Stalking the Wily Bivalve

A tribute to my friend John Leo

My old pal John Leo died on Monday at age 86.  He was a long-time columnist for Time Magazine and U.S. News & World Report.  He worked briefly for the Bergen Evening Record, the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal, the New York Times and the Village Voice before he joined Time in 1974. 

Leo, as we called him, was a paid-in-full member of the New York intelligentsia, although I’m sure it would rankle him to hear that.  But most of all, he was a real character and a great friend. 

I’m proud to say I helped him get his job at the Village Voice.  Leo was at loose ends, having quit the Times, when over copious quantities of alcohol one evening, he came up with the idea of writing a column that would be nothing but press criticism.  Such a thing didn’t exist at that time, the job of being what came to be known in the trade as a press critic, and as we pondered where he might be able to publish such a thing, I came up with the idea of the Voice, where I was then a staff writer.

The next day, somewhat worse for wear from the night before, we marched into the office of the Voice’s editor Dan Wolf, I introduced them, and Leo made his proposal.  He reeled off a number of crimes that had been committed recently in print by newspapers and magazines, most of them by the Times, I should add, because why not go straight for the Big Guy on the Block?  Wolf asked him what he would call it, and Leo quipped, “Press Clips.”  Thus was born the first newspaper column devoted exclusively to press criticism ever to exist. 

Leo wrote it for a year or so, and when his talents came to the attention of editors at Time, he was offered a job there and the Voice column was taken over by Alexander Cockburn.  It went on to be written by James Ledbetter among others, but it always carried the name that tripped from Leo’s lips that afternoon in Wolf’s office.

It was around then – if memory serves, 1973 – that Leo and the Albany Bureau Chief for the Voice, Phil Tracy and I decided we should dip our toes into the burgeoning scene out in Sag Harbor as journalists and novelists and other writers began gathering in the “Un-Hampton,” as the village was called, renting cottages and small homes that could be had cheaply in those long-ago days.  Leo and Tracy and I rented a pile of shingles and clapboard over on Shelter Island for the summer and decamped every weekend with our girlfriends and in Leo’s case, wife and daughters, to enjoy what looking back as the frontier days of writers in the Hamptons. 

We used to give weekly dinner parties and invite other journalists and writers over to Shelter Island to enjoy its bounty.  Leo and I discovered that a nearby salt pond was practically overrun by clams, and every week we would take a bushel basket that we affixed within an old innertube and wade into the salt pond to retrieve clams by treading for them.  This meant seeking them out in the mud with your toes and then reaching down to pick them up and plop them into our bushel basket.  Over time, we became quite skilled at finding them and eventually learning to pick them up with our toes.  Leo, who had a natural born gift as a wordsmith, soon called it “stalking the wild bivalve.”  Eventually, we reduced that to “going after the wilies,” because as Leo reasoned, the damn things had to be wily if the likes of us had to work so hard to find and harvest them.

We would serve them raw on the half-shell, or stuffed with breadcrumbs and onion and green peppers and spices, or as Clams Casino – baked open on the half-shell in the oven with an “X” of bacon and pimento crossing their tops.  We took so many out of that salt pond we could feed whole tables of Hamptons literary intellectuals which often included Alice Mayhew, the Simon and Schuster editor of Woodward and Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men;” the literary critic Wilfred Sheed and his wife the chef and cookbook author Miriam Ungerer; the New Yorker writer Ken Auletta and his wife the literary agent Amanda Urban; the Time Magazine war correspondent and investigative reporter Robert Sam Anson – you get the picture. 

At some point that summer I came across a derelict sailing skiff on a beach, and Leo and I fixed it up and took off sailing the listing thing around Shelter Island.  Leo was, not to put too fine a point on it, rather dismissive of all the fancy names real sailors had for sailing accoutrements:  a rope was a “line;” left and right were “starboard and port” (or was it the other way around); changing direction was “coming about.”  Leo came up with his own sailing jargon:  reefing the sail was “snarfling in the cardle,” coming about was “reversing the wangdoodle.” For taking a new tack, Leo borrowed the exclamation, “fore!” from golf.  He would sit at the stern with the tiller in one hand and a beer in the other and bark out commands with such hilarious authority it brought tears to your eyes.  I used to wish some of our literary friends could have been out there with us to hear his salty jargon, but the leaking, listing skiff was only big enough for two, so the summer went by without the rest of the intelligentsia experiencing Leo’s mastery of his own nautical universe.

Some thought Leo became more conservative as he aged – a favorite target in his columns later in life was the academy, which he saw as having fallen into the clutches of political correctness.  But in my memory, he’ll always be at the other end of a summer dinner table skewering one orthodoxy or another, it didn’t matter whether liberal or conservative, and wading next to me across the salt pond with the rope to the innertube tied around his waist warning the wily bivalves that their masters had taken to their waters and soon they would be dinner.  Then his muddy foot would emerge from the depths of the pond with a fat, glistening wily bivalve clutched by his toes, and the already wide smile on his face would widen even more as he called out across the water, “gotcha!”