The tough love of David Wiegand

When we learned that our Datebook section boss, David Wiegand, had been found dead in his apartment, we at The Chronicle went into professional overdrive, calling community leaders for comment, seeking out information on his early years, preparing and organizing the facts and data that would constitute his obituary. He had a rich life, was well known in the cultural world, and sometimes the personal and professional parts overlapped. There was, of course, way too much information to use.

One major relationship — acknowledged by each as their closest friendship — was with fiction writer Ann Beattie, with whom he attended American University. Her admiration for his editing skills was quoted in the obituary, but “that wasn’t why I loved him,” she emailed.

“We shared a dark sense of what was funny, we felt — of course we did, over the years — that we’d really grown up together. We could finish each other’s sentences, so we were comfortable also with silence. (Music infiltrated silence, to be sure — this was David.) Still, his enthusiasm always came sparking off the page, even in his emails, in an anecdote about Angus, his dog (and the late, great Morgan), or about his friends and family.

“We sent each other books without gift cards, because it was obvious who the sender was. He had so many talents, painting among them. For my 40th birthday, he worked all year on a painting” that still hangs in Beattie’s home office, based on “a bad photograph I showed him (we both loved snapshots that misfired).” The work pictured a child they both knew, looking at a cow.

“He really liked certain children,” wrote Beattie, “and he never took them for granted or talked down to them. They got it that he had magic, and that he was both serious and a goofball. In most ways, actually, he was a loner — though he wanted to be active, involved, finding things out, re-thinking things when he needed to.

“When I was in Vincennes, near Paris, a couple of years ago, I went to a teacher’s class (young kids — maybe they were 10 or 11) and (I don’t speak French) the interpreter told me their question in English and I answered, then that got translated. But everything stopped when I talked about the invaluable editing and encouragement my best friend always gave me, and how deeply I depended on him, how much I adored him.” Beattie was stunned at the kids’ response to this. “All further questioning had to stop while I explained how it was that I was a married woman whose best friend was a man.”

***

On the professional side, Carey Perloff, artistic director of ACT, recalled the February 2017 opening of “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” which Perloff had directed. “At the end of the show, I turned around, and David was literally a puddle. He was weeping and smiling at the same time, so unlike the way critics (or editors!) usually behave. He was just letting himself fully feel everything that he felt.

“And it was clear how open he was to the emotional magic of theater, even after so many years of covering it! That lack of cynicism totally amazed me.”

***

I’d worked with David for 26 years; he was still a copy editor when he showed me, with justifiable pride, that one of his stories had won an O. Henry Award, for short stories of exceptional merit. In the years to come, I would watch him morph from copy editor to critic to manager, accumulating skills as he stretched his wings at every level.

He made demands on himself, as he did on his staffers. At times he was impatient with colleagues; he could be cutting about things he didn’t like; he urged shooters of the office breeze to get to the point.

If some humans got tough love, the other kind was most visible in his relationship with Angus, his prancing, barking, jumping Australian shepherd. The dog was irrepressible, and his master didn’t try to repress him. David was unironically straight-up adoring, and watching him with Angus gave me, a co-worker, the best glimpse of what a best-friend relationship might have been.

“Gotta go home to Angus,” said the editor who worked 20 hours a day. He died with Angus at his side.

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING

Woman: “Spring is finally here, ’cause it’s overcast and chilly.” Man: “Yeah. It’s not cold enough yet to be summer.” Conversation near Freight & Salvage in Berkeley, overheard by Ellen Pelissero