THE JC PENNEY DEBACLE

I finally come clean

It is one of the most distressing thoughts in my head.  I have done so much work in my life.  I had eight produced plays by the time I was 26, and crawled my way from the garage theater underground into legitimate Bay Area venues like The Magic and Berkeley Rep.  I’ve been a professional journalist since I was 19, published 4 books I’m proud of with real publishers, and written 2 screenplays for Francis Ford Coppola.  I had a cool show on MTV.  I contribute to the New York Review of Books.  I have told no lies and not sold out at all.  But the thing I will probably be remembered for when I am dead — the thing that will probably be the headline of my obituary —  is the JC Penney debacle that happened when I was writing about fashion for the New York Times in 2009. 

When I Google “Cintra Wilson JC Penney” over 50,000 entries come up.  It is both the great shame and the apex of my writing career.  

This was before people got “cancelled” — before they called it that.   I got the living shit cancelled out of me.  

It started out like any assignment, with the difference being, as the Times’ Critical Shopper, I was accustomed to reviewing luxury boutiques. I was surprised when my beloved editor wanted to send me to JC Penney, because it wasn’t in the same league as Dior, or Gucci, or Dolce & Gabbana, or any one of the numberless other wealthy labels I’d reviewed. 

My editor, the great Anita LeClerc, told me to write it like I’d write anything else.  I presumed this meant with switchblades, vinegar, and the searing truth I had become accustomed to writing about stores with. I had gotten away with writing funnier and more subversive stuff than I had ever dreamed possible at the Times, at that point.  (The paper has since edited most of the edge and funny stuff out of my articles, for posterity.) My voice and brand were going strong.  It was my tiny reign of terror. 

I had suffered many humiliations at the hands of JC Penney as a child, but I was determined to be fair in my reporting, because my editor trusted me to be fair, and I am fair. I regard things not with contempt, but with wry objectivity.  

I do tend to think there is a certain amount of acceptable brutality in humor.  It is perhaps not my fault, because I was brainwashed early in my life by National Lampoon, which taught me that humor at everyone’s expense was a form of egalitarianism. 

Here is a link to my actual JC Penney article.  Judge for yourself. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/fashion/13CRITIC.html

“Hundreds of people have been writing in,” said my editor on the phone, the day the article came out. 

“Oh!” I exclaimed, assuming it was positive. 

“It’s not good,” she said, with a deadening tone. 

Hundreds, possibly thousands of hate letters were pouring in from all over the states.  The website Jezebel, she told me, had published an article about my JC Penney article, calling it “remarkably nasty…a marvel of snobbery, cruelty, and ugliness.”  The tone of my article was perceived by the Jezebel writer as being sneering and downward-punching:

https://jezebel.com/times-writer-finds-j-c-penneys-focus-on-fat-people-cle-5335844

The Jezebel article inflamed a torrential maelstrom of overweight women against fat-shaming, who suddenly decided I was some kind of prevailing force against them.

My inbox started to fill with seething hate from oversized women from places like Lubbock, TX. I read a lot of it.  Many women told me I was ugly and needed an eye-job. Several women accused me of having killed my dead ex-boyfriend.  A midwestern nurse wrote in to say that if I ever came into her emergency room, she would kill me. 

I felt like Tippi Hedron in “The Birds.”  The sky turned suddenly black.

The next thing I heard was baleful sound of my phone ringing, and my ass being torn out by the New York Times’ Public Editor, who scolded me like I was in fourth grade.  I assured him I hadn’t intended to cause any inflammation in readers whatsoever.  I had easily been that tart in previous articles and didn’t see it coming. “I’d already gotten away with so much worse,” I lamented. 

Choire Sicha, the editor of the Awl (who had impaled me tabloid-style on several occasions) was moved to call me on the phone.  “It happens,” he consoled me.  “It’s literally 40 times worse for women. Men don’t turn on each other with anywhere near as much evil.” 

The New York Times wasted no time utterly renouncing me ( but not firing me. Not then, anyway.)  The Times’ Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote an apology for the piece, insisting (presumably for greater relatability,  because he is in fact an out-of-touch, elitist swine) that his mother was an avid Penney’s shopper.  The Public Editor of the Times wrote an entire article about the mess the following Sunday, calling the incident a “teachable moment.” 

Puke.

I found the whole thing incredibly bewildering. 

At first I didn’t take the situation seriously, but it didn’t fucking go away for weeks. There were articles about my article on all of the fashion publications and NBC news. I was finally compelled by Buddhism to apologize on my blog for any offense my comments might have caused, but I always felt dirty about the whole thing, because I felt so misunderstood.  I had stepped right in the middle of a class war already happening around the New York Times, where it was being perceived as out-of-touch and elitist. My mock-snotty tone was taken at face value. 

When I wrote that article, I was a size 2, and had the poor taste to mention it in passing.  Now I am a size 14.  I thought perhaps that I would see the JCPenney article with softer eyes, now that I am an older, larger person, but the opposite is true.  I think that the women who cancelled me are obese, dribbling Red State cum-dumpsters with zero sense of humor or context who digressed into a remarkably hateful mob-think, and the New York Times brass should have bucked the fuck up and supported me instead of hanging me out to dry and publicly shaving my head on a Sunday morning. 

I avoided the aftermath by running away to Istanbul to follow my feckless art-star boyfriend to the Biennialle.  When I got home, I found my mailbox crammed with invitations to fashion week shows I had just missed.  I was suddenly a very popular girl with the fashion crowd.   I just couldn’t fucking win. 

I was eventually fired by the Times because I refused to stop writing a political column for some weekly papers in Connecticut.  I couldn’t afford to stop.  The Times had a draconian rule that freelancers weren’t allowed to have other writing jobs.  I was living in New York and making $1800 a month at the Times.  I ended up losing my apartment subsidizing my ability to write that article, because I loved it. 

Months later, I became friends with a woman named Megan Carpentier - an ex-K-street lobbyist who was the editor who ran the Jezebel article.  She didn’t believe it, she told me — she hadn’t been offended by my article, but she had run the article, she said, just to fuck with people.

Months later still, I was at an Albert Brooks event uptown because his wife Kimberly is my dear childhood friend and art teacher.  Sitting to Kimberly’s right was her other guest, the then former Executive Times editor Bill Keller.   I hadn’t eaten anything all day, so I got a box of popcorn, which Kimberly kept handing to Bill Keller.  He kept eating it.  I could not fucking stand the idea of Bill Keller eating my dinner — he had so righteously taken so many dinners out of my mouth.  So I stopped handing the box over.  Kimberly ended up scooping up handfuls from my lap and handing them over to Bill.   He ate my popcorn, but it was under glaring silent protest from me.  

One nice thing came out of it.  A knight in the form of one of The Economist’s regular writers came to my rescue on his blog. 

“I am prepared to die so that Cintra Wilson may live,” wrote Lewis Grossberger, who declared himself my “#1 Fanboy.” 

“I’ll make it simple: Funny not bad. Funny good! People like funny. Funny make people larf. People larf, people feel good! They maybe buy paper again.” 

The Times, bless its shriveled gray soul, will never be a place of mirth. 

Cintraw@gmail.com

Artwork: “Domestic Violence,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2019