Rememberance of TIME ETERNAL

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 1, 2003

Byline: KAREN HOLT

In Calvin Trillin's 1980 novel, "Floater," middle-aged white men, who made arbitrary, often wrongheaded decisions, ran a newsmagazine modeled on Time. Everyone drank too much, and talked about sex when they should have been working.

In "Bite," a new novel by the pseudonymous C.J. Tosh, middle-aged white men, who make arbitrary, often wrongheaded decisions run a magazine called Star Face that is really Entertainment Weekly, and one called Profit that is really Fortune. Everyone drinks too much, and talks about sex when they should be working.

But oh, how life has changed at Time Inc. In "Floater," it was all about the gray flannel suits. Women were for ogling and homosexuality was a trend story. In "Bite," which hits the stores in October, heterosexual men still have a lock on the top spots, but women and openly gay men are jostling up the mastheads.

You'd expect that. But the real cultural differences between then and now - if you buy the pictures drawn by these romans ? clef - concern something more basic: sex and alcohol. Or rather, sex talk and alcohol. Magazine staffers, apparently, have lost their ability to handle either well, according to Tosh.

The editor-in-chief of Star Face is worthless most of the day - hung over in the morning, drunk after lunch and hung over again in late afternoon. You wonder (though never find out) how he keeps his job.

But in the more civilized era of Trillin's novel, the editors indulged on a strict schedule - stronger drinks early in the week when the workload was the lightest, less potent libations on Wednesday and Thursday, as they approached the close. This routine enabled them to get their work done, without resorting to actual sobriety.

And about the sex talk. In "Floater," sex was the renewable fuel source of gossip, as it was when three colleagues spent an extended lunch compiling a list of their coworkers' secret relationships: "They had the freedom that came with all of them having agreed, even before the menus arrived, to betray everyone who had ever told them anything in strictest confidence." The sport of it came from the "remarkable discretion people at the magazine customarily employed in carrying on their romances."

Fast forward a quarter of a century and sex talk has morphed from gossip into confession. The only sex lives the editors at Profit and Star Face care to discuss are their own. And discretion? They can barely shut up about their liaisons long enough to down their expense-account martinis.

Ironically, in "Bite" the plot turns on a sex rumor - regarding a favor allegedly bestowed on actor Russell Crowe during an interview - that gets one of the two main characters fired. With gossip glossies ruling the newsstand, gossip is now treacherously serious stuff.

This might be a good time to remember we're talking fiction. Who's to say "Bite" or "Floater" really reflects the culture of Time Inc., then or now? So what if Trillin was a floating editor at Time and that C.J. Tosh is the pseudonym for the writing team of Erik Torkells, a senior editor at Fortune (who, like one of the two main characters in "Bite," started a lifestyle section at a financial magazine) and Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, a senior writer for EW?

After all these are novels. They're probably all made up anyway.