by Gail Sheehy
THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL of Tom Wolfe’s many indelible pieces for New York was the cover story “Radical Chic,” which took up twenty-six pages in the issue of June 8, 1970. This was a chronicle of the infamous party at Lenny and Felicia Bernstein’s thirteen-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue, where the Black Panthers were celebrated and fawned over and bathed in humbly mumbled liberal white guilt while munching on little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts, offered to them on silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons. (It was okay, they were white maids.) We had all seen the bloody pictures in Life magazine of police shootouts in Chicago where Black Panthers were treated like the Viet Cong. So what were they doing being pampered in a Park Avenue salon? Tom would tell us as only Tom Wolfe could.
“When you walk into this house,” the host, and maestro of West Side Story, apologized to Don Cox, the Panther’s field marshal from Oakland, “you must feel infuriated!”
The man with a giant Afro and black turtleneck looked embarrassed, wrote Tom. “No, man . . . I manage to overcome that . . .”
“Don’t you get bitter? Doesn’t that make you mad?”
“Noooo, man . . . I’m over that.”
“Well,” said Lenny, “it makes me mad!”
Lenny’s wife, Felicia, was “smiling her tango smile at Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had in a parked car in Queens . . .” The revolutionaries were surrounded by stars: Jason Robards, Steven Sondheim, Lillian Hellman, Mike Nichols, Otto Preminger, Larry Rivers, Aaron Copeland, Barbara Walters, Jerome Robbins, and countless others. Tom, who had RSVPed on an invitation borrowed from David Halberstam, politely introduced himself to the host and hostess with his pen and reporter’s pad in plain sight. Tom thought he’d fallen into a scene that Hollywood couldn’t have cast any better to reflect the comedy of manners that masqueraded in the 1960s as a revolution. Years later, he described his delight in a New York magazine tribute to Clay: “The sight of the rich, the famous, and the brainy kowtowing to a band of black radicals from Oakland, California, in Leonard Bernstein’s living room, baring their soft white backs the more poignantly to feel the Panthers’ vengeful lash, then imploring them not to kill their children—no writer would have ever dreamed of a bonanza quite this rich.”
“Radical Chic” stood the test of time as the earliest social commentary on political correctness. The title also was only one of many popular phrases that Tom introduced to written and spoken language, along with “the Me Decade” (sometimes altered to “the Me Generation”). He also liked to use nostalgie de la boue, which is literally translated as “nostalgia for the mud,” but which Wolfe used ironically to skewer the newly rich for romanticizing the trappings, fashion, style, and even radical philosophies of the underclass in pursuit of social aplomb and prestige.
CLAY TOOK ANOTHER CHANCE when he allowed himself to be one of the first male chauvinists enlisted in the movement for women’s equality. Gloria and I both believed that he could be educated. Simultaneously, he and Gloria picked up on a brilliant idea floating in the atmosphere of free radicalism.
“Let’s test the idea of a magazine reflecting the philosophy of women’s liberation,” he suggested to Milton. They discussed testing it in the year-end double issue. With so many women working for New York, the two men thought they had a ready-made staff of writers.
“And you are the perfect editor,” Clay told Gloria.
Gloria retaliated. “How can you publish a credible voice for women’s liberation in a magazine owned by men!” It took Clay a few days, but he told me when he had the epiphany: “It doesn’t make sense for a company run by men to be the publisher of such a magazine. But I could let Gloria use the pages of New York to launch a sample issue.”
Separately, Gloria and her sisters at Women’s Action Alliance had produced a dummy issue of Ms. magazine. They’d had no luck in raising money for it. Clay went back to Gloria with a generous proposal.
“I can add one hundred pages to our double issue for January,” he said, “so we could print thirty pages of your Ms. and fold it inside New York. Like a sample issue. We could test it for you as a one-shot.”
Gloria was impressed. Clay paid her writers’ fees and all the expenses of production. Eager to repay Gloria for helping him to launch his publication, he gave Gloria full ownership of the new magazine.
