In high school, I waited tables on weekends at a restaurant in the tony Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, where framed covers of The New Yorker hung on the walls. That’s how I first encountered the magazine, and so I associated it with the moneyed clientele of genteel tastes who ordered items then exotic to me: ricotta blintzes, croque-monsieurs, frittatas.
Then, one night, I went to see “Adaptation,” a new movie that was playing at one of the art-house theatres downtown. I vaguely recall a friend describing it as “meta”—superlative praise for a moody teen. The movie is, in part, about the labor pains of its creator, the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman had been hired to adapt “The Orchid Thief,” a book by Susan Orlean based on her New Yorker profile of an orchid poacher. Feeling stuck, Kaufman wrote himself into the script. In the movie, Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) complains to his agent, “I can’t structure this. It’s that sprawling New Yorker shit.” Kaufman, and Cage as Kaufman, also made Orlean’s interactions with the flower snatcher, John Laroche—a genius in Florida redneck clothing (Mylar wraparound sunglasses, tropical T-shirt, etc.)—a subplot.
In one scene, Orlean (Meryl Streep) finds Laroche (Chris Cooper) outside a Miami courthouse where he has just finished testifying in his own defense—or, more accurately, bragging about his research on “the asexual micropropagation of orchids under aseptic cultures,” a self-satisfied smile revealing his missing front teeth. He gives Orlean, pen and pad in hand, a quote for the record: “I don’t care what goes on here. I’m right, and I’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court, cuz that judge can screw herself.” As Orlean jots down that last bit, Laroche looks shocked—but also a little charmed. “That for real would go in?” he asks. I wondered the same thing. Maybe there was something more to this magazine than wall art for the well-heeled.
I took my tip money and ran to the bookstore to buy “The Orchid Thief,” and eventually I tracked down “Orchid Fever,” the original article. The colorful rejoinder to the judge wasn’t in there, but I did find what might indeed be called “sprawling New Yorker shit.” The meandering sections were and remain my favorite, like the long aside in which Orlean imagines millions of orchid seeds, “as fine as gunpowder,” floating their way from South America via air currents: “Winds blowing into Florida drop seeds in swimming pools and barbecue pits and on highways and shuffleboard courts and hotel parking lots and the roofs of office buildings, and also in places that are tranquil and damp and warm, where the seeds can germinate and grow.” I could almost feel something small and alive on my skin as I read it. Kaufman’s decision to have the onscreen Orlean and Laroche fall in love wouldn’t pass fact checking, but it indirectly captures the stormy sensuality of Orlean’s prose, her tendency to linger over details as if hovering inappropriately. The Brassolaeliocattleya orchid pictured on an American Orchid Society Visa card bares “a reddish lip as full and shapely as a handbag,” she writes. The swamp where Laroche was arrested is home to grass “so dry that the friction from a car can set it on fire.” Orlean’s article taught me that the place where a tree branch meets the trunk is called a “crotch.”
Orlean, in her forthcoming autobiography, “Joyride,” writes about coming up with the idea for “Orchid Fever.” It was 1994, and Tina Brown was in her second full year as The New Yorker’s editor, after leaving Vanity Fair. Orlean wanted to impress her new, celebrity-oriented boss and worried that the story was “too niche, too odd,” the crime of orchid poaching “too minor.” To think, I had loved the article for precisely those qualities; someone had waded through swamps, deciphered Latin, and gained the trust of egomaniacal horticulturalists, all for my passing delight. It made me feel rich, even though I was still wiping ketchup off tables.
And I had, in a sense, touched a luxury item. The article’s title, “Orchid Fever,” is a translation of “orchidelirium,” the Victorian-era frenzy for rare, pricey orchids. Orlean, in her memoir, compares herself to an orchid thief, “dispatched by readers to retrieve stories from the outer world.” I picked one up and read it, never imagining that I’d join the hunt. ♦
