DGH
2008-07-01 17:40:46 UTC
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New York Magazine Founder Felker Dies at 82
By Matt Schudel, Washington Post Staff Writer
Clay S. Felker, the far-sighted editor who founded New York magazine
and helped launch the New Journalism of the 1960s, with its novelistic
techniques and strong point of view, died July 1 [2008] at his
Manhattan [New York] home of throat and mouth cancer. He was 82.
By defining the form of the modern city magazine, and by encouraging
writers to address modern life in a bold, vividly descriptive style,
Mr. Felker was one of the most influential journalists of his time.
His first triumphs came in the mid-1960s, when he was editor of New
York, originally the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune
newspaper. He gave writers such as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin the
freedom to roam the city and write as they pleased, making the
colorful supplement "the hippest Sunday reading in town," as Newsweek
put it.
When the newspaper folded in 1967, Mr. Felker used his severance pay
to buy the magazine's name and secured more than $1 million in
financing to rebuild New York as a glossy weekly publication. When it
debuted on April 8, 1968, it was not an immediate success, but Mr.
Felker soon found an innovative formula that would inspire imitators
around the world.
He combined in-depth articles on politics, crime and finance with
lighter features on shopping, restaurants, reviews and listings that
made New York, in Mr. Felker's words, "a guide on how to live in this
city." The magazine's lively design, created by art director Milton
Glaser, reflected Mr. Felker's view of New York -- both the city and
the magazine -- as a bright and varied feast for the mind and the
eye.
His complicated personality, which ranged from soothing encouraging to
volcanic anger, left few people indifferent.
"He is variously described by associates and acquaintances as
autocratic, devious, dishonest, rapacious, egotistical, power mad,
paranoid, a bully and a boor," a 1977 Time magazine article said.
"Almost in the same breath, the same people call Felker a genius."
In the early years of New York magazine, Mr. Felker assembled a staff
of writers that included Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Nora Ephron, Richard
Reeves, Pete Hamill, Jack Newfield, Aaron Latham, Mimi Sheraton and
Gail Sheehy, who became Mr. Felker's third wife. He exhorted them to
write in distinctively personal voices as they explored city's trends,
horrors and delights. An anthology of writing from New York will be
published in the fall.
"It was a magazine that helped create the notion of the writer as
star," one of Mr. Felker's writers, Ken Auletta, told The Washington
Post in 1977.
New York had a tone that seemed to match the heady confusion of the
times. Much of the issue of June 8, 1970, was devoted to Wolfe's
"Radical Chic," which described a fundraiser for the Black Panthers
held at the apartment of conductor Leonard Bernstein. Wolfe's scathing
story, which coined the term "limousine liberals," became a classic of
New Journalism. Six years later, in another New York article, Wolfe
summed up the entire era when he called it the "Me Decade."
Wolfe called Mr. Felker "the greatest idea man that ever existed" in a
1993 interview with The Washington Post.
"My philosophy is that you have faith in the writer's point of view,"
Mr. Felker told The Post. "You pick the writers you believe in and
give them their freedom. As opposed to most editors who want to mold
the writers into what they want, make them a tool of the editors."
As an early champion of women in journalism, Mr. Felker helped
Steinem's fledgling magazine, Ms., get off the ground when he included
a 40-page preview issue in an edition of New York.
Yet, for all his success in defining an era, Mr. Felker was just as
often derided for what could be called his feats of Clay. He once
published a nude photo of Viva, an actress associated with Andy
Warhol, and critics found some articles to be adolescent or needlessly
provocative.
The journalism review More complained that New York magazine was
little more than "a weekly diet of superficiality at best and
deception at worst, reality distorted for the sake of titillation."
Breslin parted with Mr. Felker in the early 1970s, saying the magazine
"caused me to become gagged with perfume and disheartened by character
collapse."
As the circulation and reputation of his flagship magazine grew, Mr.
Felker sought to expand his journalistic empire in the mid-1970s by
buying the Village Voice and by launching New West, a West Coast
version of New York.
