The Wrath of Cohn, Part 1

Not long ago, I was browsing through Peter Manso’s enormous oral biography Mailer: His Life and Times, which has been one of my favorite reads for years, when I came across a passing reference to Norman Mailer’s friendship with the attorney Roy Cohn. Mailer and Cohn couldn’t have been less alike in their politics, but they found each other useful, and they were linked by the late publisher Si Newhouse, who passed away just last month. Cohn doesn’t figure prominently in any of Newhouse’s obituaries, but the two of them first met as teenagers at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx and remained lifelong friends. In the book Newhouse, Thomas Maier explains the Mailer connection:

With Cohn’s help, Norman Mailer was convinced to become a contributor to Newhouse’s Parade magazine and later to sign a lucrative book contract with Random House…Si [had] expressed a desire to sign up Mailer, hoping to add that lustrous name to his publishing house’s stable of well-known authors…Cohn relayed this version of Si’s intentions to Peter Manso, a writer who then was close with Mailer and would later write a biography about him. Si Newhouse wanted Mailer to write a magazine piece about his views on capital punishment, Cohn told Manso…”He’ll pay cash,” Cohn told Manso about the Newhouse offer. “We’ll give him seven thousand dollars for the piece.”

Maier doesn’t mention how the two men happened to know each other, but they had evidently met when Manso was assigned to interview Cohn for Playboy in 1981—which is a detail that I’ll explore further in a moment.

Cohn took obvious pride in serving as a power broker, with what Maier describes as a talent for “making things happen,” and he systematically cultivated his famous contacts. After Mailer wrote the article on capital punishment and another piece on Russia, the two men became friendly, despite what Cohn saw as Mailer’s Soviet sympathies. Maier writes:

“I think Norman was always a little embarrassed about his association with Roy—he didn’t want to be too public with it,” said Peter Fraser, Cohn’s companion during the early 1980s when Roy’s personal life became an open secret. Cohn became involved in other business matters with Mailer. He rented a small cottage for himself and Peter Fraser in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The house was owned by Mailer and was next to a larger house where Mailer’s family stayed during the summer. On some summer evenings, Cohn and Mailer would hold court at a large dinner shared by family and friends.

Manso, who was living with Mailer at the time, goes even further, recounting that Cohn wanted to join their plan to turn the house into a condo, securing an interest-free loan of $300,000 from Si Newhouse for “all of us.” When Manso told Mailer about the deal, the author responded: “It’s about time I had a patron.” This is already pretty good gossip, but it gets better. In 1985, according to Manso, the Mailers attended Cohn’s fifty-ninth birthday party, which had a guest list that included Si Newhouse, Roger Stone—yes, that Roger Stone—and Donald Trump. After Cohn died the following year, the Mailers didn’t go to the memorial service, but a number of other prominent friends did, as Manso relates: “Donald Trump sat in the audience weeping with Cohn’s lover, Peter Fraser, and the ubiquitous Si Newhouse.”

There’s obviously a lot to unpack here, but I want to focus for now on the thread between Newhouse, Cohn, and Trump. Cohn’s mentorship of Trump has been closely scrutinized, including by Peter Manso, who wrote a reminiscence for Politico last year about a party at Cohn’s house in 1981, at which he found himself seated next to “the boyish-faced real estate mogul, habitué of Le Cirque and staple of Page Six.” (In Manso’s account, Trump inquired of him: “Roy says you live on the Cape, and that you’re writing a book about Norman Mailer. Norman’s smart but a little crazy, right?” He then asked Manso whether or not he should do an interview with Playboy, which he eventually did, kicking off what became a long association between him and the magazine.) What’s more surprising is that Newhouse’s friendship with Cohn and its obvious relevance to Trump hasn’t received more attention. Last year, a profile in The New Yorker—which Newhouse still owned at the time—highlighted the publishing magnate’s role in the writing of The Art of the Deal. As the reporter Jane Mayer relates:

The idea of Trump writing an autobiography didn’t originate with either Trump or [ghostwriter Tony Schwartz]. It began with Si Newhouse, the media magnate whose company, Advance Publications, owned Random House at the time, and continues to own Condé Nast, the parent company of this magazine. “It was very definitely, and almost uniquely, Si Newhouse’s idea,” Peter Osnos, who edited the book, recalls. GQ, which Condé Nast also owns, had published a cover story on Trump, and Newhouse noticed that newsstand sales had been unusually strong.

