The Private Life of A. Sock

The Private Life of A.Stock

Kings and Presidents pay him court, office seekers solicit his support, and audiences of Elks and securities analysts are eager to receive his wisdom. Yet the man who sits at the top of one of the world's most powerful newspapers was, to put it gently, a late bloomer. Mild dyslexia inherited from his mother was only part of his problem. "He was the most adorable, attractive boy," says she. "He was also a lazy little bum."

When Punch was about five his father decreed that he was too old to be playing with his sisters' dolls, so the boy staged an elaborate backyard burial for them. When he went to school, young Arthur was less interested in studying than in tinkering: with clocks, wagons, radios, broken toys--but not toy soldiers or guns, which were proscribed by his father in keeping with the Times's support of gun-control legislation. The elder Sulzberger liked to bring Punch and his sisters to the office on Sundays to meet the editors. Sister Judy, closest to Punch in age and temperament, is indirectly responsible for his intriguing nickname. His father marked the boy's birth with a verse* about how he had arrived "to play Punch to Judy's endless show."

The handle followed Punch through four expensive prep schools and into the Marines, which he joined at age 17 to his parents' distress. But the corps gave Sulzberger a hard edge of purpose, and after World War II service in the Philippines, he enrolled at Columbia College, made the dean's list his first semester and graduated in 1951. After uninspired tours as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal and the Times, Sulzberger took the first in his succession of management jobs at the family paper. He also took a Times secretary as his wife, had a son, Arthur Jr., and a daughter, Karen, and was divorced in 1956.

Remarried that year to the former Carol Fox Fuhrman (they had a daughter, Cynthia, in 1964, and Punch adopted his wife's daughter Cathy), Sulzberger now divides off-duty hours between his Fifth Avenue apartment and a modern, eleven-room cypress-and-glass house on his mother's 300-acre estate in suburban Stamford, Conn. Both residences are furnished in what one disapproving family member calls "Howard Johnson decorator stuff." Another upgrades it to "Bloomingdale's pleasant." Sulzberger drinks vodka on the rocks and eats hamburgers at his favorite restaurant, Manhattan's 21 Club (at $9.25 a burger). He prefers to entertain at home, however, barbecuing steaks for Stamford visitors (mostly relatives and Times colleagues) and working wonders with vegetables. "I can't wait for Wednesday and all the recipes in Living." says the chef. "I was really fond of the artichoke recipes, but as soon as we started running them, artichokes disappeared from the market."

For fun, the publisher reads spy thrillers (but can never remember the titles and has found himself rereading them by mistake), shows cowboys-and-Indians flicks on a home projector at Stamford Saturday nights, and generally neglects television. He had to give up golf because of a bad back ("Played one hole last year and had to be carried off in a golf cart"), but still tinkers and putters, and he enjoys browsing in hardware stores. Says Sister Ruth: "His idea of a good time is coming to visit and cleaning my car, then straightening my house." He keeps his desk as uncluttered as his sister's car, and moves through the Times building with mild good humor. He places many of his own calls when he is in New York, and when Punch travels on business, it is often in the company plane, which is piloted by a man punningly known as Pontius Pilate. He sometimes writes letters to the editor under a pseudonym, most recently to lament the departure of a brewery from the city by encouraging the mayor to "plant an Anheuser-Busch." He signed the letter A. Sock ("A punch, a sock get it?").

Sulzberger borrowed that practice from his mother, who at 84 still fires an occasional witty missive to the paper under the name of some long-dead relative. Though she retired from the Times board in 1973, Iphigene Sulzberger remains a formidable force in the family. She designed its coat of arms, which features a duck-billed platypus--"an egg-laying mammal that suckles its young," explains Punch--and the motto NOTHING is IMPOSSIBLE. Not for her, anyway. She traveled to China several years ago with a granddaughter and playfully invited Chou En-lai to write for the Times; he declined. The matriarch rarely interferes in Arthur's affairs. "Sons either have an Oedipus complex about their mothers or hate the ole gal for giving them too much chicken soup," says she. "But then I believe in telling my children what I think." She did protest a story about sex at Barnard College, her alma mater. "It was an unfortunate piece of publicity," she sighs. "I guess people get lots of sex nowadays, but they lose the romance."

Her son has similar views--he saw red over a story about group sex that he found tasteless--but rarely loses his temper and always bubbles with enthusiasm for the task at hand, whether weeding his garden or pruning his executive ranks. "The idea that a publisher sits up here and issues directives, wields great power and smites people to their knees is a lot of baloney," he says. "But it's a lot of fun. It's the best job in the world."

*A family custom that survives. Punch last year marked a grandnephew's birth with this ditty: O Nicholas Ochs put on his socks to cover his chubby feet. He dropped in the hamper a slightly used Pamper and went out for a walk in the street. O Nicholas Ochs walked blocks and blocks till his socks grew dark and dank. When he came to a stop and sat with a plop at the keys of the Times Data Bank ..

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