Time-server
BATES, STEPHEN
TLVif-SERVER Henry Grunwald's Life as an Editor By Stephen Bates As a boy in Vienna, Henry Grunwald dreamed of becoming an inventor or an engineer, "the most typically American occupations."...
...Only "a certified anti-Communist like Nixon" could have established relations with China...
...He gives a number of expense-account tales, including a submission for "orchids and caviar for Maria Callas, as well as pate for her poodle," reimbursed without question...
...They were not his proudest years...
...Over the pages that follow, Grunwald's pal Norman Mailer admits to finding Margaret Thatcher sexy ("a feeling I could not share...
...Deep commitment to a cause is laudable in anyone else, but in a journalist it is not permissible...
...Looking back as he prepares to leave Time Inc., Grunwald calls journalism "great work, a pass to all the world" and "important to democracy," but bothersome on two levels...
...Grunwald has few scores to settle...
...At times the author comes across as poignantly fogeyish, as when he relates that "I sometimes told Beverly that we should have more black friends, and she agreed...
...As a writer, he is polished and unostentatious, but unacquainted with that paramount newsmagazine virtue: brevity...
...One Man's America—padded out with quotes not only from Grun-wald's magazine articles and internal memos, but also from his high school compositions, poetry, and after-dinner remarks—is far too long...
...was well on its way to becoming just another faceless conglomerate, in which the editor in chief no longer ran the show...
...Journalists tend to be general-ists, hiding behind (in the case of newsmagazines) smart-assed omniscience: "I had often felt uneasy passing judgment on stories about nuclear physics or the validity of the Laffer curve," he writes...
...Marilyn Monroe urges Grunwald to read a new novel called Catcher in the Rye...
...The explanations, alas, rarely rise above conventional wisdom...
...As a person, Grunwald appears graceful, gracious, and likeable...
...When Grunwald wouldn't oblige him, Kissinger took his complaint to Grunwald's boss, Hedley Donovan...
...no more pate for poodles...
...I told him," recounted Donovan, "that if he didn't stop pressuring us, we would put him on the cover alone...
...Grunwald's saga comes full circle when he returns to Vienna as the American ambassador...
...The President is really upset," Kissinger reported...
...ii Very much aware that the previous regime . . . had produced People and Money," Grunwald writes, "I was greatly frustrated by the lack of similar accomplishments on my watch...
...Already, publishing accounted for only about a third of the company, with the rest divided between cable TV and forest products...
...A journalist," he says, "must never forget that he is only an observer and, almost by definition, an outsider...
...Like Time itself, Grunwald aims not merely to report but to explain...
...Instead, he tells agreeable stories of life at Time...
...Second, journalists too often lose sight of their role...
...Grunwald repeats the legend of the reporter who, after being given an insultingly measly raise, cabled the home office using coinages to save a few pennies on telegraphy: "Upstick your raise asswards...
...was a career he adored, as he shows time and again in his amiable memoir One Man's America...
...It was a time of budget-cutting...
...After the Quiz Show scandals, "Americans felt betrayed...
...In 1972, Henry Kissinger begged that Time's Man of the Year honors go solely to President Nixon, and not jointly to Nixon and Kissinger as the magazine had planned...
...In the bathroom-less dressing room at the Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein tells the Grunwalds that "all the great conductors in the world have peed in this sink...
...It Stephen Bates is the author of three books, including If No News, Send Rumors: Anecdotes ofAmerican Journalism...
...He became editor in chief of the company's publications just as the newsmagazine niche was vanishing...
...Instead, as the Age of Edison gave way to the Age of Woodward and Bernstein, he wound up in journalism, and he wound up at the top...
...The company closed the money-hemorrhaging Washington Star, launched Discover and sold it off because it was losing money, and poured nearly $50 million into the disastrous TV Cable Week...
...Freud's granddaughter...
...After his stint as managing editor, Grunwald left the newsroom for Time Inc., where he eventually became editor-in-chief...
...First, it's superficial...
...Another reporter put on his expense account the single and unelaborated statement 'Trip down the Nile, $25,000.' Granted, but correspondent subsequently fired...
...The name-dropping starts before our narrator is out of knickers, when he develops a crush on a Vienna schoolmate who happens to be Dr...
...Editing Time, as he did for almost a decade, might demand impossible hours, but it provided "an excitement unknown to civilians who lived by a conventional clock and calendar...
...Time Inc...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 22
