by Gail Sheehy
But a very human appetite often slowed him down. He was a collector. I sometimes wondered if that instinct was encoded in his DNA. Too many mornings, on his way to work, he would shout to our taxi driver “Hold the cab!” and dive into James Robinson’s shop to indulge his taste for antique silver. Of course, the last thing he needed was another silver biscuit basket, or another English porcelain dinner platter, but he couldn’t help himself. His assistant, Jane Maxwell, later told me how she used to come over on Saturday mornings and shuffle his bills—which ones to pay this month?—while Clay would be out perusing the lots up for auction at Sotheby’s, hoping for a bargain on a Della Robbia terra-cotta sculpture or a Majolica painted lion to add to his collection. He once told Maxwell that he believed a man should always live beyond his means.
I was worried about the feet of Clay.
CLAY WAS HUNGRY BY 1976. Why not? New York magazine was fat and happy by its eighth year in business. The family of writers, editors, and contributing artists and photographers had grown to include more of the most noted journalistic talents to come out of the late 1960s and 1970s: Kurt Andersen, Pete Hamill, Anna Wintour (who would become the queen-mother editor of Vogue). John Simon became a fearsome theater critic.
“If you wanted to learn about magazine writing, editing, or design, all you had to do was keep your eyes peeled and your ears perked—it was all being done out loud, with great sweeping gestures and the unforgettable sight of Clay’s fist crashing down on the art counter, making all the X-Acto knives and glue pots jump into the air,” said Elizabeth Crow, who went on to become editor of several magazines. “You’d pick up enough information to run a magazine of your own.”
Clay backed Judith Daniels to start her own magazine for women, called Savvy. Michael Kramer, the political writer, was encouraged by Clay to start his own magazine, More. Joan Kron, the home decorating editor, gave birth to the high-tech movement, using industrial objects for interior furnishing, such as operating tables for bar carts or police barricades under a tabletop. It only became a movement because Clay later published an excerpt from the book Kron wrote with Suzanne Slesin, another visionary of interior design who wrote for New York and authored twenty books of her own. Clarkson and Potter, their publisher, hated the title, demanding: “What does it mean?” Kron refused to give in on her title. Once Clay owned Esquire, he ran it bigger than a title, as a banner across the August 29, 1978, cover: “HIGH TECH: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home.” The idea swept the country in the ’70s and spawned office furnishing and big-box stores decades later.
AN INSTINCT FOR THEATRICS also came naturally to Clay. I’ll never forget the celebrity-studded party he took me to at Lally Weymouth’s East Side apartment in 1977. To begin, I was suspicious of Clay’s friendship with Lally, a social colossus with a smoldering ambition to become the greatest journalist of her day. Lally was the daughter of Kay Graham, whom she openly accused of following the archaic practice of primogeniture by grooming her firstborn son, Donald, to take over the helm of the family business, rather than Lally. Clay tried to play the peacemaker between mother and daughter, which only exaggerated their rivalry and focused it on a competition for Clay’s ardor.
At the party, I was left in the hallway as Clay plunged into the gilded crowd. Right behind me, Jacqueline Kennedy swept in on the arm of the handsome Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. She was immediately enveloped in a bear hug by the guest of honor, Lord George Weidenfeld, a Holocaust survivor who had elevated himself to a British lord and powerhouse publisher.
I followed Jackie into the main salon and watched with my reporter’s eyes as she sat at a cocktail table and was immediately surrounded by men. They virtually bowed their heads like vassals. She selected them, one by one, her enormous eyes fixed on the elderly filmmaker Sam Spiegel, then the CBS chairman Bill Paley; these and other tycoons melted in the resplendence of her full attention. She listened. That was her secret. When finally her breathy childlike voice spoke, it touched them like an anointing. I had watched it happen with Clay.
He had described for me a telling vignette from the time he went to the Kennedy compound on Hyannis Port in the summer of 1953, a new reporter for Life, to interview the attractive new senator from Massachusetts. John Kennedy, then only thirty-five, scion of the state’s most prominent Irish Catholic family, had displaced the WASP dynasty of the Lodge family in a stunning upset. Clay, as usual, had spotted a comer. Only a few months before, Kennedy had proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier. The twenty-four-year-old daughter of a prominent New York family, Jackie was working as a street photographer for a Washington newspaper. Clay was invited into the family’s screened-in porch for the interview.