The cover of the preview issue of Ms., added as an insert in the January 1972 New York issue, featured Kali, the multiarmed Hindu deity, pregnant, and attempting the impossible balancing act performed by women who tried to be perfect in all their roles. Gloria went on a publicity tour and ran into male TV commentators who ridiculed Ms.: What could women possibly have to say after the first issue? More troubling were the call-ins from viewers who complained they couldn’t find Ms. on their newsstand.
Gloria called Clay in a panic. He laughed. “Our year-end issue usually sells forty thousand copies. All one hundred thousand copies of the Ms. issue have sold out. Congratulations!”
Four decades later, Ms. still had plenty to say in its fortieth anniversary issue, and by 2012, it had gone global.
CHAPTER 9
“I’ll Make You a Star”
THIS WAS CLAY’S SIGNATURE PROMISE. He delivered on that promise many times over. As Richard Reeves said, “He was a Godfather, but actually, he didn’t make his star writers. It was much better than that. He gave us the freedom to make ourselves.”
At a party barely weeks after New York launched, Clay walked up to Reeves, a New York Times political reporter, and said, “How come you never write for me?” Reeves quipped, “You never ask me to write for you.” Clay said, “Well, I’m asking you now.” The handsome single young stud with a sterling silver byline on the Old Gray Lady looked at this rude interloper whose tiny rag wasn’t yet out of infancy and said, “Trade the New York Times for a dream? No thanks.”
If Clay read the work of a writer and wanted him or her to join the family, he never gave up. It was a year or so later that Reeves happened to walk out his door on West Eleventh Street and was startled to see a line around the corner to get into a hole-in-the-wall soup and sandwich joint. What the hell was going on? He found out that Milton Glaser had touted the place in his “Underground Gourmet” column. There went the neighborhood. The next time Reeves saw Clay, he told him the story.
“Write for me,” Clay repeated. Reeves did join the New York family and became a major political star who went on to write an acclaimed trilogy on the presidencies of John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. He was never sorry he made the move: “Being part of New York was so much more fun.” Whenever he wrote pieces for the New York Times Magazine, people would come up to him, obviously impressed, and say, “I saw your piece in the Times on Sunday.” From the first time he wrote for New York, people would stop him on the street wanting to argue: “Listen, when you say Rockefeller and Nixon . . . blah blah blah . . . you don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Reeves introduced Clay to his best friend, Ken Auletta. Nobody thought that a former political campaign manager could write. But Auletta had great sources at city hall. “The city is lying about this fiscal crisis,” Auletta told Clay in 1975. Using all kinds of fiscal chicanery, the city was hiding the truth of how deeply it had gone into debt. Auletta had a fresh point of view: “Ford is doing New York a favor, pushing the city to the wall to save itself.” Going against conventional wisdom tickled Clay. He hired the feisty young man to write a series on the fiscal mess.
Auletta’s most memorable piece brought out the best of the collaborative process that was encouraged by Clay and Milton. When Franklin National Bank collapsed, it was the biggest bank failure in the country up until then. Auletta fingered the city’s top bankers along with its top politicians. Clay called Milton and Walter Bernard and his top editors—Byron Dobell, Jack Nessel, and Sheldon Zalaznick—around the art table,
along with Auletta, to brainstorm about how to give this shocking story maximum impact.
Milton pulled out a big sheet of paper and started to draw thumbnail sketches of a lineup including banker David Rockefeller, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Mayor Abe Beame, and a dozen other big shots. Then he drew a box around them and prison bars to which they were clinging.
“Should These People Go to Jail?” Clay called out the headline. It all happened in a matter of minutes. The artwork was assigned to a brilliant British artist, Julian Allen. That story, like many others, proved that the editorial team was not tied to either political party but on the side of the citizens of New York. That was a good part of the magazine’s success. (Auletta is renowned today as The New Yorker’s window into our media democracy, in his influential column, “Annals of Communications,” and his many books, including Googled and Greed and Glory on Wall Street.)
Clay’s approach also worked because he hired several brilliant editors to provide adult supervision of the wild-eyed wunderkinder he was hiring fresh out of college and graduate schools. Sheldon Zalaznick was his senior managing editor, an intellectual’s intellectual with a dry sense of humor. He was a teacher to his perfectionist core. Shelley knew how to spot a story and help an untrained writer to weave it into a solid magazine piece. It was he who found Andrew Tobias.
