For David Talbot

David Talbot and Gary Kamiya at the Cafe Zoetrope in 2020. Photo by Dennis Hearne.

I want to post something about my dear friend, longtime journalistic colleague and fellow San Francisco historian David Talbot. As many of you may have heard, David had a severe stroke eight days ago. Fortunately he survived. He is able to understand some of what his family says, has been deemed a good candidate for acute rehab and has regained some physical movement. His wife Camille Peri, also a dear friend and fellow writer, says it seems like he is still the same David on the inside. However, he has not been able to speak. We are all hoping that he will regain his speech, just as he came back from the first stroke he suffered in 2017.

David’s family and friends have established a GoFundMe campaign for him. If you care about San Francisco, history, and writing, or just want to help a great journalist, beloved San Franciscan, and special human being when he truly needs it, I urge you to contribute whatever you can.

I’d like to say a few words about David. I first met him around 1986, when I was in my early 30s. I was an unknown freelance writer who had published a few features in the Berkeley Monthly. David was an editor at the San Francisco Examiner’s old Sunday magazine, Image. He invited me out to lunch and assigned me to do a story for Image. To say I was clueless in the ways of journalism would be like saying that Donald Trump does not always tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. At the end of that first lunch, I asked with bright-eyed and bushy-tailed naivete, “Is it all right if editors and writers become friends?”

Somehow David managed not to burst out laughing. We did become friends, and we have remained friends ever since.

I wrote that assignment for David, then another one. In 1990, he hired me to work as an editor at Image. At the age of 37, it was my first real job.

The Image gig was, in every way, my big break. I needed one. I was an intellectual Berkeley hippie and Yale drop out, a wannabe theater critic and timorous Nietzschean who went back to UC at the age of 28 and got an MA studying deconstruction while driving a taxi in San Francisco. Had it not been for David, there is every reason to believe this glittering resume would have led to continued employment as a taxi driver for 45 or 50 more years, punctuated by occasional unpaid publications in the Derrida Quarterly. I owe my career as a journalist to him.

But more important, I owe him for making that career fun.

David has always been a dreamer, a troublemaker, a renegade, a rebel with a cause. He’s an LA boy whose father, Lyle Talbot, was a major B movie actor, and some of that silver-screen chutzpah and imagination and daring is in his DNA. He has the Irish gift of blarney (and an occasional temper to match). He thinks big, sometimes too big, but he somehow pulls his harebrained schemes off more often than not.  There’s a fearlessness to David, a maverick streak, a fuck-you attitude to The Man, that is very much in the great free-spirited tradition of San Francisco journalism, going back to Mark Twain, William Randolph Hearst and Ambrose Bierce. And he’s also restless.

So after five years at Image, fun and productive as they were, David grew weary of the constraints of print journalism and decided to try a new medium. He would launch an internet magazine!

That was all well and good, but there was one small problem. Neither David, nor I, nor the other four hapless dupes, I mean fearless pioneers, whom David convinced to come with him, knew what the “internet” was. OK, one of those dupes, former Examiner theater critic Scott Rosenberg, did, but his knowledge didn’t rub off on the rest of us. David found someone to pony up a tiny amount of seed money (he prudently did not inform us how much). Emulating those cartoon characters who don’t fall as long as they continue pedaling madly in midair, we jumped into the void and started Salon.com.

I think I can speak for most, if not all, Salon alumni (many of us still stay in touch with each other) when I say it was the best move of our professional lives.

David and I spent almost 10 years working together at Salon. I tell that rollicking, sublime, idiotic story here. He was the editor; I was the executive editor. During that decade, I spent more time with him than I did with my then-wife. We were inseparable. We dreamed up stories together, edited each other, wrote headlines at the end of the day together, went out to cheap lunches together, drank together, traveled together, partied together, threw footballs in Washington Square together, went through all the ups and downs of work and life together. I wrote a lot more than he did, but he was a ceaseless font of ideas—and he was the leader of the whole damn thing. We called each other Mick and Keith. Our collaboration was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

We had a blast at Salon—and we kicked some serious journalistic ass. Salon exposed Rep. Henry Hyde’s “youthful indiscretion,” helped save President Clinton from the Whitewater scandal, did some of the best reporting and writing on George W. Bush’s catastrophic “war on terror,” ran long essays on race and music and art and literature and women’s issues, and on and on. We did it all under a constant financial sword of Damocles—when would the money run out? And we loved every minute of it. Working at Salon was like playing in a rock band. We made up the rules as we went along. The inmates ran the asylum. Salon spoiled me for all subsequent employment.

Eventually, the wild ride came to an end, at least for David and me (Salon is still thriving). And the people who rode that Magic Bus, for just a stop or two or for many years, are a virtual who’s who of contemporary journalism and writing. Dwight Garner. Jake Tapper. Dave Eggers. Laura Miller. Camille Paglia. Michelle Goldberg. Joan Walsh. Mark Schapiro. Andrew Ross. James Poniewozik. Andrew O’Hehir. Cintra Wilson. Scott Rosenberg. Camille Peri. Ruth Shalit. Doug Cruickshank. Suzy Hansen. Mark Hertsgaard. Rebecca Traister. Chris Colin. Juan Cole. Andrew Sullivan. Ann Lamott. Kate Moses. James Surowiecki. Andrew Leonard. Joyce Millman. Amy Standen. Farhad Manjoo. Aluf Benn. Carina Chocana. Damien Cave. And many, many more.

David Talbot—pied piper, ringmaster, slashing writer, bullshit artist, visionary, brilliant editor—was responsible for Salon. That in itself qualifies David as a major figure in the history of modern American journalism. But David wasn’t finished, not by a long shot. He went on to write groundbreaking, meticulously researched explorations of the dark side of American history, such as The Devil’s Chessboard, as well as one of the best contemporary books about San Francisco, Season of the Witch.

It always makes me smile when I see Season of the Witch and Cool Gray City of Love displayed side by side in bookstores, as they often are. It’s been 20 years since David and I worked together at Salon, but they still can’t separate us. And they never will.

There is so much more I could say about David. What a wonderful and loyal friend he has been. His passionate political views. His love of San Francisco. His empathy and humility, which grew deeper after his stroke six years ago. His love of music. His zany sense of humor. His love of his wife Camille and his boys, Joe and Nat, and his siblings. But I’ll leave it here. I would just like to wish my old friend a full recovery, and if that is not possible, the courage and wisdom to face whatever life has in store for him.

I still don’t know what the internet is, but I would like to lead it in a virtual cheer. It may not be audible, but some sounds do not need to be heard to be felt.

Three cheers for David Talbot!

Please consider making a donation to David’s GoFundMe campaign. David and Camille are in difficult financial straits and all contributions will be greatly appreciated. Thank you!