He had the salad
A celebrated newsletter writer on the art and importance of magazine profiles
After insisting I order first, Brendan Murphy asks for a flat white and a blackberry Bubly. In person, he’s funnier and taller than he is in print. He picked the setting for our interview, a delightfully obscure coffee shop that he gently requested remain unnamed.
The shop’s owner passes by our table with some warm greetings and biscotti, then we settle in to discuss Murphy’s latest project, a piece on magazine profiles for his wildly successful (source needed) newsletter, Dead Fresh.
“Growing up, we always had the New Yorker and sometimes Vanity Fair and I usually zeroed in on the profiles,” says Murphy, who speaks with a light Mid-Atlantic provinces accent. “I was drawn to celebrity coverage, despite often having no idea who they were. Especially in Vanity Fair, which sometimes was about the most famous person in the world but other times was about some European art world gadfly named Ludo.”
Vanity Fair was home to the big ticket “important event” print interviews, which were often elevated in stature by the accompanying Annie Leibovitz photo shoot. Murphy explains that, as a troubled but gifted teen, he implicitly understood how controlled these interviews were.
“I got that they were stage-managed, but that made it more interesting because the writers had to build a portrait, an impression, out of a series of little details,” explains Murphy, lightly dusting off his JJJJound x New Balance shoes. “If it was a lunch interview, the subject either picked at a salad or made a show out of eating a burger. Their clothes were effortlessly elegant or disingenuously down-to-earth. Oh and how they arrived and the first impression they made, that always was used to speak to some larger theme that came up later. Even when it was a little hack-y, I loved it.”
For Murphy, who arrived seven hours early for our interview, it was the idea of building the bigger picture piece by piece that was so appealing. In his current advertising work, where he’s often referred to as the “Don Draper of content” (source needed), he explains that often the goal is to be broad and hint at multiple interpretations rather than committing to specifics. This work has made him appreciate all the more how profile writers have to take some sort of position in order for the piece to be interesting and have some momentum.
“You do have to make it about something or else why should someone read it,” asks Murphy. “So you find an angle and see it through but that can be a tough line to ride. I was just reading this Wired piece about a massively successful but little-known fantasy author, and the writer was sort of balancing the quality of the writing with its success and he just didn’t nail the tone. It comes off as unnecessarily mean. Twitter rightfully was all over him for it, but I can see how he got there. It seems more of an execution problem than anything else.”
Those fawning Vanity Fair articles may seem like a relic of the past, but we haven’t left them behind entirely. Increasingly, as the role of critics becomes murkier and celebrity fandoms becoming more militarized, access still reigns supreme. What has changed perhaps is the rise of the self-aware profile, in which the subject and writer acknowledge the thing they’re doing and don’t pretend to not care how it turns out - a recent NYT profile of Noah Baumbach (described at one point as “compressed”) at times feels like it’s being workshopped together in real time.
While Vanity Fair may have been a way in, it was really the New Yorker that formed Murphy’s love of profiles. Murphy, who subscribes to the magazine every second year when he can get that sweet discount, explains that it opened the door to the art of it all.
“Well I think it’s the best written magazine in the world and with that comes writers who can make anything interesting and engaging, so you don’t need celebrity,” says Murphy, who has previously written about great interviewers. “I always marvelled at the time they were able to take - to craft the profile over multiple interviews in multiple places over the course of year. But also getting 5000 words with which to construct it. But again, the job is essentially the same: find a new truth about the person and build up to it through details you thread together.”
Reluctantly Murphy wraps up our meeting, as he had to take his children to the public library, ride 50km on his bike and read 3 books before dinner. But, before leaving, he was kind enough to share some of his favourite profiles over the years.
Secrets of the Magus by Mark Singer: “This an absolute masterpiece and considered one of the New Yorker’s best. When I first read it, I only knew of Ricky Jay as sort of an odd actor in some David Mamet movies and knew nothing about the magician part. This profile is incredible all the way though, but one of its real draws is having one of the great opening scenes I’ve ever read.”
The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:
Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.
“Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.
He turned over the three of clubs.
Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.”
After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.”
Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.”
Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right—what was the card?”
“Two of spades.”
Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.
The deuce of spades.
A small riot ensued.
“Orchid Fever” by Susan Orlean: “Ok, I'll limit myself to just one more from the New Yorker. I’m tempted to mention the profile of Jeremy Strong because it’s sort of a perfect modern celeb profile which really lands the plane, but honestly let’s just play the hits. This profile, which became a book that became a movie, is just so artfully constructed. Orlean is so skillful in building a nuanced view of John Laroche that manages to show how engaging and interesting he is while also subtly planting the seed that he may not be reliable narrator. Also “posture of al dente spaghetti” is bars.”
