August 31, 2006 Issue                                       

©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

The Philadelphia Reader illuminates the elite well, misses big picture
by PETE MAZZACCARO

In the forward to The Philadelphia Reader (Temple University Press, $18.95 paperback), a collection of 29 profiles culled from the pages of Philadelphia magazine, writer Buzz Bissinger tries to sum up his hometown in a few words. An exercise he is quick to admit is futile.

“Trying to capture the essence of Philadelphia in fewer than 1,500 words is both an honor and a plague,” he writes, concluding at the end of his 1,500 or so words that the city he has spent many years in, as a resident and as a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, cannot be captured easily. It is a city that offers much more than the blue-collar, joyless stereotype that is so often applied to it by outsiders, but even more often by its residents.

“Philadelphia is much more than that,” he writes of that stereotype, “much more, not just a city, of course, but a wide expansive region of three million. It is a place with the most beautiful neighborhoods in the world, from Society Hill to Chestnut Hill to the royal estates of the Main Line. It is a place of funk and culture from the jazz joints of North Philly to the Philadelphia Orchestra. It is a place with the greatest urban resource known to man, the splendor of Fairmount Park and the Wissahickon Creek.”

Still, says Bissinger, The Philadelphia Reader strives to do what seems impossible: to tell the story of the city’s recent history through intimate sketches of some its most notable persons, all committed to print between the years of 1988 and 1995. It’s a tall order for a set of personality profiles. The story of Philadelphia is a tall order for any book less than 1,000 pages. But can a book about the elite capture an un-elite city like Philadelphia?

The book certainly does an admirable job of capturing its chosen subjects, a complex selection of people who have steered the city and occupied the front pages of its newspapers, but an intimate portrait of the city that Bissinger tries to describe seems to elude the book as much as it does him. Often, one gets the sense while reading that there is something left out. It’s often the same problem one experiences when reading Philadelphia magazine. The story of the little people, the workers, criminals, children, and parents – the great unheralded three million – isn’t anywhere to be seen or sensed.

That’s not to say that there is not great material in Reader. Often, the writers, current or former staffers at the magazine, manage to capture the essence of the city’s newsmakers through remarkable immersion reporting – spending days, weeks and sometimes months with their subjects. And the book covers a lot of territory. There are political figures: Ed Rendell, John Street and Arlen Specter; businessmen: Commerce Bank CEO Vernon Hill, Comcast’s Brian Roberts and producer-cum-developer Kenny Gamble; athletes: Mike Schmidt and Julius Irving.

All are well-written even if some are less than thorough. Larry Platt’s portrait of Roberts, “Roberts Rules” is particularly bland, painting the young mastermind of Comcast as a two-dimensional business genius with little other character development to recommend him to membership in the human race. (example: “…and then Brian Roberts is off, a hand full of pink message slips in tow, headed for his office, where a spate of brainstorming phone calls cry out to be made, and barely hatched dreams wait to come true.”)

Perhaps it is because many of the pieces don’t necessarily tread new ground with their subjects (though to be fair, these pieces often were the first to break or at least to solidify the stories we now hold to be universal truths) the most memorable of these pieces are the sketches of marginal and colorful fringe Philadelphians, the notorious and outlandish people who really do make Philadelphia a one-of-a-kind place.

Harry Jay Katz, the East Falls ne’er-do-well millionaire, is wonderfully illustrated by Stephen Roddick in “The Trouble with Harry.” Roddick takes the readers into Katz’ nutty nightlife-fueled world, buying supposed mobsters drinks at the Palm, conducting an interview in his pool and trolling for women on Main Street, Manayunk.

