The Times Of His Life

By MARGARET CARLSON

Someone who grows up with his own gas pump and dog cemetery, and is heir to the greatest newspaper dynasty in the country, has to work hard at being a regular guy. For Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who succeeded his father as publisher of the New York Times this year, this means taking public transportation, not owning a country house or a car, and touring Europe by secondhand BSA 175 motorcycle. His signature sport is not golf or squash but rock climbing. The new Star Trek is his favorite program. He has taken on cleaning up Times Square and working at homeless shelters rather than organizing charity balls. If the restaurant choice is up to him, it is usually inexpensive and convenient to a subway stop.

But despite the camouflage, if he were taken prisoner by the Daily News, his cover would be blown when he couldn't recite the rules of stickball. His wardrobe is suspicious as well. With his double-breasted jackets, pink suspenders and purple-striped shirts, he dresses as if Paul Stuart grabbed him by the French cuffs when he was young and has not let go. The burden he has decided to take on in life -- to be like everyone else when he so obviously isn't -- requires immense energy and makes him seem hyperactive at times. That he engages so earnestly in the effort is one of the more endearing things about him.

As Sulzberger returns by subway from jury duty, talking about it as a great adventure rather than an onerous task, he bounds into the company cafeteria for a late-afternoon yogurt and a chance to wave to a few troops. If there is a hand among the 300 in the newsroom he hasn't shaken, it is not for lack of trying. "I'm a journalist who gets off at the wrong floor now," he is fond of saying.

Unlike his father, who reportedly witnessed a fiery car crash at Le Mans and neglected to call the news desk, he knows his way around a notebook. While an undergraduate at Tufts, he worked at the Boston Globe and the Vineyard Gazette. After graduating, he worked at the Raleigh Times in North Carolina and the Associated Press in London before joining the New York Times as a reporter in the Washington bureau in 1978.

David Binder, his editor there, remembers him as "an invading army. He worked harder than anyone and had fun at it besides." No other cub reporter would have played along so willingly when Binder, trying to prevent Sulzberger from going home on time and spoiling a surprise birthday party, asked him to get quote after quote about the Panama Canal treaty. "I said, 'Arthur, why don't you call Ellsworth Bunker and see what he has to say?' Arthur got a quote from Bunker a few minutes later. Then I said, 'What about Averell Harriman?' He got a quote from him. Then another elder statesmen, and another. Finally I let the guy go."

In 1980 Sulzberger moved to New York City and had to prove once again he was more than the boss's son. Columnist Anna Quindlen says, "From the moment he walked in the door, there were people desperately trying to dislike him. It proved to be impossible." He did everything but deliver the paper -- and as night production manager, he came close to doing that. He covered city hall, then became an assignment editor, "the single most exhausting job I ever had." This was when he learned the importance of walking around, often without his shoes on, practicing his theory that participatory democracy is the best way to manage people. Says a Metro reporter: "I wasn't afraid of him, and I'm afraid of just about every other editor here."

Once Sulzberger became deputy publisher in 1988, he felt for the first time "the job was mine to lose." His confidence increased, and the Lettermanesque wise-guy side of his personality receded. Reporters noticed a deeper affection growing between him and his father, "Punch" Sulzberger. One editor observed, "Arthur took on some of Punch's winning characteristics -- his self-deprecating humor, his listening rather than talking." (He did not find it humorous, however, when people tried to stick him with the obvious diminutive "Pinch.") When, just after being named publisher, he said that it gave him comfort to know that his father would remain as company chairman and be there to counsel him, colleagues believed him.

But if Sulzberger is 40 going on 60 one minute, he can be irrepressibly coltish the next, leaping out of his chair in his 11th-floor office with its view of Broadway on the slightest pretext: checking with his secretary on whether he calls his father "Dad," "Punch" or "the chairman" (in public, it's "the chairman"); grabbing a book by a management guru he admires; pointing out the stand-up desk where he reads the paper at 7 each morning. At a birthday party at the 300-acre family estate in Connecticut (where the family dogs have their own memorial park), it poured all day but, like a camp counselor with a shrill whistle, he insisted that everyone jump into the pool and play volleyball.

Some who lived through the "reign of terror" under executive editor A.M. Rosenthal say that Sulzberger's single greatest achievement has been instituting a philosophy that values people almost as much as their copy. "Fear is not the best way to get things done," he says. This works better on the business side, he admits, where he has been able to wipe out layers of middle management, and less well on the editorial side, where executive editor Max Frankel joked on the day Sulzberger was named publisher that the newsroom would remain a monarchy.

Right after taking over as publisher, Sulzberger invited Frankel's subjects to two lunches of cold cuts and pasta (pleasantly tacky, a reporter said) at a nearby Marriott. When Sulzberger described his theories of management, a reporter piped up that terror was still the prevalent emotion on 43rd Street. Sulzberger went on in his usual cheerful way, while "Max and Joe ((Lelyveld, the managing editor)) looked like they wanted to die," the reporter recalls.

One of Sulzberger's most notable efforts has been to increase diversity in the newsroom. "Anyone can buy a fancy press," Sulzberger says. "The race is for new talent, hiring it, keeping it. I say to minorities, Come and make us strong." He adds, "And we have to find a way not to judge talent by the traditional white male standard."

