Among the Intellectualoids/Scabrous Spy
Barry, Philip
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS SCABROUS SPY by Philip Barry F or many years one of the advantages of life in the United States over life in Britain was the absence of an American equivalent to...
...A single particularly wordy libel can earn the writer over a hundred bucks, and in a major Spypiece there could be scores of them...
...How did Andersen know...
...Spy deplored too-logical editor Handy's articles opposing enactment of a New York City homosexual rights law as "gay-bashing" and "poorly-reasoned homophobia...
...In short, at least two people...
...38, previously worked at Time Inc.—is written in a variation of Time-style that replaces Time's perky-adjective-before-the-noun with a slander, or a slander and a perky adjective, or an entire perkily slanderous clause...
...Still, oddly, the urge to finger-point and name-call remains...
...Some of the sources the Spyeditors cite: a Harvard classmate, a college classmate, another Harvard friend, a THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 25 family observer, a Harvard friend, one friend, a friend, a friend, a friend, a classmate, one aficionado, a classmate, a Handy-watcher, a friend, one friend, one Handy-watcher, a friend, another friend, one source, one such pal, friends, a once-impressionable freshman, none of the friends interviewed for this piece, a college acquaintance, a friend, a knowledgeable friend, a friend, a friend, a friend, another friend, a puzzled former associate, a longtime friend, one New York writer, a friend...
...Instead this major Spypiece is made up almost entirely of anonymous quotes—which is not to say it was entirely made up...
...In 400 column-inches of searing quote-filled expose they were unable to come up with more than one three-line quote openly uncomplimentary to Handy...
...Blurt out "right-wing, breast-enlarged, document-shredding former secretary Fawn Hall" and you have made $4 at the base 40C per-word rate Spy pays its free-lancers...
...Joe ("War Criminal"), and Richard Nixon ("All-purpose crook and figure of evil...
...But what of the heartbreak of scabrousness...
...Comments one Spy editor in a moment of reflection and humility: "It's irreverent and light and biting, but there is a moral background, a purpose...
...that in college he sometimes cut himself while shaving (his shirt collars, Spy reports, "were habitually flecked with blood from shaving nicks—this last detail courtesy of a Handy-watcher who confesses to have been itching all these years to feed it to the press...
...Or maybe he just made it up...
...What the serious journalists of Spy magazine bury is the other half of the Handy wedding—his wife, a liberal journalist who formerly helped edit the New York Times op-ed page where she had become friendly with many of the celebrity guests whose presence at the Handy wedding attracted the very unfriendly attention of Spy magazine...
...In October 1987 all that changed...
...Behind the boyish giggles, however, Spy's attitude toward homosexuality reflects a deep ambivalence...
...He is one wild and scabrous guy...
...the magazine's own promotional literature asks...
...Spy's crass mass-marketing of malice has had the predictable consequences—overproduction, repetition, bad-taste, the division of the malice-universe into a small clique of malice-producers and a large mass of malice-consumers, such as Elizabeth Comen of Flatbush, Brooklyn, who each month plunks down $2.50 for Spy's 120 pages of malice and bad-liquor ads—enough to have lasted a lifetime ifpassed on the old, civil way, in small doses by friends and co-workers...
...Spyeditor Andersen's table talk is filled with speculation about the hitherto unknown homosexuality of various famous capitalists and right-wingers...
...The impartial tone is unmistakable...
...Perhaps he was acquainted with the popular television hosts from the sordid West Village bar scene...
...Spy has honed its unique editorial combination of good humor and bad manners into an upscale switchblade that has nearly doubled circulation...
...A typical coy implied-Spysmear: "heterosexual New York City Ballet master and dancer turned walker, the heterosexual Graydon C." (name changed so as not to further Spysmear...
...There's a simple and quite obvious answer to this question, but then there would have been no major piece of journalism...
...Think up a sentence—l'Abe [Rosenthal] is now bustling along in his fancy new career as a professional dinner guest—albeit an unengaging one, according to those who have had the misfortune of being placed next to him"—and you have made over $12...
