A Journalism History Lesson from Calvin Trillin
20:43 Share

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Whether you love true crime or comedy, celebrity interviews or news, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue. And guess what? Now you can call them on your auto insurance too with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive. It works just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

Welcome to On the Media's Midweek Podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Writer Calvin Trillin began his career at Time Magazine, but joined The New Yorker in 1963, where he continues to contribute today. He

He's published upwards of 20 books, and he even made a name for himself on the late-night TV circuit. Calvin Trillin has been writing for the New Yorker magazine for many years. He also writes a syndicated column of humor and satire for newspapers across the country, and recently did a one-man show on Broadway. Would you welcome Calvin Trillin. Calvin, you went to Broadway.

That was close. I was about half a block off, I think. Trillin's trademark humility and dry humor shows up in all of his writings, whether it's a story about the invention of the buffalo chicken wing or the civil rights movement or an old ditty about our political woes. Here's one he recited to Jon Stewart in 2008. I have a song called The Rhyme of the Ancient Candidate. Um...

One of the stanzas is, houses, houses everywhere, abodes in the amount, no short-term memories involved in failing to keep count. I recently sat down with Trillin to discuss his career and his latest book, The Lead, Dispatches from a Life in the Press.

Welcome to the show, Bud. Thank you, Brooke. You call yourself a collector of leads. What do you like about them? Well, I think that a lead sets the tone for what's going to be written. There was a New Yorker editor named Robert Bingham, a lovely man. He edited my stuff and also John McPhee's. And he always said that McPhee and Trillin start stories in the middle. Hmm.

And it's sort of true. I think what he means is that we jumped on when the narrative was going. It's sort of like a carousel turning and you run a couple of steps and then you jump on. I always thought that was the style of the New Yorker. People always said the best way to write for the New Yorker is to put the last paragraph on the top and the top paragraph at the end. I never knew that. Yeah.

I typed out, when I was thinking about it, a couple of leaves. And there's one, it came to light because of a bad left turn. The funniest lead I have ever come across is from the, I think, Baton Rouge Advocate. September 23rd, 2019. Right. So here it is. A veterinarian prescribed antibiotics Monday for a camel that lives behind an Iberville Parish truck stop.

after a Florida woman told law officers she bit the 600-pound animal's genitalia after it sat on her while she and her husband entered his enclosure to retrieve their deaf dog. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

For a while, I couldn't read that without bursting into laughter, particularly the deaf dog. I don't know why that always got me. The telling detail. You've observed a number of things about this lead, how the reader's drawn in with a single unpunctuated sentence that starts slowly and gradually becomes an express train that whistles right by the local stops.

Yeah. Something like that was so funny in itself that I think the task was just to erect a little scaffolding to hold it. But it's the deaf dog still that gets me. I think you can never go wrong with Florida Woman. Florida Woman is good, too.

You're a big fan of the leads of the legendary Miami Herald crime reporter Edna Buchanan, who you profiled in 1986 for The New Yorker. Would you share a lead that conveys her approach to her beat? Edna liked short sentences. Sometimes she used what the people in the newsroom of the Miami Herald used to call the Miller chop phrase.

named after Gene Miller, a wonderful reporter. I think he, in separate stories, got two people off of death row. But he liked to use a few long sentences and then, as if hitting you on the head with a blunt instrument, use a three-word sentence. The start of the profile is...

In the newsroom of the Miami Herald, there is some disagreement about which of Edna Buchanan's first paragraphs stands as the classic Edna lead. I line up with the fried chicken faction. The fried chicken story was about a rowdy ex-con named Gary Robinson, who late one Sunday night lurched drunkenly into a church's outlet,

shoved his way to the front of the line and ordered a three-piece box of fried chicken persuaded to wait his turn he reached the counter again five or ten minutes later only to be told that churches had run out of fried chicken the young woman at the counter suggested that he might like chicken nuggets instead

Robinson responded to the suggestion by slugging her in the head. That set off a chain of events that ended with Robinson's being shot dead by a security guard. Edna Buchanan covered the homicide for The Herald. There are policemen in Miami who say that it wouldn't be a homicide without her. And the story began with what the Fried Chicken faction still regards as the classic Edna lead. Gary Robinson died hungry.

The year after he profiled her, Buchanan won the Pulitzer Prize for general news reporting. She was tough and persistent. Her attention to detail was unparalleled.

She was relentless. If she wanted to interview some relative of a recently deceased person, she found it was often more efficient to go back and use the phone because the cops had covered the scene with yellow tape and everything. And if she called and the person who answered the phone was enraged that she had called at such a moment and hung up on her, she counted to 60 and then she phoned again.

