Out to Lunch

with San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, who tells JON BRADSHAW why he dropped the "ert"

Nattily attired in a polka-dot tie and a six-button British blazer with a pink carnation in the lapel, Herb Caen waited for me at the bar in San Francisco's Campton Place. He looked like an elegant and jovial troll. "You're late as usual, J.B.," he greeted me with a smile.

"Actually, I'm on time, which is early forme."

"Oh," he said, "you're going to give yourself all the good lines, I see."

The sixty-nine-year-old newspaperman, known hither and yon as Mr. San Francisco, was in a particularly fine mood that afternoon. He had just celebrated the forty-seventh anniversary of his popular column, which runs six days a week in the San Francisco Chronicle. The column first appeared there under the title "It's News to Me." In 1950 it moved to the Examiner, where it was renamed "Baghdad by the Bay." Caen and his column returned to the Chronicle in 1958. "Now the column's just called 'Herb Caen,' which is my real name. Actually, it's Herbert Caen, but for reasons of style and brevity I dropped the 'ert.'

But isn't 'Herb Caen' a great name for a column? I mean, it's better than 'George F. Will,' isn't it?"

Caen is fond of referring to himself as a three-dot journalist writing three-dot journalism, an upbeat staccato style he picked up from Walter Winchell. Over numerous goblets of Kir, crab cakes with a tomato remoulade sauce, and sauteed red, green, and yellow peppers, Caen explained that Winchell had been an early idol. "You really felt you were in New York when you read him. I must have been the only kid west of the Rockies who subscribed to the New York Daily Mirror, but I just had to read him. Winchell was the cleverest thing I'd ever seen.

"I loved the newspaper business when I was young. I was just a crazy kid full of energy and enthusiasm. I

scoured the town every night with chorus girls on each arm. I had a car with a red light, like Winchell's—you know, a siren on the roof. I stayed up all night, I wrote my column at four in the morning, and then went home and slept till noon. It was fantastic. It was fun. Until I ran out of steam." "When was that?" "Oh.. .forty years later."

"Why do you think people continue to read your column?"

"I've become a habit. Coffee and Caen. People just expect you to be there. My readers have grown up with the column. I've got three generations of readers. I get letters from people who say they remember their grandfathers used to read the column at the breakfast table and laugh over something, and they would say, 'What are you laughing at, Grandpappy?' and he'd tell them and they'd say, 'What's funny about that?' And now they read it at the breakfast table and laugh and their kids say, 'What's funny about that?' People have been laughing at me for nearly fifty years. Uh.. .make that laughing with me."

"Do you ever read your column yourself?' '

"Are you crazy? Never. Early in the

morning, when the paper comes in, I go right by it. And if by mistake I get caught by it, entrapped, I read it and cringe. And I think, Did I really write this crap?"

"And then you call up your editor and say, 'Fire this man immediately.' "

"Yes, yes. 'For God's sake, stop me before I kill again.' '' Caen paused. "Someday I'll write the perfect column.. .but I haven't yet. The

perfect column would be twenty-four laudable items—very short, pithy, and fast-paced. It would be a perfect mixture of several scoops, a few one-liners, a double entendre, a triple pun, a needle or two, an incredibly funny graffito, some morsels of choice gossip." (Two legendary Caenisms: "Isn't it nice that the kind of people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?" and a description of the Golden Gate Bridge as "the car-strangled spanner.")

"You see," he continued, "the whole problem is that I don't love this city the way I once did. You have to be a kid to fall in love with the city the

way I did. In fact, of late I've become a critic of San Francisco instead of its biggest booster. But the town has deteriorated alarmingly in many ways over the years. In the old days, I used to make the rounds every night. Now there aren't any rounds to make. Or maybe I've just lost my energy."

"Then why don't you write fewer than six columns a week?"

"Because it's easier than writing three columns a week. With three columns a week, you've got to be pretty good. With six columns, you can be pretty bad, because the readers will say, 'Well, old Herb really stank today, but tomorrow he might be pretty good.' I've been living on that for forty-seven years. And, J.B., tomorrow has never come."