By Michael Miner
“Never once did he say he was proud of what he’d done. That’s what I was waiting to hear….I figured that if you tried to gut somebody in public, you’d have the guts to stand up for what you did.”
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But Schmidt knew Kass hadn’t traveled to Beverly to work up a column on the probity of mergers and acquisitions. “Oh, I talked to Kass,” Schmidt told Snyder later. “He’s going to kill me again tomorrow.”
Kass refuses to comment on his columns after they run, so there’s no way of knowing how he’d grade his performance. But I have no reason to doubt Snyder’s version of Kass’s conversation with Schmidt and no reason to believe it troubled Kass for a second. Was Kass duplicitous? Of course he intended to kill Schmidt again tomorrow, but of course Schmidt knew that–and of course Kass knew Schmidt knew. Kass was offering Schmidt a deal: Come clean about your perfidious ad, and tomorrow might turn out to be another day.
The distinguished directors–including architects Walter Netsch, Laurence Booth, and former editor Richard Solomon–stayed on a while as advisers, but Polydoris soon ran them off. Inland Architect plummeted in quality, and advertising all but disappeared. It’s of interest these days only because it’s so odd that it still exists.
“Oh my God, don’t ask me!” he said. “I haven’t seen a copy of it. I was removed from the editorial staff. They didn’t want to listen to me. They antagonized a lot of people. They didn’t accomplish what we thought they were going to do, which was take over a very respectable magazine and continue it. It became a real estate tool rather than an architectural tool.”
Tigerman was out of town, but I talked to Taber Wayne, his business manager, who talked to him. “Mr. Tigerman doesn’t even read the magazine anymore,” she said. “The subscription was allowed to lapse.”
