Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,29
month.”
Back in January, when I accepted the job, I’d insisted on having some time off after leaving the paper. That, of course, was before I’d rashly promised the staff that I’d come to Gourmet every day. “Are things so bad,” Jill asked, “that you felt you had to start early?”
That wasn’t it, although there had been a certain pleasure in watching Larry question everyone on the most minute details of the magazine’s workflow. Most of the time I had no idea what he was talking about, so I followed him around as he met with production people, paper experts, color correctors, and lab technicians. It was a crash course in the technical side of magazine-making.
At least twice a week Larry stormed into my office shaking his head over some new and even more outrageous situation he’d uncovered. Mostly I just listened. But when he came in holding out a budget report, his hands shaking with emotion, I sat up and took notice.
“Have you seen the production budget?” he raged. “It’s tiny. Vogue spends more on a single photo shoot than Gourmet spends on an entire issue. I’m guessing the former editor tried to save money so she’d stay below the radar.” He gave me a rare smile. “That worked out well for her, didn’t it?”
Larry, I knew, was more than capable of reorganizing the magazine without any help from me.
I was also taking enormous pleasure in watching Laurie conduct her own reconnaissance, slowly getting acquainted with the staff. She was, in her quiet way, as irate as Larry. “What a waste of resources! There’s so much talent here and it’s been squandered. The former editorial team made all the decisions at the top. None of the other editors ever got to share their ideas. Do you know what one senior editor told me?”
She was so angry she had to stop to compose herself. “She said she had never made a single assignment of her own. The executive editor simply doled out the manuscripts, and when they were done editing she’d come in with a ruler, pull up a chair, and go over it.”
“Oh, my God, it’s like something out of Dickens.”
“Exactly! And given the level of expertise in this staff…They’re all so smart, they know so much about food, and they have so many interesting ideas!” She told me that Jane Lear was a walking food encyclopedia who could answer questions about arcane ingredients and techniques without having to look anything up.
“I know,” I said. “A couple of weeks ago I asked her an innocent question about sesame seeds and she gave me an entire treatise on benne and how the seeds arrived from Africa with the slave trade. She even went into the science of the seeds.”
“She is,” said Laurie, “a national treasure. Do you know how lucky we are to have that kind of resource? Then there’s Jocelyn Zuckerman, one of the younger editors, who’s extraordinarily well read. She gave me a list of the writers she’d like to work with: Junot Díaz, Ann Beattie, Jane Smiley, David Foster Wallace…And that’s just for starters. She has a whole list of young literary writers I’ve never even heard of.”
Laurie had learned that the lone male editor, James Rodewald, was passionate about wine and itching to make Gourmet’s wine coverage more appealing to younger oenophiles. “And I can’t wait,” she said, “for you to see the way Romulo imitates your walk. He had the entire kitchen laughing until they were crying.”
Laurie didn’t need me any more than Larry did, so it was certainly not a sense of duty that brought me in the door every day. As I struggled to explain why I’d started early, I tried to put my feelings into words. The energy in that office was so potent, it was as if we’d pulled the cork on a bottle of champagne and released a vibrant explosion. At the Los Angeles Times, Laurie and I had done all the heavy lifting; here we didn’t have to do a thing. When we asked, “What do you think we ought to do?” the staff invented an entirely new magazine. They were bursting with ideas—for writers, for columns, for special issues—and it was exhilarating. Magazine-making is a collaborative process, and watching Gourmet grow and change was so enthralling that I didn’t want to miss a single day.
When I’d contemplated the job I’d worried about the burden of being a boss, afraid the staff would fear and resent me. But