...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS SCABROUS SPY by Philip Barry F or many years one of the advantages of life in the United States over life in Britain was the absence of an American equivalent to Britain's politically minded satirical magazine, Private Eye...
...says cryptically, "is very important to us...
...The community that wears suspenders," Spypublisher Tom Phillips, Jr...
...What made Abe Rosenthal the constant target of their abuse was not any office temper tantrum but his tampering with the Times's happy progressive unanimity by occasionally publishing, and even hiring, people with an ordinate fear of Communism...
...As the monsters are tucked away in the closet it becomes a better-run place, and probably less fun to write about," is how one puts it...
...Anyone we pick on is bigger than us," Carter replies...
...The Times Magazine's occasional publication of articles by these fearful people—people who simply refused to understand the intense, claustrophobic feelings that occasionally oblige Soviet Bloc countries to move large numbers of troops into other countries—marked Times Magazine editor Ed Klein for constant vilification by Cockburn-Andersen...
...Even while Spyediting, Spyeditor Andersen continues as a Contributing TimeWriter...
...The community that wears suspenders," Spypublisher Tom Phillips, Jr...
...Spy—whose founding editors, Kurt Andersen, 33, and E. Graydon Carter, Philip Barry is a writer living in Northeast Harbor, Maine...
...As generations of clever undergraduates have done at exam time when unacquainted with course material, the Spyeditors leap to an audacious theory which renders facts superfluous or stands them on their head: in this case that Handy's success and good reputation are just proof of his cynical cultivation of "connections," with those hardto-refute anonymous sources calling him very nasty names: "a weird, sleazy guy," "a genetically groomed mix of Uriah Heep, young Dick Nixon, LBJ and Sammy Glick," "the Father Coughlin of the eighties," and "in with a lot of schmucks [neoconservatives...
...O ne Spyanomaly is how a self-proclaimed "wicked" and "scabrous" monthly should earn the universal gush of America's normally hard-toplease press corps, including not only Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Dallas magazine, but even USA Today's difficult Deirdre Donahue...
...Andersen justifies his vicious, highly-personal monthly assault on former top Timesman Abe Rosenthal citing his alleged "years of capricious pain infliction . . . far greater than anything to which the man has been subjected in this space...
...If Spy is so "Annoying, Appalling" (Time), why aren't more people (especially those important media people) Annoyed, Appalled...
...The old theatrical saw that satire is what closes on Saturday night turns out to have been just wishful thinking in Spy's case...
...So as not to injure this young man further by repeating his real name in connection with this major but rather unkind piece of journalism, a fictitious name---"Bruce Handy"—will be used...
...For the "major piece of journalism" Spy now promises "in every single issue, a serious piece," the magazine chose an unusually obscure fattened grandee 'a young man," it admits, "you've probably never heard of...
...Spy magazine has changed all that...
...One of the sparse comic conceits of Nixon Era leftist publications was to call pretty much everyone on the other side "war criminal" and other funny stuff...
...What is Spy...
...Spy magazine started publication, immediately becoming another of the things wrong with New York...
...Spy doesn't take anything too seriously, not even itself," writes New York magazine's media critic...
...Spy is a smart, stylish, satirical magazine that chronicles life in urban America...
...and, perhaps most damningly from Spy's view, that his articles were "logical...
...Some Andersen-watchers say it is reminiscent of the case of the late Roy Cohn, but there is no evidence of that...
...The Spypeople went to Harvard with Handy and they might conceivably have just interviewed themselves for the piece...
...Spy's iconoclasm is the same as everyone else's iconoclasm...
...A ten-page slam of a "right-wing editorialist" had been slated but the Spyjournalists had come back with only a few not-so-damning facts: that Handy was liked and considered "brilliant" by those who knew him best, including some well-known people...
...If these Spycharges derive from the intimate personal experience of Spystaffers, they should come out with it openly, in a manly way...
