Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker

The well-known New Yorker writer, Nicholas Lehman's profile of George W. Bush on the campaign trail would be an atmospheric, perhaps poignant look at the country previous to the Supreme Court decision and 9/11, except for one thing. On the campaign bus, Bush came up to Lehman and said, "So who you writin' this piece for Nicky?" - (NICKY?) Lehman answered, with the name that Bush already knew. And Bush replies, "The Noooo Yawkuh, don't see why any of those readers would be interested in me." That, no matter what your political viewpoint or opinion about the magazine and its readers may be, is an indicator of the power of the magazine via its writing. The authors of the selected pieces are sometimes the primary reason to read the article. Perhaps the most famous example is Capote writing on Brando making Mitchener's Sayonara, an impossible thing to imagine today. The grandiosity of Brando doing something that he would no doubt later be ashamed of is not lost over time. Capote always boasted of his ability to keep himself out of an interview, something that I found amazingly untrue and part of his attraction. In this case, he managed to find the comedy in the Japanese girls calling, "Marron" while remaining deferential to the star. Capote innocently notes every plate of high calorie food consumed like Henry VIII and the serious tone Brando took about his own artistic endeavors. The result was that upon reading the article, Brando vowed to kill the author. Every reader will find their particular famous people who are no longer interesting, and that itself is instructive. For me, those were Johnny Carson, an early Roseanne, Baryshnikov and perhaps sadly, Al Gore. Others, eternally fresh are Isadora Duncan, Richard Pryor and Ernest Hemingway drinking champagne with Dietrich, who was passing around pictures of her grandchild. Papa mentioned that he'd like to see a Dietrich grandson in the ring. The best, I think most New Yorker fans will agree are the otherwise unknowns, sometimes to everyone, and sometimes just to you. These are those pieces that seem to bring on Buddha-like powers of concentration where time stops and you can't account for the hours, the stuff's been so good. The pieces that will be the most deeply memorable for me are, "Mr. Hunter's Grave," a 1956 favorite of David Remnick, the editor who placed it first. It's about a lost, secret community of black Oystermen and a mystery solved in graveyard fashion. There are the `Chudnovsky Brothers' and their entire apartment and life spent studying Pi, A piece of Henry Luce that was a savage, sarcastic and hilariously wicked perspective that quite naturally infuriated the tyrant. Nancy Franklin's profile on the infamous Katherine White was an unexpected source of female pride, without the attachment of doctrinaire feminism. This is a sure thing for future journalists with an interest in the ubiquitous personality piece. Plenty here for those that may aspire beyond People Magazine but still can

You have heard of the obnoxious person who, upon meeting a biographer who has given up the last 25 years of his life to write the definitive biography of say Queen Elizabeth II, asks, "Now tell me, what's she REALLY like??" Friends, I am that person, which is one reason I always find New Yorker Profiles an unalloyed delight. Rightly or wrongly, I always believe I am getting the real insider stuff.David Remnick makes thoughtful selections in this anthology. He has covered a time period from the `30s to the present, some very famous people and some you have never heard of, and the same is true for the authors of the Profiles. I fully intended to make a leisurely tour through the book, picking and choosing a Profile here and there for a short read. Once I read the very first one, Joe Mitchell's "Mr. Hunter's Grave," I was hooked and read the whole book from start to finish. So much for leisurely reading!It is hopeless to attempt to select a favorite; all have their own merits. I was particularly fascinated by Truman Capote's insightful piece on Marlon Brando. Capote's flamboyant personality frequently overshadows his tremendous skills as an interpretive writer. Jean Acocella's study of Mikhail Baryshnikov is an excellent in-depth study of both the man and the artist. John Lahr's Profile on Roseanne is almost scary (or at least Roseanne is!) Joe Mitchell's, "Mr. Hunter's Grave" is so beautifully rendered you can understand why The New Yorker never took him off salary even after Joe suffered the granddaddy of all writer's blocks; he didn't submit an article for fourteen years! The New Yorker always said Joe had a "work in progress.""Life Stories" is worth it at twice the price. Some of these profiles are unobtainable (unless you have a roomful of old New Yorkers). This is a book you will go back to again and again.

