Day: September 20, 2017

Lillian Ross, the ever-watchful New Yorker reporter whose close, narrative style defined a memorable and influential 70-year career, including a revealing portrait of Ernest Hemingway, a classic Hollywood expose and a confession to an adulterous affair, has died at age 99.

Ross died early Wednesday at Lenox Hill Hospital after suffering a stroke, New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison said Wednesday.

In an email statement to The Associated Press, New Yorker editor David Remnick called Ross a groundbreaking writer.

“Lillian would knock my block off for saying so, she’d find it pretentious, but she really was a pioneer, both as a woman writing at The New Yorker and as a truly innovative artist, someone who helped change and shape non-fiction writing in English,” Remnick said in a statement.

Hundreds of Ross’ “Talk of the Town” dispatches appeared in The New Yorker, starting in the 1940s when she wrote about Harry Truman’s years as a haberdasher, and continuing well into the 21st century, whether covering a book party at the Friars Club, or sitting with the daughters of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II as they watched a Broadway revival of “South Pacific.”

After the death of J.D. Salinger in 2010, Ross wrote a piece about her friendship with the reclusive novelist and former New Yorker contributor.

Her methods were as crystallized and instinctive as her writing. She hated tape recorders (”fast, easy and lazy”), trusted first impressions and believed in the “mystical force” that “makes the work seem delightfully easy and natural and supremely enjoyable.”

“It’s sort of like having sex,” she once wrote.

Ross’ approach, later made famous by the “New Journalists” of the 1960s, used dialogue, scene structure and other techniques associated with fiction writers. She regarded herself as a short story writer who worked with facts, or even as a director, trying to “build scenes into little story-films.” In 1999, her 1964 collection of articles, “Reporting,” was selected by a panel of experts as one of the 100 best examples of American journalism in the 20th century. The group, assembled by New York University, ranked it No. 66.

“She is the mistress of selective listening and viewing, of capturing the one moment that entirely illumines the scene, of fastening on the one quote that Tells All,” novelist Irving Wallace wrote in a 1966 New York Times review of her work.

Short and curly-haired, unimposing and patient, Ross tried her best to let the stories speak for themselves, but at times the writer interrupted.

In the late 1940s, Hemingway came to New York for shopping and socializing and Ross joined him as he drank champagne with Marlene Dietrich, bought a winter coat and visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, flask in hand. She presented the author as a volatile bulk of bluster and insecurity, speaking in telegraphic shorthand (”You want to go with me to buy coat?”) and even punching himself in the stomach to prove his muscle.

Ross was friendly with Hemingway — she liked most of her subjects — but her article was criticized, and welcomed, as humanizing a legend. “Lillian Ross wrote a profile of me which I read, in proof, with some horror,” Hemingway later recalled. “But since she was a friend of mine and I knew that she was not writing in malice she had a right to make me seem that way if she wished.”

Not long after, Ross went to Hollywood to report on director John Huston as he worked on an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel “The Red Badge of Courage.” She soon realized that the movie was more interesting than any one person: She was witness to a disaster. Ross’ reports in The New Yorker, released in 1952 as the book “Picture,” were an unprecedented chronicle of studio meddling as MGM took control of the film and hacked it to 70 minutes.

Praised by Hemingway among others, “Picture” was a direct influence on such future Hollywood authors as John Gregory Dunne (”Studio”) and anticipated the nonfiction novel that Truman Capote perfected a decade later with “In Cold Blood.” Huston’s daughter, actress Anjelica Huston, became a lifelong friend.

“My parents loved and respected her, and trusted her. She was, they would say, different from other reporters,” Huston wrote in the foreword to the book’s 50th anniversary edition.

Deeply private even around her New Yorker colleagues, Ross did step out in 1998 when she published “Here But Not Here,” a surprising and explicit memoir of her long-rumored, 40-year liaison with New Yorker editor William Shawn, a mating of secret souls allegedly consummated in a bedroom once used by Dietrich as a clothes closet.

“We were drawn to each other from the first by all the elusive forces that people have been trying to pin down from the beginning of time,” Ross wrote.

William Shawn had died six years earlier, but his widow was still alive when the book was published, leading New York Times writer (and former New Yorker deputy editor) Charles McGrath to call it “a cruel betrayal of the Shawns’ much-valued privacy — a tactless example of the current avidity for tell-all confessions.”

While involved with Shawn, Ross adopted a son, Erik, who in later years would accompany his mother on assignments. Her New Yorker work was compiled in several books, most recently “Reporting Always.”

She was born in Syracuse, New York, and was always more comfortable as an observer and played hooky just to hang around professional newspaper offices. She graduated from Hunter College, worked at the liberal New York City daily PM, then was hired by The New Yorker in the mid-1940s, when the magazine was looking for women writers because so many men were serving in World War II.

