My dear friend Peter Kaplan is leaving the New York Observer (2 years after I did). A few quick thoughts:
–An era ends. Print/newspapers/the legacy of William Shawn and Harold Ross, that arc of literary sophistication and great New York news values that Kaplan personifies, is coming to a cultural finis. That part's obvious. It assumes a different garb now; and Kaplan will be there.
–Kaplan's a genius for a few reasons. He is the most intuitive person I know in the business. He never bothered with the fussy superficialties of a story, he always got to heart of a story, to its emotional breathing agonized soul. I often felt he was disappointed in my work because his Storytelling standards are so high. This was evident in college when I wrote a long tedious piece all about cancer research and he did the cartoon to accompany the story, and the cartoon was better than the story. It showed a scientist with a beaker announcing he had discovered the cure to cancer and he was going to sell it to people for $10 a person! Savage.
–He is a great editor in that he tried to help me, and countless others, become writers. He always said, "Where's Weiss in it?" He meant a story was a dead thing unless a writer was engaged emotionally by the material. He was the first editor to really explain this to me and push me to figure out what I thought. (That said, he was made uncomfortable by my distaste for Zionism, which made him an unsuitable editor to me in that way; he's pro-Zionist, oldfashioned that way, prehistoric.)
–He named this site. When I tried to name my column at the Observer, "An American in New York," he said, No Phil you're a Jew. He was right. When I tried to name this site, The Needle, he said, that sounds like you have a needledick, no way. Outside the Tribe made him scowl. Lacking in poetry. He said that the power of naming separated the great producers. With a great name, it was like God/Ziegfeld up in the sky in his armchair tapping the ash off his cigar as he thought up the right name for someone. Maybe Monica Lewinsky produced that insight? I forget. Kaplan loves cigars and this was the best thing that happened to this site, early on, getting that name. It said, the world of Weiss, the fact that I have no connection to reality, the fact that I am a B movie.
–His psychological insights are deadly. He gets people in an instant. Streetsmart, close to the ground, and rambling the house late at night to grab a turkey leg from the fridge and a cigar.
–The most maddening man on the planet. The most charming, the most quotable–and the most maddening. I'll tell you some other time.
–It was time for him to go. I can't wait to see what he will do next.
