Libby Handros: My times with Lewis Lapham, great editor and essayist and sparkling colleague

Lewis H. Lapham

— Photo by Joshua Simpson

Lewis H. Lapham wrote and hosted this droll musical film.

I first met Lewis Lapham in the late 80’s at a glittering cocktail party honoring a well-known television critic. It was the type of party that is no longer thrown, and it was also the type of party that Lewis, in his inimitable way, would have had fun critiquing. My boss, Ned Schnurman, introduced us. Ned had great respect for Lewis, who had helped rescue Harper’s Magazine just a few years before. Lewis died on July 23 at 89.

After the cocktail party I ran into Lewis again, having a nightcap at the Hotel Pierre. There, we discussed his idea to do a show that framed the events of the day from the perspective of the past. The two of us collaborated on a proposal for it, but the timing was off, so that particular series was never made.

Sometime later, I was producing a documentary on the “crime of the century” — the Lindbergh-baby kidnapping — and how coverage of the kidnapping and its subsequent trial were the precursors of tabloid television journalism. I needed someone to write the script, and asked Lewis. He had just the right sensibility to connect the contemporary spectacle of the O.J. Simpson trial to the Lindbergh-baby events that had taken place all those years ago in New Jersey. He wrote a beautiful script. 

Now we needed an editor. A friend said she knew someone: John Kirby. John had just lost his job, so he was available. The two of us met, little suspecting that a decades-long business partnership would result. I do not recall saying too much. I simply handed John a copy of Lewis’s recently published Lapham’s Rules of Influence. John laughed his way through the book at lunch, and a couple of hours later he was back in my office, full of enthusiasm. “If I had read this book sooner, I might not have just been fired,” he told me.

John’s rough-cut — which made the script into a film — was soon ready for Lewis to review, and the two of them met. They hit it off immediately. Later, after a screening of another cut, Lewis looked at John and said, “Kirby, next time we are going to pick the pictures together.” A year or so after that, the three of us collaborated again, this time on The American Ruling Class, a cutting-edge “dramatic documentary musical” film that follows two newly minted college graduates through the halls of mammon and power.

Lewis found the demands of filmmaking annoyingly time-consuming, but he was always good-natured about it. During the making of ARC, he did take after take outside the Council on Foreign Relations. He sat in the New York Times boardroom talking to Pinch Sulzberger in his own seemingly innocuous way that was anything but. He patiently put up with repeated takes at Elaine’s, the once celebrated Manhattan restaurant and watering hole, sitting with Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich as in a diner. (She was recreating her undercover role as a waitress in the lead-up to a song based on her book.)

There was one shoot that Lewis actually enjoyed: the day we filmed a scene on a golf course. He was happy to keep practicing his swing while we reset the shot or worked with another actor. Eventually I noticed that people were watching him, entranced. One of the onlookers came up to me. “Who is that man practicing his swing?” he asked, pointing. “Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s Magazine,” I responded. The guy’s incredulous reply surprised me: “You mean he isn’t a famous pro?!”

It turned out that, unbeknownst to us, Lewis was a phenomenal golfer. At the Blind Brook Club, the great and near-great of corporate America asked Lewis to join their foursome. After a round of golf, they would settle in for a game of bridge — something else Lewis excelled at.

Years later, Lewis wrote about his personal connection to golf and bridge for Lapham’s Quarterly:

Both my father and my grandfather taught the lesson on the golf course and at the card table. Golf they construed as a trying of the spirit and a searching of the soul. Scornful of what they called “the card-and-pencil point of view,” they looked askance at adding up the mundane trifle of a paltry score.

How one plays the game was more to the point than whether the game is won or lost. Play the shot and accept the consequences, play the shot and know thyself for a bragging scoundrel or a Christian gentleman. So fundamental was my grandfather’s disdain for mere numbers that, at the bridge table, he deemed it ungentlemanly to look at his cards before announcing a bid. 

Made for the BBC, The American Ruling Class had a successful festival and theatrical run. It was the most-watched film at the Tribeca Film Festival that year and received special mention in the “New York Loves Documentary” feature category. Lewis, John and I were subsequently invited to attend the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Of course we went. Lewis was bemused by his three days there, and John and I were lucky to be with him as he soaked it all in — then wrote about it for Harper’s as only Lewis could, in a piece entitled “Eyes Wide Shut.”