But his lavish spending on limousines, office space and personal chefs
drew criticism from his board of directors, who rejected his demand
that they buy him a house in the Hamptons. Mr. Felker invited Rupert
Murdoch, then newly arrived in the United States as owner of the New
York Post, to invest in New York magazine.
Instead, Murdoch made a hostile bid for the three publications that
Mr. Felker controlled. With backing from Washington Post Co. chairman
Katharine Graham, Mr. Felker proposed a series of counteroffers, but
he was outmaneuvered by Murdoch and soon ousted.
Feeling betrayed by Murdoch, Mr. Felker said, "Rupert Murdoch and I
disagree on the meaning of friendship, of human values and the meaning
of journalism."
Most of the New York staff walked out in solidarity, but Mr. Felker
seemed to have lost more than just his magazine. He would spend the
rest of his life trying to regain his magic touch, though seldom with
the same success.
"His ambition was too large," an anonymous New York staffer told The
Post in 1993. "Why wasn't he satisfied with New York magazine? He
wanted to be Citizen Hearst, and he lost his dream."
Clay Schuette Felker was born October 25, 1925, in St. Louis
[Missouri], where his father was managing editor of the Sporting News.
Mr. Felker printed his first newspaper, the Greeley Street News, when
he was 8 and sold it in his hometown of Webster Groves, Missouri.
He entered Duke University in 1942. Nine years later, after wartime
service in and a stint as a statistician for the New York Giants
baseball team, he graduated.
He moved to New York and wrote about sports and politics for Life
magazine. With his background in sports -- he later wrote a book about
baseball manager Casey Stengel -- Mr. Felker was assigned to a secret
Time-Life group that developed Sports Illustrated in 1954.
As features editor of Esquire magazine from 1957 to 1962, he hired
Gore Vidal to write a column on politics and asked novelist Norman
Mailer to cover the 1960 Democratic National Convention. Mailer's
resulting article, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," was hailed as
an early example of New Journalism, in which writers adopt fictional
techniques and inject their own experiences into the story.
When Mr. Felker lost out to Harold Hayes -- another progenitor of the
New Journalism -- as top editor of Esquire, he left the magazine and
worked as a consultant for the Herald Tribune, a distinguished but
struggling newspaper. In 1964, he became editor of the paper's Sunday
magazine, which he transformed into a showcase of smart reporting and
writing.
"Each week's lineup was as varied and unpredictable as the city
itself," Richard Kluger wrote in "The Paper," a history of the Herald
Tribune.
In 1977, after Mr. Felker was forced out of New York magazine, he
became publisher and part-owner of Esquire, where he hoped to
revitalize the ailing men's journal. Less than two years later, the
magazine was sold out from under him, and he was adrift once more.
For several years, he was a consultant to Twentieth-Century Fox, which
transformed several stories he had edited, most notably "Saturday
Night Fever" (1977) and "Urban Cowboy" (1980), into movies.
Mr. Felker continued to have modest triumphs as editor of Adweek
magazine and the business-oriented Manhattan Inc. in the 1980s, but
both efforts proved short-lived. He was still remembered as the editor
who created -- and lost -- New York.
He turned to teaching in the 1990s and had a long association with the
Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at
Berkeley, which named its center for magazine studies in his honor. He
became a powerful force at the school, spotting young talent and
overseeing the magazine writing and design programs.
Mr. Felker viewed the glamour and excitement of New York with never-
ending wonder. He shared a spacious apartment on East 57th Street with
Sheehy, his wife since 1984, and Manhattan's literary crowd clamored
for invitations to their parties. Long after he had retired from
running magazines, Mr. Felker continued to be regarded as a sage of
journalistic wisdom.
"His reach may have exceeded his grasp," Newsweek declared in 1977,
but "Felker has left a strong and highly personal imprint on American
journalism."
