RIP R.W. Apple

[JR]

Legendary NYTimes correspondent dies at 71.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/nyregion/05applecnd.html?pagewanted=2

He remained a colorful figure as new generations of journalists around him grew more pallid, and his encyclopedic knowledge, grace of expression — and above all his expense account — were the envy of his competitors, imitators and peers.

Also, the New Yorker has put up online a Calvin Trillin profile of him from a few years ago.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/030929fa_fact1

 

[YankeeFan]

The obit is a great read.

I wasn’t a fan of his politics, but I enjoyed his travel & dining columns.

Anyone have a personal anecdote? This quote, “Mr. Apple was no manager, and he could be cruelly short-tempered with hotel clerks, copy editors and political aides" makes me think that while he was an interesting guy, he was probably also a pain in the ass to deal with.

 

[poindexter]

This quote, “Mr. Apple was no manager, and he could be cruelly short-tempered with hotel clerks, copy editors and political aides" makes me think that while he was an interesting guy, he was probably also a pain in the ass to deal with.

JR's type of guy.

 

[Almost_Famous]

The obit is an outstanding read. Printed it out because the writing is THAT good.

Remember reading a profile of Apple in the New Yorker last summer (I think). Good stuff. The guy can write.

 

[Ben_Hecht]

Yeah, but that constant battering of underlings is low-rent, and no-class.

Hold some old-timers in this business in high reverence, but would hold them higher if
they hadn't torn off the heads of too many clerks and waiters within my eyesight/hearing, during their raging-testosterone
days.

 

[mediaguy]

"Boys on the Bus" is a great read. This makes me want to find my dog-eared copy from college and burn through it again.

 

[Orange Hat Bobcat]

I could see this inevitable day coming – as could everybody else, I'm sure; the man was old and fat and worked under rather strenuous conditions throughout his life – but this still hits pretty hard.

I met Apple once, during high school. He came and spoke at my school – our school, really, as he graduated 51 years before I did – and blew me away with his knowledge and reportage and ability to be a nice guy and an asshole all at once. That we shared an alma mater, and that, during high school summers, I worked for the grocery company his wife's family owned, was enough for me to go back through reels of microfiche reading decades-old stories.

Johnny could write.

He will be missed, I'm sure, though The Times will not miss his personal expense account.

 

[JR]

Poindexter's comments notwithstanding, people who bully clerks, waiters, and receptionists are assholds--plain and simple.

Guy's a legend in journalism. BTW, read the Trillin piece in the New Yorker. Classic New Yorker profile.

 

[busuncle]

The obit is an outstanding read. Printed it out because the writing is THAT good.

Here's a passage...
With his Dickensian byline, Churchillian brio and Falstaffian appetites, Mr. Apple, who was known as Johnny, was a singular presence at The Times almost from the moment he joined the metropolitan staff in 1963. He remained a colorful figure as new generations of journalists around him grew more pallid, and his encyclopedic knowledge, grace of expression — and above all his expense account — were the envy of his competitors, imitators and peers.

This passage would never make it into any other newspaper in America. Certainly not mine. It would be quickly edited to something our readers could understand -- after the copy desk stopped laughing at me, of course.
Not taking shots at the NYT (although I think "Churchillian brio and Falstaffian appetites" is a bit over the top, even by NYT standards) but it's worth remembering that their audience is a bit different than most of ours.

 

[Ben_Hecht]

Yeah, it was written for literate adults.

What a concept.

It wasn't written for readers of USA Today.

 

[Double Down]

Well said, Ben.

You can tell what an institution Apple was at the Times from that obit. I never met him, but I always enjoyed reading his stuff every chance I could. He'll always be a little special to me too because he wrote such a brilliant restaurant review of Billy Kwong's in Sydney, calling it his favorite neighborhood restaurant in the entire world, that my wife and I decided we absolutely had to go there while we were down under for our honeymoon. It was, to this day, the best damn mean I've ever had. Freaking fantastic.

