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CLAY FELKER was such an icon of New York magazine publishing that it seemed almost unthinkable he could ever break the surly bonds of Manhattan and move west. He had become a legend of energy and ambition as the creative grand progenitor of magazines like New York and Manhattan Inc., and the makeover artist for ones such as Esquire and The Village Voice. In the process, he gained virtual landmark status in New York. Clay came to San Francisco to start New West in 1977. The magazine failed, suggesting that such transplantations to the Golden State were not easy. But when in 1995 my predecessor at the Graduate School of Journalism, Tom Goldstein, set up an endowment for the Felker Magazine Center, Clay and his wife, author Gail Sheehy, did actually come west. They bought a lovely Spanish-style house and garden above the Claremont Hotel that became a salon for his many visitors. And, Clay immediately began working with students to write, design, and produce magazine prototypes. And then Clay got sick. But what distinguishes him even now is the way he has raged against the agonizing relapses of his illness, fighting as fiercely as I have ever seen anyone fight to stay involved with his classes and the world of magazines. Even when he felt poorly and had trouble speaking, he kept showing up, as if his students were life itself. As he once said of his love of magazines, "The secret of a magazine is passion." The same can be said of his teaching. —Orville Schell TOM WOLFE What follows is a fable for journalism in our time. A fable, as I say; but we shouldn’t let the fact that this one is true spoil it for us. We’re talking about journalism, after all. When the New York Herald Tribune folded in 1966, two highly valuable and radically new assets went down with it. One was Jimmy Breslin’s column, which I consider the greatest newspaper column of the second half of the 20th century, if not the entire century, if not—well... why hold back?—the entire history of American journalism. Breslin had come up with the bizarre notion that a columnist should be a reporter, not just an amateur thinker. Every morning he would go to the city desk and see what stories were coming up that day—crime, courts, sports, politics, the lot—and choose one to cover. Then he would do something unheard of among the columnists of the 1960s: leave the building! He would return as late as six o’clock facing a seven o’clock deadline. I can still see him. Breslin was a sawdust-on-the-floor-steakhouse trencherman at the time. He looked like a stack of medicine balls—his head atop his barrel chest atop his ponderous gut—visible through a haze of cigarette smoke and coffee fumes, as he attacked an Underwood typewriter with two fingers and wrote a nonfiction short story, complete with scene-by-scene construction, novelistic detail, and rich dialogue—against the deadline. His opinions were often artfully woven into the telling. Breslin pulled off these tours de force five days a week. Readers could go to the newsstand in the morning and put down a dime and read a Maupassant-style short story that was news, among other things. Often the column began on Page One. The Trib’s other great asset was also founded upon a bizarre notion, the idea that a Sunday supplement might be a real magazine and not just brain candy. The Sunday supplement was called New York. Its new editor was a 30-odd-year-old, powerfully built, 210-pound adrenaline-addicted man named Clay Felker, who had first come to the Trib as a consultant after losing out in a battle with Harold Hayes for editorship of Esquire. His entire staff consisted of Breslin and Tom Wolfe—both of whom also worked as daily reporters—and an assistant editor named Walt Stovall. Leave it to me: The first thing I noticed about Felker was that he wore button-down shirts with French cuffs that required cuff links. Where on earth did one find such things? Then I experienced the Aha! phenomenon. They had to be custom-made! Then I checked out his shoes. Sure enough, they were so closely fitted (by John Lobb, Jermyn Street, London) and so beveled in the arches, they looked about six inches long. They made you wonder how such a big man could keep from toppling over every time he took a step. Soon enough, however, I focused on something else entirely. That was the day I heard him say—Felker grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, and spoke as if the George Washington Bridge spanning the Hudson River was as close as he had ever been to the place—in his New York Honk voice: "Look, we start the week the same way as The New Yorker, with blank paper and ink. There’s no reason why we can’t be just as good as they are. Or better. They’re so damned dull.” Suffice it to say here that within two years Clay Felker’s Sunday supplement had done the unbelievable, become a magazine so hot it had eclipsed The New Yorker, at least among those who have the lips that generate and the dog’s ears