The Golden Condom (20 page)

The protégé's precocity clinched the deal for his patron because it reminded him of his own. How could the man who had written a bestselling polemic at age twenty-one fail to see himself in the eloquent recent graduate of the same university he had attended, who as a high school freshman had sent in an article that he himself could have written, particularly since its cheeky, contrarian style had been inspired by the editor in chief's own prose? Overjoyed to find a mirror that reflected so well on himself, he had scrawled “This kid is a
genius
!” on the typescript when a staff member gave it to him for comment, and he published the piece as a cover story with the author's age prominently displayed. He might as well have added, “This Just In: I've Found the Next Me!” In fact, although their writing had a similar sparkle and punch, their personalities were worlds apart. The editor in chief never took into consideration or even noticed that the original “me” was an extrovert and the new “me” an introvert, that the first edition was wealthy and worldly and the second was a naive child of the middle class, or that he himself was supremely confident and self-directed and his successor self-conscious and anxious to please. Talent in a kindred spirit was the only thing he saw.

Beyond literary style and a common political philosophy, what created such intoxicating synergy between them? The protégé's father, a self-contained, unexpressive man, felt little affinity for his younger son and preferred his elder son. The mentor had an intermittently contentious relationship with his own son, who was slightly older than his protégé and considerably more rebellious. The younger man sought an appreciative and inspiring father; the elder one wanted a responsive son who shared his vision. Each seemed to be a perfect match for what the other needed.

This was a once-in-a-lifetime offer the heir apparent could not—dare not—refuse or even consider the implications of too closely. To question his idol's judgment at all would be to risk displeasing the man to whom he owed everything. “He was the most exciting person in the world to me,” he said. “I'd been reading his work and watching his TV show for years. He perfectly expressed my own thoughts and beliefs and championed the political cause that mattered most to me. I'd corresponded with him; he'd recognized my talent and given me national prominence as a teenager.” He feared, with justification, that he risked losing his unique position if he demurred. Raising any question at all might well be interpreted as ingratitude and cast doubt on his aptness as his mentor's chosen one.

I recall being at least as astonished as my boyfriend (to whom I became engaged the next year and married the following one) when he told me the news the night he received it, looking as much dazed as dazzled. As exciting as it was in the abstract for our future together, I felt queasy about the proposition. Was this, I wondered from the start, what he really wanted? And yet, how could he refuse? To these misgivings in his behalf were added my wondering how on earth I was going to become the official hostess for this small but potent empire, a position I was at least as ill suited for. How could we sponsor private classical music concerts by famous artists in our two-bedroom apartment, as the editor in chief regularly did in his palatial East Side duplex? My own future was in the balance too. Just as the wizard Merlin had revealed the future to his protégé Arthur before his coronation, including Arthur's demise, I had vague fears that there was something ominous in the fate that this modern-day magician was revealing to his crown prince.

Everything seemed to be going as planned when, a year later, the editor in chief made another grand gesture, this one inauspicious in retrospect. “He said, ‘I want to talk to you,' and I figured we'd go to lunch again, but instead he took me to Mexico for the weekend; it was a piece of performance art. He insisted that we stay in the same hotel and the same suite he and his son had stayed in, but once we got there, he didn't tell me anything.” Being forthright, particularly with criticism, was not among his boss's gifts. “Finally, on the last night, he said that he wanted me to ‘step up' to the role he'd assigned me. In essence, he was saying, ‘I've decided you're me. You have to be more like me than you are.'” He did not elaborate, and of course his heir apparent was afraid to ask for details or advice; it might have broken the charm.

The editor in chief made another telling gesture on that trip. He bought a turquoise-encrusted silver plate for his protégé to deliver to me when they returned. So sumptuous a gift was far beyond my fiancé's—we had become engaged by then—means to buy for me himself; that it wasn't at all my taste was beside the point. Was this showing off, pulling rank, competing with a younger man who didn't have the resources to be a challenger? Even now, my husband remembers the sting that having to present me with his boss's purchase epitomized and what it stirred up in him. “I felt humiliated and inadequate,” he said. “I thought, ‘I can't do this. I've got to tell him I have serious doubts about this; what should we do?' But I couldn't take him into my confidence because I couldn't face it myself. ‘If I'm not going to accept the offer, can we continue to have a relationship? If I don't become the next him, will he need me at all? What will I do?'” He was still bowled over by the honor, but the weight of expectation that had been placed upon him, with no guidance on how to fulfill it—since they were the same person in his boss's eyes, none should be needed—felt crushing. No one, he was vaguely beginning to realize, can step effortlessly into a ready-made identity. A paralyzing paradox faced him: if he became his own true self, he would lose his special role in the life of the man he adored, longed to emulate, and depended on for his livelihood.

For the next eight years, there were no more subtle complaints from headquarters, and the plan seemed to be going swimmingly. The protégé was given all manner of plum assignments designed to showcase his talents and to initiate him into the position that would someday—though it was never made clear exactly when—be his. He edited a book of his patron's columns, ghostwrote the most challenging parts of his voluminous correspondence (“I could impersonate him on paper,” he observed), produced portraits of all the presidential candidates, oversaw the magazine's thirtieth anniversary edition, and became its managing editor. He also wrote his own first book—the editor in chief arranged for his own editor to take it on. Any misgivings he had about this poisoned proposition went underground. “‘Is this right for me?' is more formulated than the doubts I let myself have,” he said. “To even ask the question meant either risking his displeasure or failing, both awful alternatives.”

