http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/books/06esqu.html?_r=1&oref=sloginEsquire Publishes a Diary That Isn’tAfter Heath Ledger was found dead in his SoHo apartment on Jan. 22, David Granger, the editor in chief of Esquire magazine, dispatched a writer named Lisa Taddeo to report on the actor’s final days.
Her article, published in the April issue, which will be on newstands next week, finds Mr. Ledger eating Moroccan food with Jack Nicholson in London, returning to New York and partying at the downtown nightspot Beatrice Inn, eating steak and eggs at a cafe in Little Italy and wolfing down a banana-nut muffin as his last morsel of food.
None of this is exactly true. “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” written in the first person as if it were Mr. Ledger’s own diary, is a fictionalized account of his last days in London and New York and ponders the indignities of celebrity.
“It becomes theatrically important, after you die, what your last few days are like,” the article begins.
Skeptical readers might surmise that Ms. Taddeo didn’t turn up anything in her reporting and turned to a gimmick to get the story in print. But Mr. Granger insists that the piece, which is labeled fiction, is neither stunt nor gimmick.
“It’s an earnest effort,” he said, adding that the magazine has tried to tackle fiction using a nonfiction playbook before. “We’ve been trying to assign fiction,” he said, “to make it topical, relevant. To go to writers with a headline or an idea.”
The first project in this vein was published in October 2006 during the baseball playoffs and called “The Death of Derek Jeter,” an extended meditation on sports, celebrity and mortality written from the perspective of Mr. Jeter, the Yankees shortstop.
“We’ve been doing these things to try to make fiction as current and lively as we can,” Mr. Granger said, “to make it as urgent as nonfiction.”
Esquire’s history does brim with journalistic stunts. There was the 1996 cover article on Allegra Coleman, a new Hollywood “it” girl. It was a hoax. Under Mr. Granger there was the 2001 profile of the R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, seasoned with a good dose of fiction. Then there are the mere gimmicks: Halle Berry interviewing the interviewer, Jon Stewart annotating his own profile.
In those cases the celebrities were either alive, participating or not real. In the case of Mr. Ledger the magazine was channeling someone who very recently died. To avoid accusations that the article was another stunt, Mr. Granger did not promote the article on the magazine’s cover. “I purposely didn’t want it to be seen as exploitative in any way,” he said.
Mara Buxbaum, who was Mr. Ledger’s publicist and now represents the actor’s family, declined to comment. She said the family did not know about the Esquire article until informed about it by The New York Times, after which Ms. Buxbaum called Mr. Granger’s office and was sent a copy.
After Mr. Ledger died from what was later found to be an accidental overdose of prescription medications, Mr. Granger said he was surprised at the public’s outpouring of grief for someone who, in Mr. Granger’s view, was not a huge movie star. “It was born out of curiosity,” he said of the assignment. “I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about.”
Ms. Taddeo, an associate editor at Golf Magazine and an aspiring fiction writer, spent four days in restaurants and cafes and parks near where Mr. Ledger died. Mr. Granger said he had read an unpublished novel written by Ms. Taddeo and had been looking for the right work to give her. When she first got the Ledger assignment it was unclear if the final product would be fiction or nonfiction. Mr. Granger simply wanted a writer on the scene.
Some of what she wrote is true. Mr. Ledger was in London three days before his death. He did return to New York. He did like banana nut muffins from Miro Café, though it’s not certain he ate one for his last meal.
Esquire was among the pioneers in the 1960s in promoting what became known as New Journalism, the style developed by the cadre of writers like Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe who used literary techniques — buttressed by voracious reporting — to produce articles of narrative nonfiction. “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” by Mr. Talese, published in Esquire in 1966, is considered a classic of the genre and the precursor of the modern celebrity profile.
Robert S. Boynton, who teaches magazine writing at New York University and wrote “The New New Journalism,” a collection of interviews with contemporary practitioners of the form, welcomes any innovation to an industry that he said had grown formulaic. “I think magazines should be encouraged to experiment,” he said. “The last thing any of these magazines should be doing is playing it safe.”
Martha Sherrill, a former Esquire writer — her name is still on the masthead, though she no longer writes for the magazine — who wrote the Allegra Coleman story, said the Ledger article fit within Esquire’s record of journalistic tomfoolery.
“If you have a subscription to Esquire, and you’re not on alert for this kind of thing, you’re probably not the right kind of customer,” Ms. Sherrill said. “I think we need more satire, and this is why people turn to Esquire.”
Mr. Granger has been editor of Esquire since 1997. During his tenure, circulation has risen, to 721,000 at the end of last year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, from 658,000. Journalistically, it has won praise, picking up 10 National Magazine Awards under Mr. Granger’s editorship, compared with four in the decade prior to his stewardship. Its closest rival, GQ, where Mr. Granger used to work, had a circulation of 914,000.
The risk of a piece like “The Last Days of Heath Ledger” is that the work winds up in a literary no-man’s land. “The biggest problem I see is you are sacrificing the biggest strengths from each of the genres,” said Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. “You are losing the veracity of journalism, and you are losing the imaginative license of fiction. You run the risk of ending up with something that is neither true nor interesting.”
Link to the Esquire piece (if anyone cares about this kind of pretend news):http://www.esquire.com/features/heath-ledger-last-days
Topic: Heath Ledger - News Accounts (Read 1260438 times)