that can hear... the Buzz. Felker had a vision of New York as the city of ambition, the magnet that drew status seekers from all over America and all over the world, whether they be artists from Tulsa, financiers from Paris, Korean immigrants who became greengrocers on Second Avenue or Filipinos who did rich women’s finger and toe nails on Madison, or journalists from Webster Groves, Missouri. Using the finest talent in New York—and few were those who didn’t respond to his call, no matter what the fees—Felker began creating a vast, lushly illustrated nonfiction cycle of stories about contemporary New York, broader in scale than even Balzac’s and Zola’s about Paris—and nonfiction, on top of that. Journalism had never seen anything like it. Henry Luce’s Time and Life of the 1920s and 1930s, Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair of the 1930s, Harold Ross’ New Yorker of the 1930s, Koming’s L’Assiette du Beure and Koming’s Simplicissimus of the turn of the 19th century, were, looking back, never in the same league. The difference was Felker’s vision of The City and his insistence on in-depth reporting—“saturation reporting,” I called it. The reporting Felker demanded became one of the great breeding grounds for the New Journalism, as Pete Hamill called it, the use of the devices of the novel and the short story while observing journalism’s rules of accuracy. Much of it was in emulation of Breslin, whose work for New York was outstanding. New York and Breslin’s daily column didn’t sink immediately upon the Trib’s collapse. They treaded water for eight months as part of a curious stillborn newspaper called the World Journal Tribune, a conglomeration of the Herald Tribune and two other New York dailies, the World-Telegram & Sun and the Journal American. The new sheet had a cumbersome troika leadership of disaffected and dissimilar souls and an aged staff, thanks to the American Newspaper Guild’s insistence that seniority rule in the hiring. Of the 11 sports reporters, eight were superannuated golf and thoroughbred racing writers. One night a reporter whose beat was the major sports, football, basketball, baseball, and ice hockey, ran into Walter Thayer, the chief financial officer for Jock Whitney, who had the Herald Tribune and was now one-third owner of the new sheet, and complained about the situation in the sports department. “I wouldn’t be worrying about that, if I were you,” said Thayer. “I’d be sending out resumes. Jock’s pulling out soon.” That was the first word that the World Journal Tribune was about to be history, and the word was accurate. Only Felker seemed to realize the value of the now-defunct New York magazine. He bought the name for $6,500—which he had to borrow from a wealthy young woman, Barbara Goldsmith, who had written for New York. Tout le monde assumed Felker himself was flush, mainly thanks to his spectacular apartment at 322 East 57th Street, which had a 30-by-30-foot living room with a double-height ceiling. Guests entered the apartment from an upper level and descended to the grand salon down a staircase not far below the scale of the Paris Opera’s. In fact, Felker, whose main reward at the Herald Tribune had been the rousing applause of the communications industry, possessed scarcely two nickels, whatever they were, to rub together. He had bought the apartment, worth about $7.5 million today, for $60,000 in the late 1950s. It was a valuable ornament during the year it took him to raise the money to launch New York as an independent magazine in 1968. It took only four issues for New York to arrive at the first of two critical moments in its history. One morning I came into the office—a loft space on East 32nd Street between First and Second avenues—and Felker immediately came up to me with a manuscript and a photograph and said: “Take a look at this, Tom, and tell me if you think we should run them. The advertising department says if we run them, we’ll lose every high-end retail account we’ve got.” Since 90 percent of the magazine’s advertising was from elegant and chic stores on Fifth and Madison avenues, this was serious stuff. I read the story. Appropriately, even symbolically, one might say, it was by the self-same Barbara Goldsmith who had lent Felker the $6,500. It turned out she could write like a dream. Specifically the story was about one of Andy Warhol’s “superstars,” as he called the random females in his posse. They often appeared in his home movies, which the art world now took seriously. The art world existed in another galaxy. Only an extragalactical creature could have watched these movies or the “super stars” with a straight face. The superstar in question was called “Viva,” a sometime model. Barbara Goldsmith’s story was the first to remove the glistening Pop campy-fun-filled screen through which the press had heretofore viewed Warhol & posse, and reveal the roach’s belly of the life they actually lived. Warhol himself came off as an even more sickly equivalent of the voyeur