Terry McDonell has spoken at a lot of memorial services: Hunter Thompson’s, Peter Matthiessen’s, and George Plimpton’s, to name a few. In his remarks, he always mentions that elegies are a “miserable assignment,” a term he picked up from a letter Ernest Hemingway wrote to Sara and Gerald Murphy when their youngest son died. McDonell adds, though, that the subtext is that “we are lucky to have the lives we lived, no matter how rocky things go.”
The Accidental Life: An Editor’s Notes on Writers and Writing, to be published by Knopf this August, is a kind of memorial to McDonell’s mentors, heroes, colleagues, and friends, as well as some of the last century’s best writers, including Tom McGuane and Richard Ford. In writing his book, McDonell taps into his nearly four decades in magazine journalism at such well-known titles as Esquire, LA magazine, Men’s Journal, Newsweek, Outside, Rolling Stone, San Francisco magazine, and Us Weekly, as well as, Sports Illustrated, where he worked until 2012. The Accidental Life is also a bittersweet tribute to the golden age of new journalism (and its paler descendants) and a guidebook to a craft that has become increasingly devalued, a driver’s manual published for the Google-era driverless car.
It’s also the story of McDonell’s own lucky life, told through other people’s words, footnoted by his experiences with them. “The people I worked with were more interesting than I was,” McDonell says with a self-deprecating laugh. The “rocky things”—his father’s early death, his impoverished childhood, the firings, the difficult bosses, the end of his first marriage, his own mortality—are only hinted at. “Maybe all that is another book,” he concedes over breakfast at Odeon, a revived publishing hangout from the early ’80s in lower Manhattan.
Of his colleagues and friends, McDonell says: “I didn’t want to use them. Of course, I was cashing the check.” And he doesn’t use them: he remembers them; he celebrates their talents and passions; he delights in their friendship and their cocaine- and alcohol-infused adventures; he glorifies the macho angst (“whatever that is,” he writes) of their brotherhood. “Work became friendship, and friendship is redemptive,” he says, “Not in a sense of career but in life.” The 72-year-old author, who was born on a U.S. Navy air station in Norfolk, Va., the son of a widowed mother, grew up mostly in Northern California. He didn’t intend to write a book about his career or about the writers he worked with—or even about what it takes to run a successful magazine—although The Accidental Life covers all those topics.
The magazines McDonell edited have garnered numerous accolades, including six National Magazine Awards (the Oscars of magazine journalism) from 28 nominations; he was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2012. That same year, as he was cleaning out his files in his office at Time Inc., unearthing artifacts from his tenure at 13 magazines, the thought of a book began to germinate. “What if writers were the story?” he writes in his book’s first chapter. “What an idea. I know it sound pompous, and I hate that, but what I really love are ideas.” McDonell’s passion for ideas is what makes him such a smart editor. (In 1987, he even started a magazine called Smart.)
By the way, don’t even think about calling McDonell legendary. “Paul Bunyon is legendary,” he says. “Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson are legendary.” He argued with his publishers about using that adjective. Any magazine editor worth his salt knows how important the first six words of a lead are, but the best ones also know not to hype. Nevertheless, the Knopf press release begins with the words, “Legendary editor, journalist, and publishing entrepreneur...”
Also, don’t call the book a memoir, though one suspects that is how it will be marketed. “If it were a true memoir, everything would be laid out,” McDonell says. “That’s not what I wanted to do.” More than likely, The Accidental Life will be shelved among the tell-all tomes, though his literary band of brothers didn’t exactly like the idea of memoir. “The vanity was unattractive,” McDonell says.
As he tells it, close friend George Plimpton—who founded the Paris Review and wrote pieces for SI about his participatory exploits as a Mets pitcher, professional golfer, and tennis player—had been offered a million dollars by publishers to write his memoir. “I don’t want to write about my life,” he told McDonell, who in turn told Plimpton that he already was writing about his life. “Shouldn’t that be enough?” Plimpton replied. Several years later, the night before he died, Plimpton signed a contract for a memoir, with a $750,000 advance.
