FLASH MEMORY

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Exit Kaplan

(See also David Carr’s compare and contrast article, wherein he also visits a party for the website collegehumor:

I wandered the rest of the party and noticed people staring at me. Had I become the dad in the basement at the teenage party? No, as it turned out, it was the analog act of taking notes with a pen on a notebook that was freaking people out. I may as well have been prancing around with an abacus.

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Kaplan and Kushner, after the switch to tabloid in 2007. Keith Bedford for The New York Times

For a couple of hours, the crowd that gathered at the Century Club last Wednesday night to send off former New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan was a highly unlikely agglomeration of a decade and a half of the paper’s universe: writers, publishers, editors, copy desk people, illustrators, hangers-on, Candace Bushnell. The New York media world, and perhaps a larger one, was distilled in the room. It may have been just another party, but an end-of-an-era ether hung in the air. If the party were a newspaper, it would have been edited by Kaplan.

Half an hour in, the man of honor, dressed in his typical tan jacket and oxford shirt, was waiting outside for his mom. “Everything I ever did was to please her and my father,” he said. “Whatever my love for New York City is, it was a function of their love for the city. We’d drive in from Jersey on the weekends and they used to say, ‘It’s the Emerald City,’” he said during an off the cuff speech later. “And in fact it was.”

In his introduction for Kaplan, 28-year-old publisher Jared Kushner used the word interesting a lot. “Everything’s interesting,” a former Observer editor muttered from the peanut gallery of the bar, small glass in hand. And in fact it was. “Everything’s always interesting.”

Captain Kaplan took the podium. He smiled over the crowd with his trademark tired eyes and smirking smile, like a director might after a long shoot, and started with a colorful anecdote, of course. After he became editor, Kaplan ended up at a party with Mario Cuomo and Cindy Adams, who were talking to each other in the corner. “I walked up to the governor and Cindy Adams and she said, “When will you stop urinating on me?’”

Kaplan then revealed “the secret” of the Observer. He could have said “trick” or “key,” but “secret” suggested something no one else in the business seemed to know about, or at least had no need for anymore: the devotion and attention and care that went into each story, no matter how small. As an intern, I remember being worried about disturbing Kaplan while he was camped out in front of a computer screen in the production room, half the staff gathered around, as he tried to come up with the right headline. Anyone could shout out their ideas, but it was Kaplan, like a navi channeling Groucho, Jackie Gleason and Clay Felker, who went into a kind of headline trance. This was, he said, “the O.C.D. Observer.”

But was that still relevant? “Sometimes I think now, I don’t think print has ended, I think it has many great eons to go,” he told the crowd. “But the Observer was a punctuation on a certain era of print I think, and in so many ways. We took care of things, we named every square inch of the paper and identified with it.

“It was largely an anticipatory rebuke to the New York Times. Because the Times, you know, was such a tyrannical presence in our lives, and somebody had to do the counter-punching. And, so, we did it.”

Some Times people were present, including Mary Ann Giordano, the Observer’s former managing editor. Dexter Filkins, the Times’ war man, was in attendance too. He had come with a tall, lanky “friend” and had a drink in his hand, and was a fan of the Observer, he said, even though he was from Florida. How did his New York life compare to life in Kabul? With sleepy, slightly blood-shot eyes, he leered at me with one of those are you kidding looks. “It’s great.”

Charlie Rose, for whom Kaplan once worked as a producer, entered early in a dark suit, made a bee line to the drink table, and stalked around the party for ten minutes. No one seemed to notice.

Later, Tyler Rush, the paper’s unflappable production manager from Alabama, said of his former editor, “He can make even someone as cynical as me like New York.”

On a table near the door, guests took copies of a fake Observer, which was full of dozens of appreciations of Kaplan. Though it was tabloid size, the paper was designed to look like the old broadsheet.

On one page, there was an imaginary cover of Conde Nast Traveler, where Kaplan would soon be decamping to be the no. 2 editor. The cover had Woody Allen standing next to Scarlett Johansson on a desert island. “Yachting is Such Sweet Tsuris,” read the headline. “Ahoy-vey!”

Gay Talese was circulating the party in a dark suit, looking as tall and handsome as ever, despite the fact that the 77-year-old had awoken at two in the morning to finish an article for the Times, about going on the Circle Line as someone who is averse to water.

Why was Kaplan so important? “He has a kind of detachment with regard to the city and its power-brokers and its shakers and its fuck-ups. He really has a very eclectic vision of who runs and doesn’t run New York. He has a great eye. It’s amazing how much he got done every week. Right on the deadline. Something would happen two hours before the Observer came out. With a staff of about six and a half people.”

