She Sat Astride, Her Arms Akimbo

There was a little welcoming committee outside Kimball Hall with balloons and a loudspeaker blasting Brahms violin concerto in D minor – I thought that last was a nice touch.

The Stanford campus is like a very nice office park. No where near as visually interesting as the Berkeley campus (or at least the Berkeley campus when I last saw it – it's been some years now.) Big change from Deep Springs! Max is infinitely adaptable being the ultimate strategic thinker (unlike his hyper-emotional, temper-tantrum prone Mom) but there was a moment there as his eyes scanned the quad when I knew he was thinking of the desert.
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Lies, lies. Damn lies.
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In ancient Greece, women were chattel. The sole exception was a class of women known as heterai. They were whores, but they were also temple priestesses, and they were the only females permitted to enter into discourse with powerful men as equal partners.

Pericles married one.

I've known two heterai in my lifetime. Maria, of course. One other.
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In 1991 People Magazine sent Maria to Kuwait to cover the Gulf War. There's a photograph of her taken during this period. She's standing in the desert dressed in combat boots and a short, short skirt. She is laughing. Her foot is perched on a jeep bumper. Is she holding a gun? Or maybe a cigar? I can't remember. The point is she looked happy.

I can just imagine Maria during wartime. Marching up to some hapless jarhead. Sticking out her hand, warming his loins with a thousand mega-watt smile. Asking, "So. Do you think about dying? What scares you the most? How do you cope with being scared?"

Maria was absolutely fearless in some respects. If she'd run into Saddam Hussein, she'd be interviewing him too. "So. What do you like best about torture? Does it turn you on? Do you really believe in Allah? If George Bush were naked on a table in front of you, how would you torture him?"

I won't say she was irresistible as an interviewer. But in order to resist her, you had to know something about her modus operandi which most people – meeting her for the first time and without benefit of counsel from a savvy media advisor – did not. People would tell her anything.

Oddly enough, this is a skill we share in common.

The only problem with this particular talent is that after spewing all their secrets people naturally assume some kind of intimacy. But the intimacy is all one-sided – you haven't told them anything. They like you more than you like them. In fact, you may not like them at all. Sooner or later they pick up on this fact and feel resentful.

Danger was elixir to Maria. And she had a genuine passion for adventures, was a walking encyclopedia of arcane facts about all the exotic and remote destinations she'd traveled to. She loved traveling to exotic and remote destinations. Sometimes I wondered why she ever bothered to come back.
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The new editor at People Online after Maria left was a guy called Stuyvesant Hedge who'd recently come over from the print side of Entertainment Weekly. Sty was just one of the nicest and most talented guys you would ever want to meet, a brilliant writer and editor. Sty was also that rare male who was utterly immune to Maria's charms. He hated her management style – five parts neglect, one part niggling micromanagement – and particularly despised her habit of gliding into meetings with that mega-watt smile and promising the moon when she knew she could never deliver.

Up to this point I had been more-or-less unsupervised in my tiny domain which back then consisted of running People Online's bulletin boards and producing online chats. Hala had taken some interest because I was providing an intangible called "stickiness." "Stickiness" was a major component in ad sales. Also when we first started out, a People Special Projects editor named Eric Levin had tagged along on some of my earliest forays into online celebrity interviews. Of course, I couldn't even get D List celebrities to agree to go online with us. I had to go after the geekiest celebs – the Mystery Theater guys, the spear throwers on Xena, Warrior Princess.

Eric was fascinated by the process in the same way a person might be fascinated by a talking dog. "I mean, this is all well and good. You've got fifteen people monopolizing their phone lines for an hour for a chance to – what? Type at [Your E List Celebrity's Name Goes Here]? Fifteen people! Compared to – what? Twenty million for the print magazine?"

And I would sigh and explain for the fourteenth time, "We're branding this for the future. We have to wait for the pipes to be built. The technology isn't there yet, the technology that will give us the bandwidth we need to compete with other media. But it's gonna happen."

Eventually Eric lost interest and disappeared back into the print magazine to oversee the choosing of this year's Fifty Most Beautiful or Twenty-five Most Interesting. (On a completely unrelated note, I've always wondered why the pretty people outnumbered the interesting people two to one, and what that says about our culture as a whole – or at least our culture as filtered through People Magazine.)

Sty, though, was very, very interested in what I did and actively encouraged me to do more. "There's a whole realm of interactivity that we're not exploring. Polls and things. Like what if we put up a poll about what upcoming movies users are most excited about seeing and then used the results for an exclusive online feature about movies?"

Great idea!

The HTML guys balked at having more work added to their already monstrous load – in addition to mirroring selected parts of the print magazine's content on a weekly basis, there were also features that got uploaded daily like the People Daily News composed by Charlotte Tyrell (not her real name either!) who sat squirreled away in a tiny office thinking up synonyms for "astride" and "akimbo."

"'Astride' is one of those words that grabs everyone's attention," Charlotte told me. "Whenever you have an opportunity to use it, you should."

Words to live by.

Charlotte and Sty were always feuding with one another. I can't remember why now. But when it looked like they were going to get into it over me, I came up with a simple solution: I would simply teach myself HTML and upload my own content.