She figured somebody else might pick up the phone this time, or the person who had hung up on her might have different thoughts about that. After she tried the second time, she said, that would have been harassment. She didn't do it. You know, once I did a story, it's called The Bummer Beat, about talking to friends and loved ones of people who had died of

Buchanan was a real hero of mine. And in that piece, I played a clip of her talking about how she would pride herself on, quote, knowing every homicide case in Miami. And of course, one year there was 637. She'd gone on vacation and came back and wanted to follow up on the murders that she'd missed. Right.

She found herself in the neighborhood of a young man who was murdered. He'd lived with his grandmother. She knocked at the door, and the grandmother opened it, and Buchanan said, I introduced myself and said I wanted to talk to her about her grandson. And she took a deep breath, stepped back, threw the door open wide, and invited me in, and she said, I wondered why nobody came.

That's interesting, right? I really think she saw part of her job as bearing witness. Yes. She was somebody who, once she started asking questions, she kept asking a long time after you would have thought.

You have an anecdote, a Herald columnist who was once her editor at a paper called the Miami Beach Sun. He told you that he'd once arrived at the offices fuming that someone had stolen his garbage cans. He was really mad.

And he said, who would want to steal two garbage cans? And then Edna said, were they empty or full or something like that? In your career, you moved around a lot from beat to beat. Religion was your least favorite?

Yeah, this was when I was at Time. And Time in those days practiced something called group journalism, where people in the field would file long stories and then somebody in New York writing one of the sections like religion, education, politics, something like that, would compress that along with

what he could steal from the New York Times and what he heard from the Washington Bureau, into 70 lines. I was for a while a floater, which meant when somebody was on vacation, I moved literally into his office. I always said, when you sit down on his chair, instant omniscience comes with that. I did religion for a few weeks.

and then I was trying to get out, and so I put alleged in front of any historical religious event that I mentioned. The alleged birth of Jesus. I had that in there, yeah. The senior editor just crossed out the alleged. They were really used to smart Alex. Back in those days. I remember the novel of

of the same name as the role you had at Time magazine then, Floater. That, I thought your novel was hilarious. But I remember that there was one editor who, when you went into his office, he had his feet on his desk and all you could see were the soles of his shoes. That's right. He was known mainly for his ability to lean back at an angle. A voice appeared as if from some cave or something.

about group journalism. It had its pluses, I guess, but mostly minuses. The problem with it was that power over the story increased with distance from the story. Right. The reporter on the ground was the least powerful with regard to what appeared in its pages. Exactly. So people used to say, time is a great place to work for a reporter as long as he doesn't read the magazine. Right.

Because if he does, he's going to have a heart attack or she. Yeah. Well, I remember the Freedom Rides. I was gone for a couple of weeks. It was exciting and sometimes scary. People trying to desegregate public transportation. Buses mainly. And I filed a lot on it. And the next week I was talking to one of the fact checkers. And she said, what do you think of our cover story on the Freedom Rides?

And I said, I thought it was very interesting. Did you get my file? You didn't even see any of your work in there. It was hard to see. You dedicate part of your book to obituaries. In the New York Times, critic Dwight Garner wrote, I've known people to attend the funerals of people they've never met.

because word had spread that Trillin would be speaking in the manner that an NBA non-fan might attend a Knicks game solely because he'd heard that Chaka Khan would be singing the national anthem. I think he may be exaggerating a little bit. I don't know. What's your approach to eulogizing?

Well, I have a general approach to memorial services, which is that they last an hour or as close to it as they can get. And that if someone asks to speak, don't let him speak. Keep it short. Don't talk about yourself. Well, sure. But in order to keep it short, you have to sort of boil down what makes that person noteworthy. Or you need to find that hook.

Yes, that is true. I think Murray Kempton's obituary, which I think I did for the Sunday Times Magazine article,

The first line— I have it here. You wrote, It would be surprising if the last gentleman turned out to be a newspaper reporter, but Murray Kempton, who may in fact have been the last gentleman, definitely identified as a newspaper reporter on his tax forms. Yeah, but I think that was sort of the central issue for me with Murray Kempton.

You know, it's funny. I'm going to admit here that I and my husband, Fred Kaplan, know you a little and love you a lot. Fred said the other day that the only two people he ever met who talked exactly as they wrote were you and Kempton. Now, your style is deadpan and sort of sneakily hilarious. Kempton's was ornate.

