The Sage of East 64th
Your fictional encounter with a real editorial icon
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As we crawl out of Dry January, parched like Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, it’s high time to mix a stiff Buzzcut cocktail: equal parts travel, style, history, and nature, served over a spherical ice cube with a blood orange garnish. This edition is brought to you by writer, strategist, and saloon fixture Zander Abranowicz.
Personal Pantheon
A tribute to someone inspiring
The Sage of East 64th
This imagined encounter with Peter Kaplan was inspired and informed by the recorded memories of those who knew and worked with the legendary editor before his untimely passing in 2013, as well as some of my own recollections of the time I spent in his presence growing up, on annual camping trips, epic bouts of capture-the-flag, and weekend games of touch-football in our yard in Bedford…
His faux baritone pierces the anxious air that’s settled over the fourth floor of the beaux-arts townhouse on East 64th. You blink and realize you’ve been staring at the same amorphous draft since nine. The cursor blinks with infinite cruelty. It’s nearly eleven. You can almost see the epitaph of your fledgling writing career engraved on a tombstone (“DEAD ON ARRIVAL”) and hear the presses whirring to life, the hum of forklifts heaving goliath scrolls of salmon-colored paper to be inked. There are no atheists in foxholes, nor on the fourth floor of The New York Observer on any given Monday, as the hour of closing looms. You run your hands through your hair, rise from your desk, and cross, like so many before you, the distance to his office, where the baritone voice originates.
Through the door, scarcely ajar, incongruous lyrics escape: “there’s an old man called the Mississippi, that’s the old man that I’d like to be…” This bodes well. Broadway tunes augur patience, whereas silence says “not now!” and a door slammed in your face. You knock next to the brass plate naming “Peter Kaplan, Editor-in-Chief.” He would occupy this office for 15 years, departing a few years after an ambitious young man named Jared Kushner — plucked from the very milieu Kaplan’s Observer was known to skewer — would buy the paper and slowly drain it of life, even desaturating its signature peach paper to bone white. The voice comes to a stop. “Yes?” “A word?” “Come in.” “Ol’ Man River” is gone, and in his place, a boyish forty-something-year-old with tousled graying hair and amber eyeglasses, a striped repp tie, chinos, and a blue oxford with the sleeves bunched above ink-stained elbows.
His desk and every other horizontal surface sag beneath their contents: books, leaning towers of newsprint, back-issues of old magazines. Robert Caro is well represented, as is Theodore White and Joseph Mitchell. Framed caricatures by Drew Friedman, Victor Juhasz, and other skilled penmen peek out from between the stacks and spines. A three-quarters-full bottle of bourbon sits on the shelf. In an old cartoon it’d be teasing you, enticing you to drown your sorrows. Here and there are back-issues of Esquire, especially the George Lois era: Ali as St. Sebastian; Warhol drowning in Campbell’s Tomato Soup; Mailer as King Kong holding Germaine Greer. Kaplan often consults them, like sacred texts, reading their iconic headlines and pull quotes with one finger pointed heavenward: “Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse.” He recites Gay Talese like it’s Ecclesiastes. A beige PC stares with its big black eye. Its expression says: I am become death, the destroyer of paper. A badly bruised legal box full of documents is sitting on the only other seat, so you remain standing.
One doesn’t come to Peter Kaplan’s office on a Monday morning seeking serenity, but encouragement, maybe even the crystal word that unlocks the other 1,499. Cultivating young and underutilized talent is a special sport for Kaplan. His most lauded triumph to date is hiring a freelancer called Candace Bushnell to write a column called “Sex and the City.” You hear HBO is planning to air a pilot adapted from it later this summer. Your words begin tumbling out: “I’m struggling. I have the pieces: the quotes from the developer, from the woman leading the community resistance to demolition, veterans of the 80s building boom to bring in context, stats from city hall. But it just defies….” You trail off, hoping he interrupts you. Peter removes his glasses, clouded as ever. He tries cleaning them on his sleeve, which only seems to distribute the smudge. He rises, clears his throat, walks around the desk, and grabs you by the shoulders like you’re a hysterical dame in an old noir.
