Brooke Gladstone: This Is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. The trend of politico turned TV pundit has been around since at least the middle of the last century, but it's accelerated in the last few years. To better understand how norms in American journalism have morphed over the past 60 years, we called up a writer whose career spans that shift. Calvin Trillin rose up in the ranks from a position at Time Magazine to a staff gig at The New Yorker in 1963 where he continues to contribute today.

Brooke Gladstone: He's published upwards of 20 books and he even made a name for himself on the late-night TV circuit.

Isaac: Calvin Trillin has been writing for The New Yorker magazine for many years. He also writes a syndicated column of humor and satire for newspapers across the country, and recently did a one-man show on Broadway. Would you welcome Calvin Trillin? Calvin. You went to Broadway.

Calvin Trillin: That was close. I was about half a block off, Isaac.

Brooke Gladstone: Trillin's trademark humility and dry humor shows up in all of his writings, whether it's a story about the invention of the Buffalo Chicken Wing or the Civil Rights Movement, or an old ditty about our political woes. Here's one he recited to Jon Stewart in 2008,

Calvin Trillin: I have a song called The Rhyme of the Ancient Candidate. One of the stanzas is houses, houses everywhere, abodes in the amount, no short-term memories involved in failing to keep counts.

Brooke Gladstone: I recently sat down with Trillin to discuss his career and his latest book, The Lede: Dispatches From A Life in the Press. Welcome to the show, bud.

Calvin Trillin: Thank you, bro.

Brooke Gladstone: You call yourself a collector of ledes. What do you like about them?

Calvin Trillin: Well, I think that a lede sets the tone for what's going to be written. There was a New Yorker editor named Robert Bingham, lovely man. He edited my stuff and also John McPhee's, and he always said that McPhee and Trillin start stories in the middle. It's sort of true. I think what he means is that we jumped on when the narrative was going. It's like a carousel turning and you run a couple of steps and then you jump on it.

Brooke Gladstone: I always thought that was the style of The New Yorker. People always said the best way to write for The New Yorker is to put the last paragraph on the top and the top paragraph at the end.

Calvin Trillin: I never knew that. I've typed out when I was thinking about it, a couple of ledes and there's one, it came to light because of a bad left turn. The funniest lede I ever come across is from I think Baton Rouge Advocate.

Brooke Gladstone: September 23rd, 2019.

Calvin Trillin: Here it is, "A veterinarian prescribed antibiotics Monday for a camel that lives behind an Iberville Parish truck stop after a Florida woman told law officers she bit the 600-pound animal's genitalia after it sat on her while she and her husband entered his enclosure to retrieve their deaf dog." For a while, I couldn't read that without bursting into laughter, particularly the deaf dog. I don't know why that always got me.

Brooke Gladstone: The telling detail. You've observed a number of things about this lede, how the reader is drawn in with a single unpunctuated sentence that starts slowly and gradually becomes an express train that whistles right by the local stops.

Calvin Trillin: Something like that was so funny in itself that I think the task was just to erect a little scaffolding to hold it. It's the deaf dog still that gets me.

Brooke Gladstone: I think you can never go wrong with Florida woman

Calvin Trillin: Florida woman is good too.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] In your career, you moved around a lot from beat to beat. Religion was your least favorite.

Calvin Trillin: This was when I was at Time. Time in those days practiced something called group journalism where people in the field would file long stories and then somebody in New York writing one of the sections like religion, education, politics, something like that, would compress that along with what he could steal from The New York Times and what he heard from the Washington Bureau, I think into 70 lines.

I was for a while, a floater, which meant when somebody was on vacation, I moved literally into his office. I always said when you sit down on his chair, instant omniscience comes with that. I did religion for a few weeks and then I was trying to get out and so I put alleged in front of any historical religious event that I mentioned.

Brooke Gladstone: The Alleged Birth of Jesus.

Calvin Trillin: I had that in there. The senior editor just crossed out the alleged. They were really used to smart Alex.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Back in those days. I remember the novel of the same name as the role you had at Time Magazine then Floater that I thought your novel was hilarious. I remember that there was one editor who when you went into his office, he had his feet on his desk and all you could see were the soles of his shoes.