… I was given the chance to look at sequences from a large number of films that one or another of the festival judges thought notable for their cinematography, story lines, and tones of voice — investigative, satirical, didactic, metaphorical, polemical, elegiac. What was striking was the broad range of topic and narrative possibility undreamed of in the philosophy of our own broadcast and cable networks — the civil war in the Sudan (unedited by the missionaries at CNN); cockroach races in Moscow; a pregnant Ukrainian wife sold into the white slave trade and shipped south to Turkey; Honduran peasants hopping Mexican freight trains on their journeys north to the Texas border; street riots in Caracas, happiness in Odessa; Chinese children paid six cents an hour to pick threads from blue jeans on the way to Rodeo Drive; the death in Baghdad of an Iraqi shopkeeper; Brazilian soybeans, genetically modified, being fed to Austrian-engineered chickens. Various in perspective and duration (nine and ninety minutes, with or without voice-over, messages both programmed and spontaneous), the films gave a face, name, age, and address to the grand but often meaningless abstractions that decorate presidential press conferences and drift across the surface of television news — “globalization,” “multinational corporation,” “political unrest,” “environmental degradation,” “widespread poverty,” “incurable disease.” 

It is perhaps the best piece ever written about a film festival.

On our last night in Amsterdam, our BBC commissioning editor, Nick Fraser, rounded up a large group of us for dinner. On the way to the restaurant, Lewis announced that he wanted to see “the girls in the window” — aka the city’s infamous red-light district. Then as now, prostitution was legal in Amsterdam, and the girls showed their wares by sitting in picture windows. It was sad. We saw … and left.

After dinner, Lewis wanted to partake in another Dutch tradition: the “coffeeshop,” where pot and hash were also legal. It had been a while since Lewis had smoked pot, he said, but that night he did. What he really enjoyed, however, was his trip to the Rijksmuseum to see the Van Goghs. He loved how the painter captured all walks of society.

In all this time, Lewis had never given up on the original idea that he had pitched to me the first night we’d met: to frame current events from an historical perspective. By now, though, the idea had evolved. He was envisioning a quarterly publication that would focus on a single subject of “current interest and concern — war, poverty, religion, money, medicine, nature, crime — by bringing up to the microphone of the present the advice and counsel of the past.” Thus, Lapham’s Quarterly was born. At an age when others would have been happy to retire and play golf and bridge, Lewis launched a new publication.

The fledgling magazine needed a home, so for several months, Lewis and his small team worked out of our studio in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Lewis sat in our glass box of an editing room with a yellow legal pad, writing and bringing his longtime dream to life. As the circulation for Lapham’s Quarterly grew, Lewis could not have been prouder. He delighted in telling people that, thanks to a grant, his magazine was available in prison libraries. 

Much has already been written about how Lewis helped save Harper’s, and the innovations he brought to that magazine. But there was precedent. Some 60 years earlier, another magazine editor had similarly shaken the publishing world: Scofield Thayer, who had taken the reins of The Dial magazine launched by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1840s and turned it into the most influential literary publication in 1920s America. Many of the major writers and artists of the day were among the revitalized title’s contributors, such as Sinclair Lewis, Amy Lowell, Archibald MacLeish, Bertrand Russell, Wallace Stevens; Chagall, Matisse, O’Keeffe and Picasso.

Lewis knew his publishing history. The first time he held a copy of The Dial in his hands, he was amazed by its design elements, starting with the table of contents.  He realized that he had unconsciously borrowed from Thayer. A mutual friend recognized Thayer’s importance in the world of art and magazine publishing and suggested we make a documentary. We connected everyone, and set out with Lewis as our guide to make a film about Thayer and The Dial; we hope to complete it in the near future, as a memorial to two beloved and innovative editors.

I have not read every single one of Lewis’s Harper’s columns, but I have read many — including his first, which was written in the oil fields of Alaska. Choosing a favorite piece of prose by Lewis Lapham isn’t easy. Everything he wrote offered a new insight, a unique way of viewing the subject du jour. My personal all-time favorite is the prescient, fantastical “A Pig for All Seasons,” which was written during the heyday of the Reagan era and published in the June 1986 Harper’s. As described by Lapham’s Quarterly’s editors, the column “details the rise of the humble pig to the upper echelons of New York society, where it will serve as both companion and bodily insurance policy.” 

You can listen to Lewis read the piece on the Quarterly’s site. I must, however, share some of my favorite excerpts here. I think it is Lewis at his inimitable best.

Certainly the manufacture of handmade pigs was consistent with the spirit of an age devoted to the beauty of money. For the kind of people who already own most everything worth owning — for President Reagan’s friends in Beverly Hills and the newly minted plutocracy that glitters in the show windows of the national media — what toy or bauble could match the priceless objet d’art of a surrogate self?