It is expected that the profiles contained herein are what they are: insightful, well-written vignettes of interesting, often celebrated, lives. What isn't expected, and what I found most appealing, is that the collection achieves a certain unity, a distinct flow, from one profile to the next. It makes the reading experience less like an irrelative tour through a picture gallery, and more like a deconstruction of the human community.Not willing to arrange this "greatest hits" package chronologically, editor David Remnick structures the book to create pregnant dichotomous pairings. In some cases they are rather obvious, as Mikhail Baryshnikov follows Isadora Duncan. But in other cases, the order enhances both pieces: A dissection of a man passing himself off as a descendant of the Romanoff's is followed by one of Anatole Broyard, a black literary critic trying to pass himself off as white. These two pieces, which on their own didn't hold my attention, came into full view once I'd read both (furthermore, Broyard is followed by Floyd Patterson, much reviled by Muhammad Ali for being a black boxing champion easily digested by white audiences).Connections are made in other ways. Roger Angell's piece on Pittsburgh Pirate Steve Blass is followed by a profile of legendary New Yorker editor Katherine White, Angell's mother. The outcome of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election is made more palatable -- in hindsight -- by back-to-back profiles on Bush and Gore, both done by Nicholas Lemann. And a fascinating troika of profiles -- on Johnny Carson, Marlon Brando, and Richard Pryor -- pull along the notion that reaching the heights of ones profession, in the field of entertainment, does not necessarily bring peace of mind (furthermore, profiles on Carson, Pryor, and Roseanne Barr advance my own hypothesis that a comedian must lead the life of a Cassandra for a while, before the spoils come to ruin them for good; Carson is said to have "painted himself not into a corner but onto the top of a mountain.").At times, the book takes on a secondary function: detailing the lengthy and lofty history of The New Yorker magazine itself. Following the life of Katherine White, and her correspondences with New Yorker founder Harold Ross, made Nancy Franklin "giddy with a feeling of discovery, as if I'd suddenly hit upon the structure of The New Yorker's DNA -- almost as if I'd been present at the creation." This is a fantasy that others appear to share. Remnick admits that an early skewering of Time publisher Henry Luce (itself a marvel of gymnastic prose) was in response to Time giving the same treatment to Ross. At many other times throughout the collection, a subject is caught recognizing the magazine's reputation, making the accuracy of the profile presented (in Heisenbergian lingo) quite uncertain. More often than not, though, the author presciently notes when this has happened.So hermetically, the collection works. Now let me note a few of its high points

If you have read Joseph Mitchell's New Yorker Profile "Joe Gould's Secret" (now in book and movie form)you know how interesting life can be. If you haven't read Mitchell, here's your chance to visit his talent along with a score of other superb New Yorker writers who are so good they make most biographys look simple by comparison.

It's easy, I suppose, to knock 'The New Yorker' as effete and self-satisfied. Certainly its left-wing bias looks a bit strange surrounded by all those ads for expensive imported whisky and porcelain figures. This book demonstrates, however, that for seventy-five years the magazine has been turning out splendid profiles of a very disparate group of people. And, what's even more important, they're written so beautifully. Even an oddball piece like Ian Frazier's 'Nobody Better, Better than Nobody' is lucid and full of fine sentences. Every one of the profiles in this book has something to recommend it. You needn't admire or be familiar with the subject of the profile. I harbour an intense dislike for Roseanne Barr, for example, but John Lahr's profile of her had me enthralled; and I enjoyed Roger Angell's piece on Steve Blatt, despite my never having seen a baseball game. David Remnick states in his introduction that he gave pride of place to Joseph Mitchell's 'Mister Hunter's Grave', and that's understandable: it's a masterpiece. But Richard Preston's long story about the Chudnovsky brothers and their search for pi, or Mark Singer's tale of the amazing sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay, would distinguish any anthology. I think that Remnick could easily compile another volume as strong, and I hope he does so in the future -- he should include something by himself next time.