The Pitch Meeting, 1984–1992

The Long Boardroom Table

For eight years at Vanity Fair, Brown built toward what that first meeting had not given her. She had expected combat. She had gotten stenography. The disappointment was the founding document: if a features meeting was not the place where editors argued for stories, challenged each other’s judgments, proposed alternatives, and fought in the room for the pieces they believed in, it was not really a features meeting at all — it was a recitation. She intended to change it, and by most accounts she did, turning the weekly features meeting into a genuinely participatory exercise in which the content of upcoming issues was hashed out collectively. Jesse Kornbluth, a Vanity Fair contributing editor from 1987 through 1993, described one such session in the magazine’s Midtown offices as taking place “in a windowless inner office” with “a dozen VF heavies” — a dozen people, the editor at the center, the issue’s shape negotiated aloud, in the room, in real time.¹

Specific and, at the time, not universal: twelve or so editors arrayed around a table, the editor-in-chief at the head, weekly without exception. The meeting was the mechanism by which Vanity Fair under Brown kept its editorial energy visible and competitive. Ideas were wanted from all levels. Note-taking, as Brown had signaled in 1984, was not the point. The point was the fight for the story.

The meeting’s fullest expression as a form — and its most dramatic deployment — came not at Vanity Fair but across town, when Brown was named to succeed Robert Gottlieb at The New Yorker in the summer of 1992. She arrived in September. One of her first acts was to convene a regular features meeting, which meant convening the first regular features meeting in the magazine’s sixty-seven-year history. The account she later gave of it has the vividness of a story she could not believe even as it happened. She sat at a long rectangular boardroom table. Around it sat the men who ran the magazine — “WASP-y guys,” she described them, with Coke-bottle glasses, “all staring at me with an ill-concealed hostility.”¹ The cartoonists in particular. In 1992, the cartoonists were a self-governing body with a culture that predated any editor currently alive; they had been meeting weekly with editors since Harold Ross had required it. They had never sat in a features meeting. They sat in this one and did not appear to enjoy the experience.

What Brown found in that room — the resistance, the stillness, the men who had run themselves for decades without being asked to argue their ideas in a group — was not a failure of will. It was the artifact of a system. The New Yorker had operated for forty years without this meeting because it had not needed it. It had run on something else entirely.

The Bud-Green Bond

What Brown encountered at The New Yorker in September 1992 had been in place since William Shawn became editor in 1952. Shawn ran the magazine for thirty-five years without convening a single regular group editorial meeting. This was not negligence and not disorder. It was an operating philosophy, sustained by a memo culture of sufficient density and discipline that the absence of a meeting was barely noticed by the people inside it.

Tom Wolfe, who wrote about The New Yorker’s internal culture for New York magazine in 1965, described staff members “practically caroming off each other” in the corridors because of “the fantastic traffic in memos” moving through the building at any given moment — correspondence on color-coded bond stock, each category assigned its own paper color.² Manuscripts circulated on maize-yellow bond. Editorial responses came back on bud-green. Other categories had their own colors. The system was not whimsy; it carried the decision itself. When a writer submitted a piece and received a reply, the color of the paper told her, before she read a word, what kind of document was in her hand.

Michael Arlen, writing about the Shawn era, recalled that the editor “privately regarded The New Yorker as ‘a secret book club, a place to write books, that seemed to all intents and purposes like a magazine… You could always get more space, more time.’”³ This was not a description of a publication that needed a features meeting. It was a description of a publication whose editors had enough space and time that the competitive pressure — ideas fighting for limited real estate, editors arguing for their assignments against other editors’ claims — did not have to be performed in a room. It was resolved upstream, through the memo, through the individual relationship with the editor, through the accumulated understanding of what the magazine wanted that a writer or editor built over years of working for it.