John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games. He is thirty-four years old, and works for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, setting up a plant nursery on the tribal reservation near Miami. The Seminole nicknames for Laroche are Crazy White Man and Troublemaker. My introduction to Laroche took place last summer, in the new Collier County Courthouse, in Naples, Florida. The occasion was a hearing following Laroche’s arrest for illegally taking endangered wild orchids, which he is passionate about, from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, which is a place he adores. Laroche did not dress for the occasion. He was wearing wraparound Mylar sunglasses, a cotton-blend shirt printed with some sort of scenic design, and trousers that bagged around his rear. At the hearing, he was called forward and asked to state his name and address and to describe his experience in working with plants. Laroche sauntered to the center of the courtroom. He jutted out his chin. He spoke in a rasping, draggy voice. He stuck his thumbs in his belt loops and said, “I’ve been a professional horticulturist for approximately twelve years. I’ve owned a plant nursery of my own. . . . I have extensive experience with orchids, and the asexual micropropagation of orchids under aseptic cultures.” Then he grinned and said to the court, “I’m probably the smartest person I know.”
Smash by Howard Jacobson: “Not sure how I first found my way to this profile of an ageing ping-pong champ by a Booker prize-winning author, but I’m sure glad I did. Nothing is more satisfying in non-fiction than plunging deep into niche scenes and Jacobson, who knows this world intimately, handles it deftly, zooming out to provide context but never over-explaining the world. He’s also never afraid to just let himself cook.”
In one sense, the lightning-quick and deadly-silent ping-pong of the modern sponge era is only fulfilling an impulse buried deep in the game’s nature. Ping-pong is for the diffident. It seeks solitude. It is a touchy, thin-skinned person’s pastime. Gossima, it was once called—something insubstantial as a moth’s wing. A good name for a condom you don’t notice you’re wearing. Otherwise whiff waff—blow on it and it’s gone.
Bong Joon-ho’s Dystopia Is Already Here by E. Alex Jung: “Jung is one of those contemporary writers, like Allison P. Davis, who could profile anyone and make it interesting. He seems especially adept at getting quotes from his subjects that make waves and in this piece with the Parasite director it was this amazing quote about the Oscars. But focusing on just the quote does the piece a disservice - he does an especially masterful job of moving between backstory and present day in a way that feels pretty cinematic.”
Of course, we are dancing around his journey into the carnival that is an Academy Awards campaign, which seems to mildly amuse him from a distance. I ask what he thinks of the fact that no Korean film has ever been nominated for an Oscar despite the country’s outsize influence on cinema in the past two decades. “It’s a little strange, but it’s not a big deal,” he says, shrugging. “The Oscars are not an international film festival. They’re very local.”
Chris Evans: American Marvel by Edith Zimmerman: “Let’s end on a fun one. This one is a profile of one of the world’s most famous people that goes totally off the rails. The author careens into the story and, in the process, sort of writes a meta-text on celebrity interviews. But, it’s also just funny and fun and sometimes that’s more than enough.
Five days later, in New York, Chris Evans is embarrassing me in front of his mother. "Edith was hammered!" he says. "Hammered!" His friends, family, and I are all piled into a monster SUV, en route from the premiere party for his upcoming lawyer-drama Puncture to its afterparty on the Lower East Side. He has traded in his uniform of baseball cap and T-shirt for movie-star attire of smart blue suit and slim tie, and I'm wedged between him and his high school buddy Zach in the backseat. Even in the car's bright overhead light and after hours of drinking and schmoozing, Evans's skin looks fresh and clear, his blue eyes bright and lively. "Nooo," I say. "Oh, but you were!" he insists. "Please, please don't," I plead, closing my eyes. But he does and, loudly enough for the entire car to hear, proceeds to tell the humiliating story of what happened after the club.
Up until half an hour earlier, I hadn't actually known what did happen. In fact, I had spent the week practicing breezy and reportorial-sounding questions like "For fact-checking purposes, can you give me like a one-or-two-sentence recap of what we did after the club last Saturday?" Except when I finally found myself alone with him in his reserved booth, what came out was more along the lines of: "Oh my God I was such a mess whaaat even happened whyyy am I always so drunk?"
He laughed. "You don't remember?"
(It was around then that we were spotted by the gossip reporter that I didn't know was a gossip reporter, or else I wouldn't have explained to him on the way back from the bathroom that Chris was "soo flirty" and that I had "the biggest crush on him." Haha. Oops!)