Popeye in Faulkner’s Sanctuary. The crowning touch was the photograph. It showed Viva nude, not a stitch covering her scrawny body, reclining on a worse-for-wear Recamier sofa after the manner of Manet’s “Olympia,” with a coffee table from the “Play It Again Sam” future-antiques store in the foreground. It was all there for the looking... her bony rib cage... her junior-braless little breasts... her mons pubis and pullet’s legs... her long hair from last night. Above all, there were her eyes, which, by way of camping it up for the camera, she had rolled up until only the whites showed, as if she were suffering a grungeinduced seizure. But somehow nothing seemed quite so grungy or louche as what was on the coffee table: a dirty ashtray and an empty milk carton. Somehow it was the empty milk carton with its scruffy, moldy unfold-open cardboard spout that... did it. The picture had been taken by a photographer named Diane Arbus. Felker waited for my reaction. I finally looked up and said, “Clay, this is so great, this story, this photograph—I don’t see how we can not run it.” “That’s the way I feel,” said Felker. “We’re going with it.” Just as the advertising department had predicted, the high-end retailers left the magazine like a mob of Lots with their forearms shielding their eyes. This led to an angry, panicky confrontation between Felker and his consortium of investors, who owned about 10,000 shares each, in the Park Avenue apartment of the most august of the group, an aging financier named Armand Erpf. I was on hand in my capacity, strictly of the letterhead sort, as vice president of the magazine. The investors were ready to shut the damnable Sodom of a rag down then and there. Far from apologizing, Felker defended his position and said he would make the same call again in any similar situation. They, the investors, should do what they had to do, because he was going to do what he had to do. Smoke was coming out of the investors’ ears. I gather it was only the intercession afterwards of Erpf himself, who knew Felker best and regarded him as that rare beast, a genius among editors, that saved New York and allowed it to live for nine more years.
It was during those nine years that Felker’s creation spawned an entirely new species of American journalism, the “city magazine.” Magazines modeled upon New York popped up all across the country. It was a heady time. The city magazines covered sides of life newspapers had never covered, matters of status, including race, ethnicity, social rank, and social conflict that newspapers had never thought could be covered. New York was so successful, so admired, that The New York Times faced up to the shortcomings of its own devoutly serious Sunday magazine, too serious to have ever been called a Sunday supplement in the first place, and instituted a Felker magazine in its daily editions, one Felker section per day for six days (and today, seven). Clay Felker’s vast nonfiction saga of the city was still on ascent to apogee when Rupert Murdoch got his teeth around a majority of New York’s stock in 1977. It was the first hostile takeover since the 1920s, a preview, in fact, of the lurid pandemic of mergers, acquisitions, and shark feeding frenzies of the 1980s. Under Murdoch’s News Corporation, New York soon ran to fat and became a “service” magazine, meaning a four-color shopping news on slick paper; and, as night follows day, unprofitable. All New York cover lines, so the jibe went, became variations on the classic “WHOLLY GUACAMOLE!—New York’s Ten Best Vendors of Fresh Avocado!” City magazines from coast to coast eventually became just as flaccid, devoted, as they became, to the recurring theme of “exciting Young Set local glamour, if any,” plus the “service” articles. A golden interlude was over, but our nonfiction fable’s lessons remain plain as day and can’t be killed with a stick. They are two. Only the unique vision of a singular editor can create a great magazine; and that editor never compromises. He is always convinced that nothing... is more important than his take on the world, not even the money that enables him to express it. Incidentally, the investors sold out for $8 a share in 1977. Most soon realized that if they had let Felker have his way for just five more years, their typical 10,000 shares would have been worth not $8 per share but close to $200, making the typical investment worth not $80,000 but $2 million. And the photographer who took the picture of Viva, namely, the late Diane Arbus? Today she is one of the beatified deities in the hagiography of photography as an art. Prints she herself made of her most famous pictures sell today in the mid hundreds of thousands of dollars, and no Arbus is more famous than... Viva. —Tom Wolfe’s three epic novels, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons have all been national best sellers. When it comes to magazines, which are trickier things to put together than most people realize, nobody ever did it better than