Is there any greater indignity than seeing Wayne Barrett’s byline at the Daily Beast?
Yes. It is hearing about his assignments from Tina Brown–the magazine editor of our lifetime, as he calls her–in this incredible NY1 profile that we have no idea how to embed.
“The first assignment I got was to do a piece about Kabbalah. I get an email from one of her editors saying we want you to do a piece on Kabbalah corruption,” Mr. Barrett remembered. “I come downstairs and I say to Fran, ‘I think they’re sending me to Kabul!”
“She wants me to do deal with what’s in the front of her mind, not my own mind, so it’s been a bit of an adjustment,” he said of the transition from the Voice to Tina’s Beast.
Or how about this one: “If I’m writing about Eric Schneiderman, am I ever going to get more hits than somebody writing about Lindsay Lohan? I don’t think so.”
“I don’t know why I left the Voice, I’ll probably never know why, but I’ve always wondered whether or not hits had something to do with it.”
Here are some other things we learned:
- He hunts and pecks.
- He is intrigued by what he calls “fact patterns.”
- He does not use cell phones.
- Or ATMs.
- Or movies.
- Or novels.
- Mario Cuomo offered to be his wife’s divorce lawyer. (They are still together.)
- He got assaulted in Puerto Rico.