...And like any good marriage, our partnership is based on sympathy and respect...
...Until recently the three worked as male models (Barney's men's clothing was a client), but with Andersen's emerging neck-wattle there are fewer bookings now...
...We've never had an argument...
...Spy is "unpredictable" the same way Sam Donaldson, Nina Totenberg, Richard Threlkeld, Mary McGrory, Daniel Schorr, Victor Navasky, Sidney Blumenthal, Alexander Cockburn, Leslie Cockburn, Vladimir Posner, and the late Claud Cockburn are unpredictable...
...Clever, witty, heartless—the adjectives keep burbling up...
...Abe Rosenthal is always "bosomy dirty book writer Shirley Lord," and her husband, now a columnist for the Times, is always "Abe `I'm writing as bad as I can' Rosenthal...
...Spy's bright, young, affluent readers and stupid, badly dressed, physically unattractive readers alike thrill to the magazine's vicious assaults on "the overdog, the fattened grandees that make up New York life...
...Malice was for free, open to anyone, with some gifted amateurs who knew just how much and what sort of malice was right for the audience (rarely more than six or seven people) and occasion...
...Those who get it elsewhere in the issue include George Bush (the "vision thing" chestnut), Ursula Meese, Lynn Nofziger, President Reagan, Middle America ("a vast cultural Gobi populated by armed neoNazi lunatics"), G.I...
...Spy's "irreverence" is tout le monde's irreverence...
...The research job was onerous but, as the Spy-editors had told Naushad Mehta and Jay Cocks of Time magazine, "we decided to make the magazine all fact...
...When the "meanness" issue is raised, the Spyeditors respond defensively, sometimes petulantly...
...In a military metaphor, editor Andersen says the magazine practices "non-partisanship about where the artillery is pointed...
...A regular column of abusive gossip is devoted to the New York Times's occasionally anti-Communist former executive editor Abe Rosenthal, his wife, and such colleagues as former Times Magazine editor Ed Klein...
...Cockburn and now Spy have kept the Vishinskyesque hilarity rolling...
...Handy is the editorial page editor of—in Spystyle-J`Rupert Murdoch's blitheringly right-wing, cheesecake-filled New York Post'—and some of the guests were friends from his dozen years in political journalism and politics...
...Perhaps they were only willing to talk to themselves on a non-attribution basis...
...The Manhattan-based magazine is quite simply the funniest publication published on these shores," wrote USA Today's magazine critic Deirdre Donahue, a bit disloyal to her own publication...
...Massive advertising for foul-smelling J&B Scotch and other panicky out-of-fashion liquor brands and a growing malicious-readership base (mean household income is $87,500) seem destined to make Spy a permanent aspect of the decline of life in America...
...Though the article is signed and ostensibly written by a Spy staff writer, Spywatchers see editor Andersen's hand in its intimate, personal knowledge of the subculture of shameless opportunism and ruthless social climbing at Harvard College...
...This was news to their wives...
...H omosexuality has been a special interest of Spy magazine and a favorite Spysmear of prominent conservatives...
...According to the Washington Post, "Spy prides itself on being an equal-opportunity destroyer...
...Now that the Times, under new executive editor Max Frankel, is moving back to relentless progressive self-parody, the Spyeditors are pleased, respectful...
...Although, like Cole Porter, married, Spyeditor Andersen now spends most of his day with older, dandyish co-editor Carter...
...There have been no libel actions to date [November 2, 1987...
...In Spystyle Mrs...
...Despite having attended the Time Inc...
...The Spy queersmear is also directed toward hackneyed targets—male ballet dancers, etc...
...Like subway graffiti, Spy was illegible, destructive, ubiquitous, and initially praised by people of confused or no criteria...
...Happily acknowledging 'a certain amount of scabrousness,' Andersen," according to Time, "thought 'it would be fun to have a forum that could be your sandbox.' " The Spyeditors, who wanted an editorial voice "engaged in real life," faced a problem...