Cohn’s name isn’t mentioned here at all. Yet it’s hard to believe that he didn’t have anything to do with what turned out, in the end, to be a far more significant literary deal than the one that he had pulled off a few years earlier by luring Mailer to Random House.

For a connection that exists in plain sight, this angle remains strikingly unexplored. The only reference to it that I can find online is a tantalizing quote from Thomas Maier himself, who said last month in an interview with Bloomberg: “Newhouse’s fondness for Trump, the link with Roy Cohn and the way in which the Newhouse publications promoted Trump over the last twenty years really helped make him a nationally known figure and is one of the great unknown stories of the Trump rise to power.” I can’t help but agree, and while it’s tempting to suspect that Newhouse’s influence kept the story from being fully investigated during his lifetime, it’s also possible that the subsidiary players remained genuinely unaware of it. Mailer’s case provides an instructive parallel. After describing Mailer’s big contract with Random House and how his first novel with Newhouse, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, was excerpted in the resurgent Vanity Fair, Maier writes:

None of the Newhouse editors, however, were aware of Si’s guiding hand or the help of Roy Cohn in securing Norman Mailer’s services. “Upon reading the manuscript it was my idea, purely my idea, to buy it for Vanity Fair,” insisted Leo Lerman, then Vanity Fair’s editor, in describing how he decided to run excerpts of Tough Guys after talking with Mailer’s Random House editor, Jason Epstein.

Cohn was content to remain in the shadows, and he had reason to take satisfaction in the service that he had rendered to his friend and new neighbor. Mailer had suffered from money problems for decades, and the deal with Newhouse offered him an important source of stability, as his editor Jason Epstein observed: “I sensed that what Norman really wanted was to clear the decks and have nothing to worry about financially for the rest of his life.” Trump was at the beginning, not the end, of his career, and what Cohn and Newhouse had to offer him was rather different, but no less precious—and the consequences would be immense. I’ll be talking more about this tomorrow.

Quote of the Day

As a playwright, laughter at your jokes is wonderful…but silence in the face of information is the most thrilling thing.

—J.T. Rogers, to Politico

The public eye

Last month, the New York Times announced that it was eliminating its public editor, an internal watchdog position that dates back over a decade to the Jayson Blair scandal. In a memo to employees, publisher Arthur Sulzberger outlined the reasoning:

The responsibility of the public editor—to serve as the reader’s representative—has outgrown that one office…Today, our followers on social media and our readers across the Internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be. Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office.

We are dramatically expanding our commenting platform. Currently, we open only ten percent of our articles to reader comments. Soon, we will open up most of our articles to reader comments. This expansion, made possible by a collaboration with Google, marks a sea change in our ability to serve our readers, to hear from them, and to respond to them.

The decision was immediately criticized, as much for its optics and timing as for its underlying rationale. As Zach Schonfeld wrote for Newsweek: “The Times’s ability to hold the [Trump] administration accountable relies on its ability to convince readers that it’s holding itself accountable—to convince the country that it’s not ‘fake news,’ as Trump frequently charges, and that it is getting the story right.”

This seems obvious to me. Even if it was a legitimate call, it looks bad, especially at this particular moment. The public editor hasn’t always been as empowered or vocal as it should be, but these are problems that should have been addressed by improving it, not discontinuing it entirely, even if the Times itself lacked the inclination to do so. (Tom Scocca observed on Politico: “Sulzberger seemed to approach the routine duty of holding his paper accountable the same way a surly twelve-year-old approaches the task of mowing the lawn—if he could do it badly enough, maybe people would decide he shouldn’t have been made to do it at all.”) But I’m more concerned by the argument that the public editor’s role could somehow be outsourced to comments, both on the site itself and on unaffiliated platforms like Twitter. As another article in the Times explains:

We have implemented a new system called Moderator, and starting today, all our top stories will allow comments for an eight-hour period on weekdays. And for the first time, comments in both the News and Opinion sections will remain open for twenty-four hours.

