The Writer Meets the Wunderkind

The phone call came from out of the blue. "What we want," the features editor at Rolling Stone said, "is a novelist who will write about the 1996 presidential campaign as though it were a novel." I admit that when the magazine flew me to New York to talk about it, I assumed the job was in the bag. "Oh, it's all set," the editor agreed, "but, uh . . . Jann can be . . . difficult . . . so we thought maybe he should just meet you," and two weeks later, ten minutes into my interview with the magazine's owner and publisher, I realized I didn't necessarily have the job at all.

Sitting on the other side of a huge empty desk, Jann Wenner kept narrowing his eyes at me in a way I think was supposed to suggest uncanny shrewdness but was really a desperate hope that if he squinted long and hard enough I might turn into R.W. Apple. He considered The New York Times the magazine's only serious competition on the campaign trail. "Who are your contacts at the White House?" he demanded to know, and in my vaguest manner tried to explain I didn't have any contacts at the White House, that actually I didn't have any contacts anywhere. I wasn't a reporter and had never been one; I wanted to write not so much about the campaign itself, I explained, as about a year in the inner life of the country during the campaign.

He visibly shuddered. I think he had horrible visions of me dispatching bulletins between cow milkings from midwest farmhouses in the middle of January, living with the Olsen family for a week and getting the pulse of the land, so to speak; and if there was one thing he most certainly was not interested in, Wenner made clear then and there, it was what ordinary people thought about this campaign. In the meantime a hundred more important matters distracted him. As our interview unfolded a certain routine developed, during which he would ask various questions about this and that . . . and just as I would begin to whimper some snivelly non-answer he would grab the telephone and start barking directives to various rock stars across the land about the upcoming Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert, or start madly scribbling something completely unrelated to what we were talking about, just to let me know he was so beset by brainstorms he literally couldn't sit still. Others would assure me later that I should consid myself fortunate he actually looked in my general direction every once in a while rather than conduct the entire interview with his gaze cast grandly over Sixth Avenue . . . . In his own puckish fashion he was charming. But it was only another ten minutes into the interview when I realized with an almost audible gasp that he didn't have a clue who he was; he didn't seem to know, I later told an editor at another magazine, if he wanted to be on the cutting edge of American journalism or invited to dinner at the White House. "Oh, he knows," the editor answered, "he knows exactly which one he wants. He just likes to pretend to himself that he still wants the other one."

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