Banty

Beautiful Day
Walking east on 79th from Fifth Avenue, June 2024

Tonight’s post is from a description of “Ray Stark, the legendary producer” in the twelfth chapter of When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines.

Ray was a banty fellow with pronounced front teeth that had earned him the nickname “Rabbit.”

I knew the word bantam but not banty. Thank you, Graydon Carter, for sending me to my dictionaries. This is a good word. It seems to have something of County Clare in it.

I was surprised how much I liked this memoir. I opened it with neutral expectations and then smiled or laughed many times along the way.

Certainly I hadn’t expected anything like the telephone poles. They charmed.

Among the book’s funny and telling stories is the time Si shrugged and also the time it was pouring rain and Graydon had to leave Si in the taxi cab. 

One of my favorite sentences in the book is about Donald Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples: “I’ve seen more honest emotion at an early morning Starbucks line.” 

Missing from the pages is Jesse Kornbluth. Didn’t he write for VF?. 

Also missing is a better explanation of how things ended with Spy and with Cynthia, mother of the four Carter children who were lucky enough to spend part of their childhood within the beautifully plastered walls of The Dakota.

It is abundantly clear that when the going was good was when Newhouse’s Golden Tickets were plentiful. It is nice to think of an editor being paid a great deal of money and being able to buy well-made clothes and shoes and well-made country houses. I’m glad somebody had that. 

Newhouse’s Golden Tickets

Although, in truth, I am much more excited by the idea of somebody “winning” a decent rent-controlled apartment — like Iris in the movie The Friend* — than somebody “winning” a coveted spot at Vanity Fair or any of the other Newhouse magazines. I will always be a New Yorker that way. The rent-controlled apartment is the brass ring. (Okay, well, a rent-controlled apartmment with ample closet space, plus windows in the kitchen and bathroom, and, of course, clean bike and laundry rooms in the basement — and a live-in superintendent. Near a good subway stop. Henry Alford understands this sentiment, I’m sure.)

At Elaine’s in the late 1990s, a Vanity Fair writer introduced me to a writer named Ed, who, if I recall correctly, had a large rent-controlled apartment with a wrap-around terrace. He didn’t make it into Graydon’s book, but I felt him there nonetheless, just on the outskirts. That’s the kind of memoir When the Going Was Good is. It brings back just enough memories in a feel-good haze. 

Right now I’m reading memoirs by members of the Chorus Line crowd. There are some choice details about New York. For somebody like me, it’s comfort food.

Another kind of great American magazine.

* Soon I will read the book. And, yes, Iris inherited the apartment; she didn’t “win” it.