In 1970, Tobias was a brainiac Harvard graduate who had already become vice president of a conglomerate, the National Student Marketing Corporation. The company used its inflated stock to buy up all kinds of unrelated businesses, and the scheme was wildly successful until its fraudulent accounting was exposed. Six months before Tobias could cash in stock options worth a small fortune, he watched the company’s stock plunge. Quick to try to turn lemons into lemonade, Tobias wrote an amusing piece, on speculation, about his exploits. It was rejected by so many magazines, he forgot about it. He was a graduate student at Harvard Business School when the phone rang in his dorm room and a cultivated voice said, “Mr. Tobias, please.”
“I’m twenty-three, unshaven, sitting on my bed in shorts in Cambridge,” Tobias remembers.
“This is Sheldon Zalaznick at New York magazine. I am terribly sorry that it has taken us so long to see your piece. By any chance, is it still available?”
“Confessions of a Youth Marketeer” featured Tobias on the cover of New York teetering inside a bubble. Ten pages were devoted to the first magazine piece he’d ever written. It was a huge success. But there was a subject closer to his heart, the new gay culture. “I was going to Harvard Business School for something respectable to do while I went to gay bars every night,” he told me. Tobias planned on becoming a little tycoon.
“No, no, you should be a writer” was the advice he heard from Clay and Shelley. Tobias worried that his straight bosses would be put off by his admission of being gay; his parents didn’t even know. “But Clay and Shelley took it in stride,” he recalls. They published an excerpt from his autobiography, The Best Little Boy in the World. Tobias did indeed become celebrated for writing amusing articles and books about investing and later as a powerhouse fund-raiser for the Democratic Party.
Clay had to lure Nick Pileggi away from the bosom of a flush wire service to take the leap into New Journalism. Pileggi’s New York was the criminal underworld. He was a nimble AP reporter who often slept in precinct houses, waiting for one of the detectives to show up too drunk to go out on a call so he could take his place. Clay liked Pileggi’s colorful stories. In his piece about Joe Colombo, a top Mafia boss, he described the “lump job” administered to his head by a couple of FBI agents in a street brawl. Pileggi was the first to suggest that Colombo might soon be taken out in a mob power struggle. Two weeks later, at the Italian Unity Day rally, Colombo was shot in the head; he ended up paralyzed and lived for the next seven years as a vegetable. Pileggi produced a dozen stories in the first year. Right behind Mario Puzo, he became a Boswell to the Mafia and later wrote the hit film Goodfellas.
One morning Clay was supposed to be interviewed about the competition between New York and The New Yorker. When the doorbell rang early, he went to the door of his apartment in his boxer shorts. A tall, lanky Texan appeared in the doorway and pretended not to be startled. Aaron Latham, an Amherst man and an editor at Esquire, was known for his often lethal interview style. Deadpan, he would ask a question and then shut up. He had no trouble with awkward silences, patiently waiting for the hang-yourself quote.
Clay sat opposite him with a breakfast tray on his lap, a poached egg propped on an English muffin. During one long silence, Clay lifted the whole egg on a fork and bit off half. The egg exploded like a yellow grenade all over his face, all over his white shirt. Clay wiped off his face with a cloth napkin, ignored his shirt, did not laugh, did not speak. Aaron hid his own embarrassment. He proceeded to his next question as if nothing had happened. Clay admired his sangfroid. A few hours later, Clay called Aaron and offered him a job.
The Texan turned out to be a natural stylist for New York. His vivid depiction of displaced frontiersmen driven to displaying their manhood by riding a mechanical bull in a downbeat dive was the basis for his screenplay of Urban Cowboy, a hit movie. He would become Clay’s adored surrogate son.
NEW YORK WAS A WEEKLY with the ambition of interpreting the news like a monthly. No independent weekly had attempted that before, except for Time, Life, and Newsweek, all with their massive corporate resources. Clay’s operating theory was disequilibrium, guaranteed by the frenetic weekly tempo. You might be working on a piece for a month, and when you thought it was done, Clay would change the lead, cut it in half, or demand, “What the hell are you trying to say?,” and you would crawl back to your keyboard and force yourself to find out.
