Clay Felker, Magazine Pioneer, Dies at 82
Clay Felker a visionary editor who was widely credited with inventing the formula for the modern magazine, giving it energetic expression in a glossy weekly named for and devoted to the boisterous city that fascinated him — New York — died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.
His death was of natural causes, said his wife, the author Gail Sheehy. He had throat cancer in his later years.
Mr. Felker edited a number of publications besides New York magazine. There were stints at Esquire, The Village Voice, Adweek and others. He also created an opposite-coast counterpart to New York and called it New West.
But it was at New York that he left his biggest imprint on American journalism. He had edited the magazine when it was a Sunday supplement to The New York Herald Tribune founded in 1964. Four years later, after the newspaper had closed, Mr. Felker and the graphic designer Milton Glaser reintroduced New York as a glossy, stand-alone magazine.
New York’s mission was to compete for consumer attention at a time when television threatened to overwhelm print publications. To do that, Mr. Felker came up with a distinctive format: a combination of long narrative articles and short, witty ones on consumer services. He embraced the New Journalism of the late ’60s: the use of novelistic techniques to give reporting new layers of emotional depth. And he adopted a tone that was unapologetically elitist, indefatigably trendy and proudly provincial, in a sophisticated, Manhattan-centric sort of way. The headlines were bold, the graphics even bolder.
The look and attitude captured the attention of the city and influenced editors and designers for years to come. Dozens of city magazines modeling themselves after New York sprang up around the country.
Mr. Felker’s magazine was hip and ardent, civic-minded and skeptical. It was preoccupied with the foibles of the rich and powerful, the fecklessness of government and the high jinks of wiseguys. But it never lost sight of the complicated business and cultural life of the city. Articles were often gossipy, even vicious, and some took liberties with sources and journalistic techniques.
A National Profile
Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem and others in Mr. Felker’s stable of star writers helped give the magazine national prominence. Meanwhile, what he called its “secret weapon,” its service coverage — on where to eat, shop, drink and live — kept many readers coming back.
Mr. Felker eventually lost New York magazine to Rupert Murdoch in a bitter takeover battle in 1977. But his influence can still be felt in the current magazine, from its in-crowd tone to its ubiquitous infographics and inventive typography tailored to each article.
“American journalism would not be what it is today without Clay Felker,” Adam Moss, New York’s current editor, said in a statement yesterday. Mr. Felker, he once said, “was obsessed with power, and he invented a magazine in the image of that obsession,” one that “reported on the secret machinations of the city’s players.”
Mr. Felker’s roster of writers also included Ken Auletta, Julie Baumgold, Steven Brill, Elizabeth Crow, Gael Greene, Nicholas Pileggi, Richard Reeves, Dick Schaap, Mimi Sheraton and John Simon. Many of them called him the best editor in the country, although some said he was autocratic and took joy in hectoring and humiliating them.
“His voice, his personality, his superhuman animation were horrifying, of course, but they were also the best part of working with him,” Ms. Crow, who later became editor of Mademoiselle and who died in 2005, wrote in 1975. “Clay’s booming tenor voice was simply the most noticeable manifestation of the 100 percent in-your-face and in-your-ears and in-your-brain atmosphere he created wherever he went.”
The supercharged atmosphere of New York was a long way from Webster Groves, Mo., where Clay Schuette Felker, born on Oct. 2, 1925, grew up. (His German immigrant forebears had changed their name from von Fredrikstein to Volker and later anglicized it as Felker.) Journalism ran in his family. His father, Carl, was the managing editor of The Sporting News; his mother, Cora Tyree Felker, had been women’s editor of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch before having children.
After enrolling at Duke University, Mr. Felker left college for a three-year hitch in the Navy before returning to graduate in 1951. At Duke he edited the undergraduate newspaper and married Leslie Aldridge, another undergraduate. The marriage ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Pamela Tiffin, an actress.
In 1984 he married Gail Sheehy, who first wrote for him at The Herald Tribune and who later became widely known as the author of “Passages” and other books.
After college, Mr. Felker was a reporter for Life magazine for six years and worked on the development of Sports Illustrated. He later became features editor of Esquire but quit when his rival, Harold Hayes, got the top job. In 1963 he joined The Herald Tribune and became founding editor of the supplement called New York.
A Debut Hits the Stands
When he and Mr. Glaser rolled out the revamped, stand-alone version in 1968, the reviews were mixed. “Though occasional critics find New York excessively slick and too often frivolous, the magazine undeniably generates excitement — an excitement that is winning readers not just in Manhattan but in urban centers across the country,” Newsweek said in 1970.
Others were less impressed. “Boutique journalism,” Mr. Breslin called it when he quit the magazine in 1971, fed up, he said, with its dilettante attitude. Ms. Steinem was bothered by the magazine’s East Side orientation. “When the city is falling apart, we are writing about renovating brownstones,” she said.
But Ms. Steinem stayed on as a staff writer and was rewarded when Mr. Felker helped her and others start the feminist magazine called Ms. He inserted a 40-page preview of Ms. in New York’s issue of Dec. 20, 1971, and helped finance the first issue.
Many of Mr. Felker’s writers followed him from The Herald Tribune. One, Mr. Wolfe, the magazine’s most visible stylist, shared many of Mr. Felker’s views and thrived on the freedom his boss gave him to write satiric, sometimes savage articles about what became known as the New Society.
