The Whisperer

"And suddenly, after 40 years, it all adds up," began the ad for the Herald Tribune Sunday magazine last week. "Whispering, inconspicuous--formal, efficient--but precisely the perfect qualifications for a museum custodian, an undertaker, a mortuary scientist. Thirteen years ago, upon the death of Harold Ross, precisely that difficult task befell William Shawn: to be the museum curator, the mummifier, the preserver-in-amber, the smiling embalmer--for Harold Ross's New Yorker magazine."

Breaking the Rules. If some readers had a hard time following the meaning of this convoluted prose, one reader grasped it immediately. The man described in the ad as the "embalmer" came suddenly to life and grabbed the phone. It was midnight, but New Yorker Editor William Shawn put in a call to Jock Whitney, publisher of the Herald Tribune, and said he was worried about the upcoming story.

Next day Shawn called Whitney again, asking him not to print the story. He also placed a total of four calls to Trib Editor James Bellows and rang up other editors, hinting of a libel suit or an injunction. Then he tried to phone Whitney again. Instead, Shawn got Whitney's wife Betsey, whom he lectured about the Trib's irresponsible journalism.

Finally, he dashed off a letter to Whitney, charging that the article was false and libelous. "I urge you to stop its distribution," wrote Shawn. "I know exactly what Wolfe's article is--a vicious, murderous attack on me and the magazine I work for. It is a ruthless and reckless article; it is pure sensation-mongering ... In one stroke it puts the Herald Tribune right down in the gutter with the Graphic, the Enquirer, and Confidential."

All this enterprise was lavished on the kind of iconoclastic article that readers have come to expect from the Trib's lively Sunday magazine and one of its liveliest writers, Tom Wolfe, 34. Breaking all the rules of clean, lean journalism, Wolfe writes in a buoyant, overstuffed, baroque style filled with grunts and guffaws; participles and expletives that fly in all directions; metaphors that are launched, mixed and sometimes hopelessly scrambled.

Horsehair Stuffing. Wolfe obviously felt at home with The New Yorker. His article reveals few inside secrets,* but with customary hyperbole he captures some of the magazine's musty-fusty atmosphere: the multicolored memo paper serving a variety of subtle editorial purposes; the ritual cocktails at the Algonquin Hotel, to which no newly hired staffer dare come until he is formally--but oh so casually--invited; the religious regard for the offices of deceased or departed writers, in which all the original bric-a-brac is kept reverentially in place.

Wolfe describes the area around Shawn's own offices as a Whisper Zone: "a kind of horsehair-stuffing atmosphere of old carpeting, framed New Yorker covers, quiet cubicles and happy-shabby, baked-apple gentility." Within 40 feet of Shawn's office, says Wolfe, everyone whispers in imitation of their sibilant boss. "He always seems to have on about 20 layers of clothes, about three button-up sweaters, four vests, a couple of shirts, two ties, it looks that way, a dark shapeless suit over the whole ensemble, and white cotton socks."

It is all very funny, but basically Shawn is charged with nothing more serious than being too quiet and unassuming. The Wolfe piece is the latest volley in a mock-serious shooting match between the Trib's Sunday magazine and The New Yorker. For months, they have taken turns parodying each other. (A nettled Trib man responded much more violently than Shawn: "Tell Shawn I'll bite his nose off.") Now the Trib has learned that the editor it has accused of whispering can raise his voice to a holler after all and the bemused Trib editors admit they have not had such a loud gripe in many a year.

*Although it does recall the little-known fact that as a youngster in the Chicago of the '20s, Shawn was considered as a potential kidnaping victim by Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, only to be discarded in favor of Bobby Franks, whom they then murdered.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.