Noting The Village Voice's 50th anniversary, Voice reporter Wayne Barrett remarked on NPR today that the longest-serving Voice editor, at nearly 10 years, is the incumbent–Don Forst, I think his name is?
Nothing could say better how far removed from its roots today's–and yesterday's, and the day before's–Voice is.
Founding editor Dan Wolf gave form to his vision every week for a year or so short of two decades. What The Voice at 50 has in common with The Voice Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer launched is the name. Only. Notwithstanding Barrett's careless lapse (he was being interviewed, not reporting, and surely meant during the time he's been there although he didn't say that), Wolf's name hasn't quite been written out of history. After all, you can't mention the money name Mailer in this context and omit Wolf's. But the editorial staff who keep The Voice name alive long ago made a cartoon of Wolf's "writer's paper" legacy.
<update, 10 November> Lucian Truscott called to my attention a second instance of the false claim that the current editor is The Voice's longest-serving,
Mark Jacobson's piece in last week's New York Magazine, "The Voice from beyond the grave (Can new owner Michael Lacey make the Village Voice relevant again?)." Barrett's error was verbal, as the subject of an interview, possibly excusable. Jacobson's iteratiom is in reportage, and he introduces a compounding new error: Jacobson describes Mailer as the founding editor. Mailer, fresh from his "The Naked and the Dead" triumph, was a writer. He categorically didn't want to be and never was the editor of a fledgling neighborhood weekly. Mailer was a Voice inspiration, a co-conspirator, an investor, and for a few weeks a columnist–till the infamous and all-too-typical Normal Mailer byline typo sent him fleeing in fury what he considered (otherwise) a far too tame venture. The founding editor was [duh] Dan Wolf. Wolf categorically rejected any modification of his title. He wasn't The Voice executive editor, editor-in-chief, whatever: Wolf was simply the editor–of Volume I, Issue 1, and every issue, for about twice as long as the current editor. NYMag can't afford fact-checkers? Unforgivable from both writer and editor. Is a systematic campaign under way after all to write Dan Wolf out of VV history? Maybe we've all lived too long in Butchworld, where up is down, fiction is fact, etc.—df
Nat Hentoff and Fred McDarrah are the last links at the paper to the roots. Hentoff deserves a lot of credit for trying again and again to explain the legacy to the heirs–McDarrah too, in his time, at the production level. Wasted energy. If the paper itself weren't proof enough, in his one-page history of The Voice's half-century, Jarrett Murphy (who he?) writes some orthodox-VV-lockstep comments on Wolf's politics that clinch my case. Wolf never engaged on that crap; far be it from me to try to deconstruct the subtleties of that mind to true believers.
It was fun anyway to see reproductions of those long-ago front pages and ledes of any number of iconic articles. The bylines poignantly brought back those writers as the people they were when the ink wasn't yet dry and we all were already at work on the next issue.
And fun to see all those McDarrah photo credits–and his name still on the masthead. What a hoot! Fred is the only human being I ever knew who could cause Dan to lose it. Routinely. Has Fred driven every mild-mannered editor since then crazy too? And what a joy to see so many Jerry Tallmer bylines, not only in those old issues, but also every week in today's Villager (as far removed from its first incarnation as The Voice) and Downtown Express. I found a rubber stamp, "RECEIVED AFTER DEADLINE," in Tallmer's desk, by then mine. After pondering it for years I actually used it once. I wonder if he ever did. I still feel guilty. I suspect that someone who could think that up wouldn't. Everyone was in awe of Jerry, by reputation a ruthless and rigorous editor, who was gone before I arrived.
While other writers have made the claim spuriously, if anyone could legitimately call himself an uncredited Voice cofounder it's Tallmer. I'm not sure when he left the Nation for The Voice–early if not at the very beginning–but he was the editor who gave the back of the book the shape that's served The Voice so well ever since, and of course Tallmer conceived the "Obie" awards, which gained traction of incalculable value over time.
I was amused to see a graphic that incorporates an artfully doctored photo of me in the commemorative issue. Back when they continued to run it weekly after they fired me I used to wonder if they knew who it was. I wonder once again, since a dogged-survivor editor–one of the 11 staff members Felker hired to replace me–in his anniversary column reflexively badmouthed me yet again. Thirty years later!?! No class then, no class now.
Writers, being the egocentrics they are, predictably take collective credit in the anniversary Voice for the paper's success. Well, I'm sorry. As a beau of mine (so long ago working at The Voice still seemed an impossible dream) said of good women, they're a dime a dozen. Aghast as I was, the fact was undeniable. Lose a writer to the New Yorker, another one turns up who you'll lose soon enough to (Harold Hayes's) Esquire, but then another one walks in who the Times will steal in a few months … that was just the way it was when The Voice was vibrant. Wolf's Voice, where freelancers and the publisher were paid nothing and the editor's weekly salary, since he was impoverished, was $10–$2 less than my father's as a daily's sports editor during the Depression.
Except for the impoverished, writers live in the suburbs of Butchworld, where money materializes magically. If the trust fund doesn't cover every whim, Poppy's friends will transfer funds. (In 2005 Butchworld, substitute "working-class taxpayers" for "Poppy's friends.") The form Tallmer-the-editor gave the back of the book gave a tenacious display advertising manager named Alexandra Fendrick the stuff she needed to flog an ad staff and herself to sell the space–especially to movie and music advertisers–that transformed newsprint into greenbacks that soon underwrote a respectable payroll and produced the profits that inevitably attracted wannabe owners and turned The Voice into the end, not the means, to enough writers to doom its vitality.
Here's a test for The Voice's self-congratulatory feminists: Who was Rose Ryan?
The Villager, the only game in town for a quarter-century, was so entrenched as the local classified advertising magnet no one in the early years could even to dream of pulling ahead of it. The week Voice classified lineage exceeded the Villager's was the week The Voice became a financial success. I remember the celebration. After seven money-losing years, The Voice never looked back. Remember the classified ad manager's name, ladies: Rose Ryan. Who will meet the Craigslist, and apparently soon the Google, challenge with equal success?
The summer before the Halloween I went to work part-time, temporarily, for The Voice the paper still distributed paychecks after the banks closed on Fridays. Ever hear of East? No, not EVO. East. East was a hip '50s rival weekly. The Village Voice would lie alongside East and the East Village Other and <sigh> the Soho Weekly News </sigh> in the graveyard of failed weeklies but for Fancher's and Wolf's business instincts–the essence of their differences with Mailer.
There was no alternative-press blueprint then, no formula, no prototype business model. The back-patting writers treat Fancher as some kind of mystery artifact. Fancher, his brilliant hires Fendrick and Ryan, plus Danny List's uncanny genius–against mob competition–for getting news dealers to display The Voice prominently, inflected by Wolf's commercial intuitions (and I'd guess, indirectly, Rhoda Wolf's too, although she'd surely deny it) played it by ear, played the angles, played games when they had to, and pulled it off. Wolf's stunning talent for fine-tuning writers' creative eccentricities existed in the mean real world. If the business side hadn't functioned at the same level in those shaky years there'd be no Voice at 50.
The Village Voice at 50. Who'da thunk? Mostly clueless, still coasting on a legacy they misunderstand and misrepresent, fretting over yet another new owner. I certainly don't wish The Voice ill. I just wish The Village Voice–like the Democratic Party–were in touch with the visceral. Time was, both were.