His earlier marriages to Leslie Blatt Felker and actress Pamela Tiffin
ended in divorce. In addition to his third wife, survivors include
Sheehy's adopted daughter, Mohm Phat Sheehy of Cambridge,
Massachusetts; a stepdaughter, Maura Sheehy Moss, of Brooklyn, New
York; a sister; and three grandchildren.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/01/AR2008070101398.html?hpid=topnews
New York Magazine Founder Felker Dies at 82
By Matt Schudel, Washington Post Staff Writer
Clay S. Felker, the far-sighted editor who founded New York magazine
and helped launch the New Journalism of the 1960s, with its novelistic
techniques and strong point of view, died July 1 [2008] at his
Manhattan [New York] home of throat and mouth cancer. He was 82.
By defining the form of the modern city magazine, and by encouraging
writers to address modern life in a bold, vividly descriptive style,
Mr. Felker was one of the most influential journalists of his time.
His first triumphs came in the mid-1960s, when he was editor of New
York, originally the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune
newspaper. He gave writers such as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin the
freedom to roam the city and write as they pleased, making the
colorful supplement "the hippest Sunday reading in town," as Newsweek
put it.
When the newspaper folded in 1967, Mr. Felker used his severance pay
to buy the magazine's name and secured more than $1 million in
financing to rebuild New York as a glossy weekly publication. When it
debuted on April 8, 1968, it was not an immediate success, but Mr.
Felker soon found an innovative formula that would inspire imitators
around the world.
He combined in-depth articles on politics, crime and finance with
lighter features on shopping, restaurants, reviews and listings that
made New York, in Mr. Felker's words, "a guide on how to live in this
city." The magazine's lively design, created by art director Milton
Glaser, reflected Mr. Felker's view of New York -- both the city and
the magazine -- as a bright and varied feast for the mind and the
eye.
His complicated personality, which ranged from soothing encouraging to
volcanic anger, left few people indifferent.
"He is variously described by associates and acquaintances as
autocratic, devious, dishonest, rapacious, egotistical, power mad,
paranoid, a bully and a boor," a 1977 Time magazine article said.
"Almost in the same breath, the same people call Felker a genius."
In the early years of New York magazine, Mr. Felker assembled a staff
of writers that included Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Nora Ephron, Richard
Reeves, Pete Hamill, Jack Newfield, Aaron Latham, Mimi Sheraton and
Gail Sheehy, who became Mr. Felker's third wife. He exhorted them to
write in distinctively personal voices as they explored city's trends,
horrors and delights. An anthology of writing from New York will be
published in the fall.
"It was a magazine that helped create the notion of the writer as
star," one of Mr. Felker's writers, Ken Auletta, told The Washington
Post in 1977.
New York had a tone that seemed to match the heady confusion of the
times. Much of the issue of June 8, 1970, was devoted to Wolfe's
"Radical Chic," which described a fundraiser for the Black Panthers
held at the apartment of conductor Leonard Bernstein. Wolfe's scathing
story, which coined the term "limousine liberals," became a classic of
New Journalism. Six years later, in another New York article, Wolfe
summed up the entire era when he called it the "Me Decade."
Wolfe called Mr. Felker "the greatest idea man that ever existed" in a
1993 interview with The Washington Post.
"My philosophy is that you have faith in the writer's point of view,"
Mr. Felker told The Post. "You pick the writers you believe in and
give them their freedom. As opposed to most editors who want to mold
the writers into what they want, make them a tool of the editors."
As an early champion of women in journalism, Mr. Felker helped
Steinem's fledgling magazine, Ms., get off the ground when he included
a 40-page preview issue in an edition of New York.
Yet, for all his success in defining an era, Mr. Felker was just as
often derided for what could be called his feats of Clay. He once
published a nude photo of Viva, an actress associated with Andy
Warhol, and critics found some articles to be adolescent or needlessly
provocative.
The journalism review More complained that New York magazine was
little more than "a weekly diet of superficiality at best and
deception at worst, reality distorted for the sake of titillation."
Breslin parted with Mr. Felker in the early 1970s, saying the magazine
"caused me to become gagged with perfume and disheartened by character
collapse."
As the circulation and reputation of his flagship magazine grew, Mr.
Felker sought to expand his journalistic empire in the mid-1970s by
buying the Village Voice and by launching New West, a West Coast
version of New York.