Kaplan, said Talese, “makes people feel young, even an emeritus journalist such as myself, because he brought a spirit of New York that no other paper had brought. And the reason he was able to do that was he elevated to positions of prominence with energy a lot of young people whose bylines became known because of the freedom they had under his aegis at the Observer.

“He’s been the father to so many wonderful, intelligent young writers of non-fiction. I don’t know any other editor that’s done that in the last few decades. Since the ’60s, ’70s, the end of the great Harold Hayes of Esquire and Willie Morris of Harpers and Clay Felker of New York, there hasn’t been an editor whose had a relationship with writers, until Kaplan comes along at the Observer. I don’t know who’s around now.”

Talese, who said he had woken up deathly early to finish a piece for the Times about the Circle Line, wanted to be positive. “I don’t want to say he’s the end,” he pursed his lips, “but he’s loved by a lot of people who struggle with writing clearly and wittily.

“I am so hopeful that it will continue even without Peter. I think what he did when he was there has influenced so many people that the lessons have been learned. He can leave because the ship has been locked into a certain way of movement.

“I am not one of those who’s pessimistic about print!” he proclaimed at last.

At one point, someone peered around the high-celinged room with the narrow, awkward eyes of Observer pedigree, and said it was like a weird wedding.

But the taut, reticent faces of the few current staffers in attendance — the youngest people there — said something more about a funeral.

Tom McGeveran, the interim editor who had been at the paper since 2000, when he started on the copy desk, was installed in a corner, talking to some people, sort of slouching over his drink. There was a mix of bemusement and despair in his tired eyes, as if he had seen or knew something few others had.

“I’ve needed a lot of Maalox and a lot of Ambien to get through this few weeks,” he grimly smiled. He was wearing a slightly worn tan blazer over his navy pants, almost exactly like Peter Kaplan.

There was something wedding-like about the whole affair, he agreed, shuffling his feet. But he didn’t mean the party.

“You want to vomit a lot,” he said.

George Gurley, the long-time Observer fixture, fabulous writer and erstwhile reality TV show potential, was standing in the center of the room with a drink of something golden in hand (this drink description technique I learned from reading Gurley), recalling his editor. “Fifteen years,” he said. “He’s had a space in my brain for fifteen years. not a day goes by that I don’t think of him. Not in a weird way, it’s just part of the deal. I want to know more. I wanna do a piece on him. He’s larger than life. He’s a journalism guide. He’s a mystery. Philip Weiss called him infuriating. I’ll go along with that. Sure, it’s a little negative. But it actually adds to his… every time he… where is he right now? Can we go over to him? Just watch the effect he has on me!”

Gurley found Kaplan near the door and interrupted a conversation. “I just want to say thank you for fifteen years…”

“George! I just want you to get your check!” Kaplan shot back with a smile. “All I care about is that this guy gets his check for the book!”

“No, no,” said Gurley, “we don’t have to talk about the check now!” He pointed to me and my recorder.

“Uh oh! Kidding!” said Kaplan, who laughed his way out of the encounter. Soon, he was down the stairs toward the exit.

“It’s good that he said that,” Gurley turned back to me. “‘I just want you to get your check.’ He owes me 2,500 bucks.” It was for a frontispiece Gurley wrote for an anthology of Observer articles, due out in the fall. “You can’t print that,” he said, then continued where he left off.

“Kaplan will always be there. Always seeking his approval. It’s not like every time I did a piece he would say, ‘great story.’ But the half a dozen times he did, it was …” he trailed off. “I don’t want to say what …  don’t want to simplify it or reduce it.

“I spent a fair amount of time in his office,” continued Gurley. “I’d say a total of ten hours in his office. Not always the best situation, not always the best circumstances, but any sort of tension, I’m kind of a difficult scoundrel, troublemaker, unprofessional, weird kind of guy, but any sort of friction between us …” He thought about this. “At one point he did try to throw my computer out the window. It was never personal. I think I wasn’t at my desk. We made up that night.

“Look, I don’t want to go any further,” said Gurley. “I need my therapist to work me through this. It might take the rest of my life to really figure it out. Imagine someone having that much of an effect on you. In an ultimately good, inspiring way, he’s just a genius and not just a journalist.”

In his speech, Arthur Carter, standing before some of his new art-deco-esque rectangular steel sculptures, said he loved his editor, and called the two of them “journalistic soul mates.” Kaplan described the two of them as a “combination of yidishkeyt and erudite.”

Carter reached back to an older New York “consumed by overreaching excesses in taste and money,” to capture the Observer that was – pre-9/11, and pre-Kushner—hell bent on exposing those excesses. He invoked John Updike’s description of New York –  ”the narrow precincts of the Manhattan intelligentsia, a site saturated in poisonous envy and reflexive intolerance and basic impotence.’”

“I will sorely miss those 14 years with Peter,” Carter said in a low voice. “It will never be the same.”