Roddick gives the reader a camera-eye view of Katz’ chaotic world, a world free of order or responsibilityThe story is in the details, like this description of the moments before an early meeting at Katz’ East Falls home:

Harry Jay Katz greets me at the door of his East Falls home. It’s 10 a.m. on a brutally hot Wednesday. Katz is clad in a white beach jacket and swimming trunks. In his left hand, a celery stick peeks out of the top of a plastic cup holding a Bloody Mary. He has already done the morning chores: calls to his mother, Selma, brother Phil, and pals [Daily News columnist, Stu] Bykofsky and Ron Pennock. Our meeting was scheduled to be a brief session, laying down ground rules, but Harry has other ideas. He loans me a swimsuit, I go upstairs to change. On the stairs is a life-size cutout of Wilson Goode wearing a RENDELL FOR MAYOR t-shirt. The bedrooms are pretty much as his kids left them years ago, with video arcade games and a vintage 1983 rock poster of The Police.

In Lisa DePaulo’s “Bobby Simone’s Last 1,000 Martinis,” the writer spends time with the noted mob lawyer in the months before receiving a jail sentence for doing business with mob. She captures Simone as an incredibly confident lawyer who seems unwilling to delve deeply into his life’s wrok: pro-bono counsel for convicted mob boss Nicky Scarfo. He also seems unconcerned that he faces serious jail time for charges he was convicted of in 1992.

With Simone, DePaulo examines her subjects moral ambiguity with simple questions and answers. In a conversation about Scarfo, she writes:

I ask him if he really likes Nicky Scarfo.

“Yeah, by and large, I like him as a person.” He likes “his loyalty, which is very rare these days. He thinks “he’s basically an honest person believe it or not.”

How does he see Scarfo – a man convicted of ordering the murders of most of his friends—as loyal and honest?

“I don’t think he conceals how he feels about things, or people. I think he’s upfront about it. If he doesn’t like somebody, he doesn’t con him. He either won’t associate with him or he’ll be rude to him.”

The Reader’s forward author, Bissinger, has perhaps the book’s best piece, “Richard Sprague Knows Everything,” in which the writer fails to actually interview his subject but delves into his remarkable reputation as a cold-blooded but incredibly talented lawyer through the recollections of friends and adversaries.

Bissinger’s narrative is driven by a trip he makes to a Norristown courtroom to meet Sprague face to face and request an interview in person. The meeting is fraught with uncertainty for Bissinger who lets the reader in on his apprehension of meeting the tough lawyer.

I smoke my cigarette and think of his face

I have seen it only in a photograph. It appeared in the newspaper roughly a decade ago, and I have always remembered it, or at least I believe I have, given the way in which memory is little more than apsychological tool. Actually it isn’t the face I remember as muchas the expression — rigidly humorless, devoid of a single touch of softness, utterly miserable-looking to be honest.

I think about turning around and just going home.

But I also know he has a middle name: Aurel. There is something pretty about that name. It rolls off the tongue in a kindly and melodious way, without bark or bite.

His piece also includes a brief anecdote about Chestnut Hill attorney George Parry’s run in with Sprague, in which Parry —during a hearing in which both attorneys are arguing opposing sides — is hassled by Sprague about retiring to the judge’s chambers to get a drink. Parry says he finally, and with clenched fists, backed Sprague down verbally, telling him, “You don’t tell me what to do.” Only a greater act of machismo manages to prevent Sprague from getting what he wants.

In the end, with The Philadelphia Reader, we get a notable “greatest hits” collection of profiles from what is still one of the best big-city magazines left in the country.

We get some great behind-the-scenes looks at Philadelphia’s elite, but the real story of Philadelphia — the place of horrible crimes vast expanses of poverty, its reputation as one of the least educated major cities in the country and its trials with reforming education, and the stories of it’s basic blue and white collar successes, the march of neighborhood revitalization and boom of center city industry — is at best a prop in the background of many of these pieces. Perhaps it is unfair to heap these expectations on a collection of profiles, but it seems a magazine with Philadelphia’s reputation should be in possession of that material.

Still, The Philadelphia Reader boasts many memorable and enjoyable pieces that any reader of great writing will be glad to have. Like the city it is named for, its not perfect, but worth the experience.