I have a table. It’s table No. 5, which is a very good table very near the front of the room. Its sight lines go directly to the entryway, and its back is secured by the east wall (in view of table No. 1 in the bay with Caroline Kennedy playing with her hair or Mick Jagger drumming his fingers or Bill Clinton monologizing his luncheon companions). Among the things I have never expected or wanted to achieve is a table of my own (like Winchell at the Stork Club). Still, this takes nothing away from the satisfaction of having gained a contested piece of turf. (There is a menacing back room at Michael’s where faceless people are led every day, never to emerge.)
Before Michael’s was Michael’s, it was the Italian Pavilion, which in a former heyday of media life had a serious following among advertising and network types. My father was in the agency business and once took me to lunch here and pointed out Bill Paley, the chairman of CBS and the most powerful and elegant man then alive.
I think this is part of the Michael’s attraction: It recalls the other, more salubrious, three-martini era (occasionally, someone will even have a martini at Michael’s), when media was the easiest game in town, when the world was made up of a passive audience and eager advertisers, when the money flowed like gin—as opposed to now, with media being a tortured, hardscrabble affair. A bleak, unpromising, Darwinian struggle.
I sometimes think this is part of the running joke. When you’re making a lunch date and say to someone, “Michael’s?”—they’re in on it. The joke is that all these media bigs show up for lunch and pretend everything is just fine and still supporting these incredibly expensive meals, while waiting for the person at the next table to break down in tears (at any given moment, everyone knows who will likely be crying next).
In other establishments like this—the Four Seasons, for instance—there’s a certain sort of pretense. People in a gated community pretend that they live the lives of people outside the gated community, or pretend the gated area is normal life.
But Michael’s isn’t like that. Everybody is open about being on the inside. It’s like a prison yard.
We’ve crossed the existential Rubicon from social and economic anxiety to an oddly pleasurable self-loathing.
If there once was a media Eden, we are its wastrel and prodigal children with bad work ethics who messed it up and were cast out of the garden. In another sense, we are just unfortunate children, who, through no fault of our own, inherited overplanted fields and poisoned air and changing weather conditions. Whatever.
I have another metaphor, which is Vichy. This makes Michael’s a kind of Rick’s Café Americain.
Pushing this metaphor, the media business, through this last twenty years, has become occupied territory.
The media business used to be run by insiders. People who grew up in those businesses, and people, who by virtue of a certain New York-ism were of a family. But then outsiders, not-of-our-class outsiders, took over.
In a twenty-year period, virtually every media company and every sector of the media industry—book, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, movies, music—came to be controlled by people from outside the clan.
The mogul invasion began—not just your usual business types, but a whole new class of rougher, ruder, preternaturally cunning businesspeople.
A sense of insider resentment or snobbishness or rebelliousness would occasionally express itself. But the stronger sensation was clearly a desire to adapt. Resistance in this situation, where economic ownership passes from one regime to another, is, strangely, almost unknown. Ownership is granted a kind of moral standing. There is no model for saying we will not submit to capital. (When Rupert Murdoch bought New York magazine in 1977, the staff walked out—but that really may be the last time there was clear resistance, and, of course, it was pointless.) It isn’t like, for instance, France. Even though these are cultural industries, you can’t talk about cultural patrimony—or a cultural exception. Although there have been federal rules that regulate exactly this, that notion—that there is something here that transcends the marketplace—that this is a special and fragile area, seemed feeble and pantywaist. For a while book people said it, but then nobody said it anymore.
The world is as it is. The idea of having no place in it became the scariest thing. (We all knew people, too, who came to have no place in it—from people at the Village Voice, to correspondents in a network’s foreign bureaus, to old New Yorker writers—who fell outside a sense of economic with-it-ness. Indeed, there are long mastheads of the missing.)
Therefore, we became collaborators: the quisling media.
Collaboration is, of course, a complicated emotional predicament, in which you often come to root against yourself—root for our own ruin. That’s the Michael’s patois. Who is going down. Who is fucking up. Whose ridiculousness will finally be exposed.
It is this self-consciousness and self-loathing that forms not only the subtext of Michael’s conversation (this is a highly verbal and analytic bunch) but the subtext of the media’s view of the media itself.
We are all here every day working to chip away at whatever is left holding up this insupportable business.
Which is why lunch is so satisfying.
NOW, my lunch companions that spring afternoon were both accomplished men—ambitious, high-end achievers who had become significant figures of the great boom.
They had transformed themselves from striving hacks into men of wealth and affairs. They were not just journalists, but had become players in the media business, working the levers of association and finance and business theory.
So of course when they unexpectedly faltered in their transformation—when the reinvention seemed to be reduced to mere overreaching—a certain degree of pathos and Sammy Glicksterism quickly attached to them.
This was, I suspect, part of the reason I was on their lunch list. I, too, had overreached—my Internet business had risen and fallen—but had, surprising nobody more than me, come back from the edge.
The media business—at least if you knew how to work the media business—turned out to be regenerative. The notoriety that attached to you going down could become, with a little craft, the added notoriety that was needed to take you back up.
John Heilemann, a journeyman magazine writer who had gotten himself a million-dollar advance for his first book, and John Battelle, who a few years after graduating from journalism school had become the CEO of a multimillion-dollar publishing company, were now just two unemployed guys in the middle of a nagging recession in more or less urgent need of a paycheck.
At the same time, they were, I didn’t doubt, planning their rehabilitation and resurgence.
Lunch with me, I was not displeased to sense, was part of their plan.
Heilemann was the more forceful of the two, although, interestingly, the more dependent—he needed Battelle to be the business guy, the feet-on-the-floor guy. Heilemann was the showman.
He was major-sport-athlete size—although he obviously wasn’t an athlete—with a stud and two hoops in his left ear. He seemed like something of a sight gag: Too big to be smart, too big to need to be smart. Like a blond bombshell in kludgy glasses.
He’d already had,