And don't let one line in his obit about his short temper make you think he was a complete asshole, especially if this is the first you're reading about Apple. Plenty of people loved him, and said so, well before he died. This is from the New Yorker profile, which for whatever reason, remains one of my favorites of the last few years:

In support of the notion that Apple is something like a lovable old Labrador, it should be said that many Apple stories portray him as enormously generous—generous with his hospitality and generous with the telephone numbers of his sources and generous with his good offices at the Times for someone he thinks should work there and generous with his restaurant recommendations (“The only place in Scotland to have Scottish beef is in Linlithgow, and here’s the name of the owner . . .”). The political-campaign reporters who rode one bus or another with him—people like Richard Cohen, of the Washington Post, and Curtis Wilkie, of the Boston Globe, and Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, of the Baltimore Sun—liked to play jokes on him and liked to complain about him, but, as Germond said recently, “Most of us had an affection for John, even when he was at his most bumptious.”

No one should die of throat cancer. It's an awful way to go. But I take some comfort in the knowledge that few people lived their lives as fully as he did. The journalism world is a little bit worse off now without him in it. I had a drink yesterday in his honor. You should too.

 

[Ben_Hecht]

He was a TERRIFIC writer.

Not good.

Not excelllent.

TERRIFIC.

 

[Double Down]

I love the anacdote in that New Yorker story where Rosenthal calls him at 6 p.m. an hour and a half before his stepdaughter's rehersal dinner and says, "We need a Q-head about the comprehensive test ban treaty, and it needs to include all kinds of historical, factual information, and we need it right away."

Apple spends ten minutes ripping Rosenthal's ass for making such an absurd request at such an inappropriate time, then an hour later, files a Q-head with references to SALT II, the Panama Canal treaties, and the tension between Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge during the formation of the League of Nations. It was one thousand one hundred and seventy-one words long, and absolutely perfect.

Few people knew, and could write so well and with such authority, about so many different things, as Johnny Apple.

 

[JR]

And here is the last story he filed for the NYTimes, "The Global Gourmand". They were going to run it later this fall in the travel section but decided to run it today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/travel/05applepics.html

 

[Ben_Hecht]

There is no justice.

Abe couldn't write his name.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

The obit is an outstanding read. Printed it out because the writing is THAT good.

Here's a passage...
With his Dickensian byline, Churchillian brio and Falstaffian appetites, Mr. Apple, who was known as Johnny, was a singular presence at The Times almost from the moment he joined the metropolitan staff in 1963. He remained a colorful figure as new generations of journalists around him grew more pallid, and his encyclopedic knowledge, grace of expression — and above all his expense account — were the envy of his competitors, imitators and peers.

This passage would never make it into any other newspaper in America. Certainly not mine. It would be quickly edited to something our readers could understand -- after the copy desk stopped laughing at me, of course.
Not taking shots at the NYT (although I think "Churchillian brio and Falstaffian appetites" is a bit over the top, even by NYT standards) but it's worth remembering that their audience is a bit different than most of ours.

Actually, what's "Dickensian" about his byline?
The fact that his surname is a noun?

 

[Ben_Hecht]

I believe that's the intent of that reference, yes.

 

[friend of the friendless]

Sirs, Madames,

Re-read Boys on the Bus last year -- if you can't find the old copy it has been re-issued in the last few years.

Apple is Liebling Redux. I don't know who would be his Joe Mitchell, tho'. Nominees?

YHS, etc

 

[hondo]

I just polled the 10 guys on our desk in here tonight, and none them knew who Johnny Apple was.

****ing horse****. Contrary to what people think of Theodore White, Apple invented the way newspapers cover political campaigns.

He was a giant...an absolute giant. He was to beat guys what Royko and Breslin were to columnists.

 

[jgmacg]

This is one of the few times Hondo and I will ever agree completely on anything. That anyone on a newspaper anywhere doesn't know this man's name isn't just disspiriting, it's alarming. And a reflection perhaps of why our newspapers are now so desperately ill - because even the people making them don't care enough about newspapering to know its history and its mythology and its household gods and its prospect for excellence in the right, chubby, hands.

White became the more widely famous of the two because of the books, I suppose, and maybe that's fair in the long turning of time; but Apple had no peer in the pages of a daily paper. Nor, FoF, did he have a Mitchell, I'm afraid. Old Joe was sui generis.

Eccentric as Johnny Apple was - and operatic and comic and terribly generous and generously terrible - for many of us he was the joyful model of what could be done with a life. And what could be done with twenty-four inches on deadline when it mattered most.

Here's to the last of the Timesmen.