Jackie, wearing shorts, literally knelt at the feet of Jack. Her 2.88-carat diamond and emerald ring blazed in the sun as she rested her hand on her bare knee. Jack sat forward in his chair, relaxed in an open shirt and shorts, facing the green reporter and waving his sunglasses to emphasize his points. Later, while the Kennedy boys were playing touch football, Jackie invited Clay to sit beside her and watch. The embrace of her full attention made him feel cocky enough to ask a flirtatious question.
“What do you see in this guy? Why do you want to marry him?”
Her answer gave Clay a clue to the future Camelot. “I like the life,” she said.
At Lally’s party, Clay came up from behind me and slipped his arm around my waist. “Where have you been? I want you to watch something. Mailer’s already drunk. He’s stalking Gore. There’s going to be a fight.”
Sure enough, the bullheaded Norman Mailer was circling his nemesis, Gore Vidal. Too short to take on tall men, Mailer preferred butting heads so he could force his opponents to bend down. He edged into the circle around the nearly six-foot Vidal, who was fully engaged, as usual, in talking about himself. Mailer threw his drink in the elegant author’s face. Gasps, shrieks, laughter, an electric charge ricocheted through the crowd. Mailer, shoulders hunched, charged forward like a minotaur. Gore bent to meet him but Mailer pushed back hard. I think it was here that Gore got off his famous line: “Once again, Norman, words fail you.” This was not just another highfalutin verbal brawl; this was the literary version of the Liston-Ali fight!
Lally looked around frantically. “God, this is terrible, please, somebody, do something!”
Clay leaned close to Lally. “Shut up, this is making your party!”
How right he was. That party has lived on from Liz Smith’s column to Murdoch’s Sun, to newspapers in every corner of the world and multiple memoirs and, recently, in a review by Graydon Carter of the biography by J. Michael Lennon, Norman Mailer: A Double Life.
RESTAURANTS WERE ANOTHER of Clay’s myriad fascinations. Back at the Trib, he had sent Gael Greene to write about the reopening of La Côte Basque. She had talked her way into the confidence of Henri Soulé, the snobby king of haute cuisine, and penetrated his inner sanctum to write a dishy piece about how the place worked. When Clay called in 1968 to spring on her the offer to be his restaurant critic, she was stunned, thinking how reckless to tap an unknown to compete with the Great God of Gourmands Craig Claiborne. But Clay’s eye for casting had spotted her unique approach.
“You make food sensual,” Felker told Greene. “You’ll be great!”
Mimi Sheraton’s food criticism was an enticing addition to Gael Greene’s restaurant reviews. Sheraton won Clay over with her first big story for New York in the early 1970s when she discovered the hottest gourmet food shop in town and ate her way through more than a thousand products. The headline was “I Tasted Everything in Bloomingdale’s Food Department.” She went on to write for just about every print publication in existence as well as to produce sixteen books.
Nora Ephron wrote some funny pieces for Clay, but she didn’t like competing with the other women writers at New York. She wrote occasional essays for The New Yorker and directed some of the era’s most popular romantic comedy films and mined the self-hating feminine eye in her books
.
Mary Ann Madden delighted readers with her topical crossword puzzles and literary competitions, calling for readers to submit humorous poetry or other clever wordplay on a theme she changed each week. Her contest hooked even star writers like David Halberstam, David Mamet, and Woody Allen.
EVEN WITH AN UNRULY FAMILY that extended from L.A. to London, Clay was not satisfied.
When Clay hired his own chief financial officer, Kenneth Fadner, his board saw the move as a slap. Clay sent Fadner out to meet with Carter Burden, the young prince of the city who owned the Voice. Born to wealth and with the delicate blond beauty of a fawn, Burden straddled the worlds of party-giving dilettante and progressive city councilman representing the Upper East Side. His exquisite Lalique figure of a wife, Amanda Burden, had killed his fantasy of becoming president someday when she was rumored to have had an affair with Teddy Kennedy. During the year of his divorce, 1974, he went virtually missing in action from the city council.
Clay’s hunch was that Burden preferred an all-cash deal because he didn’t want it known that he owned a media property that covered politics, and especially not a pinko tabloid in Greenwich Village. Fadner was able to borrow $1.5 million from Chemical Bank and, with the excess cash the magazine had, meet the $5 million asking price.