...Annoying, Appalling . . . Hilarious," burbled Time...
...One of the rich, older men who befriended Andersen at Harvard, and who would later help him financially with his exciting publishing project, was coldly turned down when he sought to buy an expensive Park Avenue co-op apartment for which he was financially qualified...
...Yet it is a long-standing pattern...
...Serious Journalism School, the Spyjournalists have some trouble with the rudiments of reporting...
...For Spy, truth is not a defense where "a particularly hardline neoconservative" is concerned...
...Fearless bully on the outside, the Spy-journalist is a quivering Samantha Smith on the inside—worried about Arms Control, World Peace, the ozone layer, and homophobic white men dressed in sheets and suspicious of civil rights...
...Personal experience has embittered Spypeople to sex-preference based prejudice...
...Beyond the politics of what the Spy-editors disapprove--!`there's a lot more to the [New York] Post's political sensibility than just poorly reasoned homophobia—there's also hard-line anticommunism and knee-jerk mistrust of arms control and suspicion of civil rights'!—are their affirmative beliefs—the earnest, sincere, deeply-held, profoundly-progressive, even loving views they have found harder to share with their readers in any open way...
...The "certain amount" of scabrousness Spyeditor Andersen happily acknowledges turns out to be lots of scabrousness...
...In Spy's June lead-in Andersen's targets include George Bush (longest entry), Ed Meese, Richard Nixon, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, President Reagan (for believing "his own dreamy lies aboutthe workability of a high-tech nuclear missile defense system"), Senate Majority Leader Byrd (for urging caution in making treaties with the Soviets he is called "especially dumb" and remembered as a "former Klan member"), and the "really shameless" ABC Television (for hiring "the right-wing, breast-enlarged, document-shredding former secretary Fawn Hall...
...Now it is malice for pay, slander for dollars...
...These are not exactly their icons...
...Spy offers witty revelations and unpredictable insights about the people and institutions that make metropolitan life special...
...that he had successfully beaten a drug problem more serious than Kitty Dukakis's...
...The reason is that Spy has been terribly fortunate in its iconoclasm...
...The constant vilification of Rosenthal actually originated not with Spy but in the late seventies with the Village Voice's notorious "Press Clips" column of crypto-Stalinist Andersen role-model Alexander Cockburn...
...Someone told the board that I liked little boys," he explained...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 M alice used to be something reserved almost entirely to private life—the exchange of such stories and information was part of any gathering of family or friends, the impetus for countless local telephone calls that helped people keep in touch...
...The daring slams at Ed Meese, George Bush, Richard Nixon, nouveau riche developers' wives, President Reagan, nouveau riche developers, Norman Podhoretz, Oliver North, Elliott Abrams, and obscure right-wing editorialists just might not cost the Spyeditors important friends at the Washington Post "Style" section...
...The sophisticated, sharp and irreverent articles appeal to a bright, young, affluent audience...
...It's truly like a marriage,"says Carter...
...Some years ago, in his "list" book, The Real Thing, Andersen's compulsive name-calling led him to identify the Sesame Street muppets "Bert" and "Ernie" as the "real thing" in homosexuals...
...Awkward Moments in Serious Journalism The article opens with a list of some of the notable guests at Handy's wedding, from various liberals such as Times columnist Anthony Lewis to—in virtuoso Spystyleright-wing crank Norman Podhoretz" and "not-yet-indicted State Department liar Elliott Abrams," and asks querulously, "How did one wedding manage to attract representatives from the entire spectrum of mainstream American political thought...
...We champion the underdog and bite the ankle of the over-dog...
...So go aheadwith the vicious, highly-personal ten-page hatchet jobs on obscure too-logical neoconservatives—you wild and wicked and scabrous guys, you...
...says cryptically, "is very important to us...
...Nor has the magazine any political or social agenda...
...Continued Time: "Fact checkers (two full-time, three part-time) make sure a story's aim stays true...
Vol. 21 • September 1988 • No. 9
