Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,33

like this. What better place for the Lauders to advertise their lipstick, their perfume, their mascara? I was impressed.

At the end of the meal, after a deep-crimson tartare of cherries and an apricot tart, the waiter appeared with a cart laden with more sweets. We selected ornate chocolates and colorful cookies, and then the waiter removed the top from a delicate glass canister and pulled out long ropes of homemade marshmallow. As he cut them apart with silver scissors, Gina moved in to deliver the coup de grâce. “Do you know,” she asked, looking earnestly across the table, “why Cartier and Tiffany advertise in Gourmet?”

Mesmerized, I shook my head, rapt as the client.

“Because fine restaurants are the only places for which Americans still dress up. Where else are women going to wear their makeup and jewels? Restaurants aren’t like movies and the theater—they don’t take place in the dark. Every time we go out to eat, we are the star of our own show, and we want to look our best. You have to advertise in Gourmet!”

“I think that went well,” she said as we exited through the restaurant’s gold-and-glass doors. The errant limo had caught up, and we climbed into the backseat. “I have a feeling you and I are going to be a great team. We’ve been in a battle in the marketplace, and your time and commitment to getting our message out to the ad community is going to mean so much.”

She’s still selling, I thought, she can’t help herself. Only now I’ve become the client.

“There are so many sales calls I want to take you on!” As the pitch continued, alarm bells exploded in my head. The lunch hadn’t been horrible, but in my twenty years at newspapers I’d never met a single advertiser. Even as editor of the Los Angeles Times food section, which brought in thirty-five million dollars a year, I had never been asked to sit down with an advertiser. I’d expected magazines to respect the same strict firewall between advertising and editorial. Indeed, Truman had made it sound as if the magazine’s business was not my problem. Was spending time with advertisers really part of my job?

As soon as we got back to the office, I went stomping upstairs and, eschewing introductory small talk, blurted out, “Do I have to go out on sales calls?”

Truman looked up from his desk. “Every publisher appreciates the chance to take his editor along.” He is never, I thought, at a loss for an answer.

“You’re being evasive.” I was too upset to be tactful. “Just answer the question: Is it part of my job?”

“Well,” he admitted, “when I was an editor I hated it. So I did it so badly that my publishers stopped taking me.”

“Thanks!” I left his office with a happy heart; he’d told me exactly what I wanted to hear.

Truman’s words stayed with me the entire time I was at Gourmet, but as the years went on I began to see them very differently. At first I thought of them in a wistful way, hating myself for not being more Truman-like. But I just didn’t have it in me. Was it because I’m a woman, trained to be a good girl and play by the rules?

Truman had related that tale with a kind of glee. Why wouldn’t he? He’d figured out how to manipulate the system. And so, although I behaved with the grudging grace of a bratty teenager, each time Gina called, I went.

But in later years, when I was throwing myself wholeheartedly into the chase for advertising dollars, I wished I’d followed Truman’s example when I still had the chance. And at the end, when my primary job had become the endless quest for the money that might save the magazine, I looked back at those words with incredulity: They were proof positive of how enormously our entire world had shifted.

“STEVE FLORIO WANTS TO SEE you.” Robin telegraphed alarm at this call from the CEO. “Right away.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you always know!”

She shook her head. “Not this time.”

Could it be Gina? Had she asked the chief executive officer to have a word about the travel editor? I could find no other explanation for this command appearance.

“His secretary”—Robin was whispering now, as if this was a dark secret—“told me he was furious when Truman hired you without consulting him. He doesn’t like it when decisions are made behind his back.”

“But he was recuperating from a heart attack! Besides, why would