Hunter Thompson, on the other hand, found a way to avoid the assignment altogether, as McDonell responded when asked about his other partner in crime. When Thompson killed himself with a shotgun at age 68, McDonell writes, varying reports suggested that he was depressed by “advancing age, chronic medical problems, and the end of football season.”
The end of football season (and the gap before basketball) was the impetus for coming up with the still hugely popular Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. The idea predates McDonell; SI editor André Laguerre (“The only other editor who lasted as long as I did,” McDonell says) had the original brainstorm. A cover photograph of a pretty woman on a beach somewhere was really a no-brainer for selling magazines when nights were long and sports were dormant.
McDonell knows something about selling content himself. “When it was ready to be sent out,” he says about the manuscript for The Accidental Life, “Binky [ICM’s Amanda Urban] said that I needed to add some of that stuff if I wanted it to sell.” There’s the chapter in The Accidential Life simply called “Swimsuit,” about Russian model Anne V., who didn’t make the cover despite appearing in various issues over the course of 10 years—almost as long as McDonell was editor at the time. She had freckles and wasn’t as large-breasted as the other models, he writes. When Anne V. asked him at a launch party in Las Vegas why she wasn’t on the cover, he replied, “It’s a business.” He explained further that she had never tested as well in market research as some of the other women. She understood. “Freckles,” she said.
McDonell says, “ I was feminist—so called.” (Whatever that means.) If the 10 pages of acknowledgements are any clue, women have been key in his life, but in the course of his long career, he assigned them stories infrequently. McDonell devotes chapters to Jim Harrison, Peter Matthiessen, Tom McGuane, P.J. O’Rourke, and James Salter, but the only woman with her own section is his dear friend Liz Tilberis, a British magazine editor who resuscitated the American Harper’s Bazaar for Hearst. At the memorial following her death from ovarian cancer in 1999, McDonell described her as “a caviar hound and a rocker.”
In another chapter, “Elaine, Francis and Louie,” Elaine Kaufman, the renowned proprietor of Elaine’s, the saloon known for its bold-faced clientele, appears as part of a triple-header. The other two? Frank Sinatra and Lewis Lapham, the former editor of Harper’s and now editor of Lapham’s Quarterly.
Let’s be honest. In the dawn of new journalism, when nonfiction narratives by genre breakers like Gay Talese and Tom Woolf “replaced the short story,” according to McDonell, few women were writing the kind of stories McDonell was assigning. Talese was recently skewered on the Internet for a remark he made at a Boston University journalism conference, when he told the audience of mostly millennials that no female journalists had influenced his career. Someone then asks about Joan Didion.“I would have assigned Joan Didion to write about anything,” McDonell says, but adds that she never wanted to write for any of the magazines where he worked.
With The Accidential Life being published this summer and his debut novel, California Bloodstock (originally published in 1980), reissued by Vintage Contemporaries, McDonell, meanwhile, serves as president of the board of directors at the Paris Review. And a year or so ago, he and Morgan Entrekin, Grove Atlantic publisher and president, cofounded Literary Hub, a website to serve independent booksellers, publishers, and readers. The site attracts 600,000 daily views, according to McDonell, and 280 publishers have signed on. The website has “almost broken even,” he says, citing theatrical producer Scott Rudin as one of its earliest advertisers.
Clearly, McDonell is still living the accidental life, a term Bob Sherill, his mentor at LA early on, coined about a nonlinear career path following the action rather than a specific beat or field of interest. But McDonell is now more aware of the accumulating losses along the way. Recently he donated his papers to University of Texas’s Center for American History—all the collateral material from editing some of the most important writers of his time. “When I wrote this book, more of them were still alive,” he says. Harrison, Matthiessen—McDonell was helping him write his own memoir—and Plimpton have all died during that time. “Make your life as interesting as you can,” McDonell reflects. “That’s what drew me to journalism. I just wanted to ride along.” The Accidental Life may not be McDonell’s defining memoir, but it’s a wild, high-octane memorable ride.
Carrie Tuhy, a former magazine editor, is a New York writer and world explorer.