And that is just what I proceeded to do.

The Passion of Clare Luce Booth

The most heinous misinformation follows.

Before its merger with AOL, Time Warner was structured along the lines of medieval Europe, a confederacy of feuding vassals – media properties loosely yoked together by belief in the one true profit motive as handed down by Gerald Levin from a big glass office on the Time Life Building’s millionth floor. (The rumor that Michelangelo was resurrected to decorate Levin’s ceilings with inspirational scenes from the life of Clare Booth Luce is simply not true.)

The movie studios hated the magazine properties. The magazines hated the book publishers. The book publishers hated the cable channels and the record companies. And everybody hated Road Runner.

In the beginning, each individual Time Warner property was in charge of its own scouting forays into cyberspace. Time Magazine was the most proactive. Several of its editors – notably science editor Phil Elmer-DeWitt and computer writer Josh Quittner – were Well members and active in the community. Phil tapped Tom Mandel to lead Time’s online message boards and Tom did a such a spot on job, infusing them with so much information, wit and sparkle, that they quickly became more entertaining than the Well itself.

(Most cyber-communication is evanescent. The only examples of Tom’s brilliance that still exist are the snippets Cynsa and I archived on a tribute site we put together after he died. He was writing about death, his death. He left them begging for more. Sadly, there wasn’t any.)

Before he threw together Pathfinder, Jim Kinsella had been Time Online’s managing editor. He was an ambitious guy with the social skills of Darth Vader, a really nasty piece of work.

Maria adored him.

I am tempted here to go off into a five thousand word screed on the emotional food chain, les liaisons dangereuses. It was only right that a femme fatale of the first degree like Maria should suffer the pangs and heartache of unrequited yearning, it proved the existence of karma. And karma always wins in the end! Yada yada yada.

Except the other beautiful, charismatic and utterly ambitious heartbreaker I know never falls for people who are emotionally unavailable. “There’s no pay-off,” she told me once.

“Well, no,” I said. “Obviously not. But, I mean, you can’t control your emotions.”

“Of course you can,” said Erica.

The pay-off for Maria was obvious: someone early on had taught her that love equals pain, so being hurt was the only way she could experience an emotion roughly analagous to what many call love. Duh!

I’m talking feelings here, I must hasten to add: I have no idea what went on behind Maria’s bedroom doors, and I wouldn’t care to speculate.

On the other hand, oh to have been a fly on the wall at those corporate meetings where Kinsella pitched Pathfinder to the corporate masters! I can only imagine the scribbles on the whiteboards!

Anyhow he succeeded, dubbed himself managing editor, installed Maria as second in command. Looked around for the biggest match he could find and started setting fire to big piles of money.

Irresistable Forces, Immoveable Objects

A word of advice to all three of you reading this. (And, oh yeah – everything I’m writing is a complete misrepresentation. Got that?)

If you’re really into empire building, don’t be cocky. At some point you’re gonna need other people’s help and the only way you’ll get it is if you’re super-powerful to begin with, pay big bonuses, or are just likeable enough so that people somehow feel invested in your success.

None of these criteria applied to Jim Kinsella. Which is why he needed Maria.

Kinsella’s big innovation as soon as Pathfinder was formed was to block users from entering double-u double-u double-u dot magazine-I-wanna-read dot com into their browsers.

Instead he decided users had to enter double-u double-u double-u dot pathfinder dot com forward slash magazine-I-wanna-read.

This was a pain in the ass and most users didn’t stick around long enough to try it.

Hala was livid. “What’s the first thing that comes into your mind when you hear the word ‘pathfinder?’ Quick!”

“Natty Bumppo,” I said.

“Sports utility vehicle,” said Charlotte Tyrell.

“The point is you do not think of People Magazine! Why would you fuck around like that with brand recognition? And not just any brand, the biggest brand in American magazine publishing? I told Kinsella he could kiss my ass. We’re not giving up people.com.”

Hala was kind of the anti-Maria. Where Maria would seduce you into giving her what she needed from you, Hala would get up close and personal – in your face, on your ass, wherever your guard was down – and rant. It would only take a few seconds of Hala’s ranting for most people – normal people – to realize nothing was worth this degree of aggravation and give up.

Of course, most of the people involved in Pathfinder and People Online were not normal. Thus meetings frequently degenerated into screaming matches, Hala versus Kinsella, Hala versus Maria, Hala versus whatever objects had delusions of immovability on that particular day.

Sty simply couldn’t take it. Between Hala’s scream fests and Charlotte Tyrell’s passive aggressive skulking, he dreaded coming to work. One day he called me up: EW had offered to give him his old job back and happily, happily, happily, he’d accepted.

I think maybe I was the only person who knew what a tremendous loss this was. Sty had vision. Moreover, he was sane. Without him People Online was very much a case of inmates running the asylum.

Charlotte Tyrell filled the managing editor vacuum caused by Sty’s departure.

As a sidebar I should note here that if my characterization of Hala makes it sound as though I didn’t like her, that’s simply not so. I liked her a great deal, actually. I even admired her.

But goddamn, she scared the piss out of me.