“Together they attacked what each regarded as the greatest untold and uncovered story of the age — the vanities, extravagances, pretensions and artifice of America two decades after World War II, the wealthiest society the world had ever known,” Richard Kluger wrote in his book “The Paper: The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).
Probably no article better captured this strain of social-history journalism than one whose title created an American idiom: “Radical Chic.” With unsparing detail and barely concealed mockery, Mr. Wolfe, exhausting 20,000 words, described a fund-raising party given by Leonard Bernstein in his glamorous Manhattan apartment, attended by rich liberals and Black Panthers, the recipients of the evening’s charitable proceeds. The article, appearing in June 1970, outraged both the liberals and the Panthers, but the issue sold out.
Mr. Felker’s New York magazine became a prime practitioner of the New Journalism, again to mixed reactions. The form’s admirers believed it represented events more truthfully than traditional objective reporting could. Conventional journalism, they said, reported what people said; the New Journalists tried to present what people really felt and thought.
“Nonsense,” its critics countered. They considered New Journalism fiction masquerading as reportage, and its practitioners as manipulators of reader responses.
One article, about a prostitute and her pimp, titled “Redpants and Sugarman,” drew heavy criticism when it was later revealed that Redpants was a composite figure created from all the prostitutes that the writer, Ms. Sheehy, had interviewed.
Mr. Felker later said he had erred in not letting readers know the truth about Redpants. He said that Ms. Sheehy had originally explained her method in the second paragraph but that he had removed it. “I felt it slowed the story down,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1995.
“But we learned a lesson,” he said. “Composite is never used any more. "
One-Borough Town
Few readers flipping through its pages would have mistaken New York as a magazine for the five boroughs. That was never the idea.
“Everybody who worked on New York lived in Manhattan,” Mr. Felker told The Times. “So it was essentially a Manhattan magazine. And I believe that print — now that broadcast has become the dominant mass media — has to be aimed at educated, affluent people.”
He added: “I’ve been criticized for being elitist, but that’s who, broadly speaking, consumes print. That was our set of values — our attitude — to understand how to make life more interesting, to explain New York life.”
In its first year as an independent publication, with an initial circulation of 50,000, New York lost $1.7 million. In the fall of 1969, still in the red, New York went public, offering 20 percent of its stock at $10 a share. The next year, with circulation at 240,000, the magazine finally broke even, and Mr. Felker became publisher as well as editor.
Demanding as his job at New York was, he was hungry for more. In 1974 New York acquired The Village Voice, the liberal New York weekly. (That same year he moved New York into new quarters on Second Avenue, complete with gym, staff dining room and full-time chef; today, the magazine, published by New York Media Holdings LLC, has headquarters on Varick Street in SoHo.) In 1976 Mr. Felker started a clone of New York for the California market, calling the magazine New West.
A Takeover Drama
By the end of that year, Mr. Murdoch, the Australian press baron who had just paid $30 million to add The New York Post to his chain of newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States, made an offer to buy New York magazine. It set off several weeks of high drama, complete with front-page coverage in the New York press.
Mr. Felker refused the Murdoch offer. Then, worried he might lose his magazine, he asked his old friend Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, to back him in a bid to keep the company. Mrs. Graham offered to buy out Carter Burden, the principal stockholder, who held 24 percent of the stock. Mr. Burden, who had once been the subject of an unflattering profile in Mr. Felker’s magazine, turned her down.
The next day Mr. Murdoch flew to Sun Valley, Idaho, where Mr. Burden was skiing, and made a deal. Mr. Felker immediately obtained a temporary restraining order to block the sale. Meanwhile, tales of Mr. Murdoch’s lurid tabloid journalism were causing such agitation among New York staff members that they walked off the job an hour before the magazine’s closing deadline, saying they would never work for Mr. Murdoch.
Concerned that the walkout would hurt his efforts to block the sale, Mr. Felker frantically tried to find his writers and get them back to work. After looking through bars on the East Side, he finally found them at a restaurant. But by then it was too late to meet the deadline.
And suddenly it was over: Mr. Felker was out. An agreement was signed before dawn on Jan. 7, 1977. Mr. Murdoch gained control of the company and agreed to buy Mr. Felker’s shares for $1.4 million.
Mr. Felker was never able to recreate the brio of New York. In 1978 he joined with Associated Newspapers to buy Esquire and was its editor and publisher until 1981. He became a producer at 20th Century Fox; the editor of Daily News Tonight, an afternoon edition of The Daily News in New York; the editor of Manhattan, inc., a magazine for Wall Streeters; and editor of various smaller publications.
In addition to Ms. Sheehy, Mr. Felker is survived by a sister, Charlotte Gallagher; a daughter, Mohm Sheehy of Cambridge, Mass.; a stepdaughter, Maura Sheehy of Brooklyn; and three stepgrandchildren.
Although repeated surgery to address his throat cancer impinged on his ability to speak in his later years, Mr. Felker continued as a consultant to magazines. In 1994 he became a lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. The next year the school established the Clay Felker Magazine Center.
The West Coast became his second home. And while he loved teaching, nothing ever quite equaled those high-living and hard-working days when New York City was his muse and New York magazine his darling.
“I know why Clay is such a good editor,” said his friend the novelist and playwright Muriel Resnick. “He works until 8 o’clock. He goes somewhere every night. He’s out with people, he talks to people, he listens to people, and he doesn’t drink.”
but i really hope they can publish a book called unseen vogue just like the british vogue..
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