Clay did more reporting than all of us put together. He had very little time for a romantic life in those days. He was out every night cruising the latest openings, screenings, book parties, art galleries; then on to dinner parties with power brokers who dropped tantalizing hints about political scandals or Wall Street shenanigans; followed by drop-ins to East Village joints to hear Jefferson Airplane or the next-next hot music group.
He demanded that his writers and artists have a point of view. “Clay knew just enough about almost everything that he could give the writer some context,” noted Amanda (Binky) Urban, who started out as Clay’s executive assistant and was promoted many times over until she launched her career as a high-powered literary agent at International Creative Management (ICM). Clay would send a writer off with several key questions: Why are things the way they are? (Sniff out the latest trend); What led up to this? (Give us the historical background); How do things work? (Who is pulling the strings or making the magic or making fools of us?); How is the power game played in your corner of New York, or in the White House with a new president?
What he never wanted was what journalism schools often teach—a “nut graf”—meaning a lead paragraph that sums up what the story is about. Clay’s style was the opposite: tantalize the reader with a compelling opening scene but don’t give the story away. He told writers, “Take me inside the world you know, where readers don’t have any access, and tell me a great story.”
I came to understand that for Clay, for any influential editor, the instinct for spotting a story is inborn. It cannot be taught. His hunch was often more prescient, more edgy, more easily supported by anecdotes than hard reporting, and that could lead to arguments with his most independent reporters. This was particularly true with women journalists. Taking direction from a male editor, especially if the subject was the emergence of feminism, ran up against a built-in resistance. Julie Baumgold, a self-described Upper East Side Jewish princess, specialized in mocking feminism and arguing with Clay about it. Jane O’Reilly was a wild spirit who also resisted direction. She wrote a famous story about the click!—the moment of truth—that turned housewives into rabble-rousers for women’s lib.
Along about this time, Esquire editor Harold Hayes grew jealous of Clay’s
success. “Felker’s got a group of terrific women writers over there,” he told Lee Eisenberg, his assistant editor. “Why don’t you take them out to dinner and try to steal them for us.” Eisenberg did indeed invite Julie, Jane, and me, separately, on consecutive nights, to “seduction” dinners. We might have felt free to fight with Felker, but when it came down to loyalty, he had us.
TALENT ATTRACTS TALENT: that was another of Clay’s secrets. It was how he persuaded Stephen Sondheim, already a matchless composer and lyricist who in the 1970s turned out ten hits with Hal Prince, to create puzzles for the magazine. The irrepressible Woody Allen wrote several stories for early issues. Clay even drafted the nearly eternal Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who went on to write many plays and over three dozen books.
Michael Kramer was fresh out of Amherst and Columbia Law School when Clay asked him to come to talk. Kramer’s book The Ethnic Factor had been well reviewed by the New York Times. When he came into the office, some of us chuckled: his suit and tie were incongruous with his cascade of unkempt hair. Kramer spoke in staccato bursts, but he had a lot to say about Clay’s favorite subject: politics. Gloria was giving up the “City Politic” column to work full time on developing her own magazine, Ms. “I’d like you to take over the column,” Clay told Kramer.
“I’ve never been a journalist before,” the young man confessed.
“Don’t worry about that. Here’s my advice. Just write like you talk.” It was the energy and rawness that Clay wanted in political columns. Kramer’s first was due in ten days. Terrified, he called his father: “What can I write about?” His father, who’d worked for two New York governors, suggested he interview his old friend former mayor Bob Wagner. Kramer groaned. “But he’s never given a single quote worth printing.” His father tipped him off that Governor Nelson Rockefeller had just appointed Jerry Finkelstein, a fat-cat businessman, to the board of the New York Port Authority. This was a powerful fiefdom that controlled every form of transportation on land, water, and underground in both New York and New Jersey. Kramer went into his interview with Wagner not knowing that beneath the mayor’s hypnotic monotone there blazed a vicious hatred of Finkelstein. Innocently, Kramer lobbed a last question. “What do you think of Rockefeller’s appointment of Finkelstein to the Port Authority?”