There are few urges quite so overpowering as the ones that involve dishing dirt and getting even, and there are few people quite so up to the task as low-level editors at some of the nation's (read: New York City's) most glittering and glamorous (read: dysfunctional and morally bankrupt) publications. These urges seem to be in full flower lately, which partially explains the great hoopla surrounding recently written books like Slab Rat by Ted Heller, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, by Toby Young and the exquisitely titled and not very credibly denied Bronx cheer to Vogue's Anna Wintour, The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger.
Onto this deliciously disreputable genre strides Tom Mallon, former literary editor at GQ, with Bandbox, his acerbic but affectionate tale of a leading men's magazine and its cologne-drenched, swaggering, feudal lord of an editor-in-chief.
Fans of the satiric takedown have reason to rejoice. When it comes to hypocrisy, lust, fear, greed and the other ointments that lubricate magazine publishing's innermost cogs, Mallon matches Young, Heller, Weisberger et. al, poisonous point for poisonous point. But whereas the aforementioned authors settle for score-settling, tsk-tsking takes on contemporary culture vultures, and other staples of view-from-the-outer-cubicle commentary, Mallon aims for and achieves much, much more. And he was an insider.
The book begins in 1928, when Bandbox's most promising senior editor, Jimmy Gordon, leaves to head up rival Cutaway, threatening the power of the man who hired him, Jehosophat "Phat" Harris. Phat, who does not take kindly to challenges, decides to crush his former protégé. He will pull out all the stops—a cover story on Hollywood starlet Rosemary Laroche (the piece will studiously ignore mentioning her swashbuckling movie star ex-husband's homosexuality), an in-depth take on Ty Cobb ("What'd Cobb do," one of the magazine writers asks jealously, of the rival who lands the juicy assignment, "beat some colored guy to death with his bat, right in front of you?"), essays on of-the-moment trends ("One on leisure vs. loafing, another on how wisecracks are killing conversation") and even a true-crime detective story about the young Indiana Hoosier subscriber who has mysteriously disappeared and is feared dead, possibly at the hands of crime boss Arnold Rothstein's henchmen.
Will Harris and Bandbox survive? Will the young man be saved? What is the starlet's salacious secret? The plot alone will keep readers turning pages late into the night. The real payoff, though, is watching Harris threaten, manipulate and cajole his Bandbox staff into figuring things out. They are a motley crew, so nakedly ambitious and conniving, sensitive and moody, resentful, self-important and vain, as to almost defy credibility. Almost, that is, unless you happen to have worked alongside the men and women who inspired them, as I did, as a senior editor at GQ from 1992-1997. (Mallon was there from 1991 to 1996).
The phrase "thinly veiled" does not apply here. There is the senior editor "with his long Shelleyan hair and humorless wit … who had he been Adam would have found the Garden of Eden a stale cliché." (We sat side by side in many a Tuesday morning editorial meeting, me in constant terror of saying anything he might dismiss with an always vicious bon mot). There is the whiny food writer, "chronically certain of his underappreciation by others … with his cranky suspicious voice and his disappointment-prone mind." (A colossal kvetch, to be sure, but a kvetch who we all agreed knew his way around a corned beef on rye). There is the aging but still sexually voracious fact-checker who I, along with many other male staffers, spent a lot of time dodging at the annual Christmas party. There is the hard-drinking, once-favored top editor who "knew more about music and books and politics than anyone else on the floor … who … having lost all clout and ambition, lay snoozing with his head atop a pile of the form rejection letters he had recently managed to stencil." (In real life, he was fired; he fares much better in the book). There is the brooding, confused and teetotaling womanizer who writes the "Bachelor's Life" column. (The one I wrote was called "The Single Guy," and I don't think I was that brooding, but otherwise, no complaints.).
Presiding over it all, at the narrative and moral center of this hilarious and wise book, looms the enormous figure of the Falstaffian Phat, blustering and bullying, cruel and vastly kind, childish and puffed up with pride, nervous around children or even talk of children, enthralled with power, a petty tyrant and visionary, laissez-faire leader and micro-manager, faithful husband and unreconstructed flirt, hard drinker and early riser, a sentimentalist and black-hearted manager whose usually terrified troops yearn for nothing more than his capacious and career-boosting love.
As wonderfully imaginative a writer as Mallon is, much of the best stuff, he didn't make up. GQ editor Art Cooper, Phat's inspiration, did once boom (Cooper always boomed), "You've got to go by the seat of your pants, be decisive. You don't want Hamlet for an editor. Othello—now there's an editor-in-chief." He was referred to by his staff, in whispers, as Il Duce, among other things. He did throw back his head and proclaim "without abashment and to no one in particular," upon walking back from a typically gout-inducing dinner to a typically best-in-the-city hotel, "God, I love my life."
And yes, while many of us chafed under him and feared him, we yearned for his love. How we yearned.
Cooper died last June at the age of 65, just months after he'd been forced from the magazine he essentially created. "He was the kind of personality who cried out for a novelist," Mallon told me recently. "He was so vivid. He was at once so complicated and transparent. There are moments when I'm still full of disbelief that he's gone. He was definitely that Reader's Digest 'most unforgettable character that I've ever met.'"
It's one of Mallon's great accomplishments that he has taken a man and a magazine so of their time—Cooper and GQ in the '90s—and transformed them into a man and a magazine so of their time—Harris and Bandbox in the '20s. He's whipped up a story steeped in historical verisimilitude and rich with timeless American truths, including celebrity obsession, addiction to instant wealth, and the endless thirst for speed. And he's done it in a book whose pace never flags, whose manic plot never slackens, whose characters never fail to intrigue.
Mallon's most miraculous feat, though, comes from something else. Even though he chronicles the lives of rat-like researchers, weasely writers and editors, and publishing executives who do absolutely appalling things, he renders them with unblinking precision and boundless affection.
When Mallon and I spoke, we swapped stories about some of those folks, and the magazine we called home.
"I liked the work," he said, "and I loved the people."
In Bandbox, it shows.