Randall Lane and the Pathological Autobiography: A Defense ... kind of

From July 2007 to around November of 2008 I put in some time at Doubledown Media, a small publishing company that put out magazines catering towards the financial set and the otherwise affluent. A few months following what was, in truth, my third departure from the company, it had officially announced it was filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. At present I am a creditor in that case, owed a meager couple hundred dollars that I knew I was never going to get even before I filed the claim. But whereas I have been mucking about in a quagmire of failure and frustration (as is my MO), the company's figurehead (and to many ex-coworkers the chief antagonist of the films taking place in their minds) Randall Lane has kept relatively busy. Not only is he on the editorial staff of The Daily Beast, he also has a memoir coming out this summer that has everything to do with the job that brought the two of us into contact with each other. In order to build anticipation for this release, Randall has arranged for a particularly juicy excerpt to be printed in the July issue of Vanity Fair. As I had anticipated it is already receiving stern criticism from former employees over its factual inaccuracies, fuzzy memories and profound distortions. Fair enough, but at the same time, so what?

The annoyance, perhaps even rage, from my former colleagues is not entirely without justification. As an editorial assistant for Doubledown, my primary task was fact-checking … lots and lots of fact-checking. For someone who is more of a stylist than a researcher this is the most loathsome of jobs, but I'd like to think that I did it with some seriousness and competence. We all did so much of it that we may well have known the contents of every issue inside and out. Naturally this is a job that comes with its own brand of stress. It wasn't terribly calming when my former boss and mentor, the company's managing editor, told me that I was the “last line of defense” against what may very well be a huge libel lawsuit. Fortunately it never came to that, but Randall was a stickler for factual accuracy of course, and to see him turn his back on accuracy in his own work is tantamount to being spat in the face. While part of this rage is based on much understood bitterness, it is mostly based on a linguistic misinterpretation.

The writing of a memoir is not an act of journalism, and while memoirs tend to be autobiographical they are by no means autobiographies. (And if they are they're autobiographies of the pathologies of their authors. Like A Million Little Pieces for instance.) Rather, memoirs are self-serving and one-sided by their very nature. No one in their right mind believes any of what happened in, say, Going Rogue and most certainly in Rousseau's Confessions were described truthfully, all that we can possibly demand of these authors is that the names and locations mentioned exist and are spelled correctly. Memoirs exist either to perpetuate a personal myth (Sarah Palin) or in Lane's case, as a defense against accusations of facilitating the collapse of an entire media company and the jobs therewith.

The content of the excerpt has little to do with the company itself, but with an incident it had every bit to do with. It details his dealings with artist Peter Max who he'd brought on board to “paint” portraits of those most worthy of making it to the annual Trader 100 list. I remember the portraits and what a big deal the arrangement was. I had not heard of Peter Max before that point, but when I did I knew not only his name and occupation, but that he wasn't very good at his occupation. Randall confirmed for mw in the piece what I had always suspected when I saw the paintings in layout: that Max was just painting bright colors around silk-screened photos. While that much is true, people have been taken aback by Lane's view of the situation, namely his dealing with money amounts which some say are conflicting, and his portrayal of Peter Max as a greedy “businessman” whose studio is more of a factory than Andy Warhol's Factory. Damning accusations indeed and ones that tend to bloat into the ridiculous when written out in Lane's irony-free prose seemingly scrapped up from the Entourage writing room floor, but not necessarily interesting or scandalous. Almost every artist in the post-Francis Bacon world has been accused of putting commerce before aesthetics, chief among them Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. That this route is taken in describing Max's supposed sleaze tactics of “selling rich people their photographs back to them in quadruplicate” is not as offensive as Lane's omission that the artist plainly sucks.

But what I feel should make people upset is not the lies of Randall Lane, but the truth. I found it only a tad amusing that Lane is now ready to admit that at the time he was dealing with Max – in February of 2008 – Doubledown was “struggling.” It's funny that, as I remember it at least, for much of that time, even after the crash later that year, we were told the opposite. Sure the company was not doing well in the sense that we might perceive it, but it would be fine, just fine, and everyone's job was safe. This, of course, was before salary cuts and layoffs. In any case, Randall seems more honest with the reader than he was with his employees, and with his prose style able to render everything intangible, those events come off as amusing anecdotes or bits of predictable narrative, the real life effects of which were conveniently glossed over. If there is to be any qualm with the excerpt, it's that.

This of course is only in a context that does not extend beyond the excerpt. At present I cannot talk about the rest of the book's contents and how they deflate or propel my comments here. Nor should this be construed as any kind of personal attack. Randall's not a bad guy in the grand scheme of things, he was actually quite helpful in offering me guidance in not being an idiot, though neither he nor I could have seen my abject indifference to grand scale ambition on the horizon. And there is more than enough room for fondness in regards to the memories I've collected while at Doubledown. This, however, does not change the fact that his writing style is not doing literature any favors. Of course if he's unhappy with my opinions regarding the excerpt he's more than happy to provide a free copy of his book so as to better educate me on the things I didn't know was going on at Doubledown while I worked there. As a creditor in the bankruptcy case, I believe he should have my address handy.