But his lavish spending on limousines, office space and personal chefs
drew criticism from his board of directors, who rejected his demand
that they buy him a house in the Hamptons. Mr. Felker invited Rupert
Murdoch, then newly arrived in the United States as owner of the New
York Post, to invest in New York magazine.
Instead, Murdoch made a hostile bid for the three publications that
Mr. Felker controlled. With backing from Washington Post Co. chairman
Katharine Graham, Mr. Felker proposed a series of counteroffers, but
he was outmaneuvered by Murdoch and soon ousted.
Feeling betrayed by Murdoch, Mr. Felker said, "Rupert Murdoch and I
disagree on the meaning of friendship, of human values and the meaning
of journalism."
Most of the New York staff walked out in solidarity, but Mr. Felker
seemed to have lost more than just his magazine. He would spend the
rest of his life trying to regain his magic touch, though seldom with
the same success.
"His ambition was too large," an anonymous New York staffer told The
Post in 1993. "Why wasn't he satisfied with New York magazine? He
wanted to be Citizen Hearst, and he lost his dream."
Clay Schuette Felker was born October 25, 1925, in St. Louis
[Missouri], where his father was managing editor of the Sporting News.
Mr. Felker printed his first newspaper, the Greeley Street News, when
he was 8 and sold it in his hometown of Webster Groves, Missouri.
He entered Duke University in 1942. Nine years later, after wartime
service in and a stint as a statistician for the New York Giants
baseball team, he graduated.
He moved to New York and wrote about sports and politics for Life
magazine. With his background in sports -- he later wrote a book about
baseball manager Casey Stengel -- Mr. Felker was assigned to a secret
Time-Life group that developed Sports Illustrated in 1954.
As features editor of Esquire magazine from 1957 to 1962, he hired
Gore Vidal to write a column on politics and asked novelist Norman
Mailer to cover the 1960 Democratic National Convention. Mailer's
resulting article, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," was hailed as
an early example of New Journalism, in which writers adopt fictional
techniques and inject their own experiences into the story.
When Mr. Felker lost out to Harold Hayes -- another progenitor of the
New Journalism -- as top editor of Esquire, he left the magazine and
worked as a consultant for the Herald Tribune, a distinguished but
struggling newspaper. In 1964, he became editor of the paper's Sunday
magazine, which he transformed into a showcase of smart reporting and
writing.
"Each week's lineup was as varied and unpredictable as the city
itself," Richard Kluger wrote in "The Paper," a history of the Herald
Tribune.
In 1977, after Mr. Felker was forced out of New York magazine, he
became publisher and part-owner of Esquire, where he hoped to
revitalize the ailing men's journal. Less than two years later, the
magazine was sold out from under him, and he was adrift once more.
For several years, he was a consultant to Twentieth-Century Fox, which
transformed several stories he had edited, most notably "Saturday
Night Fever" (1977) and "Urban Cowboy" (1980), into movies.
Mr. Felker continued to have modest triumphs as editor of Adweek
magazine and the business-oriented Manhattan Inc. in the 1980s, but
both efforts proved short-lived. He was still remembered as the editor
who created -- and lost -- New York.
He turned to teaching in the 1990s and had a long association with the
Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at
Berkeley, which named its center for magazine studies in his honor. He
became a powerful force at the school, spotting young talent and
overseeing the magazine writing and design programs.
Mr. Felker viewed the glamour and excitement of New York with never-
ending wonder. He shared a spacious apartment on East 57th Street with
Sheehy, his wife since 1984, and Manhattan's literary crowd clamored
for invitations to their parties. Long after he had retired from
running magazines, Mr. Felker continued to be regarded as a sage of
journalistic wisdom.
"His reach may have exceeded his grasp," Newsweek declared in 1977,
but "Felker has left a strong and highly personal imprint on American
journalism."
His earlier marriages to Leslie Blatt Felker and actress Pamela Tiffin
ended in divorce. In addition to his third wife, survivors include
Sheehy's adopted daughter, Mohm Phat Sheehy of Cambridge,
Massachusetts; a stepdaughter, Maura Sheehy Moss, of Brooklyn, New
York; a sister; and three grandchildren.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/01/AR2008070101398.html?hpid=topnews