Robert Gottlieb, who succeeded Shawn in 1987, maintained the culture in its operational particulars while bringing a different personal register to it. Where Shawn’s manner had been carefully formal, Gottlieb favored sneakers and open-neck shirts; his desk was decorated with garish kitsch — Elvis Presley figurines, a Lone Ranger statuette.⁴ He was described by those who worked with him as more direct and in some ways more difficult than Shawn. Where Shawn had been, in the standard account, “painfully indirect” with writers, Gottlieb was blunter. His approach was characterized, by a New Yorker writer of the period, as “going after pieces rather than going after writers.” The same writer offered a sharper contrast: “Gottlieb takes the view that writers are children who are not to be indulged; Shawn thought they were children who ought to be indulged.”⁴

The memo culture persisted through the Gottlieb years. The sole regular group meeting at The New Yorker that could be traced back through any editor’s tenure was the weekly art meeting for cartoons, a fixture since the Ross era. Cartoons were the one department where the editor-in-chief sat in a room with contributors and made decisions collectively, because the form — a single-panel drawing — required a visual response that could not be transmitted adequately by memo. For everything else, the bond paper was sufficient.

The results were not invisible to outsiders who tried to breach the system from below. Susan Orlean, then a freelancer without an established relationship to the magazine, wrote to deputy editor Chip McGrath “on the strength of a rumor” — a tip from a journalist friend that Talk of the Town paid well and welcomed pitches from the outside — and became a regular contributor. Her description of the experience: “In the past I was afraid even to knock, and then I knocked once and the door flew open.”⁵ This was the paradox of the memo culture. It could appear impenetrable from outside and prove almost casually open once the initial contact was made, because the system ran on individual relationships rather than institutional gatekeeping. There was no committee to convince. There was one editor. If the editor was interested, the door opened.

The Couch and the Desk

Graydon Carter took Vanity Fair in July 1992 — the same summer Brown departed it for The New Yorker — and ran an operation that resembled neither of his predecessors’ models. It was not Brown’s combative roundtable, because there was no regular group meeting of that kind. It was not Shawn’s memo culture, because Carter’s editorial relationships were not built on paper. It was something more intimate and, in its way, more theatrical: the private audience.

Bryan Burrough, who wrote for Vanity Fair over a span of twenty-five years beginning before Carter’s editorship, described the form directly: “Our office meetings were perfunctory. He sat behind his desk or on a low couch. I sat with Doug [Stumpf, his editor], straining to say something clever.”¹ Small rooms. Two or three people. The editor-in-chief holding either the power position behind his desk or the apparently relaxed position on the office’s low couch; writers and their assigning editors seated across from him in chairs. Not a conference room. Not a dozen people. A private performance with a very small audience.

The structure of the editorial relationship at Carter’s Vanity Fair was triangular. A contributing writer worked primarily through an assigning editor — a staff member who served as intermediary between the writer and the editor-in-chief. The assigning editor knew what Carter wanted, knew how to frame a pitch to him, and knew how to translate his responses back to the writer in usable terms. Most contributing writers, Burrough included, worked at home and “rarely attended anything like a meeting.” The contact that mattered was not the meeting but the lunch: “Every few weeks, my longtime editor, Doug Stumpf, took me to a pricey lunch.”¹ These lunches were not social events dressed as work; they were the editorial apparatus in its operational form. A senior Vanity Fair writer in the early 1990s was being taken to expensive restaurants with some regularity as a condition of the working relationship.

Carter communicated displeasure through absence rather than confrontation. When he was dissatisfied with a writer or a piece, his calls stopped — not returned, not replaced by criticism, simply absent. The silence was the signal. Burrough, in an account of asking to be released from a piece he was struggling to complete, described breaking down emotionally in Carter’s office. Carter “did not react to my plea; he only calmly insisted I finish the piece.” The verdict Burrough drew from the encounter was precise: “You don’t tear up in Graydon Carter’s office.”¹

Where Brown’s table demanded that editors argue out loud, Carter’s office demanded composure. The editorial value at the roundtable was energy; the editorial value in the private office was control. Both were performances. They selected for different performers.

