The Calendar Letters Page -- 'Snow White' edition
During most of the 1980s, I had the subversive pleasure of editing the LA Times' Sunday Calendar Letters Page. I did all the trouble-making and entertaining I could.
For almost nine years, I spent a lot of time opening, choosing, verifying, editing, laying out and headlining the 50 or so letters we received each week at the LA Times’ Sunday Calendar arts & entertainment section.
Aided and abetted by my colleague and friend, ace copy editor David Shear, and supported and protected by the great Calendar editor, Irv Letofsky, I had one over-riding goal: to entertain, inform and arouse the readers of the Times’ huge and hugely popular Sunday section, all 1.1 million of them.
In addition to breaking as many of the stuffy rules and regulations of newspaper journalism that I could get away with, I also wanted to reward the smart, clever and perceptive readers who wrote us letters, especially the critical ones. I deliberately did not seek to please or puff up the enlarged and hyper-sensitive egos of the staff critics and writers — even those who had won Pulitzers.
Calendar editor Letofsky faithfully defended me from the ire of the star critics who resented my power to select letters critical of them and were very happy to see me leave the Times for my native Pittsburgh in January of 1989.
After I left the Times, the highly popular Calendar Letters Page quickly devolved into a boring, humorless and edgeless space filled with the kind of letters that I would never have run — just like the letters pages of most newspapers around the USA.
This reproduction of the Letters Page from July 24, 1983 is typical.
It’s loaded with the usual fun and playfulness. Particularly good is the batch of letters reacting to the charge by some feminists that the 1937 Walt Disney movie ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’ (which had recently been re-released) was anti-woman, harmful to little girls and reinforced the idea of female passivity.
The first ‘Snow White’ letter by Mr. Christie is a masterpiece of political incorrectness and way ahead of its time. The other ‘Snow White’ letters, all printed below, are high quality, too.
I’m proud to say that this page contains one of the most anti-woke headlines I ever wrote — ‘Ms. White and the Seven Vertically Impaired Persons.’
Breaking News:
My pal David Shear pointed out that this page contains an example of what we called ‘Celebrity Letters’ or ‘Famous Person Letters.’ That James Woods under the headline ‘Gentleman Jim’ is none other than the volatile actor himself (trying to cover his ass). Less than 10 years later I would interview him alone in his trailer when he was in Pittsburgh doing the HBO movie ‘Citizen Cohn.’ Now a conservative Twitter force at @RealJamesWoods, he was very scary in person. I wish I had the tape.
Letters
MS. WHITE AND THE SEVEN VERTICALLY IMPAIRED PERSONS
Man the barricades! Lock up the children! Let slip the dogs of academe!
Another Disney film is back in the theaters and it's up to the guardians of right thinking and ideological correctness to tell us all how to handle it ("Was Snow White a Snow Job?" by Charles Solomon, Calendar, July 16).
Many thanks to Karen Rowe, UCLA associate professor of English, for warning that Snow White teaches that passivity is a characteristic of princesses in coffins.
Kudos to Lauren Jardine, director of Lesbian Central at the Hollywood Gay Community Services Center, for informing us that "this exquisite little creature singing out in the woods is not reflective of women's lives" and for dutifully grilling her daughters as to whether "the story seems realistic to them based on the women they know."
And three cheers for feminist film historian Sally Fiske for her invaluable observation that had it been a young prince and seven little women we would have thought it was pretty stupid as well as for anti-feminist Helen Andelin for her assurance that Snow White teaches little girls to be "domestic cheerful loving and hard working."
Where were you all when Walt Disney needed you? As it is he made a movie called "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" — the story of a frightened child in a nightmare world who survives in spite of everything and makes out quite well.
For that reason children have always identified with the title character and always will. Male children. Female children. Just children without power and also without the pathetic blindness to reality and matters of importance that so greatly afflicts so many of their elders and which, alas, may affect them as well later on especially should they pickle their brains in some academic discipline or become bound to a specific cause to such a degree that they must bend everything to their narrowed restricted vision and the greatest and simplest works of art can no longer touch them at all.
ANDREW CHRISTIE
Canoga Park
***
The more distressing thing about "Snow White" is that it encouraged a whole generation of young men to go around kissing dead girls.
PAUL CREHAN
Los Angeles
***
Both sides seem to have missed the point.
If "Snow White" were the only story a little girl ever read or saw she might get the wrong impression about womanhood.
On the other hand, if all she ever read were the Los Angeles Times she would also get the wrong impression. I would rather she read "Snow White."
NORA LEE
Hollywood
***
A pox on Lauren Jardine and her PhD and position as director of Lesbian Central at the Gay Community Services Center. Prince Charming is being discriminated against and I won't stand for that.
