Mark Singer, a staff writer for The New Yorker for 23 years who expanded the magazine’s rich reporting and witty prose about offbeat, complex and quintessentially American characters, died Friday in Manhattan. He was 75 years old.
His son Tim said in hospital that the cause of death was salivary gland cancer.
Mr. Singer wrote urbane “Talk of the Town” pieces for the magazine’s cover, weighed in on serious national matters such as the Affordable Care Act and traveled around the country as a correspondent for the “U.S. Journal” column.
But he was known as a profiler. His subjects included magician Ricky Jay, whom he called “probably the most talented sleight of hand artist alive”; A group of four doorman brothers in New York; and Donald Trump, an arrogant real-estate developer, years before he ran for office.
“He came out of the tradition of AJ Liebling and Joseph Mitchell and Calvin Trillin,” magazine editor David Remnick said in an interview, “which means he combined careful reporting and a very distinctive comic voice, which is extremely rare.”
A native of Oklahoma, Mr. Singer moved back to the state in 1985 to write a wide-ranging series of articles that became the book “Funny Money.” It’s about a small suburban bank that overinflated its balance sheet wildly during an energy boom, led by a goofy gang of executives, including a guy who wore Mickey Mouse ears to work.
A 2005 collection of profiles of Mr. Singer, “Character Studies”, was subtitled “Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed”, a description matching the author himself.
The book included excerpts about a group of Texans searching for Pancho Villa’s missing skull and a family of diehard California farmers, the Chinos, who grew vegetables for Chez Panisse’s chef Alice Waters (who was married to Mr. Singer’s brother Stephen).
Jeff McGregor wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “Singer’s voice fits perfectly into the register of The New Yorker: cool and intelligent, with a sarcastic and artistic skepticism not tainted by cynicism.” “Neither aloof nor Olympian, but he maintains an efficient distance from his subjects. He is a brilliant reporter, with a receptive ear for dialogue and a painter’s eye for key details.”
The collection also includes Mr. Singer’s 1993 Shree Jai’s profileWith a description of his amazing card tricks and feats of memory, which Mr. Singer observed during two years’ acquaintance.
“His hands are small – just big enough to fit a playing card in the palm of his hand,” Mr Singer said. “There is a slightly raised pad of flesh on the underside of the first joint of each finger.”
He was less than thrilled to be tasked with profiling Mr. Trump in 1997 by Tina Brown, then editor of The New Yorker.
Observing him over several months on construction sites, in his Trump Tower office, and in a private plane, Mr. Singer concluded that Mr. TrumpIn the period before he became a reality TV star, he was a man “who aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence untouched by the stirrings of the soul.”
“In that profile,” Mr. Remnick said, “you found everything about Trump 20 years before he ran for president: the arrogance, the casual cruelty, the extreme selfishness. It was all there.”
The profile was included in “Character Studies” and after it was mentioned in a Times review, Mr. Trump wrote a letter to the editor attacking Mr. Singer, saying he “was not born with great writing ability.”
Mr. Singer sent Mr. Trump a fake thank-you for the publicity, which apparently sent his book climbing the Amazon book charts. He also enclosed a check for $37.82, “a small token of my immense gratitude,” he wrote.
Mr Trump returned the letter with a note in capital letters at the bottom, which read in part, “Mark – you are a complete loser.”
Mr. Trump also cashed a check for $37.82, Mr. Singer Later Said. Mr. Singer made a photocopy of it for his apartment.
In 1999, Mr. Singer accepted the challenge of solving Mystery of Joseph MitchellThe magazine’s venerable, Joycean profiler of New York eccentrics, who served 32 years in office without publishing a single article after 1964. Mr. Singer, who never properly resolved the causes of Mitchell’s epic writer’s block, quotes Philip Hamburger, a friend of Mitchell: “Why didn’t he write more? Well, he wrote enough.”
Mark J. Singer was born on October 19, 1950, in Tulsa, Okla., one of five children of Alexander and Marjorie (Taylor) Singer. His father ran an oil and gas business, Singer Brothers, which was founded by his own father and an uncle, whose family members were Jewish immigrants from Russia.
Mr. Singer attended Yale, where he found a mentor William Zinsser, A non-fiction writing teacher whose classic guide, “On Writing Well,” preaches removing clutter from sentences and choosing precise words. (He first introduced Mr. Singer to Mitchell’s work.)
Mr. Singer received a bachelor’s degree in English in 1972. Two years later, he was hired by The New Yorker, at a time when the magazine offered an on-ramp to promising but inexperienced young writers who sank or swim by writing unlined pieces for “The Talk of the Town.”
Mr. Singer married Rhonda Klein, a lawyer, in 1972. Like Caroline Mailhot, his second marriage also ended in divorce.
In addition to his son Tim from his first marriage, he is survived by his partner, Lisa Brody; his sons Jeb and Reed, also from his first marriage; a son, Paul Mailhot-Singer, from his second marriage; two grandchildren; and his siblings George, Stephen and Sandra Anderson.
Mr. Singer is also the author of “Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin” (1996), an expanded version of a New Yorker profile of a drug trafficker, murder suspect and media manipulator, which was a finalist for a national magazine award; and the collection “Somewhere in America: Under the Radar with Chicken Warriors, Left-Wing Patriots, Angry Nudists and Others” (2004).
The New Yorker writer Ian Frazier, who shared an office with Mr. Singer when both were much older, recalled that his colleague and friend once berated the magazine’s famously reserved former editor William Shawn at a wedding reception. Mr. Singer tells Mr. Shawn an old anecdote about his first marriage.
As the editor retreated, exploring the terrace, Mr. Singer listed an elaborate menu he had requested from a Jewish caterer – bagels, herring, etc. – after which the caterer said, “So far, you’re not giving them anything.”
Started laughing.
“Mark and I,” Mr. Frazier said, “are going to talk about what writing is?” he is writing,” he said of Mr. Singer’s tall tale presented with confidence to a defensive audience. “When you can feel a real breeze and just keep going with it.”