He stares right into your eyes, eyebrows raised. “Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me!” Each time, he squeezes harder. “You’re a star. Editor of the Crimson. Remember? But you’re missing the point.” He eyes the doorway, where another writer is lingering. His glare sends them scampering off like an opossum. He looks back at you. “I read the draft. There’s gold in those hills but it’s buried under too much…” Now he trails off. His speech is often interrupted by long pauses. “Listen to me: I want to see this guy, this developer, I want to know who makes his suits, if he takes his coffee black, who he’s sneaking out to the Rainbow Room when the family’s in Aspen. Robert Moses is cold in the ground: I wanna know who’s really building this city in 1998. Is he trying to remake Manhattan in his pudgy image? Put that hubris on paper. Does razing a Stanford White apartment building to make space for another skyscraper bother you? Make you angry? Use it! You write best when you’re angry. Use it. Keep it simple: it’s about hubris, building too close to the sun. Bring me…the body of Icarus.” He releases his grip and grins, his cheeks nearly obscuring his warm squinting eyes. “You look terrible. Go throw some water on your face and meet me downstairs.”
A few minutes later the two of you are walking up Madison Avenue. “You know White was shot in the head, point blank, by the millionaire husband of one of his former mistresses? In the middle of a cabaret on the roof of the old Madison Square Garden — a building White himself designed?” You nod. “Of course you do. But can you tell me what song was playing when it happened?” “No, but I bet you can.” “‘I Could Love a Million Girls.’ How about that.” It’s only a few blocks to Kaplan’s favorite diner but everything takes longer with him, his walking style as digressive as his speech. Over there, he points to the site of some minor event in The Bonfire of the Vanities, and over there, at a fellow in a wool coat whose unassuming stance belies the fact that he’s the most ferocious trial lawyer on the island (“a real old-school pitbull”), and there, at the former location of a Gilded Age mansion once occupied by a lonely addled dowager and her army of cats until its razing in the 40’s. You know he’s hamming it up today to keep your mind off your piece, and it works. Between his banter you just catch a glimpse of a closing line, like the sun appearing for an instant through a cloud-locked sky.
Just north of 66th a beautiful woman in running attire walks by. To your amazement (and faint horror) Kaplan halts, slides his glasses to the tip of his nose, and when she disappears around the corner, speaks through the side of his mouth like his childhood hero, Popeye: “holy moly!” You continue, passing La Goulou, a white tablecloth type of spot that gives you a humiliating oversized blazer if you’re underdressed. A few doors up you duck into Gardenia. It’s dark and smells like butter. Your eyes adjust. Kaplan greets the man at the bar. “Michael!” “Peter, take your pick.” The place is mostly empty. You select a linoleum table against the wall, opposite the bar.
Michael brings over one menu, just for you. Kaplan knows it by heart. Michael comes over. Peter orders the usual. “And what’s that?” you ask. “Tuna on rye, split pea soup, coffee.” Kaplan tucks his tie between the buttons of his shirt. You look up at Michael. “The same.” After lunch Kaplan needs to make a call so you walk back to the office alone. On the corner of 65th and Madison you lift your eyes up to the autumn sky, framed by towers and wires and flecked with passing pigeons. High above Manhattan you notice something unusual: plummeting earthward through the cloud-cover is a stout man in a dark double-breasted suit, white hair fluttering, a pair of enormous wings belted beneath his armpits.
For more in the Personal Pantheon series, read “The Cocktail Prince of The Pierre Hotel,” another imaginary encounter set in Manhattan
Something You Should Know
A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver
On ceremonial occasions, Haida Indians of British Columbia sometimes filled the crown of their headdresses with eagle down, so as they danced, it scattered like snow all around them