After two months as general manager I was muddling through, though George was anything but pleased with my job performance. Despite his reputation for ruthlessness, however, he found it difficult to fire anyone. On I stayed, wondering when my fatal foul-up would come.
It wasn’t mine that did it. The editor-in-chief of all three magazines, a native of Québec named Joseph Arsenault (1951-2021), failed to obtain a model release from a muscular young man whose convex buns but rather unremarkable equipment took up five pages, including the centerfold, of the latest issue of Mandate. Lawsuit!
When someone sued George -- and someone did fairly often -- he roared. Literally roared, yelling and swearing as he chain smoked up and down the corridors, an awesome sight that made me quail, even after it had become routine. He was Don Corleone crossed with Shakespeare's Richard III, plus a hint of King Kong.
Dangerously overweight -- 300 pounds and counting -- George was nevertheless as light on his feet as a ballet dancer. He could be upon you in seconds, like a Looney Tunes beast. "Fat 'n fabulous," one of my colleagues dubbed him, for when his anger melted he turned into a red-faced version of Burt Lahr’s Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. I worried that one day, in an apoplectic rage, George might suffer a stroke and fall athwart my desk.
Over the intercom one morning I heard words that foreshadowed Doomsday: "Mr. Staggs, come in immediately!" In George’s office a terrible row was in progress. George, crimson-faced with veins bulging, was devouring Joe Arsenault because of the lack of "a goddamn model release!" As general manager I was expected to take part in the fracas, though I didn’t know what role to take and anyway, no one could speak until George’s fury abated. "You're a fucking lame brain!" he yelled at mild, good-natured Joe, who deliquesced like a snowman under the Mavety blowtorch.
Poor Joe mumbled something. The blowtorch cooled. George mopped his brow. Finally he mellowed slightly, shook his head, and declaimed like Charles Laughton onstage, “The door, Mr. Arsenault.” (George, like The New Yorker’s William Shawn, avoided first names.)
Oddly, neither George nor Joe took those words to mean he was out on his ass, so Mr. Arsenault stayed on. A week of limbo stretched into two, though one assumed that Joe would leave -- mañana, or the day after that. George, meanwhile, told me he wasn’t pleased with my general management and threatened to demote me, though to what wasn’t made clear. Silently I vowed that if he offered me a spot on the floor below in “merchandise” -- i.e., dildos, butt plugs, amyl nitrate, fetish underwear, the hardcore "ten-dollar magazines," both gay and straight -- I would return to the teaching of druggy prep schoolers. He called me in for frequent meetings that had no topic and led nowhere. At one of these, playing the last card in my hand, I said, "George, let me edit the magazines. When Joe leaves. I can do it! I have excellent skills, you know."
George froze. He looked me up and down as though I had just blown in through his window on a gust of winter wind. Skills...the word hypnotized him like the incantation of a sorcerer.
"I'll do a damn good job," I said. Knowing that Joe was a lame duck, I felt no guilt over making my own grab at survival. To convince George further, I reminded him of my "veddy splendid, excellent qualifications" by stating somewhat incongruously, "You'll recall that I speak several languages, and I wrote for Gaysweek,"referring to a short-lived New York giveaway that perished a few years earlier. I named several other publications that had used my work.
"Mr. Staggs," said George, trilling his R’s and puffing his chest like Chanticleer crowing a welcome to the morning sun, "I have not forgotten how to be tender hearted." My naive dream -- a real job in publishing! -- came true in a flash. It sounds like a scene from The Best of Everything, when Hope Lange vaults from the typing pool to top editor at Fabian Publishing, but that’s how it happened. A few days later Joe Arsenault drifted out the door and was not seen again. I was in charge.
But in charge of what? I moved into my predecessor's office and began organizing manuscripts, photo submissions, query letters, correspondence, and most important of all, model releases. I felt reborn: nothing here in triplicate, and no figures, only photos and words, words, words. Already I knew that in George’s eyes, an editor’s job was not so much choosing articles and photographs and layouts, nor editing copy or proofreading, indeed, not planning and nurturing magazines really, but keeping an ironclad file of model releases with the notarized signature of every naked man whose image appeared in our pages. Otherwise he risked being sued, a prospect whose very mention turned him into Mussolini. The art department, he believed, was all it took to produce his monthly moneymakers. But his art directors were too giddy to trust with obtaining and filing model releases. "If you're smart," he said at one of our meetings, "you'll make yourself indispensable." Then he grinned like the wolf who digested Red Riding Hood's bedridden granny. "But my money's not on it." Having spoken those discouraging words, he glided out the door.
Without realizing it that day, I took his challenge as a dare. Almost five years later, when I resigned, he offered me incentives to stay on. I had become essential; my work brought in the dough. I reminded him of his challenge. "Did I make myself indispensable, George?"
"Mr. Staggs, the quality of mercy is not strained." Followed by an inimitable Mavetyism: "Who wrote that? Robert Browning?"
On those dark February days of 1982, however, I recalled Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz at the conveyor belt in that mad chocolate factory. Like them, I was boggled by work pouring off the editorial assembly line. I knew that to succeed I must re-create the magazines top to bottom. To do so meant establishing effective office procedures and bringing order to the backlog I inherited. Plus finding new writers and photographers while wooing the holdover contributors whose work I wanted to use. And staying sane while learning to think like a kook. I had become a company man after all -- in this corporation of nuts.