Calvin Trillin: That's right. He was known mainly for his ability to lean back at an angle. A voice appeared as if from some cave.

Brooke Gladstone: About group journalism, it had its pluses, I guess, but mostly minuses.

Calvin Trillin: The problem with it was that power over the story increased with distance from the story.

Brooke Gladstone: The reporter on the ground was the least powerful with regard to what appeared in its pages.

Calvin Trillin: Exactly. People used to say Time is a great place to work for a reporter as long as he doesn't read the magazine.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Because if he does, he's going to have a heart attack or faint.

Calvin Trillin: Yes. Well, I remember the Freedom Rides, I was gone for a couple of weeks. It was exciting and sometimes scary.

Brooke Gladstone: People trying to desegregate public transportation.

Calvin Trillin: Buses mainly, and I filed a lot on it. The next week I was talking to one of the fact-checkers and she said, "What'd you think of our cover story on the Freedom Rides?" I said, "I thought it was very interesting. Did you get my file?"

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: You didn't even see any of your work in there. [laughs]

Calvin Trillin: It was hard to see it.

Brooke Gladstone: You dedicate part of your book to obituaries in The New York Times critic, Dwight Garner wrote, "I've known people to attend the funerals of people they've never met because word had spread that Trillin would be speaking in the manner that an NBA non-fan might attend a Knicks game solely because he'd heard that Chaka Khan would be singing the national anthem." Pretty good.

Calvin Trillin: I think he may be exaggerating a little bit.

Brooke Gladstone: I don't know. What's your approach to eulogizing?

Calvin Trillin: Well, I have a general approach to memorial services, which is that they last an hour or as close to it as they can get. That if someone asks to speak, don't let him speak. Keep it short. Don't talk about yourself.

Brooke Gladstone: Well sure, but in order to keep it short, you have to boil down what makes that person noteworthy or you need to find that hook.

Calvin Trillin: Yes. That is true. I think Murray Kempton's obituary, which I think I did for the Sunday Times Magazine, the first line--

Brooke Gladstone: I have it here. You wrote, "It would be surprising if the last gentleman turned out to be a newspaper reporter, but Murray Kempton, who may in fact have been the last gentleman definitely identified as a newspaper reporter on his tax forms."

Calvin Trillin: Yes, but I think that was the central issue for me with Murray Kempton.

Brooke Gladstone: It's funny, I'm going to admit here that I and my husband, Fred Kaplan, know you a little and love you a lot. Fred said the other day that the only two people he ever met who talked exactly as they wrote were you and Kempton. Now your style is deadpan and sort of sneakily hilarious. Kempton's was ornate.

Calvin Trillin: It was ornate, but also it's interesting that Fred said that because Kempton also had the habit, if you were on a story with him together, a trial or something in one of the breaks, it would sometimes audition for a line or observation. He was a wonderful gentleman. I think it was his great-grandfather who was something like the Arch Episcopal Bishop of Baltimore, and Murray would leave saying, "God bless." You could see that was in him somewhere.

Brooke Gladstone: He always said that he came from shabby gentility. Do you remember what happened in that defamation case against him?

Calvin Trillin: No.

Brooke Gladstone: A plaintiff accused him of defaming him. His name was Laskey, and the judge responded with a decision in Murray Kempton style that basically said that the offending article was so cryptic, contradictory, and hyperbolic that you couldn't tell whether it was defaming the guy or not. Therefore, case dismissed.

[laughter]

Calvin Trillin: I always said that Murray Kempton's columns required group parsing. You had to have more than one person to figure it out, but they were often eloquent. Also, he had another quality that I really admired. He was the opposite of someone who kicked somebody when he's down. That was true, even of mobsters and things like that.

