Medianatomy

David Granger Has Something Stuck Between His Teeth

May 17, 2001

By Andrew Hearst

David Granger, the bald, beer-bellied editor of Esquire, is sitting across the table from me at a midtown restaurant, a few blocks away from his magazine's offices on West 55th Street. He's wearing a Molly Hatchet T-shirt, torn blue jeans, and a John Deere baseball hat. Though he doesn't realize it, he has a poppy seed lodged between two of his upper teeth. Every time he opens his mouth to speak, the small black seed peeks out from behind his upper lip. It's really distracting. "At Esquire," he says, and there's that poppy seed again, "we're always trying to come up with ways to subvert the tired format of the celebrity profile." He riffs excitedly on this topic for a few minutes, enumerating the frustrations that come with being a sophisticated and powerful man in an industry that rewards lowest-common-denominator thinking. I'm not really listening to what Granger is saying--my tape recorder is capturing the conversation, and I can transcribe it later--because the whole time I'm thinking to myself: Jesus, David, how long has that seed been stuck in your teeth? It's now 8 p.m. Is it possible you've been walking around since lunchtime, or even breakfast, with bagel detritus hanging out of your mouth?

Eventually, I'm able to tune out the bobbing poppy seed, and I start asking Granger about the subject we've gotten together to discuss. The June issue of Esquire contains an unusual article by Tom Junod, a regular contributor to the magazine who is perhaps best known for having written "Kevin Spacey Has a Secret," a 1997 Esquire cover story that may or may not have outed Spacey. This time, Junod and his word processor have spit out "Michael Stipe Has Great Hair," a purportedly high-concept profile of the R.E.M. frontman. The purported high concept? Approximately half of the seven-thousand-word article is fiction.

Yes, when Junod arrived in Los Angeles to interview his subject, Stipe didn't feel like talking, though he occasionally let Junod follow him around like a puppy. Instead of calling Granger and telling him there was no story, Junod forged ahead, concocting a draft in which Stipe eats granulated sugar straight from a jar, puts pennies over his eyes when he sleeps, takes Junod along on a trip to the Hoover Dam, and claims that Kurt Cobain thought the Eagles were "a great American band." None of these things happened, though other parts of the article are true. Junod then submitted the draft to Granger without telling him of the conceit. "It was a little bit of a shock after having read it to find out it was fiction," Granger told Inside.com last week. When the shock wore off, Granger and his fellow editors convinced themselves that they had a clever postmodern trick on their hands. They decided to run the piece, flagging it with an explanation of what Junod had done. Though it's unclear in the print version of the article which parts are factual and which are not, the online version contains hyperlinked notes explaining many of the liberties Junod took with the truth.

As fiction writers have known for centuries, it's fun to make stuff up. I did just that at the beginning of this piece. David Granger is indeed bald, but I've never met him, let alone had dinner with him. I have no idea if he's beer-bellied, or if he ever eats food that contains poppy seeds. And he may brush his teeth after every meal, which would mean that the core of my made-up account is basically implausible. But my imagined encounter has a point: to poke fun at David Granger. I've tried hard to figure out the point of Junod's article, and I've had no luck so far.

"I just didn't want to write a story in which the subject is being an asshole and not talking," Junod says on the issue's Contributors page. "Here's a guy who has tried his whole public career to be elliptical and elusive. I wanted to make him mythic and large because I believed in the music. As a fan, I was determined to carry on the myth. I was determined to preserve what I like about Michael Stipe and what I thought was entertaining about him. So I distilled my experience with him into fiction."

With his article, is Junod saying we can never know what celebrities are really like, so we must imagine the details of their lives? No, I don't think so. Is he trying to say that celebrities are less normal, or more weird, than the rest of us? No. Is he implying that what we read in the media is so bizarre, so clearly not true, that we shouldn't believe a word of anything? No. Is he in fact making no larger point at all, and instead trying to capture something about Stipe in particular? That's what he seems to be saying in the quote above--but if that's what he was trying to do, it didn't work. Stipe doesn't come across as "mythic and large" in the piece; he comes across as just another slightly weird celebrity willing to let a panting reporter follow him around. In attempting to transcend the tired celebrity-profile format, Junod has merely regurgitated its most familiar cliches: the narcissistic celebrity, the lapdog writer, the quirky anecdote, the precious dialogue, the career overview.

For a trick like this to have worked, Junod would have had to stretch reality enough to create an alternate universe. (Like one in which David Granger wears a Molly Hatchet T-shirt and a John Deere cap.) But instead of giving Stipe two heads, say, or a twenty-inch penis or a robot arm or a father who was a famous movie star, Junod made up a series of more or less believable scenes. If I had read the piece with no clue that half of it was fictional, I would merely have been a little surprised that the cranky and enigmatic Stipe had agreed to spend so much time with a writer as aggressively obnoxious as Junod. So what's the point of all this? Shouldn't it tell us something that Junod had to explain to Granger--and to us--that half of the piece was made up?

Junod's explanation--"I wanted to make him mythic and large because I believed in the music"--strikes me as disingenuous. Here's a more likely explanation of what happened (and this passage may or may not be fictional): Junod is a talented writer who gets paid a lot of money to follow celebrities around and write about them for a prominent magazine. Like a lot of smart writers for glossy magazines, he can't help feeling that he's wasting his literary talents. So when he gets out to Los Angeles and one of his musical heroes treats him like a big dork, he gets frustrated. In a wild spasm of self-indulgence, he goes home and seizes control of the story from the uncooperative asshole celebrity, writing a draft in the spirit of what he would have written if the asshole celebrity had cooperated. When he's done, he slaps the label "high-concept" on it, and he's got a postmodern experiment good enough for the editors at Esquire.

It's too bad. I would have loved to read a story about a Michael Stipe with two heads and a robot arm.

Andrew Hearst is a writer and editor who lives in New York. He has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Newsday, Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications.

Care to respond? Hearst will be moderating the Bulletin Board "Question of the Week: Creative Fiction, or Lazy Cop-Out?" Go there to put your two cents in!

Back to Home