“We have sent her on stories ranging from in subject matter from politics to uplift brassieres, and she’s done splendidly by both,” PM editor Peggy Wright Weidman wrote to Shawn. “Another baffler is that she likes to work and does so, at any hour of the day, night, or weekend, with concentration and no nonsense.”
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The collapse of a prominent Native American media network has triggered debate over how Native media can best serve the interests of communities across Indian Country and counter stereotypes and misinformation in the mainstream press.

Native American journalism dates back to the Cherokee Phoenix, founded in 1828 to advocate against the U.S. government policy of assimilation and forced removal. Many newspapers have since come and gone, victims of high costs and low revenue.

The most recent casualty was Indian Country Today Media Network (ICTMN), whose publisher, Ray Halbritter of the Oneida Indian Nation, this month announced that after 36 years in business, the network would take a break to explore “alternative business models.”

The news disappointed many, who surmised that the venture was too costly to support.

“This is a really tough environment for anyone that’s in the advertising side, and Indian Country Today was selling advertising,” said independent journalist and blogger Mark Trahant.

Others suggest ICTMN failed because it lost touch with the audience it intended to serve.

Humble beginnings

ICTMN began as the Lakota Times, founded in 1981 by Oglala Lakota journalist and editor Tim Giago, serving South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. A weekly community newspaper, independently owned, it gradually expanded its coverage to national issues and was renamed Indian Country Today.

New York State’s Oneida Nation, a tribe which has profited through the gaming industry, bought the paper in 1998. They later renamed it ICTMN and moved operations to New York City. In 2013, they ended the print edition and shifted online. Last April, ICTMN launched a glossy, bimonthly magazine, Indian Country, at considerable expense.

“One of the things I think they forgot was all these folks here in Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Cheyenne River, Crow Creek or Standing Rock reservations,” said Giago, now publisher of Native Sun News Today. “They live way out in the middle of nowhere. A lot of them don’t have money to buy computers, least of all to hook up to the internet.”

Giago and others have also criticized ICTMN for hiring non-Native American writers and editors.

“Most of the other Native publications over the past couple of generations were written and edited by people who were deeply involved in their respective communities,” said Mohawk journalist Doug George-Kanentiio, vice president of the Hiawatha Institute for Indigenous Knowledge and a former editor of the now-defunct newspaper Akwesasne Notes.

He also questioned whether a network owned and funded by a tribal government could guarantee editorial independence.

“Whoever is writing the checks by and large determines the content,” he said.

‘Crabs in a bucket’

ICTMN op/ed editor Raymond Cook bristles at the criticisms.

“People always poke at success,” he said, citing the analogy of crabs in a bucket, “where one crab is trying to get out of the bucket, and then the others pull him down.”

First, he explained why ICTMN shut down.

“The state of New York recently handed out several gaming licenses, and now these non-tribal entities are trying to creep into the casino market,” he said. “So, the Oneida had to readjust its revenue projections. And reluctantly, with tears in their eyes, they put us on hiatus.”

He denies ICTMN lost touch with tribes.

“New York City has a larger Native American population than any other U.S. city,” he said. “So we never moved out of Indian Country. If we had stayed in South Dakota, we’d still be waiting for internet connection.”

He defends ICTMN for hiring non-native writers, whom he calls ‘indigenous identifiers,’ as well as targeting non-Native audiences.

“’Cause we can’t talk to ourselves only,” he said.

The paper regularly interviewed prominent U.S. politicians, including President Barack Obama.

“We not only educated our readers on the views of these politicians on Indian-focused issues, but we also helped ensure that Native America was on the radar of many of the top power brokers in our country and beyond,” said ICTMN’s Washington bureau chief Rob Capriccioso, a member of the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians.

Looking forward

At their recent annual meeting, members of the Native American Journalists Association discussed setting up a national Native American wire service to serve both tribal and mainstream media.

“Instead of trying to create a new vehicle, we’d just create a new driver,” journalist Trahant said.

In the meantime, ICTMN’s Cook said his network is looking for a qualified party to take over operations, something that would require an annual investment of $2.5 million to $3 million until 2021.

“Basically, we’d sell it to them for $10, and they can take over operations, as long as they can guarantee our journalistic standards,” he said. “It could be a tribe, a business, a government — anything, as long as it’s based in Indian Country and it’s run by Natives.”
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Hillary Clinton’s What Happened had a big debut.

Clinton’s book about her stunning loss in 2016 to Donald Trump sold more than 300,000 copies in the combined formats of hardcover, e-book and audio, Simon & Schuster told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The book’s hardcover sales of 168,000 was the highest opening for any nonfiction release in five years, according to NPD BookScan, which tracks around 85 percent of retail print sales. Mark Owen’s No Easy Day, a 2012 memoir about the killing of Osama bin Laden, sold more than 250,000 copies in its first week.

