Читать книгу Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media - Michael Wolff - Страница 8

In the spring of 2002—in the year of the autumn in question—I received an official, even ceremonious, invitation to have lunch with two journalists I knew from the Internet years (already sounding like some druggy past, or a best-forgotten unpopular war). They had a proposal to discuss. We want to bounce something off of you, one of them said in an email.

And so we met at Michael’s. To have lunch at Michael’s seemed specifically part of their point here.

You step into the door on West 55th Street, in a building once owned by the Rockefellers, and get a greeting from Michael himself (when he’s in from the Coast—Michael’s has a sister restaurant in Santa Monica), in brilliantined hair (recently he’s been sporting a new floppy cut), or from one of the oddly nurturing (“You look great today”) front-desk people. Then, from the top of the few steps leading down to the spacious dining room with good art and many flowers, you see everybody else in the media business who wants to be seen.

I have a table. It’s table No. 5, which is a very good table very near the front of the room. Its sight lines go directly to the entryway, and its back is secured by the east wall (in view of table No. 1 in the bay with Caroline Kennedy playing with her hair or Mick Jagger drumming his fingers or Bill Clinton monologizing his luncheon companions). Among the things I have never expected or wanted to achieve is a table of my own (like Winchell at the Stork Club). Still, this takes nothing away from the satisfaction of having gained a contested piece of turf. (There is a menacing back room at Michael’s where faceless people are led every day, never to emerge.)

Before Michael’s was Michael’s, it was the Italian Pavilion, which in a former heyday of media life had a serious following among advertising and network types. My father was in the agency business and once took me to lunch here and pointed out Bill Paley, the chairman of CBS and the most powerful and elegant man then alive.

I think this is part of the Michael’s attraction: It recalls the other, more salubrious, three-martini era (occasionally, someone will even have a martini at Michael’s), when media was the easiest game in town, when the world was made up of a passive audience and eager advertisers, when the money flowed like gin—as opposed to now, with media being a tortured, hardscrabble affair. A bleak, unpromising, Darwinian struggle.

I sometimes think this is part of the running joke. When you’re making a lunch date and say to someone, “Michael’s?”—they’re in on it. The joke is that all these media bigs show up for lunch and pretend everything is just fine and still supporting these incredibly expensive meals, while waiting for the person at the next table to break down in tears (at any given moment, everyone knows who will likely be crying next).

In other establishments like this—the Four Seasons, for instance—there’s a certain sort of pretense. People in a gated community pretend that they live the lives of people outside the gated community, or pretend the gated area is normal life.

But Michael’s isn’t like that. Everybody is open about being on the inside. It’s like a prison yard.

We’ve crossed the existential Rubicon from social and economic anxiety to an oddly pleasurable self-loathing.

If there once was a media Eden, we are its wastrel and prodigal children with bad work ethics who messed it up and were cast out of the garden. In another sense, we are just unfortunate children, who, through no fault of our own, inherited overplanted fields and poisoned air and changing weather conditions. Whatever.

I have another metaphor, which is Vichy. This makes Michael’s a kind of Rick’s Café Americain.

Pushing this metaphor, the media business, through this last twenty years, has become occupied territory.

The media business used to be run by insiders. People who grew up in those businesses, and people, who by virtue of a certain New York-ism were of a family. But then outsiders, not-of-our-class outsiders, took over.

In a twenty-year period, virtually every media company and every sector of the media industry—book, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, movies, music—came to be controlled by people from outside the clan.

The mogul invasion began—not just your usual business types, but a whole new class of rougher, ruder, preternaturally cunning businesspeople.

A sense of insider resentment or snobbishness or rebelliousness would occasionally express itself. But the stronger sensation was clearly a desire to adapt. Resistance in this situation, where economic ownership passes from one regime to another, is, strangely, almost unknown. Ownership is granted a kind of moral standing. There is no model for saying we will not submit to capital. (When Rupert Murdoch bought New York magazine in 1977, the staff walked out—but that really may be the last time there was clear resistance, and, of course, it was pointless.) It isn’t like, for instance, France. Even though these are cultural industries, you can’t talk about cultural patrimony—or a cultural exception. Although there have been federal rules that regulate exactly this, that notion—that there is something here that transcends the marketplace—that this is a special and fragile area, seemed feeble and pantywaist. For a while book people said it, but then nobody said it anymore.

The world is as it is. The idea of having no place in it became the scariest thing. (We all knew people, too, who came to have no place in it—from people at the Village Voice, to correspondents in a network’s foreign bureaus, to old New Yorker writers—who fell outside a sense of economic with-it-ness. Indeed, there are long mastheads of the missing.)

Therefore, we became collaborators: the quisling media.

Collaboration is, of course, a complicated emotional predicament, in which you often come to root against yourself—root for our own ruin. That’s the Michael’s patois. Who is going down. Who is fucking up. Whose ridiculousness will finally be exposed.

It is this self-consciousness and self-loathing that forms not only the subtext of Michael’s conversation (this is a highly verbal and analytic bunch) but the subtext of the media’s view of the media itself.

We are all here every day working to chip away at whatever is left holding up this insupportable business.

Which is why lunch is so satisfying.