Clay. There’s a very hard-to-catch chemistry to magazines. He always caught lightning in a bottle. —Joan Didion GLORIA STEINEM Clay Felker was my first editor. When he was a legendary figure at Esquire and I was an obscure freelancer there writing such things as “The Student Prince: How to Seize Power Though an Undergraduate,” he took a chance by giving me my first serious assignment: a report on the then-new contraceptive pill. I researched my heart out, and got hooked on the irony of a pill that had been invented to increase fertility, yet would become more valuable for suppressing it. Clay blue-penciled my pages on the history of the pill, told me I had left people out, and made the memorable comment: “You’ve performed the incredible feat of making sex dull.” He sent me out to do interviews and a total rewrite. That was why I produced in 1962 an article on sexual politics and new science that prefigured the women’s movement. I had a great editor. From then on, I was one of many writers—from Jimmy Breslin to Tom Wolfe with a whole alphabet of talent in between—who would follow Clay Felker anywhere. We tap-danced for rich people at endless lunches when he tried to find investors for New York, a new kind of city magazine. Once that was up and running, we cheerfully worked for less money, and were rewarded by being part of the fun, innovative, and powerful community Clay created at the magazine. He also helped us become better writers. When I pitched an idea to Clay, his questioning made it more important, not less, increasing my confidence instead of diminishing it. His interest in the “why” of everything widened my own attention to include everything from who was profiteering off welfare hotels to why apple pie was costing more at the Automat. Meanwhile, he was not just creating a stable of a few stars, as many editors do, but always looking for new and unlikely ones. Perhaps that’s why New York published more women writers than was acceptable then, though low pay may also have been a reason. Clay wasn’t being consciously inclusive, just oblivious to the source of an article as long as it interested him. His willingness to make space for good writing was matched only by his ruthlessness in cutting anything that was boring, obscure, or wasted the readers’ time. He also endeared himself to hung-up writers—that is, all writers—by scaring, cajoling, tricking, and shouting us into actually writing. “You’re killing me!” I would hear him yelling into the phone, and I knew there was a lucky writer at the other end of the line, someone who would have to stop procrastinating and actually produce. “What the hell is this about? What’s the headline?” Clay would say, throwing down pages with too many words and too few points. Indeed, his love of ideas was so strong that he was literally outraged if they weren’t presented with clarity and style. I remember a Harvard study on how new ideas entered the culture: More had come through New York magazine in those years of Clay’s editorship than through any other single media entity. This combination of new ideas and trends, of service to New Yorkers (with the idea that New York was a state of mind), and high style that might come from anywhere, from Park Avenue to the barrio, created a magazine that was soon imitated in other cities, and that annoyed or inspired the good grey New York Times into creating its own magazine-like sections. All of this might still be going on, had Clay not bought The Village Voice, thus creating a rebellious board that sold New York magazine out from under him. By then, I was spending most of my time on Ms. magazine, a feminist monthly that Clay made possible by giving birth to its preview issue in the pages of New York. I went back to the old office in order to walk out of it with dozens of writers who were staging a protest. I can think of no other editor who inspires the same combination of creativity, loyalty, and excitement in writers. One measure is our love for telling Clay stories. Whether we worked with him in New York offices of the past or attend his Berkeley magazine course now, I bet we all tell them. I am having a huge argument with Clay about whether something is worth reporting. This is a peculiar pleasure because he is the only person with whom I can argue fiercely and happily at the same time. Why? Because a) he yells in a way that clearly expects me to yell back; b) he loves to learn even more than he loves to win; and c) even if he never admits that I’ve won, I’ll know it when I overhear him using my argument on someone else. Clay’s work is his life—and vice versa. This means that good article ideas may come from the taxi driver just arrived from Nigeria, a dinner partner in from the Hamptons, or the neighbor’s kid who’s home from college. Certainly, each of the many smart women he went out with (these were the years before his marriage to the love of his life, writer Gail Sheehy) influenced the magazine. This was so obvious that the staff acquired an