asked to write about two of New York's new "yuppie magazines," I was pleased...
...What kind of person has felt most at home in the United States during the past decade...
...The Newyorican can speak whatever he wanth...
...The rich were getting richer, and the poor poorer," Hill writes of the decades preceding the Puritan Revolution...
...and touches like this give it a certain charm...
...An interview with WCBS-TV anchorman Rolland Smith featured this exchange: Spy: What is—what is dialectical materialism...
...Several [of the magazine's] writers said that as they understood it, Mr...
...There's a Notes and Comment that doesn't concern nuclear holocaust or Nicaragua—right there, you see it—but there's no place for you to crow about it...
...Manhattan, inc...
...Suggesting that the recent insider-trading scandals had revealed the hollowness of the yuppie dream, Rosenbaum had proposed a reeducation camp for "as-yet unindicted investment bankers," in which they would have to learn how to tell the difference "between the peace symbol and the Mercedes hood ornament," how to dress in something other than red suspenders and yellow ties, etc...
...I mean, what I don't understand . . . why...
...What . . . I mean, what . . . where are you going with this...
...This is the complacent cynicism of one who's seen through the money-worshipping business world, but who believes that those who try to fight it are doomed and ridiculous...
...Rosenbaum comments that Cohn misses the old days, misses the thrill of combat...
...So on the rare occasions when Spy FALL • 1987 577 THE CULTURE OF THE CITY chooses to notice the poor or minorities, it is usually to comment on how ill-bred they are...
...But taking them in in one big dose, having to think about them for this article, has put me in an irritable mood...
...He has become a scoundrel...
...I thought it would give me a chance to strike a blow at those three morons...
...When I got home to my Bleecker Street sublet, I found what I'd been looking for...
...His speech is rendered in this way: "I am no elititht...
...It's aimed at a young, hip audience of people who see through the hypocrisies of the business world even as they want to make their way in it...
...I don't know about you, but I find this pretty funny...
...Ali leaned against the ropes and let Foreman batter him for seven rounds, and when Foreman was completely spent, Ali knocked him out with a couple of quick combinations...
...But it doesn't...
...To miss Bobby is to miss an era when social reform was sexy...
...is for people who are yuppies by default...
...Someone like that man I saw wearing a blanket on Broadway, for instance—a victim of the "Manhattan passion" for grandiose development...
...An article on Caroline Kennedy's husband, "Renaissance Man" Ed Schlossberg, featured charts comparing him with Arnold Schwarzenegger (another Kennedy husband), and Leonardo da Vinci (another Renaissance man...
...An article on "famous nobodies" —people from Harlem who happen to have the same names as various celebrities—expected us to be amused by the fact that Barbara Walters of 138th Street thinks the other Barbara Walters works for NBC...
...After Cohn has boasted about himself for fifteen pages or so, Rosenbaum tells us that he senses social acceptance hasn't made Cohn happy...
...and Spy—were not intended for those men, but for a different kind of person entirely...
...But Spy never bothers to look very closely into its own idea of intelligence—which accounts for the one truly ugly thing about it: its occasional touches of racism...
...Well, maybe you have...
...The professor, we're told, "talked in the elegant, self-conscious fashion of his Castilian dialect, all z's and soft c's blurring into a lisp...
...deals with someone who does battle with Trump and his kind, the results are instructive...
...The implication is that Rosenbaum would like to be a Balzac of New York...
...The great physicist of society never forgot that wealth and poverty are part of the same equation...
...His profile of Roy Cohn ends more poignantly...
...One such letter asked why the New Yorker has never published a list of its staff members . . . and Spy responded with a complete New Yorker masthead...
...But Spy's limitations are obvious...
...If I were a casual reader of these two magazines, I'd probably like them more than I do...
...Rosenbaum's interviewing style is similar to the old "rope-a-dope" technique with which Muhammad Ali took the heavyweight title from George Foreman...
...The humor here contained a touch of smugness: instructions on how to sneak into the Harvard Club from someone who doesn't need to...