Sales for What Happened far exceeded the first week numbers of more than 100,000 copies for Clinton’s book about her years as secretary of state, Hard Choices, which came out in 2014 as she was preparing to launch her run for president.

What Happened has been at or near the top of the Amazon.com best-seller list since its publication Sept. 12 despite a suspicious early wave of negative reader reviews (later pulled by Amazon), likely posted by commentators who had not yet read the book.

“The remarkable response to What Happened indicates that, notwithstanding all that has been written and discussed over the last year, there is clearly an overwhelming desire among readers to learn about and experience, from Hillary Clinton’s singular perspective, the historic events of the 2016 election,” Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy said in a statement. “In its candor and immediacy, What Happened is satisfying that demand.”

Clinton’s all-time opening was for her memoir, Living History, a 2003 release that included her first extended comments on the affair between her husband, President Bill Clinton, and White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Living History sold more than 600,000 copies in its first week and came out before the fall of the Borders superstore chain and struggles of Barnes & Noble weakened the hardcover market.

Clinton had promised to let her “guard down” for her first book to come out when she was neither in government nor seeking office.

Responses to What Happened, as with so much of Clinton’s political career, have varied widely. What Happened has been called everything from boring and self-serving to revelatory and poignant.

According to Simon & Schuster, the book set a company record for weekly digital audio sales and sold more e-book editions in a single week than any nonfiction release from the publisher since Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs in 2011.
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Jake LaMotta, the former middleweight champion whose life in and out of the ring was depicted in the film “Raging Bull,” for which Robert De Niro won an Academy Award, has died, his fiancee said Wednesday. He was 95.

LaMotta died Tuesday at a Miami-area hospital from complications of pneumonia, according to fiancee Denise Baker.

“Rest in Peace, Champ,” De Niro said in a statement.

The Bronx Bull, as he was known in his fighting days, compiled an 83-19-4 record with 30 knockouts, in a career that began in 1941 and ended in 1954.

LaMotta fought the great Sugar Ray Robinson six times, handing Robinson the first defeat of his career and losing the middleweight title to him in a storied match.

In the fight before he lost the title, LaMotta saved the championship in movie-script fashion against Laurent Dauthuille. Trailing badly on all three scorecards, LaMotta knocked out the challenger with 13 seconds left in the fight.

LaMotta threw a fight against Billy Fox, which he admitted in testimony before the Kefauver Committee, a U.S. Senate committee investigating organized crime in 1960.

“I purposely lost a fight to Billy Fox because they promised me that I would get a shot to fight for the title if I did,” LaMotta said in 1970 interview printed in Peter Heller’s 1973 book “In This Corner: 40 World Champions Tell Their Stories.”

LaMotta was “stopped” by Fox in the fourth round on November 14, 1947, in Madison Square Garden. He didn’t get a title shot until 10 fights later.

On June 16, 1949, in Detroit, he became middleweight champion when the Frenchman Marcel Cerdan couldn’t continue after the 10th round.

Of the claim that Cerdan had to quit because of a shoulder injury, LaMotta said in 1970: “Something’s bound to happen to you in a tough fight, cut eye, broken nose or broken hand or something like that. So you could make excuses out of anything, you know, but you got to keep on going if you’re a champ or you’re a contender.”

Renowned for his strong chin, and the punishment he could take, and dish out, LaMotta was knocked down only once – in a 1952 loss to light-heavyweight Danny Nardico – in his 106 fights.

LaMotta’s first defense was supposed to be a rematch with Cerdan, but the Frenchman was killed when a plane en route to the United States crashed in the Azores in 1949.

So in his first defense, LaMotta outpointed Tiberio Mitri on July 12, 1950, in New York, then on September 13, he rallied to knock out Dauthuille at Detroit.

LaMotta’s title reign ended on February 14, 1951, when Robinson stopped him in the 13th round in Chicago. In a fight that became known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, LaMotta gave as good as he got in the early rounds, then took tremendous punishment. He would not go down.

In their second match, on February 5, 1943, in New York, LaMotta won a 10-round decision, giving Robinson his first defeat in the 41st fight of his illustrious career.

LaMotta was born July 10, 1922, on New York City’s Lower East Side but was raised in the Bronx. After retiring from boxing in 1954, he owned a nightclub for a time in Miami, then dabbled in show business and commercials. He also made personal appearances and for a while in the 1970s he was a host at a topless nightclub in New York.

The 1980 film “Raging Bull,” based on LaMotta’s memoir written 10 years earlier, was nominated for eight Academy Awards. Though director Martin Scorsese was passed over, De Niro, who gained 50 pounds to portray the older, heavier LaMotta, won the best actor award.

In 1998, LaMotta, who had four daughters, lost both of his sons. Jake LaMotta Jr., 51, died from cancer in February. Joe LaMotta, 49, was killed in plane crash off Nova Scotia in September.

A funeral in Miami and a memorial service in New York City are being planned, Baker said.

 
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