The thing about Alice — and that first name was enough, what her authors called her, never Mayhew — was that her reputation gave her legendary status as one of the great book editors of late 20th- and early 21st-century America, yet she despised superficial legends and anything to do with celebrity. In an age of style, she was a spitfire of substance. Her life largely comprised reading and talking and reading some more. There was always ample room for debate with her, but no room for alternative facts. She devoted her career to a search for truth and nurtured writers who believed in that as much as she did.
Her personality was too blunt, raucous and in some ways unrefined for one to think of her as any sort of grande dame, but even in her final days, up to her death at — as we now finally know — 87, she was a dominant force in the world of nonfiction publishing. Day after day, year after year, she sat at her desk on the 24th floor of Simon & Schuster in midtown Manhattan, this little dynamo with her feet barely touching the ground, her desk a chaotic mess of books and papers, perhaps a food stain on her clothes, her glasses misplaced, often three conversations going at once — one with an assistant, one with an author on the other end of the phone and a third with herself about god knows what. Sometimes the conversations would merge and blur in a Mayhewesque confluence where the person on the other end of the phone had no idea what she was saying, until — click — out would come a moment of clarity and brilliance.
Those few critics who asserted that she was consumed with acquiring too many books and spitting them out to the public were more wrong than right. She did lend her editing imprimatur to a mind-boggling number of books, as my wife can attest from the almost daily arrival of a new Alice-edited book at our front door with her business card tucked inside. But she was all about the work, from beginning to end, with a vast assortment of subjects in her repertoire. She became justifiably famous for having been the editor behind Woodward and Bernstein during Watergate, and she published many chroniclers of the Washington political scene, but that was just one part of her vast portfolio. She was obsessed with history and sociology. She nourished feminists and theologians and iconoclasts, scholars of Lincoln and FDR, of Martin Luther King Jr. and Jimmy Carter. A library stocked only with books edited by Alice Mayhew would go a long way toward explaining American history.
She also loved ballet and opera, played a cutthroat game of bocce and croquet, was a baseball and tennis nut, and had no room for football, but took to my biography of Vince Lombardi with the eagerness of a cheesehead. One of Lombardi’s players once complained that “he treats us all alike, like dogs.” It wasn’t true — he was a master psychologist and knew precisely who needed pushing and who needed stroking. That was Alice, too, and like Lombardi (they both graduated from Fordham, by the way) she was fiercely and unfailingly loyal to her team, her writers — all of them, not just the noted ones; she cared less about how the books sold than how they read.
In an early telephone conversation with Alice when she was editing my first book, a biography of President Bill Clinton, we got into a mild disagreement about something and she blurted out, “Don’t yell at me, David!” This took me by surprise. I’m a mild-mannered guy. “I’m not yelling, you’re yelling!” I responded. Maybe I was yelling by then, upset by her false accusation, but not before. But a few seconds later I realized what she was doing, how she was testing me, and we quickly reached an understanding and an equanimity that was sustained for more than a quarter-century.
A few weeks ago, upon learning that she had badly injured herself tripping over a low iron-grillwork fence between the sidewalk and a Manhattan street, I went to visit her at her cluttered apartment near Washington Square. She was a life force, but hers seemed to be draining. She was always short and stooped, but now even more so. She had a cough that she couldn’t shake. A young woman made us lunch, and Alice had her usual glass of red wine. When I kissed her on the top of her head and then looked back from the door as I was leaving, I could see her taking another sip and digging into the manuscript she had lifted from the pile on the table next to her chair — at work to the end. The world was a better place with Alice reading manuscripts.
Washington Post Associate Editor David Maraniss wrote all 12 of his books for Alice Mayhew. They were working on his 13th when she died.
2020-02-05 12:00:00Z
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/05/an-age-style-editor-alice-mayhew-was-spitfire-substance/
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