...The article ended like this: As I left the Rohatyns and took a cab down Park Avenue, I was trying to recall something I'd read recently about the rich...
...Several of Spy's regular columns are especially enjoyable...
...In an essay in Mother Jones last year, Barbara Ehrenreich lamented the disappearance of Bohemia, of a "genuine money-hating counterculture to counter the dominant money culture...
...A pity...
...To portray Trump as a jerk may seem bold for a moment...
...A blurb from a West Coast magazine, Equator, gives a good sense of what Spy is about...
...They're witty, well-written, they have an anti-establishment flavor...
...While other magazines applaud celebrities' successes and fabulous lifestyles, Spy gloats happily over their failures and idiocies...
...A typical feature, commenting on how difficult it is to find a bathroom in New York, contains maps of the Ivy League Clubs of New York, advising you that if you are well-dressed and have an air of belonging, you can walk in and use their bathrooms...
...In Balzac's later volumes, Rastignac is often glimpsed from afar...
...But the longer one reads Manhattan, inc., the less a tender view of it seems justified...
...These were three happy men...
...Despite its editor's brave talk about "adversarial journalism," it's hard to say just what Spy thinks its adversary is...
...He has become wealthy and polished, a cynical master of the social rituals of Paris...
...Quoting one of Spy's editors to the effect that "most magazines long ago gave up * Rosenbaum has since resigned as well...
...The article never explained why a teacher named Barbara Walters is less of a somebody than the Barbara Walters who makes millions by putting fatuous questions, in a tone of breathy sincerity, to the same fatuous celebrities Spy mocks...
...The writer to whom we owe these reflections is Ron Rosenbaum, one of Manhattan, inc.'s contributing editors...
...pride themselves on rocking the boat, but they too confine themselves to the superficial level of personalities...
...others appear, as friends, on its cover...
...A satirical exam for prospective token clerks in the New York City subway system belabored the idea that token clerks are stupid and rude...
...The dictionary defines an upstart as a parvenu...
...Nuclear holocaust or Nicaragua...
...A People magazine from hell is finally only a People magazine...
...anatomized the business world of New York with a hint of the intelligence that Balzac applied to Paris, it would be doing us all a service, no matter what its political attitude...
...A profile of City Councilmember Ruth Messinger in the May 1985 issue described her as a "poker-faced woman with a loud, flat voice," and, though praising her intelligence and her work habits, wrote her off in the end as a relic of the New Left, "ferociously tenacious" but incapable of compromise and incapable therefore of bringing about constructive change...
...Smith: I have no idea...
...But before he could ask for anything, one of the young men thrust his palm out and shouted, "Spare a quarter, buddy...
...Felix concluded darkly that "something is wrong with the system...
...Even if we set aside the role he played during his brother's administration—the hawkishness on Vietnam, the plot to kill Castro, the timidity on civil rights—even at his best, what was he...
...These magazines make the implicit claim that Bohemia has migrated to a spot within the dominant money culture...
...The last line of the article is this: "Politicians come and go, but real estate is forever...
...But if he'd put Trump in a novel, I can't imagine that he would have told his story in isolation...
...Spy is the young upstart who will pull a few pranks to embarrass Daddy's club—like publishing a map of it so that outsiders will use its bathroom—but who knows quite well that he'll sit on the board of directors someday...
...It's nice that Manhattan, inc...
...He gave utterance to these portentous words: "Between us the battle is joined henceforward...
...it had the tone of someone complaining about the difficulty of finding good help...
...How many business magazines would conclude a profile of a prominent investment banker and his wife by quoting a Marxist scholar's condemnation of class oppression...
...And as a first act in challenge of Society, Eugene went to dine with the Baroness de Nucingen...
...the other was the New Yorker...
...A former reporter for the Village Voice, Rosenbaum is not an admirer of the business world...
...You wish the magazine would let Elizabeth Drew write much, much longer pieces—and yet where can you make the case...
...An article making fun of game shows (how bold...
...a mix of Forbes, People, and M.") reflect the growing empeoplement of American culture...