And:

The possession of such a pig obviously would become a status symbol of the first rank, and I expect that the animals sold to the carriage trade would cost at least as much as a Rolls-Royce or beachfront property in Malibu. Anybody wishing to present an affluent countenance to the world would be obliged to buy a pig for every member of the household — for the servants and secretaries as well as for the children. Some people would keep a pig at both their town and country residences, and celebrities as precious as Joan Collins or as nervous as General Alexander Haig might keep herds of twenty to thirty pigs.

Lewis could not stop imagining the pig as a sign of social status and security blanket rolled into one:

As pigs became more familiar as companions to the rich and famous, they might begin to attend charity balls and theater benefits. I can envision collections of well-known people posing with their pigs for photographs in the fashion magazines — Katharine Graham and her pig at Nantucket, William Casey and his pig at Palm Beach, Norman Mailer and his pig pondering a metaphor in the writer’s study.

Celebrities too busy to attend all the occasions to which they’re invited might choose to send their pigs. The substitution could not be construed as an insult, because the pigs — being extraordinarily expensive and well dressed — could be seen as ornamental figures of a stature (and sometimes subtlety of mind) equivalent to that of their patrons. Senators could send their pigs to routine committee meetings, and President Reagan might send one or more of his pigs to state funerals in lieu of Vice President Bush.

People constantly worrying about medical emergencies probably wouldn’t want to leave home without their pigs. Individuals suffering only mild degrees of stress might get in the habit of leading their pigs around on leashes, as if they were poodles or Yorkshire terriers. People displaying advanced symptoms of anxiety might choose to sit for hours on a sofa or a park bench, clutching their pigs as if they were the best of all possible teddy bears, content to look upon the world with the beatific smile of people who know they have been saved.

Lewis was always open to new ideas, which made having drinks with him something to really look forward to. He would frequently arrive pulling a random book or magazine or essay draft out of his Lapham’s Quarterly tote and excitedly talking about it. His personal stories were wonderful, too, whether he was talking about the time he spent as crew on a freighter, or the time he traveled with John D. Rockefeller III to help him promote the idea of birth control, or the time his godfather negotiated with Goering for the return of the Texaco tankers at the start of World War II. A great reporter at heart, Lewis knew a good story when he saw one. Even better, he knew how to tell it.

Lewis was a pleasure to work with. A good friend. An irreplaceable loss.

The tribute to him in Lapham’s Quarterly does him proud. I recommend that you read it.

—Libby Handros, producer, The Press & the Public Project

Trump movie: A fun slide down America's decline

We got so much reaction to the press release sent us by the producer of Trump: What's the Deal? that we're republishing it here. Links to the trailer and the movie are below. You can see the whole movie for free. The trailer is very funny-- and of course fast-paced. Listening to the utterly unique voice of Peter Foges, the narrator, is quite an experience.

The movie is an often hilarious and often enraging look at  crony capitalism, runaway narcissism and materialism, much of it within a time capsule of '80s kitsch.

American civic life has been heading  ever deeper into the sewer, but it's sometimes a fun ride.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For inquiries, please use:

press@trumpthemovie.com

DOCUMENTARY TRUMP SUPPRESSED TO BE RELEASED AFTER 25 YEARS

Trump: What’s the Deal? is an investigative documentary that was completed in 1991 --- but has never been seen by the national audience it was made for.  Trump took great pains to suppress the film, threatening networks, distributors, and the filmmakers.

Producer Libby Handros says: “Now that Trump is running for president, it’s time for the American people to meet the real Donald and learn how he does business. The old Trump and the new Trump? They're the same Trump.”

“While much has been written on Donald, few know how he built his business,” she explains. “This documentary, which we made at great personal cost over three years, is filled with vivid and dramatic commentary by Trump insiders and prominent outside observers, who expose how he operated as he rose to national prominence.”

NOT “SELF-MADE”

Trump has claimed to be a self-made billionaire. That’s the first myth this documentary punctures. Trump used his father's money and government connections in addition to taxpayer largesse to begin his empire.

“Donald is neither self-made nor anything like a true small-government conservative,” Handros says. “His father made huge profits off Federal Housing Authority loans, and with the help of his father’s friends in government, Donald used the same techniques to build what fortune he actually has.”

TRUMP’S “WEALTH.”

“We also launched one of the first investigations into Trump’s finances to reveal that he did not have nearly as much money as he says he did—a pattern of deception and aggrandizement that continues to this day,” Handros says. “Of all the damaging things we uncovered about Trump, that’s definitely the one that upsets him the most and led to him going after our film so hard.”

