Wolff: Publishing's a joyful war, with necessary casualties
There’s a book that’s been sitting on my shelves since the mid-'70s called If You Have A Lemon, Make Lemonade: An Essential Memoir of a Lunatic Decade, by Warren Hinckle, who died last week at 77. It’s a celebration of the anarchy and joie de guerre of the publishing business and one of the reasons I decided I had to be in it.
Hinckle was a San Francisco PR man, publisher, political activist and enthusiastic reprobate who transformed Ramparts magazine, a Catholic quarterly, into one of the most influential publications of the 1960s, and the model for almost every signature magazine of the age — Esquire, New York, Harpers, Rolling Stone — before it went into bankruptcy in 1969 (it limped on, under new management, until 1975).
I had been thinking of Hinckle anyway, coincident with his death, as I’ve thought about Gawker’s Nick Denton, another publisher who, a few weeks ago, lost his publication. In the wake of Gawker’s end, I’ve been making a mental tally of all the publishers I have known, many whom I’ve worked for, who have had their publications taken from them. Are they any different from Denton, who lost Gawker when a rich man — tech entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel — financed an invasion of privacy suit against him?
Denton, in his battle with Thiel, has been accorded a kind of martyr status, not least of all by an alumni of young employees who have never before lost their publication (there are few of us who have spent substantial careers in the publishing business for whom that can be said). Gawker, in this view, has been singled out and punished for its fearlessness and free speech bona fides.
Ramparts, it seems worth noting in remembrance of Hinckle, may have been among the most obstreperous and antagonistic magazines ever published — it helped invent the genre of pop culture subversiveness. For better or worse, it was a prime contributor in tackling the Black Panthers, Che Guevara, resistance to the war in Vietnam, Timothy Leary and LSD, the radical left and those first early suspicions about the super-security state mainstream, not least because it packaged all this in a slick magazine. Oh, and then it went crazy for conspiracies — really crazy. Was there anyone not implicated in the assassination of JFK?
What was most clear about Ramparts, and, come to think of it, every other magazine I’ve known that’s gone under or been stolen from its intrepid founder, is the tension between doing what you want to do and achieving commercial success while doing it. In a sense, that’s the point, the frisson, of a certain kind of magazine. While these might be inimical goals, you pursued them both anyway.
The Gawker outcry assumes it is its right to do exactly as it wanted to do, with no compromises at all, and yet having its fortune too. The righteous argument, in the days since its end, has to do with the perfidy of Peter Thiel, of him using his power so selfishly and clandestinely. How could he? How could he not recognize Gawker’s right to do as it pleased?
As it happens, Hinckle and Ramparts were also sent down the drain by a rich man, as he describes in his book. Martin Peretz, whose wife was an heir to the Singer Sewing machine fortune, was an investor in Ramparts — and later the owner of the New Republic. Peretz withdrew a then-vital million dollars from Ramparts because he disagreed with its position on Israel (pro-Israel, as Hinckle describes, but not pro enough).
In addition to Denton and Thiel, and Hinckle and Peretz, I’ve been thinking about Clay Felker, the founder of New York Magazine, and Alan Patricof, the financier who served as New York Magazine’s chairman of the board and who came to dislike Felker and the magazine. In 1977, Patricof secretly helped organize other investors to sell the magazine out from under Felker to Rupert Murdoch. (Patricof once pulled the plug on a venture of mine and, before he died, Felker and I used to have a merry time cursing Patricof’s memory.)
The story of the publishing business, if you want to fly high in it, if a bit of hubris is mixed in with your martini, is about getting along with the rich — or not. Mostly not. Hinckle fought a dialectical battle with people on the left who said he ought to put out a magazine on “butcher-block” paper. That is, a cheap magazine that would need a lot less money. But a cheap magazine would get a lot less attention— so he needed the rich.
Hinckle, ever financing and refinancing Ramparts, was always aware of the gambler’s bargain he was trying to make — and as often as not, reneging on — and that it would likely end in acrimony and a distress sale. Denton’s acolytes, and Gawker’s supporters seem genuinely amazed that publishing is a risky game.
A decade after the end of Ramparts, and after Hinckle had lost at least one more magazine — Scanlan’s Monthly — I met him in San Francisco for an article I was writing about his former Rampart’s cohort, Howard Gossage, an ad man, and among the early mass media theorists, indeed, the packager and promoter of Marshall McLuhan.
Over a drink, or many of them, in a North Beach bar, Hinckle’s part-bitter, part-rueful point was, in essence, about the medium being the message. Many publications, perhaps the most incandescent of them, exist only for a second in time, he said. That is their nature. It’s not, he said, even so much the money, but the moment that passes. In this, he bitterly attacked Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, Ramparts’ most direct successor and San Francisco neighbor, for doing what you had to do merely to survive. Part of the nature of fearlessness, Hinckle said, with some grandiosity, is mismanagement, which he defined as not doing what you have to do just to survive.
The current despair and shock over Gawker’s demise perhaps have something to do with Gawker seeming to be a product of new technology and new behavior, which might have seemed to grant it additional entitlement — and riches. But Gawker, for better or worse, was in the publishing business, and those rules haven’t changed.