interest in deciding who he went out with. Quietly, there were sub-editorial meetings on the question of what terrific woman we should introduce him to. When a mutual friend of many years complained that Clay never remembered him, I suggested he come up with an article idea. He did, and Clay never forgot who he was again. Clay and I no longer work together, and decades have passed. But every once in a while, I get a phone call from a young and enthusiastic student sent to me by Clay, someone who is hooked on the dream of starting a magazine: How about a magazine that selects the most important articles from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East? Wouldn’t this help us to understand how this country is viewed and how our foreign policy is doing? What do I think of a magazine for people living in the bicultural overlap between California and Mexico? Should it be called La Frontera? As the whole area was called in ancient times, how about Califia? I’m hooked on their ideas and by their enthusiasm. This rare and precious energy has been inspired in them by Clay, just as it was in me. It is the hallmark of everything Clay Felker touches: an interest and energy for all of life. —Gloria Steinem wrote a celebrated book of essays, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), and the 1992 book Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, which was a national best seller and has been translated into 11 languages. It’s a given that Clay invented the city magazine, but the truth is that he did much more than that: He changed the way we look at New York, and from there, at all cities; he changed the way we understood the way we live in cities, and from there, the way we actually lived. He was in some way a function of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, in that by observing what was happening, and reporting on it, he also changed it. There are many reasons why the quality of life in New York is so much better than it was in l968, but one of the main ones is Clay. —Nora Ephron KEN AULETTA Clay Felker had a private office, but he rarely used it. He preferred to wander about asking questions. From these wanderings emerged the “Me Generation” and Saturday Night Fever. Felker always had the insatiable curiosity of a very young man. He hosted regular staff lunches in the conference room and hired a chef to prepare the meals. Sometimes the press would sneer at Clay and Phillipe, the expensive chef who cooked the meals. But Clay invited to these lunches mayors, governors, senators, bankers, cultural figures, and academics, and with his staff would drill them with questions. We never left a lunch without a notepad full of story ideas. And the food was great. I had an encounter with him that taught me the value of a great editor. It happened in 1976, in the thick of New York’s fiscal crisis. I had set out to discover whether several generations of city and state officials, bankers, and labor leaders had committed fraud when they certified that city budgets were balanced, hiding several billion dollars worth of deficits. Their motives were clear: By cloaking deficits, politicians did not have to cut spending or raise taxes, bankers continued collecting steep interest payments, labor unions added benefits. The victims were city taxpayers, whose debt payments choked nearly one-quarter of the city’s budget. I spent many weeks reporting and returned with a story that explained the relevant laws that may have been broken, the various budget tricks performed, the motives behind the tricks, and fingered the “magicians” who fooled the public. It was comprehensive, but it was a thicket. Felker and his brilliant artistic partner, Milton Glaser, read it and suggested a title that made the piece come alive: “Should These People Go to Jail?” Milton and Walter then produced a caricature showing various well-known officials behind bars with the question emblazoned across the cover of the magazine. Through a headline and art, Felker had both sharpened my piece and beckoned readers. As an editor, Felker had two biases. Before each of us went out on a story, he instructed us to be sure to answer two questions: Why are things the way they are? How do things work? He knew if we answered those two questions the piece would succeed. As a teacher and mentor, he has changed little. He’s still insatiably curious, always asking questions, ever willing to try new things. He remains the youngest person in any room he enters. —Ken Auletta has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992. He is the author of 10 books, including four national best sellers. I can hear him telling some 23-year-old who’s written him an article on how Maria Shriver is—secretly!—laying the groundwork to succeed her husband as governor of California: “This is terrific! This is great! We’ve got to get this into the next issue! To hell with what the art department says!” —Christopher Buckley |
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