...Its criticisms of business are never incisive, never anything but waggish...
...I don't know if we're more stupid than we used to be, 578 • DISSENT THE CULTURE OF THE CITY but we're stupid in a new way...
...Far uglier was an article on the mixture of Spanish and English spoken by NewyoricansPuerto Ricans living in New York...
...In the introduction to Manhattan Passions, a collection of his pieces from Manhattan, inc., Rosenbaum confesses that he has developed a "Bad Attitude" towards this milieu, in which people "wipe the margarita foam from their lips and tell you that they'd discovered that the truly important thing for their personal growth at this point in their lives was to make a huge pile of money...
...Spy introduced its New Yorker letters column this way: "A cartoon makes you laugh, but you have no way of singing the artist's praises properly...
...There's no discussion of what Trump's development projects have done to New York—of how people like Trump and the forces they represent have transformed the city...
...You can dedicate your life to the quest for a whopping salary, but if you keep an ironic distance from it all, if you remember that it's only a game, then you've beaten the system...
...The first few times I thumbed through Manhattan, inc., I was pleasantly surprised by its irreverence...
...I'm tired of reading about power lunches...
...After Malcolm Forbes has gone on complacently about his own liberal-mindedness, his essentially spiritual nature, Rosenbaum baits him by making a rude comment about the Reagan administration's war on Nicaragua— and Forbes throws him out of the house...
...reader enjoys the challenges of business, but doesn't take it all that seriously— sees it as a sort of game...
...576 • DISSENT THE CULTURE OF THE CITY the notion of the adversarial reporter," Equator goes on: Spy tries the crimes of image, lifestyle and journalism...
...Spy is very much a part of the milieu it mocks...
...The New Yorker stressed that Solidarity's program pointed toward a society more civilized than any yet seen, in which political and economic democracy are joined with a system of reciprocal aid...
...but the portrayal is merely personal and therefore toothless...
...Rosenbaum is the sharpest and funniest of the magazine's regular writers...
...But in its own way, the New Yorker is more daring than Spy will ever be...
...wrote about the developer Gerald Guterman, whose chief distinction is a remarkable record of tenant harassment, it concentrated on his . . . art collection...
...misses Bobby . . . but who was Bobby anyway...
...is not a magazine for the three men I saw on the street...
...The April 1986 issue featured an article on Felix and Elizabeth Rohatyn, "society dissidents...
...Trump comes off looking like a self-infatuated fool, but . . . that's it...
...According to the New York Times, Lipson was displeased that Rosenbaum "poked fun at men who wear red suspenders...
...What is interesting, and sad, is the degree to which even people of more decent impulses are infected by the spirit of the age...
...I think this captures the nature of its appeal...
...A Columbia University professor, visiting from Spain, is brought forward to condemn the dialect...
...The New Yorker's political commentary has all the well-known vices: that ponderous overearnestness...
...Her "fighting stance" is "unlikely to lead to higher office," nor is it likely "to unseat developers from their place in the city's power structure...
...As I leave the four o'clock dimness of Le Cirque and all these tales of the way the world really works, it suddenly occurs to me: I miss Bobby, too...
...He may not be the modem Balzac but he was the only reason to read Manhattan inc...
...Uptown Swagger Spy, the "New York Monthly," is a humor magazine that's been around since October 1986...
...Rosenbaum lets his subjects babble on for as long as they like, then dispatches them in a swift concluding paragraph...
...The Rohatyns talked about how disturbed they are by the extremes of wealth and poverty in New York...
...As they sauntered down the street, I watched them with a kind of envy...
...but when you call yourself an upstart, you mean that you hope your elders think you a little bit brash...
...The first few issues of Spy featured interviews with television journalists by Spy's nineteen-year-old "cub reporter," who specializes in throwing people off balance with idiotic questions...
...Because they came from a sensibility that isn't satisfied with being a People magazine from hell...
...I wouldn't have guessed that a magazine that views business as "basically pretty silly" could find an audience today...
...that faux naïf style, in which everything must be spelled out at interminable length...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
