Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/081792/0817520.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 13KB | 258 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 46

The Times Of His Life


With a friendly exuberance, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. tries to put
a younger face on his family paper

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."