It was ornate, but also it's interesting that Fred said that because Kempton also had the habit, if you were on a story with him together, a trial or something in one of the breaks, would sometimes audition for a line or observation. And he was a wonderful gentleman that when we met first at the Freedom Rise,

My entire experience as a reporter was maybe six months or something like that. But he talked to me as if he was talking to Martin Luther King. I mean, he treated people equally. I think it was his great-grandfather who was something like the Archbishop, the Episcopal Bishop of Baltimore. And Murray would leave saying, God bless. And you could see that was in him somewhere. He always said...

said that he came from shabby gentility. Do you remember what happened in that defamation case against him? No. A plaintiff accused him of defaming him. His name was Lasky.

And the judge responded with a decision in Murray Kempton's style that basically said that the offending article was so cryptic, contradictory, and hyperbolic that you couldn't tell whether it was defaming the guy or not. Therefore, case dismissed. Right.

I always said that Marie Kempton's columns required group parsing. You had to have more than one person to figure it out. But they're often eloquent. And also, he had another quality that I really admired. He was the opposite of someone who kicks somebody when he's down.

That was true even of mobsters and things like that. I think Carmine the Snake Persico. I think his view was that people were in the sort of line they were, whether they were senators or mobsters, for a variety of reasons. But the question was how they played the cards that they were dealt. So he was willing to give everybody a break.

I'm wondering, in the course of compiling your book, whether you came to any sort of realizations about the development of journalism over the course of your career. In one essay, you remarked about how rereading your work, you were surprised by what turned out to be true.

Well, that was, I mean, I do two things, I guess. I try to write moderately serious journalism, and I also write what the New Yorker used to call casuals, short pieces that are meant to be funny. I was just talking about my theory that when there was a lot of angst on Wall Street and a falling stock market, and it was right around the time when these very exotic people

things like credit default swaps were being introduced. My theory was that the problem with Wall Street

was that too many smart people were going to Wall Street. And the people in my era who went to Wall Street were the pleasant sort of probably lacrosse player or something. Not stupid, but not really that smart. And those people couldn't have gotten involved with credit default swaps because they couldn't do the math. No.

Neither could a lot of people who did get involved with them. That's right. And then I got a couple of letters in the Timescott letters saying, that's a good theory. So sometimes when you're only joking, it's accidentally true. What was your most notorious piece? Was it about a chicken? No.

It might have been about a chicken. By notorious, you mean... I just remember the chicken that did arithmetic. Tic-tac-toe. I did enjoy taking people to Chinatown to play tic-tac-toe with the chicken because they would look at the arrangements and they would say, but the chicken gets to go first.

And I'd say, but he's a chicken. You're a human being. Surely there's some advantage in that. And then some of them would say, I haven't played in years, but chicken plays every day. But do you have a favorite piece? I like the piece that I did around the time that Jimmy Carter selected as Attorney General, Griffinville. I think it was called something like Remembrance of Moderate's Past.

And it was sort of about how people made the adjustment between the segregated days and politician and the...

Here's a quote. I keep hearing about white people who say they've been working behind the scenes, a black lawyer in New Orleans told me during the desegregation of public schools there in 1960, a time when the business and professional leadership in New Orleans stood silent while the city seemed to be taken over by a bunch of women in hair curlers screaming obscenities at six-year-olds.

Yes, sir, he said. Must be getting mighty crowded back there behind the scenes. Yeah. Turns out when the sort of turn came that everybody was a moderate. It's like all those people in the resistance during the Nazi invasion of France. That's right. Was it your idea to write this compilation or did someone come to you? Well, I'm an inveterate collector.

recycler, I think, some would say. And it was my idea. Random House said at first, why do I need to do it on the press, that I could just do my favorite pieces or something like that. Turned out that a lot of my favorite pieces were about the press. And even though I still wasn't exactly sure why we were doing it, I said in the introduction that I thought my father had something to do with it. I always assumed that my father's

for me was that I become the president of the United States and his fallback position was that I not become a ward of the county. And...

But once when the Kansas City school system stopped in spring, ran out of money, he sent my sister and me to Sarah Sean Hooley Secretarial School to learn how to type. And that really wasn't done for boys. That was a girl's thing to learn how to type. And neither the president of the United States or a ward of the county actually needs typing. Yeah.

So I thought maybe he was sort of pushing in the direction of journalism. And I think a lot of people in my era backed into journalism. The novel didn't work out or they were just being pressured to make a decision while they were working for a magazine. So I don't think very many people in my cohort woke up and said, I want to be a reporter. I think maybe Watergate might have changed that a bit.

Such a pleasure talking to you. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. Calvin Trillin is longtime writer for The New Yorker and author of the new book, The Lead, Dispatches from a Life in the Press. Thanks for listening to this week's Midweek Podcast. Tune into The Big Show on Friday to hear about the rising numbers of Americans getting their news from TikTok and what that means.