Liebestod ...

... Working for Tina Brown.

Home from World War II, I landed a job with the Herald Tribune and found myself in the same room–the vast and grimy city room–with the giants who first put that boyhood dream in my head. They were a mixed bag of mavericks and oddballs, unsurprised by human oddity. Nobody gave it a second thought when Lucius Beebe, the legendary fop, who covered “café society,” arrived for work in midmorning wearing a derby, a bespoke suit, a magenta shirt and a white silk tie, or when the absent-minded music editor Francis D. Perkins, who often smoked his pipe upside down, started another paper fire in his wastebasket. We were a community held together by the common purpose of our daily voyage.