Jim Bellows fired me.
NOT THAT THIS MADE JIM UNIQUE IN PUBLISHING. The road full of bosses who have canned my sorry ass is long and winding, from Jann Wenner (who practically threw me bodily out of his San Francisco Rolling Stone office) to David Packer (who told our staff at California Magazine that he should have done it years earlier) and many others too numerous to count.
MY FIRING OFFENSE WAS PRETTY GRIEVOUS IN JIM’S CASE. A movie star had told me, (I was a “National Writer” for TV Guide at the time) that her biographer had lifted her computer — I think they call that grand larceny, serious stuff and, as it turned out under a gag order that she flaunted — but I went ahead and put it in a story, after checking its authenticity with only one other source, a tabloid reporter on Fleet Street. Of course, the biographer's wife threatened to sue and no amount of charm would make it go away. Jim, my editor at the magazine, tried to cover for my carelessness but the higher-ups in New York wanted blood and mine was tasty. Big lesson learned on that one, by the way.
JIM, OF COURSE, WHEN THE MOMENT CAME TO RID THE OFFICE OF ME,fired me in the unique way he treated all his writers. You had no idea what he was saying but through his pauses, hems, haws and bobbing, you got it. I was out.
BUT WE REMAINED CLOSE FRIENDS, probably closer than if I had continued to work for him.
HE FOUND ME AMUSING, LIKE SOME KIND OF PET. I MADE HIM LAUGH. Which, by the way, was easy. Jim was one light-hearted dude. He hated stuffy phonies like the ones he had to endure as a top editor at the Los Angeles Times, which he, legendarily, called “the velvet coffin.”
AND HE LOVED GOSSIP. Bring Jim a juicy story about someone famous and you could see his mouth open wide, his face light up. He’d even slap his knee the way people do in a cartoon.
AND HE WAS INTERESTED IN EVERYTHING.This is a guy who just knew that the Internet was going to be big, and went to work as editorial director for Prodigy, long before any of us even owned a computer. This is the guy who inspired the creation of two of the best magazines that ever existed: New York, when he was editor-in-chief of The New York Herald Tribune, and West, when he was at the Los Angeles Times. This is the guy who sensed that Tom Wolfe, who was unafraid to take on The New Yorker, would make a great New Journalist and that Gail Sheehy would be more useful on the streets of New York than in a lame home-ec, ladies’-style section.
BUT IT WAS HIS WORK AT THE LA HERALD EXAMINERwhere he brought it all together. Festooning the nearly moribund daily with a bunch of rebels, he created a must-read for a city that couldn’t care less about reading. But when that paper finally went under (it had been severely damaged by a six-year-old strike before Jim even got there), Jim then went on to star in many other different media. He served as an early managing editor of the TV show, Entertainment Tonight (before it became, as Homer Simpson calls it, Publicity Tonight) and then at TV Guide where the magazine became a real chronicler of the TV business. He knew a story when he saw it. And he hated laziness. “Begin at once and do the best you can,” read his calling card. Words to live by.
THEY SAY THAT JIM’S CAREER GOT ITS INITIAL START WHEN, while he was reporting on the Ku Klux Klan for a Southern newspaper, the Klansmen tried to besmirch him by pouring liquor down his throat.
I’M HERE TO REPORT THAT NO ONE, FROM THAT MOMENT ON, ever had to force liquor down Jim Bellows’ throat.
Which is just the kind of zinger Jim would want in his obit.
Just to make it interesting.