Then, as swiftly and shockingly as the keys were proffered, they were snatched away. The protégé, now thirty-two, went out to lunch one day and came back to find a letter from his mentor on his desk, marked “Confidential.” The deposing was done with more elaborately defensive eloquence than the original anointing. “It is now plain to me that you are not suited to serve as editor-in-chief after my retirement. This sentence will no doubt have for a while a heavy, heavy effect on your morale, and therefore I must at once tell you that I have reached the conclusion irrevocably. You have no executive flair.… You do not have executive habits [or] an executive turn of mind, and I would do you no service, nor the magazine, by imposing it on you.” After lowering the boom, he bestowed honest praise. “What you have is a very rare talent, so rare that I found it not only noticeable but striking when you were very young. You will go down in history as a very fine writer, perhaps even a great writer.” Writing, he said, was what the recipient naturally inclined to, whereas editing would be “asphyxiative” to his true gift—perhaps as he thought it had been to his own. The message could be summed up as “do what you're actually good at, and not what I wanted you to be good at just because I was good at it.” This turned out to be excellent advice, although the delivery left something to be desired. The editor in chief wanted his soon-to-be-ex-protégé to stay on as a senior editor, and of course to continue to write for him, but at a 60 percent pay cut. To avoid dealing with the fallout, the editor in chief conveniently, if cravenly, left the country before his letter was delivered.

In addition to coping with a blow of gargantuan proportions to his ego, the still-young man, who was no longer as young as he was when his future was mapped out for him, now had to figure out what to do for himself, all the while coping with shame, rage, and the devastation of having been treated abominably by the person he most esteemed. He went from precocious to superannuated in one day. “I had no idea what else I could do,” he recalled. “This had been my world since I was fourteen. I'd never written for anybody else—the magazine was an enchanted cave. I was paranoid, sure that everybody knew what had happened, but in fact nobody did until I wrote about it myself decades later. I crafted a cover story that I was cutting back to leave myself more time to write, and I learned to be a freelance journalist; I proceeded to do what I should have been doing all along.” He never stopped writing for the magazine, and still does so, but it was no longer the center of his universe.

Eventually, he discovered that being a biographer and chronicler of American history used all the political, psychological, and literary acumen he had been accumulating in the cave. His first historical biography—not surprisingly of George Washington, a father figure who did not disappoint and whose motto was, unlike the editor in chief's, “We must take men as we find them”—made the front page of
The
New York Times Book Review
. From then on, he defined his own future, lecturing, making documentaries, and fulfilling his early promise in his own way.

It took longer to mend the tie with his former mentor than it did to create a professional identity for himself. “Of course the relationship chilled,” he said. “We were never rude, but when he complimented articles of mine, it felt sour.” The elder man never apologized, and they never directly discussed what had happened, but their relationship reconstituted itself with new warmth and less of a power differential over time through efforts on both their parts. Theirs was a slow, but authentic, rapprochement. “The first thing that impressed me later was the concern he showed when I got ill,” the ex-protégé said. “In the manner typical of him, he had a piano delivered to me, knowing that I, like him, loved the instrument, and remembering that we had played duets together.” This was another grand gesture, to be sure, but it also revealed another side of the man: genuine affection, generosity, and sympathy for people who mattered to him. He even put his money where his mouth was, giving his former surrogate son a large sum, as you would to a family member, to refurbish “your dream house,” the country place we had recently bought, where many years later we entertained him. He also gave us a handsome old shotgun to defend ourselves against human and animal intruders—a far more practical gift than the turquoise-encrusted plate.

Then, as swiftly and shockingly as the keys were snatched away, they were proffered a second time.

The person the editor in chief picked to take his place when he finally did decide to retire, a seasoned British journalist who was nothing like him, naturally failed to please him. “It turned out nobody could succeed him—he was unique,” said his older and wiser former heir. He was astonished all over again when the man who had concluded decisively that he lacked executive flair thought he saw some that he had missed the first time around and approached him once more. This time, though, the editor in chief made a request, as if to a peer, rather than presenting a fait accompli to a novice, saying, “If you don't want to succeed me, I want to hear it from you formally.” Was this a sincere desire to redo history, an authentic reconsideration, or simply a matter of what he considered courtesy? His motivation was never clear. But this time, his former protégé was absolutely clear, because he had found his own voice and his own vocation. He said no.

Only then could the once and almost-future protégé realize that his mentor had done him a favor by firing him in advance from a position he had never aspired to. “He must have had an inchoate sense that becoming him 2.0 would be more, but also less, than what I ought to have been doing. It really would have cut into my writing time.” Ultimately, another, even younger, man was chosen to be the successor. He too was nothing like the editor in chief, and the magazine, as is natural, metamorphosed into something quite different in his hands, suited to a different time and an unrecognizably altered media climate, in which political pundits were of a radically different type than they once had been.

The former protégé had an opportunity to pay a formal tribute to the man who had catapulted him into the world in which he ultimately made his mark in his own way. “My symbolic kiss of peace was when he stepped down in 1990,” he recalled. “An important statesman threw him a dinner to which he invited me. I planned a toast, since I knew I would be called on for one. I quoted Yeats's poem ‘Beautiful Lofty Things,' which talks about his own father's ‘beautiful, mischievous head'”—for the editor in chief's head was truly both beautiful and mischievous, and his only real protégé wanted him to know he knew it. “He was moved and asked for a copy of my remarks. But I didn't give it to him. I said I didn't have one. I did that because I knew if I gave one to him he would have printed it in the magazine. This was for him and that audience only; I didn't want him broadcasting it to the world. I was through being his trophy. I did, however, print it in the book I wrote about our relationship after he died. I was man enough finally to print a loving tribute myself, but also man enough not to let
him
print it.” The
enfant terrible
stayed an
enfant
, if a less terrible one, all his life, but the boy genius became a man—his own man.