In the years I spent as an active homosexual I dreamed of that guy. I couldn't care less about Snow White and thinking of that prince's kiss made me go back again and again to fantasize of keeping house for him. That was a real movie.
It is the darn female chauvinists that ruin my memory of the picture. I remember too many kisses from princely frogs and the warts they left. My dreams were of gay princes and Snow White was my competition.
Thank God I woke up and walked away with the seven dwarfs into a deeper part of the forest. Snow White, the lesbians and feminists are coming at you like you were Phyllis Schlafly. Beware!
ALLAN BENJAMIN
Los Angeles
***
Let's enjoy fairy tales for what they are — fairy tales. I'm really sickened by all of the explanations and hidden meanings that certain radical groups read into these harmless things. Let's work on today's problems instead of looking for excuses in the past.
PHYLLIS WAGGNER
Pacific Palisades
***
This was one of several other clever letters on the page that, I think, was defending a letter criticizing my friend and colleague, the great rock critic Bob Hilburn, who took a weekly beating on the Letters Page but never tried to have me sacked.
CRITIC CRITIC REVIEW
Eric Adler's exuberant composition of outrage at rock critic Bob Hilburn in Calendar Letters (July 17) revealed a landscape of a heart strewn with barbed wire.
From the opening lines of his statement — indeed throughout the four-paragraph opus — his work expressed a tortured innocence reminiscent of the lofty grandeur of the early Who coupled with the feverish idealism of the young Springsteen.
When is the video due?
(Some terms we didn't have room for: dark and compelling seminal driving tortured vocals purging visionary brutal honesty cathartic haunting brilliant textured tension rich and poignant unrestrained.)
LISA and CAREY STEVENSON
Claremont
Letters should be brief and must include full name address and phone number Mail to Calendar Letters Los Angeles Times Times Mirror Square Los Angeles 90053
Facebook Comments from ex-LATers, 2022
For the record, here are the comments made by me and a couple of very smart and talented fellow LAT’s alums after I posted a link to this Substack item on Facebook:
At the LA Times in the 1980s I edited the letters to Sunday Calendar, the paper's fat and hugely popular arts & entertainment section. I got into lots of trouble with my colleagues, entertained hundreds of thousands of readers and broke as many rules of newspaper journalism as I could. I also had a lot of fun, for which I have no regrets or shame.
That was the period when they hired Irv Letofsky as Sunday Calendar editor and the great Jean Sharley Taylor was on the masthead. He was a difficult to understand editor with a great imagination and appreciation for new ways of doing things. He sent his Hollywood reporters out on stories with the injunction, 'Remember, they're all liars." He moved me from mucking out the Augean stables of little theater to becoming, as cultural essayist, one of Calendar's editorial voices and the first comedy critic in the nation on a major journalistic outlet. Now every major paper and magazine has one. The '80s was a great decade for Calendar. I thought we were two years away from the kind of greatness Clay Felker made of the NY Herald Tribune's arts section, New York, which became the savvy magazine. In '89, the corporate shift began, in which authoritarian values pushed out editorial ones, and the great purge of its best section heads, including its Pulitzer Prize-Winners, began. We're still seeing the results in, excepting a few critics, a mediocre arts section.
I got a chance to go to Japan on what was essentially a junket, and to write up the happenings. Irv's directive: "My god, make it interesting." He was a being to love, made everyone feel part of something. I suppose feeling like one was levitating when entering the building and heading for the elevator helped. And, Larry, it was interesting that shift that occurred in 1989 -- I thought it was 1988 -- when we were more under the thumbs of lesser editors, at least I was.
I too flourished under Irv. In the spring of 1980 I snuck-sneaked in the side door at the Times as a part-time copy editor in View/Calendar. I was 32. My only journalism experience besides being an ex-paperboy was four years at a community paper in the eastern Cincinnati suburbs.
Irv, God bless him, didn't ask for credentials. He let me do free lance stories -- chronicling Bukowski's last public reading in Hermosa Beach was my first.
When Chuck Champlin Jr. stopped doing letters for some forgotten reason, Irv let me take over the Letters Page. I was the smallest fry in the great Calendar sea of star critics and great writers, but Irv gave me power and responsibility, which I tried my best to not be corrupted by.
He not only protected me and gave me a long leash. He never criticized all the crazy rule-breaking things David Shear and I did to that page to make it extremely popular (with readers) and entertaining in an admittedly often sophomoric way-- running letters upside down, doctoring photos, soliciting readers' letters, doing our own reporting and, most dangerously, giving readers a voice to criticize the Calendar's rich school of critics.