Moderator was created in partnership with Jigsaw, a technology incubator that’s part of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. It uses machine-learning technology to prioritize comments for moderation, and sometimes, approves them automatically…The Times struck a deal with Jigsaw that we outlined last year: In exchange for the Times’s anonymized comments data, Jigsaw would build a machine learning algorithm that predicts what a Times moderator might do with future comments.

Without delving into the merits of this approach or the deal that made it possible, it seems clear that the Times wants us to associate the removal of the public editor with the overhaul of its comments section, as if one development were a response to the other. In his memo, Sulzberger wrote that the relationship between the newspaper and its readers was too important to be “outsourced”—which is a strange way to describe an internal position—to any one person. And by implication, it’s outsourcing it to its commenters instead.

But is that really what’s happening here? To my eyes, it seems more likely that the Times is mentioning two unrelated developments in one breath in hopes that we’ll assume that they’re solutions to the same problem, when, in fact, the paper has done almost nothing to build a comments section that could conceivably take on a watchdog role. In the article on the partnership with Jigsaw, we read: “The community desk has long sought quality of comments over quantity. Surveys of Times readers have made clear that the approach paid off—readers who have seen our comment sections love them.” Well, whenever I’ve seen those comment sections, which is usually by mistake, I’ve clicked out right away—and if these are what “quality” comments look like, I’d hate to see those that didn’t make the cut. But even if I’m not the intended audience, it seems to me that there are a number of essential factors that go into making a viable commentariat, and that the Times has implemented none of them. Namely:

1. A sense of ownership. A good comment system provides users with a profile that archives all of their submissions in one place, which keeps them accountable and provides a greater incentive to put more effort into what they write. The Times, to my knowledge, doesn’t offer this.
2. A vibrant community. The best comment sections, like the ones on The A.V. Club and the mid-sized communities on Reddit, benefit from a relatively contained pool of users, which allows you to recognize the names of prolific commenters and build up an identity for yourself. The Times may be too huge and sprawling to allow for this at all, and while workarounds might exist, as I’ll note below, they haven’t really been tried. Until now, the comments sections have appeared too unpredictably on articles to attract readers who aren’t inclined to seek them out, and there’s no support for threads, which allow real conversations to take place.
3. A robust upvoting system. This is the big one. Comment sections are readable to the extent that they allow the best submissions to float to the top. When I click on an article on the Times, the column on the right automatically shows me the most recent comments, which, on average, are mediocre or worse, and it leaves me with little desire to explore further. The Times offers a “Reader’s Picks” category, but it isn’t the default setting, and it absolutely needs to be. Until then, it might get better policing from readers simply by posting every article as a link on Reddit and letting the comments live there.

It’s important to note that even if all these changes were implemented, they couldn’t replace a public editor, a high-profile position with access to the thought processes of editors and reporters that no group of outside commenters could provide. A good comment section can add value, but it’s a solution to a different problem. Claiming that beefing up the one allows you to eliminate the other is like removing the smoke alarm from your house because you’ve got three carbon monoxide detectors. But even if the Times was serious about turning its commenters into the equivalent of a public editor, like replacing one horse-sized duck with a hundred duck-sized horses, it hasn’t made the changes that would be required to make its comment sections useful. (Implementing items one and three would be fairly straightforward. Item two would be harder, but it might work if the Times pushed certain sections, like Movies or Sports, as portals in themselves, and then tried to expand the community from there.) It isn’t impossible, but it’s hard, and while it would probably cost less than paying a public editor, it would be more expensive than the deal with Google, in which the paper provides information about its readers to get an algorithm for free. And this gets at the real reason for the change. “The community desk has long sought quality of comments over quantity,” the Times writes—so why suddenly emphasize quantity now? The only answer is that it’s easier and cheaper than the alternative, which requires moderation by human beings who have to be paid a salary, rather than an algorithmic solution that is willing to work for data. Given the financial pressures on a site like the Times, which outlined the changes in the same article in which it announced that it would be offering buyouts to its newsroom staff, this is perfectly understandable. But pretending that a move based on cost efficiency is somehow better than the alternative is disingenuous at best, and the effort to link the two decisions points at something more insidious. Correlation isn’t causation, and just because Sulzberger mentions two things in successive paragraphs doesn’t mean they have anything to do with each other. I hate to say it, but it’s fake news. And the Times has just eliminated the one person on its staff who might have been able or willing to point this out.

