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a letter from san francisco
What the Shadow Knew
by Peter H. King
Peter H. King has worked at the San
Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times. He writes a column
on California for the Bee newspapers in Sacra mento, Fresno, and Modesto.
Almost everybody I know is dead already, but as long as they keep moving around, hardly anybody notices.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, December 1, 1985
It has
not been easy for San Francisco, letting go of Herb Caen. His manual typewriter
- the "loyal Royal," the columnist called it - sits enshrined in a
glass case in the lobby of the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper where
for something like sixty years, minus a term at the rival Examiner, Caen rapped
out a deceptively well-written, daily ramble of gossip, one-liners, news tips,
biting asides, "sightems," and melancholic Valentines to his "Baghdad-by-the-Bay."
Two-and-a-half years after the columnist's death, readers still track down longtime Caen assistant Carole Vernier in retirement to pass along "items." Says Vernier: "My home number is listed, so they will call me up and say something like, 'I just heard the greatest joke in the world, and it's so sad there is no place to put it. It would have been the perfect Herb Caen item."'
And on the Chronicle's editorial page, in the letters column, a popular rhetorical thrust has emerged: "Herb must be rolling over in his grave . . . ." Letter writers have invoked Caen's spirit to argue matters ranging from Monica Lewinsky, to freeway construction, to what to do with a giant, artificial dog's head that adorned the Doggie Diner. The announcement last August that the Chronicle would be sold to the Hearst Corp., owner of the Examiner, produced several such references: "If Herb wasn't already dead," declared one correspondent, "this would probably do it."
Caen's posthumous staying power probably could have been predicted. Years before his death even, the Chronicle was running reprises of his earlier columns. And on a late spring day in 1996 - a season in which Caen, in a blur of moments, celebrated his eightieth birthday, received a special Pulitzer Prize, married his longtime girlfriend, and revealed in print that he had inoperable cancer - San Franciscans demonstrated the depth of their devotion when they converged on the waterfront by the tens of thousands to celebrate Herb Caen Day.
Looking frail, but still crowned in a snappy brown fedora, Caen shared the stage with celebrities - Walter Cronkite, Willie Mays, Robin Williams - and told a joke about a San Franciscan who dies, goes to heaven and observes: "It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco." Hearing this, the crowd seemed unsure how to respond, so painful was the subtext. There were a few chuckles, but many people simply lowered their heads, as if in prayer. And when Caen died on February 1, 1997, his readers again turned out by the thousands to mourn. For days the Chronicle pages dripped with grief and tribute, some of it more than a little maudlin:
Fog on Russian Hill
Editor: I want to report a "Herb sighting." We were walking north on Jones, coming back from the theater, and there he was, Herb, a block away, walking down Vallejo and Jones, the fog obscured our view, and he was gone.
On drippy nights, when the foghorn blows, I can feel Herb rolling in at 2 a.m., walking the top of Russian Hill. Herb is here. The shadow knows.
This is a time of transition for San Francisco newspapers. Last summer, after 134 years of family control, the 480,000-circulation Chronicle - the self-proclaimed "Voice of the West" - was placed on the market. The Hearst Corp. agreed to purchase the paper for a reported price of $660 million, and announced that its 114,000-circulation Examiner "The Monarch of the Dailies" - was for sale. Should no viable offer emerge, and most industry analysts doubted one would, the afternoon paper would be killed, its staff absorbed into the Chronicle, and the thirty-five-year-old joint operating agreement between the two papers terminated.
These major strokes fell in rapid order. What followed, from August through October, was a strange, foggy period of uncertainty. It was said Hearst executives had been advised by counsel to keep mum about any merger plans until all possible Examiner offers had been fully explored. In this twilight time, to ask working editors at either publication which paper exactly had eaten the other was to elicit shoulder shrugs. Nobody knew. Would Examiner management move over, top to bottom and, as one editor put it, "Examiner-ize the Chronicle?" Was the Examiner staff in peril of being lost in the shuffle?
Many were the theories and rumors. Few were the facts. Still the papers plugged away. Sometimes, it seemed as though an audition was under way ambitious projects were published, new columns and sections launched. The problem, said a Chronicle editor, is that "we don't know who we are auditioning for. We also don't know if the game is rigged going in. Who knows?"