Brooke Gladstone: I know. [laughs]

Calvin Trillin: I think Carmine "The Snake" Persico-- I think his view was that people were in the line they were, whether they were senators or mobsters for a variety of reasons, but the question was how they played the cards that they were dealt. He was willing to give everybody a break.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm wondering, in the course of compiling your book, whether you came to any sort of realizations about the development of journalism over the course of your career. In one essay you remarked about how rereading your work, you were surprised by what turned out to be true?

Calvin Trillin: [chuckles] Well, I do two things I guess. I try to write moderately serious journalism and I also write what The New Yorker used to call casuals. Short pieces that are meant to be funny. I was just talking about my theory that when there was a lot of angst on Wall Street and a falling stock market, and it was right around the time when these very exotic things like credit default swaps were being introduced, my theory was that the problem with Wall Street was that too many smart people were going to Wall Street.

The people in my era who went to Wall Street were the pleasant probably lacrosse player or something, not stupid, but not really that smart. Those people couldn't have gotten involved with credit default swaps because they couldn't do the math.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Neither could a lot of people who did get involved with them.

Calvin Trillin: That's right. Then I got a couple of letters in the Times got letters saying, "That's a good theory." Sometimes when you're only joking, it's accidentally true.

Brooke Gladstone: What was your most notorious piece? Was it about a chicken?

Calvin Trillin: [laughs] It might have been about a chicken. By notorious, you mean?

Brooke Gladstone: I just remember the chicken that did arithmetic.

Calvin Trillin: Tic-tac-toe. I did enjoy taking people to Chinatown to play tic-tac-toe with the chicken because they would look at the arrangements and they would say, "But the chicken gets to go first."

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs]

Calvin Trillin: I'd say, "But he's a chicken"

[laughter]

Calvin Trillin: You're a human being. Surely there's some advantage in that. Then some of them would say, "I haven't played in years, the chicken plays every day."

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Do you have a favorite piece?

Calvin Trillin: I like the piece that I did around the time that Jimmy Carter selected as Attorney General Griffin Bill. I think it was called something like Remembrance of Moderates Past. It was about how people made the adjustment between the segregated days and politician.

Brooke Gladstone: Here's a quote, "I keep hearing about white people who say they've been working behind the scenes, A Black lawyer in New Orleans told me during the desegregation of public schools there in 1960, a time when the business and professional leadership in New Orleans stood silent while the city seemed to be taken over by a bunch of women in hair curlers screaming obscenities at six-year-olds. "Yes, sir." He said. "Must be getting mighty crowded back there behind the scenes."

Calvin Trillin: Yes. It turns out when the turn came that everybody was immoderate.

Brooke Gladstone: It's like all those people in the resistance during the Nazi invasion of France.

Calvin Trillin: That's right.

Brooke Gladstone: Was it your idea to write this compilation or did someone come to you?

Calvin Trillin: Well, I'm a veteran collector, recycler, I think some would say, and it was my idea. Random House said at first, why do I need to do it on the press that I could just do my favorite pieces or something like that. Turned out that a lot of my favorite pieces were about the press. Even though I still wasn't exactly sure why we were doing it, I said in the introduction that I thought my father had something to do with it.

I always assumed that my father's aspirations for me was that I become the president of the United States, and his fallback position was that I not become a ward of the county.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs]

Calvin Trillin: Once, when the Kansas City School system stopped in spring, ran out of money, he sent my sister and me to [unintelligible 00:48:49] Secretarial School to learn how to type. That really wasn't done for boys. That was a girl's thing to learn how to type. Neither the president of the United States or ward of the county actually needs typing.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs]

Calvin Trillin: I thought maybe he was pushing in direction of journalism. I think a lot of people in my era backed into journalism. The novel didn't work out or they were just being pressured to make a decision while they were working for a magazine. I don't think very many people in my cohort woke up and said, "I want to be a reporter." I think maybe Watergate might have changed that a bit.

Brooke Gladstone: Such a pleasure talking to you.

Calvin Trillin: Well, thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you so much. Calvin Trillin is longtime writer for The New Yorker and author of the new book, The Lede: Dispatches From a Life in the Press.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical directors, Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

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