Vol. 81: At last! My 15 minutes of fame

…wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be

         “In the future,” Andy Warhol predicted 56 years ago, “everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” As he saw it, information technology would render fame accessible to nearly everyone, but that kind of fame would almost always be fleeting.

         Because I was a young Wall Street Journal reporter at the time, my initial reaction was: Who wants to be famous? Fame, in my view, impeded a journalist’s mission: to seek truth. If you’re famous, people will inevitably adjust their behavior in your presence. If you want to observe what they’re really like, better to be a fly on the wall.

         One small example: In 1980 I was an op-ed columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer who had frequently criticized Philadelphia’s former (and putative future) mayor, Frank Rizzo. But my picture never appeared with my column. That year, California’s governor, Jerry Brown, challenged President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination. A Philadelphia lawyer hosted a reception for Brown that turned out to be a rare occasion where both rival wings of the local Democratic party— the liberals and the Rizzocrats— showed up in the same place. Rizzo himself didn’t attend, but his cronies gravitated to one room, where they sat around swapping funny stories about their boss and other politicians. I walked into the room and sat down on a sofa. These Rizzo rooters had no idea who I was, and they were too full of themselves to inquire. So I just listened, and I learned— a simple but vital journalistic practice that would have been impossible for a celebrity like, say, Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Anderson Cooper.

Who needs awards?

         Like many journalists, early in my career I sought and accumulated my share of writing awards, the better to label myself an “award-winning writer.” But once I had covered my office wall with plaques and trophies, I soured on the whole exercise. At their best, I came to feel, awards provide recognition to those who are deserving but overlooked. (If you're the Son of God but nobody believes you, nothing can quite boost your credibility like winning the Templeton Prize.) But in most cases, I sensed, awards went to those candidates with the strongest marketing support.

At their worst…. well, consider the National Book Awards, or the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Close to 4 million books are published in the U.S. every year. Given the diversity of human tastes and the limitations of time, how could members of any prize committee presume to read some 300 nominated works of fiction, many of them large and complex novels, much less reach some consensus as to which one is best? Better you should choose America’s best spouse or best friend.

Or consider journalism’s venerated Pulitzer Prize. Janet Cooke of the Washington Post won one in 1981 for a story she concocted out of whole cloth. Tom Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Sun-Times won a Pulitzer in 1970 for spot-news reporting that was subsequently shown to be flat-out wrong. Walter Duranty of the New York Times won a Pulitzer in 1932 for a glowing series about the Soviet Union that somehow overlooked that year’s devastating famine in Soviet Ukraine.

As for the Nobel Prize, well…Do I really want to be lumped in the same group with Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and Bob Dylan?

Harper Lee after Mockingbird

Ultimately, I came to feel, awards reflect popularity rather than quality. Sally Field nailed it when she exclaimed, upon winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1985: "You like me!"

But does winning a Nobel or a Pritzker or a Pulitzer or an Oscar make you a better writer, architect, journalist, or actress? I couldn’t help noticing that William Faulkner wrote 14 mostly great novels before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949; afterward, he wrote five books, mostly of lesser impact. Ernest Hemingway wrote nothing of note after winning his Nobel in 1953. Harper Lee never wrote another novel in the half-century after she won the 1961 Pulitzer for To Kill A Mockingbird. Allen Drury, presumably inspired by his Pulitzer for his very first book— Advise and Consent, in 1960— dashed off 20 more novels and four works of non-fiction in his remaining 38 years, all utterly forgettable.

On the basis of such examples, I concluded that I would produce better work by staying hungry and humble rather than rich and famous. So, at some point I simply stopped applying for awards (unless the prize money was extraordinary).

Gluck’s distant message

Frank Sinatra once observed that success in any field “enables you to continue doing what you want to do.” He was surely correct. Had I sought and won more awards, perhaps opportunities to write books or articles would have come my way more easily. But would I have produced better work? I don’t pretend to know the answer, or whether I was right to shun the awards game. I confess that, in the late afternoon of my life, I’m increasingly aware of the number of obituaries I read that describe the deceased as a Nobel or Pulitzer winner, as if that convenient (if deceptive) label indicates someone important.

         My first decades as a journalist, editor, critic, and author left me feeling not so much fulfilled as impatient to grasp the world’s cosmic truths before my sojourn on Earth expired. To everything I read and heard— in newspapers, magazines, even the New York Review of Books or The New Yorker, for God’s sake— I found myself shouting, “So what? What difference will it make a century from now?”

         There’s a two-minute ballet in Act III of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Eurydice that I sometimes listen to late at night. Across the vast distance of 262 years, that music speaks to me of something I once had but lost— a bizarre notion in itself, since I’ve never really lost anything: never been orphaned or widowed or heartbroken or bankrupted. But I’d happily decline a Nobel or a Pulitzer if, 300 years hence, I could connect with somebody the way Gluck connects with me.

The New Yorker’s spotlight

         Why am I telling you this now? Because last week, after 82 years on this planet, I finally got my allotted Warholian 15 minutes of fame: For the first time in life, my name appeared in an issue of The New Yorker.

         The occasion was a July 29 essay by Louis Menand titled “When Yuppies Ruled,” which in turn drew on Tom McGrath’s recent book, Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the ‘80s, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation.

         Menand’s second paragraph informed his readers that the term “Yuppies”— an abbreviation for the young urban professionals who once abandoned suburbs and flocked instead to big cities— “first appeared in print in 1980, in a Chicago magazine piece by Dan Rottenberg.”

         The online version of Menand’s article provided a link to my original article, offering the me the satisfaction of re-reading my 44-year-old effort and seeing how well it has withstood the passage of time. (It challenged the wishful-thinking notion that Yuppies— almost all of them single or childless— would save America’s cities: “In most ethical and civilized societies,” I wrote then, “the family remains the most appropriate vehicle for transmitting values from one generation to the next.”)

Where were the fact checkers?

         That New Yorker issue had barely arrived in my own mailbox before I was deluged with messages from folks around the globe whom I hadn’t heard from in years. A high school classmate, now living in Israel, excerpted a salient paragraph of my 1980 article (“The Yuppies seek neither comfort nor security, but stimulation, and they can find that only in the densest sections of the city”) and transmitted it to our classmates.

         I heard from Joe DiStefano, the Philadelphia’s Inquirer’s longtime business columnist. I suggested to Joe that we never know which seeds we p[lant will bear fruit. He replied by reminding me of the famous line from Ecclesiastes: “Cast thy bread upon the waters, and thou shalt find it after many days.” He also provided his grandmother’s astute retort: “No, you won’t; the ducks will eat it.”

         Just one slight problem with my moment in the limelight. Menand, in describing my use of the “Yuppie” term, wrote, “Rottenberg said that he had heard the word being used around Chicago, possibly in real-estate circles.” But I never said any such thing, nor did Menand ever ask me. I had simply told McGrath (who did ask me) that I hadn’t invented the term, because in 1980 it already seemed ubiquitous not only in Chicago but in Philadelphia (where I had moved from Chicago eight years earlier).

         A minor quibble? Of course. But The New Yorker has long prided itself on its legendary army of fact-checkers who nail down every tiny detail and hypothesis before approving an article for print. Following a 2017 talk by Peter Canby— a stalwart of The New Yorker’s fact-checking department since 1978— the Columbia Journalism Review reported: “For each story that goes to print, Canby’s staff will endeavor to speak to every person mentioned.”

         Hmm. Do you suppose they lost my phone number?

         The bottom line: Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes’ worth of fame isn’t what it used to be. And neither, apparently, is The New Yorker. Christoph Willibald Gluck, on the other hand, has held up very well indeed.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com.