From these shadows, a familiar phantom would emerge The Newspaper that San Francisco Deserves. This mythical newspaper has haunted the city for decades. "Why can't San Francisco get the newspaper it deserves?" the nation's editors will ask whenever they convene on Nob Hill, which, understandably enough, is quite often. Many San Franciscans, too, also play the parlor game: Why, they will ask, as they linger over late lunches, can't this great city of ours produce, say, a Boston Globe, or a Washington Post?
A SF Weekly cover piece articulated this hope. The headline was a chance for respect?, and contained within the article was a quote from Orville Schell, dean of the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley: "This is the moment of truth. San Francisco has an extraordinary opportunity to acquire a paper on par with other great cosmopolitan cities like Los Angeles, New York, Boston, or Washington . . . ."
Implicit in such analysis, of course, is the subjective conviction that San Francisco newspapers have been off the mark, a poor match for a great city. Maybe this is so, but the point certainly can be argued. Is it too simplistic to suggest, for instance, that one reason San Francisco has not produced a Boston Globe, say, or a Washington Post is because San Francisco is not Boston, is not Washington? Is it possible San Francisco already has the newspaper or newspapers, counting the Examiner it deserves?
Consider this lingering of Caen. "The shadow knows," was one of his favorite item sign-offs, and it would seem that Caen, indeed, did know something something editors across the land today spend endless hours searching for from behind the one-way mirrors of focus groups. He knew his audience and city or at least the parts of it he chose to include in his elliptic universe. As a Chronicle editor once observed: "San Francisco is a concept. It is an idea, a legend, a myth, and Herb Caen is the prophet, the high priest of the mystique."
Caen also was one of the last links, and certainly the most prominent, to the Chronicle's zany days, a period which ran, roughly, from the 1950s to the early 1970s. This was the Chronicle of the front page exposιs of bad coffee a great city's people forced to drink swill, moaned one headline. This was the Chronicle of Count Marco, a hairdresser paid to rant about women, of the crusades against animal nudity. This also was, interestingly enough, the Chronicle that vaulted ahead in a competitive market to dominate San Francisco journalism.
The reputation of the Chronicle seems frozen in this period unfairly, it appears to me, as someone who has regularly read the paper for the last twenty-five years. Trade articles about the Chronicle, and San Francisco journalism in general, are peppered, again and again, with the same descriptive words provincial, loopy, light, eccentric, parochial. (For the Examiner, meanwhile, are reserved the expressions of faint praise applied to all afternoon papers: feisty and, always, scrappy.)
To be a San Francisco editor means always having to say you are serious. "The only late-breaking recipe' I can recall on the front-page of the Chronicle," editor William German felt obliged to write last August in response to a New York Times piece, "was there to save lives. One of our recent investigative projects about the safety of hypodermic needles resulted in changes to state and federal laws. The series was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize."
The most enduring bit of criticism was a Hollywood invention. In All the President's Men, the Ben Bradlee character, played by Jason Robards, is hounded by a syndicate representative promoting a new feature: yesterday's weather report, "for people who were drunk or slept all day . . . ." The editor's response? "Send it out to the San Francisco Chronicle they need it." The line was received as an inside joke by journalists. Hollywood, though, tends to shoot for the thickest swath of audience, and the barb just as likely was aimed, not just at the newspaper, but at the city itself.
San Francisco has long fascinated, titillated and sometimes appalled the rest of the country. When bad things happen in San Francisco or, for that matter, anywhere in California they are held up as parables, lessons from On High about the consequences that await those who frolic too long in the golden sun, who drink and sleep all day. Some brand this "kookism," as a Peoria, Illinois, editorialist did in 1978 after Jonestown and the city hall murders: "If any place has earned a reputation for kookism, for a climate divorced from reality, it would seem to be California. And if any city has earned its growing reputation as Capital of Kookism, it is San Francisco . . . ."