A HOST OF REVELATIONS

• Trump’s mob-connected contractor used illegal immigrant labor, provided with no safety equipment, to demolish the building that stood in the way of Trump’s first signature building: Trump Tower.
• Trump hired a company that specialized in psychological attacks and blackmail to move tenants out of a building he wanted demolished.
• Trump was a major factor in the implosion of the United States Football League, and made a failed bid to “buy” Mike Tyson.
• Trump was in bed with the Mafia to buy the land for his first casino, Trump Plaza; he had ongoing associations with known mob figures and drug dealers in Atlantic City.
• Trump’s compulsion, then and now, to verbally abuse his wife and other family members as well as his colleagues and employees.
• Trump bad-mouthed three top executives of his Atlantic City casinos after their death in a company helicopter crash, blaming them for the near collapse of his empire.
• Trump’s manipulation and lying to the press… and their complicity in making him the force he is today.
• Trump’s long battle to move the airport farther away from his mansion in Palm Beach.

And much, much more…

The film was a production of The Deadline Company and produced by Al Levin, an award-winning documentary film producer, (now deceased) and Libby Handros. When the film’s executive producer Ned Schnurman passed away, Handros inherited the piece.

Trump: What’s the Deal? was recently called “an unforgettable investigation into the mating of commerce, corruption and celebrity in America's latest Gilded Age. It explodes the Trump mythology and his presidential campaign with it.’’

To watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qy75pRQKMU

To watch the film: www.trumpthemovie.com

Long-suppressed film about Trump is now released

This press release, and links, are from my friend Libby Handros,  regarding the long-suppressed documentary about the rise of Donald Trump that's now being released. You'll laugh and cry and get mad.

-- Robert Whitcomb

To watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qy75pRQKMU

To watch the film: www.trumpthemovie.com

DOCUMENTARY TRUMP SUPPRESSED TO BE RELEASED AFTER 25 YEARS

Trump: What’s the Deal? is an investigative documentary that was completed in 1991 --- but has never been seen by the national audience it was made for.  Trump took great pains to suppress the film, threatening networks, distributors, and the filmmakers.

Producer Libby Handros says: “Now that Trump is running for president, it’s time for the American people to meet the real Donald and learn how he does business. The old Trump and the new Trump? They're the same Trump.”

“While much has been written on Donald, few know how he built his business,” she explains. “This documentary, which we made at great personal cost over three years, is filled with vivid and dramatic commentary by Trump insiders and prominent outside observers, who expose how he operated as he rose to national prominence.”

NOT “SELF-MADE”

Trump has claimed to be a self-made billionaire. That’s the first myth this documentary punctures. Trump used his father's money and government connections in addition to taxpayer largesse to begin his empire.

“Donald is neither self-made nor anything like a true small-government conservative,” Handros says. “His father made huge profits off Federal Housing Authority loans, and with the help of his father’s friends in government, Donald used the same techniques to build what fortune he actually has.”

TRUMP’S “WEALTH”

“We also launched one of the first investigations into Trump’s finances to reveal that he did not have nearly as much money as he says he did—a pattern of deception and aggrandizement that continues to this day,” Handros says. “Of all the damaging things we uncovered about Trump, that’s definitely the one that upsets him the most and led to him going after our film so hard.”

A HOST OF REVELATIONS

• Trump’s mob-connected contractor used illegal immigrant labor, provided with no safety equipment, to demolish the building that stood in the way of Trump’s first signature building: Trump Tower
• Trump hired a company that specialized in psychological attacks and blackmail to move tenants out of a building he wanted demolished.
• Trump was a major factor in the implosion of the United States Football League, and made a failed bid to “buy” Mike Tyson.
• Trump was in bed with the Mafia to buy the land for his first casino, Trump Plaza; he had ongoing associations with known mob figures and drug dealers in Atlantic City.
• Trump’s compulsion, then and now, to verbally abuse his wife and other family members as well as his colleagues and employees.
• Trump bad-mouthed three top executives of his Atlantic City casinos after their death in a company helicopter crash, blaming them for the near collapse of his empire.
• Trump’s manipulation and lying to the press… and their complicity in making him the force he is today.
• Trump’s long battle to move the  airport farther away from his mansion in Palm Beach.

And much, much more…

The film was a production of The Deadline Company and produced by Al Levin, an award-winning documentary film producer, (now deceased) and Libby Handros. When the film’s executive producer Ned Schnurman passed away, Handros inherited the piece.

Trump: What’s the Deal? was recently called “an unforgettable investigation into the mating of commerce, corruption and celebrity in America's latest Gilded Age. It explodes the Trump mythology and his presidential campaign with it.’’