Nowhere has Sulzberger's expansive attitude been more apparent than in his treatment of gays. Rosenthal was called "homophobic" by the Advocate for refusing to use the term gay in print, among other things. One gay reporter lived in total secrecy, fearing the consequences if Rosenthal found out he was gay.

Sulzberger made a point of giving the Advocate his first interview after being named publisher, and he sent to the first national meeting of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association a videotaped speech in which he supported domestic-partnership benefits at the Times. Along with the & Advocate, he co-hosted a reception for the same group during the Democratic National Convention. Jeffrey Schmalz, who covers politics for the Times, says Sulzberger clearly lets it be known that he won't tolerate discrimination. "I collapsed in the newsroom and went to the hospital with what later would be diagnosed as AIDS. Arthur checked up on me almost every day. When he saw me for the first time after that, at a book party, he walked straight across the room and gave me a big, long hug. That's how Arthur leads."

Sulzberger sent another signal of his openness just after the paper ran a now notorious piece describing the wild streak of the alleged victim in the Palm Beach rape case. Many reporters, Quindlen says, thought she was nuts to write a column saying that the article was beneath the Times's standards. But, she recalls, "the next time I saw Arthur in the newsroom, he came up to me and, in a loud voice, told me that he was proud that I had spoken out the way I did."

Unlike his father, who had his job thrust upon him at age 37 when his own father was paralyzed by a stroke, Sulzberger has followed a carefully calibrated path to the top. At the tender age of 14, he decided to leave his mother's house and go live with his father. He knows how hard it must have been on his mother, but, he says, "she didn't cry in my presence." He moved uptown to an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment that included his father's second wife Carol, so demanding that she once told the wife of the Paris bureau chief to get the chintz curtains cleaned immediately. An adolescent boy, however well house trained, can seem like an invasion of Visigoths. "It wasn't easy for either of us," Sulzberger says, "but she handled it with great sophistication."

Shortly after that, Sulzberger had his only burst of rebellion, letting his hair grow long, wearing his father's old green Marine jacket on most occasions, and getting himself arrested in peace demonstrations. The second time, Sulzberger recalls, his father flew up to Boston to check up on "where I was, where was I going. His was never a heavy hand."

During Thanksgiving break from college, on a trip to Topeka to visit his mother and her third husband, he met his future wife, Gail Gregg, literally the girl next door. The two married in 1975 and shortly thereafter moved to London, where they worked for competing wire services. She often beat him on stories. Being related to a Sulzberger is not the best career move in New York unless you want to work at the Times, so Gregg decided to go to art school. She has a studio over a bagel shop on Broadway and has a growing reputation as a serious painter. They live well but not grandly in an apartment on the Upper West Side, where their two children go to private school. They socialize mainly with family and non-Timesmen. "When I moved to New York, I decided for my own mental health that my closest friends should be outside the Times. They can afford to be honest with me." This policy is not popular with colleagues who used to be close to him.

In September 1987, Sulzberger recalls, just before he became deputy publisher, he held in his hands the fattest paper in New York Times history; a few weeks later, after the stock market crashed 500 points, advertising fell, and the paper began to shrink. "Suddenly we were no longer talking about the Grand Plan but about how to control the descent," he says. Spending was frozen on the business side and buyouts were offered. But the Times never stopped hiring reporters, because "somewhere in there is an assistant managing editor in 20 years."

Sulzberger's biggest challenge is to attract to an old gray newspaper those who now get most of their news from MTV. The splashiest effort to pull in these twentysomething readers is the start-up of a Sunday section called Styles of the Times. When he unveiled it for the Washington bureau at a brown- bag lunch, Sulzberger joked that young readers had better like it because all the older ones would drop dead when they saw it.

Not dead, but perhaps a little numb, as the paper of record takes on a clothing store specializing in "bondage trousers," described as a lace-up crotch contraption for skinheads and dominatrices, or covers a smoke-filled party given by High Times, a magazine devoted to legalizing marijuana. The debut front-page piece, "The Arm Fetish," which analyzed "the body part as fashion accessory," was followed by others on "The Lipstick Wars" and health clubs (they're popular). Like an American abroad speaking slower and louder to be understood, the type is extra large and the sentences are extra short. The overall effect is of a grandmother squeezing into neon biking shorts after everyone else has moved on to long black skirts; the Saks Fifth Avenue ad Styles replaces was hipper. The section is evolving; it adds value for those who want to read it. "No one has to read the whole Sunday paper but me," says Sulzberger.

He recently won a tough but deft battle against the drivers' and mailers' unions, which means that a new color-printing and distribution plant in New Jersey can begin operating. Those readers who managed to live through the Styles section will go into shock in the spring of 1993 when several of the Sunday sections go to color.

During the board meeting last January at which his father announced that his son would get the keys to the kingdom, the drama was heightened when the famous clock on the Times Building suddenly went dark. Now it is ticking again, as Sulzberger gallops out of the building, talking about the new plant, covering Brooklyn as thoroughly as Beirut, the outer suburbs to conquer, Pulitzers to win. Without a sigh -- he is not a sigher -- he turns down 43rd Street to catch the bus, and says, "I'm only 40. I've got time."