I didn't fully appreciate Irv's quirky genius and f-'em style until I went to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and met other editors who would have never trusted me with so much subjective power over a page of letters every week.
A week after I left the LAT in January 1989, Irv was demoted to TV critic by Shelby Coffey and forces of editorial dullness and corporate darkness took over and began to turn Calendar -- in the 1980s arguably the greatest newspaper entertainment sections of all time -- into a place that was as boring as the rest of the stuffy paper -- the Daily Titanic, I like to call it.
RIP, Irv.
Thanks for that, Bill. Wonderful memories. My work went from Fred Crafts, who was, like Irv, go for it, and really showed me what a profile was supposed to be, and, most importantly, to write a strong lede. Then when he left around 1988, David Crook, TV writer, took over, and I did get a column after Leonard died. But no sense of community. Then came John Thurber, who I think you missed. Another former copy boy, but, sadly, not a warm fellow. Eventually, I got the sack for writing a story about drummer Elvin Jones and his spiritual approach to jazz. But in between, many good years. Indeed, cheers to Irv.
Permit me to relate one anecdote which (for me) sums up the curious tribal practices of the Los Angeles Times. One weekend I stumbled upon a small but well-stocked and distinguished secondhand bookstore tucked in a shopping plaza somewhere in Beverly Hills. It was devoted exclusively to books about film, theatre, actors, Hollywood, plays, show biz, etc. and the owner proudly explained to me that it was the largest such shop devoted to the subject (as I recall) west of the Mississippi. As he spoke I couldn't help but notice that he seemed to suffer from some neuromuscular disorder which made speaking (and, as I recall, locomotion) difficult. This, I thought to myself, would make a nice, even interesting, feature piece: A unique little enterprise of distinction devoted to show business thriving in the capital of cinema, owned and operated by a handicapped individual -- the perfect confluence of elements for Calendar, or so I believed. I asked for his card and, on the following Monday, presented it to a Calendar editor (Robert Rawitch?) with the observation that it might be of some interest to a reporter. Rawitch assumed an expression on his face as if I had made a notably distasteful suggestion -- as, it seems, I had: 'All our writers generate their own ideas,' he declared, shook his head, and handed the card back to me.
It was that kind of narrow, creepy, smug, stupid thinking that permeated the editorial ranks of the newspaper business. Irv was grumpy and cynical sometimes, but underneath he was a good guy who did not hate humans or his job. The people in charge at the LAT and two other papers I worked at in Pittsburgh were more often than not miserable, anti-social know-it-alls who looked down on their readers and disliked freelancers, even if they came from within the building.
The newspaper will soon vanish from the earth, leaving no record that in the entire history of newspapers, no newspaper got maximum mileage out of its letters section. All letters sections should have been four times larger and run against advertising. Nuts and flakes should have been welcome. Letters should have gotten full article treatment, with heds and decks and illustrations. Warren Hinckle tried something innovative for the letters to the editor at Scanlan's, and we put forward a short-lived online extra of letters at the L.A.T. But overall, what a waste of content that often out-shined the rest of the paper.
I agree completely with everything you say -- and I tried to put that letters-maximizing philosophy into practice at Calendar from 1980 to 1989. The letters page at the back of Calendar, the Letters Annex on the inside pages that I invented to handle overflow, and the daily Letters section that I also invented for a while were my attempts to encourage and tap a talented, smart, funny and near-infinite resource -- 1.1 million readers.
I built my little empire to please readers and to make the Calendar a better place. Irv Letofsky protected me. I even did year-end wrap ups and I remember I wrote something about maximizing the first amendment rights of Calendar readers. I gave the Letters Page in the back of Sunday Calendar a wise-ass but reader-friendly voice.
Matt Welch at Reason says he and his Long Beach gang members looked forward to the Letters Page each week. Little did I know....
I never made fun of readers, I exalted them and rewarded them with the best layouts we could give them. I had no rules. We once ran three letters from the same guy the same day -- Marvin Leaf, the anti-rock ‘n roll nut. He sent us a letter from his deathbed, literally, and we ran it.
We made fun of the Sunday LAT's gigantic heft and let readers blast away at the critics and writers. By the way, when the Nuremberg Journalism Tribunals are held I will be brought up on charges for violating 231 stupid newspaper rules. I will defend myself by saying I was not an enemy of the reader (I used to have a sarcastic sign over my desk that said, 'The reader is the enemy,' which most of the rest of the Times openly or unconsciously believed, as did those working at subsequent papers that had the pleasure of my employment). I have nine years of rolled up Letters Pages to prove my innocence. I can provide visual proof if I can find them.
Another randomly selected Sunday Calendar Letters Page fished from my bottomless archives …