The Floor Below the Meeting

Whatever form a pitch meeting took — roundtable or private audience, memo or phone call — its raw material was the pitch itself, and the pitch had to be prepared before anyone entered the room. This preparation was not optional and not informal. At every major publication in the period, the proposal that arrived at an editor’s attention had been worked, in some form, before it arrived.

Hybrid, and publication-specific: staff editors at publications with weekly meetings — Vanity Fair under Brown being the primary example — pitched orally, in the meeting, expected to defend their ideas aloud against competing claims on the magazine’s limited well space. Contributing writers pitched by a different route: phone calls to assigning editors, lunches, brief office visits, and then, to formalize the exchange, a written proposal or memo committing the idea to paper. Toby Young, who worked at Carter’s Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s, reproduced several of his rejected written pitch documents in his account of the experience — short, tightly argued proposals, sometimes running to a page, that identified a subject, proposed an angle, and made a case for the magazine’s interest in it.⁶ The written pitch was not merely convention. It was evidence that the writer had thought through the assignment past the cocktail-party premise; that the idea was specific enough to survive the translation from conversation to page.

The visual dimension did the persuading at Vanity Fair in ways it did not elsewhere. A pitch to Carter’s or Brown’s Vanity Fair had to anticipate the photograph — whether Annie Leibovitz or Herb Ritts could be deployed against the subject, whether the story had the visual dimension that justified the expense. A profile of a reclusive figure who refused to be photographed was a harder sell than a profile of someone whose life would produce striking images. The camera was a co-author of every Vanity Fair story before a word was written, and the pitch meeting was where its claim on the subject was first weighed.

Hierarchy shaped every dimension of the process. Junior editors’ roles depended entirely on the EIC’s model. Brown’s participatory culture meant that ideas were wanted from all levels, that an associate editor could in principle walk into a features meeting and propose a cover story and be taken seriously if the idea was good. Carter’s more hierarchical structure concentrated editorial access at the senior level, with contributing writers working through assigning editors who themselves had established relationships with Carter. Under Shawn, the authority structure was inverted in a different direction: even very senior writers deferred, in the most important matters, to the editor’s judgment, not because they were required to but because forty years of consistent editorial taste had made deference the rational response.

Around the meeting, the conditions were not incidental to its form. Condé Nast editors at 350 Madison Avenue operated in an environment that made no pretense of institutional austerity. Si Newhouse, who owned the company, provided editors with annual clothing allowances reported to exceed $40,000, black town cars with drivers available on demand, and first-class travel on assignments. The line attributed to Newhouse — “Budgets are for the unimaginative” — described the operating philosophy accurately whether or not he had spoken it in that exact form.¹ The environment communicated, before anyone opened a mouth, what kind of magazine this was and what kind of person it required.

Class literacy was not a soft skill in this environment. One prospective editorial hire at a Condé Nast title lost the position after “committing the cardinal sin at a lunch interview of using cutlery to eat asparagus” — asparagus being, in the etiquette of the relevant social class, finger food.¹ The correct way to eat asparagus was not taught at journalism school. It was either known already, absorbed somewhere in the twelve years before college, or it was not known, in which case the fact of its not being known was the relevant information about the candidate. The lunch interview was a pitch meeting of a particular kind. The subject was the editor’s own suitability, and the pitch was made in the moment of reaching for the cutlery.

The through-line was this: the form of the pitch meeting was inseparable from the material conditions of pitching. Who could afford to live in the neighborhoods where Carter’s assigning editors ran their expense-account lunches. Who had been to the schools where asparagus etiquette was ambient knowledge. Who knew, without being told, which color bond to use when writing to the deputy editor of The New Yorker. The meeting room was the visible tip of a longer process of selection whose earlier stages were invisible and more determinative.

Also drawn on: Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983–1992 (Henry Holt, 2017).