The likability fallacy, revisited

Last year, I wrote a post on what I then saw as the fallacy that characters in stories ought to be likable. My argument, which I still mostly believe, is that characters need to be interesting—or, even better, that they take logical actions in response to the vivid situations in which they find themselves—and that if a protagonist isn’t engaging, it’s less a problem of sympathy than a symptom that something is going wrong elsewhere in the story. In the meantime, however, I’ve found myself backing away slightly from my initial hard stance. I’m still a little wary of likability, partially because it’s one of those notes, along with raising the stakes, that can never be wrong, which means that you’re likely to get it from readers who aren’t writers themselves. But since it’s a note that I expect to receive for the rest of my life, I’ve decided to work my around to a more nuanced version of what I’ve said here before. Likability may not be essential, but it’s a smart baseline from which to begin. All things being equal, I’d rather have a protagonist that the reader liked and admired than otherwise, so it makes more sense to start with that assumption and inch away from it as necessary.

In other words, likability belongs to the short list of best practices in fiction, rules that can be broken when the story demands it, but followed whenever you’re in doubt. The problem with likability, of course, is that it’s an inherently slippery concept. Unlike such guidelines as providing your characters with a clear sequence of objectives, which works as an unambiguous test, a character’s likability is a very subjective thing, with a wide range of potential interpretation, and it leads to confusion even among capable storytellers if they’re unable to distance themselves from the material. We may like or take an interest in our own characters, but it can be hard to know how others will react, even when the potential issues are obvious. (Witness the recent kerfuffle on Game of Thrones, which continues to position Jaime Lannister as a likable rogue despite a despicable act, not present in the original books, that the show’s creators don’t seem to have thought through until it was too late.) Likability makes me nervous because it’s an emergent property, arising from many small choices and decisions along the way, and you often don’t know what you’ve got until you’re done.

Still, that’s true of anything in fiction, and it’s still possible for writers to influence the outcome with smart choices. I got to thinking about this after reading a provocative piece by the economist Russ Roberts in Politico, in which he argues that Frank Underwood—the manipulative, borderline psychopathic politician played by Kevin Spacey on House of Cards—is a Democrat for shrewd narrative reasons:

I think [series creator Beau] Willimon made Underwood a Democrat because he wanted us to like him…The show wouldn’t work if he were totally despicable. And for a lot of viewers, that means he can’t be a Republican. Because for some significant number of Netflix viewers, Republicans are automatically despicable in a way that Democrats can never be.

Roberts, for the record, is a passionate proponent of small government (and also a published novelist) who sounds a little like Aaron Sorkin’s Ainsley Hayes when he makes his case against federal spending for education and the poor. His piece is intended as a wakeup call for Republicans to regain the moral high ground, but it indirectly points to how canny House of Cards, for all its flaws, can be. Underwood can be a liar, a manipulator, and worse, but we’d turn against him at once if he were, say, a racist—or a conservative.

In other words, likability doesn’t seem all that different from anything else in writing: you start from a principle of doing no harm, follow the rules you know, and don’t make things any harder on yourself than they need to be. Of course, if that was the only way we proceeded, we’d end up with a lot of formulaic fiction, and in practice, the process is more of a spiral than a straight line, homing in gradually on the center we’re trying to find. (Contrary to what I may have implied above, by the way, there are plenty of rules out there for constructing likable protagonists, from the list of good and bad character flaws on TV Tropes to Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, and I’ll leave it up to you to decide how useful they are.) But I suppose I’ve come around to the realization that likability, as muddled a concept as it might be, is something that a writer needs to take seriously, especially if it inspires other elements in the story to snap into focus. It can’t be taken in isolation, and if you force it, the reader or viewer will naturally resist. If it’s lacking, the real problem may be somewhere else entirely. But yes, it’s important. Which doesn’t mean I have to like it.