The Times Of His Life: ARTHUR SULZERGER JR.

(4 of 5)

During Thanksgiving break from college, on a trip to Topeka to visit his mother and her third husband, he met his future wife, Gail Gregg, literally the girl next door. The two married in 1975 and shortly thereafter moved to London, where they worked for competing wire services. She often beat him on stories. Being related to a Sulzberger is not the best career move in New York unless you want to work at the Times, so Gregg decided to go to art school. She has a studio over a bagel shop on Broadway and has a growing reputation as a serious painter. They live well but not grandly in an apartment on the Upper West Side, where their two children go to private school. They socialize mainly with family and non-Timesmen. "When I moved to New York, I decided for my own mental health that my closest friends should be outside the Times. They can afford to be honest with me." This policy is not popular with colleagues who used to be close to him.

In September 1987, Sulzberger recalls, just before he became deputy publisher, he held in his hands the fattest paper in New York Times history; a few weeks later, after the stock market crashed 500 points, advertising fell, and the paper began to shrink. "Suddenly we were no longer talking about the Grand Plan but about how to control the descent," he says. Spending was frozen on the business side and buyouts were offered. But the Times never stopped hiring reporters, because "somewhere in there is an assistant managing editor in 20 years."

Sulzberger's biggest challenge is to attract to an old gray newspaper those who now get most of their news from MTV. The splashiest effort to pull in these twentysomething readers is the start-up of a Sunday section called Styles of the Times. When he unveiled it for the Washington bureau at a brown- bag lunch, Sulzberger joked that young readers had better like it because all the older ones would drop dead when they saw it.

Not dead, but perhaps a little numb, as the paper of record takes on a clothing store specializing in "bondage trousers," described as a lace-up crotch contraption for skinheads and dominatrices, or covers a smoke-filled party given by High Times, a magazine devoted to legalizing marijuana. The debut front-page piece, "The Arm Fetish," which analyzed "the body part as fashion accessory," was followed by others on "The Lipstick Wars" and health clubs (they're popular). Like an American abroad speaking slower and louder to be understood, the type is extra large and the sentences are extra short. The overall effect is of a grandmother squeezing into neon biking shorts after everyone else has moved on to long black skirts; the Saks Fifth Avenue ad Styles replaces was hipper. The section is evolving; it adds value for those who want to read it. "No one has to read the whole Sunday paper but me," says Sulzberger.

He recently won a tough but deft battle against the drivers' and mailers' unions, which means that a new color-printing and distribution plant in New Jersey can begin operating. Those readers who managed to live through the Styles section will go into shock in the spring of 1993 when several of the Sunday sections go to color.