Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,38
Condé Nast’s cozy corporate theater, shook back her hair, and straightened her short black skirt—“explain what I do.” Diana was not tall, but she projected a distinct air of authority. “Our biggest problem is that advertisers are like cockroaches. We no sooner create a design than they colonize it, appropriating it in an attempt to make their ads look like editorial. So we have to keep changing what we do. It’s my job to stay one step ahead of them.”
A gasp ran through the room. The reps all looked appalled and I turned to Gina; even beneath the makeup I could see that her face had gone pale. “Please tell me she didn’t just call the advertisers cockroaches!”
“She did!” I laughed, delighted by Diana’s boldness. Gina shot me a glare of pure loathing. It was one more proof that I had taken Truman’s words to heart and erected a firewall between advertising and editorial. One more proof that as far as I was concerned the magazine’s economic health was not my problem.
But Diana, like most art directors, considered advertisers her mortal enemies. They were, she was convinced, intent on destroying the beauty of her work. She was always looking for new ways to get the better of them.
Never one to mince words, Diana stalked the halls of Condé Nast with the confidence of a creature who knows she’s in her natural habitat. On her first day she marched into my office and tossed the current issue on my desk. “We can definitely do better.” She opened the magazine and turned to “Gourmet Every Day,” the section of quick, simple recipes we’d invented to overcome critiques of our recipes as too complicated. “You’ve been working backward.”
“What do you mean?”
She pointed to the stiff rectangular photographs and long lines of text. “The copy is dictating the visuals. That’s fine in the front of the book. But the well belongs to the art, and you should be working the other way around.”
She’d lost me.
“Come. Let me show you.” I followed her into the art department, where she stood at the light box, gesturing at layouts, talking with her hands. She gave off the clean, slightly medicinal scent of nicotine gum, which had a strangely sensual quality. “We’re going to fit the recipes right into the photographs.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If we get finished recipes from the cooks before we start shooting, we’ll know exactly how much space the type will take up. Then Romulo can set up the photograph so the recipe literally becomes part of the picture. See? It will fit right inside. We’ll waste less space and end up with a more dynamic page.”
I was still lost, so Diana forged ahead. She and Romulo—thrilled that his nemesis was gone—began collaborating, and when Diana showed me the final result, I was stunned. The images were now married to the words, giving the pages a loose rhythm that invited you to cook. “What do you think?”
I looked at the picture she was holding: orange cream meringues splashed with a chocolate sauce that dripped so deliciously down the page I reached out a finger, thinking to take a taste. “I love it!”
Diana grinned and ran her hand across the image. I thought of my father: She was caressing the page as if the magazine were whispering secrets through her fingers, secrets she alone could hear. Even the little smile she wore resembled his. “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?” I asked.
Diana shrugged. “I’ve never worked at a food book.” It wasn’t arrogance; she simply loved her work. Her redesign was clean and simple: The pages didn’t draw attention to themselves, but each time I looked at them I heard my father’s voice. “I want all traces of my work to vanish,” he once told me, explaining that he was most successful when you did not notice the design. “All I want people to feel,” he’d said, “is that they’ll keep turning the pages because they’re so easy to read.
“Now, book jackets,” he’d continued, “are a different matter. They’re supposed to catch your eye and keep it. Like magazine covers, they’re mostly advertising. And that,” he admitted ruefully, “has never been my strong suit.”
I worried that Diana was the same: better at the quiet interior than the loud, eye-catching cover. As the months passed I worried even more. Magazines make the bulk of their money in the fourth quarter, and I stressed about those end-of-the-year issues. Diana had encouraged Romulo to create a beautiful