San Francisco no doubt does have its peculiarities a rough-hewn eccentricity that dates back to the Gold Rush days. And if the city is, well, different, wouldn't it follow that its newspapers if they were doing their job would be different as well? Caen raised this point often, sometimes with a hint of defensiveness peeking through the prose:
"Trivia is trivia," he wrote in 1980, "no matter how thin you slice it or fine you write it, and trivia is my business. Not, mind you, that I believe the real news of the world comes anywhere near the front page or the six o'clock news. The real news happens out there somewhere, usually behind locked doors in a bug-proofed room, and eventually makes the headlines when it is too late to do anything about it . . . .
"San Francisco is a city that lends itself nicely to trivia. Parks built on sand, monuments dedicated to firehouse groupies, hills named Russian for no easily discernible reason . . . . Why did our most distinguished architect, Willis Polk, have this irresistible desire to stand on his head in public? . . . From what floor of the Mark Hopkins did George Vanderbilt throw himself to death, and why, and who remarked to the Mark's owner, Your scion fell down'? This is heavy trivia, as opposed to light news of alleged front page significance."
A personal digression: It took me awhile to appreciate Caen in particular and the Chronicle in general. I arrived in the city in the mid-1970s, straight from Fresno, all dust and ambition. After a brief stint with The Associated Press where a clipboard memo warned never to put any Caen item on the wire without independently verifying its accuracy I moved on to the Examiner. There, reporters were programmed to despise the Chronicle.
Caen referred to us as Brand Ex. We returned fire with references to the morning "Comical." Feisty and, yes, scrappy, we rejoiced over every scoop not that they mattered in the larger scheme. With the JOA, the fix was in. The structure of the arrangement dictated the outcome the Examiner, however glorious its journalism, was a stunted creature. The only reason the Examiner is allowed to exist, a critic wittily explained to me early on, is because the Chronicle wants to rerun its ads in the afternoon. This might not have been technically accurate, but it certainly captured the spirit of things.
There was the feel of laboratory work to the enterprise and, strangely enough, this could be liberating. The upside of the pact was that the Examiner was allowed to build a far bigger staff and budget than its circulation, in a free market, would support. From city hall to Central America, armies of Examiner reporters were dispatched to dig and write. In 1980, still green as a sapling, I was sent across the country for a year to explore the mood of America (I found it wary, but hopeful).
Only after I departed the Examiner in the early 1980s did I begin to reconsider the Chronicle, to suspect that maybe, like Caen, it did, in its own peculiar way, fit the city. One day last June I did something I never would have considered as an Examiner reporter: I took a Chronicle reporter to lunch. Carl Nolte, sixty-six years old, a native San Franciscan and thirty-eight-year Chronicle veteran, was not in the most chipper of moods: the Chronicle that day was reporting that the paper was for sale.
Nolte saw this development in the context of changes within the city itself: "We're turning into a branch city, a chain city, one big Home Depot," he growled. "Look at what has happened in the past five years: Bank of America taken over by some bank in Charlotte; Pac Bell controlled by some Texas outfit; the Emporium killed on its 100th birthday . . . This city was a major city, a headquarters city, and now it's turning into a tourist city. Tourism is a sort of industrial pollution . . . . The cable cars have become a Disneyland ride, carrying yahoos to Fisherman's Wharf, where the trucks back up, not to pick up fish, but to deliver it."
And so on.
Caen, too, had understood San Francisco was changing. He tended to write about the old money crowd, and long before he died there already was much new money seeping into the city. Economic power was shifting south, down the peninsula, to San Jose and Silicon Valley. In terms of readers, the suburbs had become the primary battleground for San Francisco Bay Area newspapers, and to Caen suburbs were only for tweaking.
In an October 1988, column, he wrote: "The first novel written by Herbert Gold or anyway the first one I read was called The Man Who Was Not With It. A catchy little title. Today, I am that man, trapped by my invention of a place that may have been as mythical as Oz or Atlantis, or in this case, Pacificus."
Now, of course, Caen is gone, give or take a fog-shrouded sightem or two. His passing marked the end of something more than a beloved columnist, or even a newspaper era. He was, remember, the high priest of the idea, the idea of the city itself. And now, as the city changes, so too will its newspapers or newspaper. Perhaps this will be the moment for The Newspaper San Francisco Deserves. And, perhaps not. Only the shadow knows.