Robert Whitcomb: Another trap in the energy cycles

A few years ago I co-wrote a book, with Wendy Williams, about a controversy centered on Nantucket Sound. The quasi-social comedy, called Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Energy, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future, told of how, since 2001, a company led by entrepreneur James Gordon has struggled to put up a wind farm in the sound in the face of opposition from the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound — a long name for fossil-fuel billionaire Bill Koch, a member of the famous right-wing Republican family.  An amusing movie, Cape Spin,  directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, came out of this saga, too. Mr. Koch's houses include a summer mansion in Osterville, Mass., from which he doesn’t want to see wind turbines on his southern horizon on clear days.

Mr. Koch may now have won the battle, as very rich people usually do. Two big utilities, National Grid and Northeast Utilities, are trying to bail out of a politicized plan, which they never liked, forcing them to buy Cape Wind electricity. They cite the fact that the company missed the Dec. 31, 2014, deadline in contracts signed in 2012 to obtain financing and start construction. Cape Wind said it doesn’t “regard these terminations as valid” since, it asserts, the contracts let the utilities’ contracts be extended because of the alliance’s “unprecedented and relentless litigation.” Bill Koch has virtually unlimited funds to pay lawyers to litigate unto the Second Coming, aided by imaginative rhetoric supplied by his  very smart and well paid pit-bull  anti-Cape Wind spokeswoman, Audra Parker,  even though the project has won all regulatory approvals.

It's no secret that it has gotten harder and harder to do big projects in the United States because of endless litigation and ever more layers of regulation. Thus our physical infrastructure --- electrical grid, transportation and so on -- continues to fall behind our friendly competitors, say in the European Union and Japan, and our not-so-friendly competitors, especially in China. Read my friend Philip K. Howard's latest book, The Rule of Nobody, on this.

With the death of Cape Wind, New Englanders would lose what could have helped diversify the region’s energy mix — and smooth out price and supply swings — with home-grown, renewable electricity. Cape Wind is far from a panacea for the region’s dependence on natural gas, oil and nuclear, but it would add a tad more security.

Some of Cape Wind’s foes will say that the natural gas from fracking will take care of everything. But New England lacks adequate natural-gas pipeline capacity, to no small extent because affluent people along the routes hold up their construction. And NIMBYs (not in my backyard) have also blocked efforts to bring in more Canadian hydro-electric power. So our electricity rates are soaring, even as many of those who complain about the rates also fight any attempt to put new energy infrastructure near them. As for nuclear, it seems too politically incorrect for it to be expanded again in New England.

Meanwhile, the drawbacks to fracking, including water pollution and earthquakes in fracked countryside, are becoming more obvious. And the gas reserves may well be exaggerated. I support fracking anyway, since it means less use of oil and coal and because much of the gas is nearby, in Pennsylvania. (New York, however, recently banned fracking.)

Get ready for brownouts and higher electricity bills. As for oil prices, they are low now, but I have seen many, many energy price cycles over the last 45 years of watching the sector. And they often come with little warning. But meanwhile, many Americans, with ever-worsening amnesia, flock to buy SUV's again.

Robert Whitcomb oversees New England Diary.

Some real and movie time with Pete Seeger

In the late spring of 1970, a group of about a dozen of us (I was along for the ride with a girlfriend of the time) spent a few hours with the mellow-voiced Peter Seeger at his 17-acre  rustic homestead, in Beacon, N.Y., on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River. It had been a lush,  warm spring, famous for anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. We had a cookout, at which Seeger was an affable host. He, of course, sang and played the five-string banjo, and a few others joined in making music.

Way down below on the river was a sloop that he owned that he was using in the early stages of leading a campaign to  stop the likes of General Electric and other organizations from dumping toxins (some carcinogenic) into the river (which  that day, despite its poisons, looked like 18th Century painting of the Rhine. Gorgeous!). It seems astonishing now to think of what we dumped into our public water, both as individuals and as institutions.

I generally disliked folk songs back then -- the lyrics seemed too sentimental and sometimes far too preachy and the tunes  repetitive and clunky. I find them easier to take these days because I hear them as part of the broad flow of history. Or maybe I'm just getting hard of hearing....

Meanwhile, take a look at this segment of the very funny and sad movie The American Ruling Class. In it, Pete Seeger is walking, banjoing and singing down a road in what seems to be a very pastoral part of Greenwich, Conn., a capital of the sometimes rapacious capitalism that the old leftie hated. I think it's pretty funny, as is much of the movie, directed by John Kirby, produced by Libby Handros and with writer/editor Lewis Lapham as the master of ceremonies. He takes us to a lot of other celebrities commenting on American society in the years before the Great Crash of 2008.

Comment via rwhitcomb51@gmail.com