But when Clay and Fadner went to the board with their proposal to buy the Village Voice for cash, they were treated like crazy dreamers. “No, no, no, it’s not good for the company to borrow money,” argued Alan Patricof. He was a forty-year-old venture capitalist brought onto the board by Armand Erpf. Patricof represented “other people’s money,” but for him personally, the magazine held a certain je ne sais quoi that doesn’t spring to mind when one thinks about the meat distributing business or the animal feed supplement business, two of the major clients Patricof attracted to his private investment company. Raised in Manhattan, this natural-born dealmaker had always been close enough to the parade of the talented and glamorous. The primary reward he looked for in his association with New York magazine was social cachet. “I wanted to be Clay’s friend,” he often told me, meaning he expected to be introduced to the governor and the mayor and other big shots naturally attracted to the parties of a big-city editor.
But long before 1974, any trust between Felker and Patricof had been fatally shaken. Clay’s benefactor, Armand Erpf, liked the idea of maintaining a “creative tension” between the artistic wildmen—Clay and Milton—and the staid moneymen. Clay was wary; he had almost lost the magazine in the late ’60s. Back then, George Hirsch, the self-congratulatory publisher, had enlisted writer Jimmy Breslin in an attempted heist. When Erpf found out, he fired Hirsch. Patricof appealed, saying, “Hirsch is just like me,” but Erpf prevailed. Breslin resigned. And Patricof became chairman of the board. Clay won that first power struggle, but he never trusted Patricof again.
The bitterness over that attempted betrayal set the stage for a “Spaghetti Eastern,” a shootout waiting to happen.
Clay’s and Patricof’s philosophies on how to run a publishing business were in constant opposition. Clay wanted to plow profits back into operations in order to expand the business and, in the long run, the profits. Patricof, having come of age during the go-go years on Wall Street, was fixated on maximizing short-term profits to raise the price of the stock.
Patricof’s insistence that Burden take stock in New York magazine rather than cash had the effect of dangerously diluting Clay’s small equity in the company he had started. Clay had given a generous spread of stock ownership to key editorial people, including Wolfe, Breslin, Steinem, Peter Maas, and Jerry Goodman (none of whom would later go along with the patricide plot). Burden and his business partner Bartle Bull got a total of 34 percent of the merged company’s stock. That gave Burden and Bull the largest block of votes. And they were no friends of Clay Felker.
As early as ’73, Clay’s board had begun getting nervous about his spending habits. By ’76, despite the fact that he had built a company that was a model in the publishing world, Clay’s equity was now confined to only 10 percent of the value he had created. He decided to live with that situation if the board would compensate him with an increase in salary or a share of the profits. Patricof was fit to be tied. Jealousy flared so brightly, it could almost be seen like lightning.
“I was not going to stand by and be the quiet, nice guy anymore,” Patricof told me in an interview after the crisis was over. “I was only getting $12,000 a year for being chairman. I gave the editors lots of tips on merchandise that would be perfect for ‘Best Bets’—do you think anyone ever paid attention?”
Several times during our interview I asked Patricof, “If being on the board brought you so much grief, rancor, and humiliation, why didn’t you resign?”
“That’s a good question, Gail, a good question,” he said with a shrug. At the end of our two-hour interview, I suggested an answer: “Prestige?”
“Yes, I enjoyed the prestige. People think being chairman of the board is an important role. But I’m not known in every restaurant. I don’t get invited to special screenings. I don’t have a press card to use . . .”
IN 1976, MEASURED BY PUBLIC ACCEPTANCE, Clay Felker had achieved his dream. Measured by the balance sheets that year, when the city’s economy was still in free fall, the company had overall revenues of $26 million. New York magazine itself earned $1.2 million. The Village Voice earned $649,000. Clay began to believe in himself as a businessman. This was his Achilles’ heel.
He set his sights on California for the next expansion. He first looked at Los Angeles magazine, which at the time was a glossy version of a Chamber of Commerce magazine, beautiful but boring. He offered $500,000 for it. His board of directors went berserk, arguing that the company didn’t have enough money. “Clay, being so instinctive, knew it was worth much more than half a million, and it later sold for something like twenty million,” Ken Fadner once told me. Clay’s hands were tied. He backed off. But the rancor with his board developed into a bitter estrangement.
Then Clay decided to make a drastic move—to launch another start-up. He was completely comfortable with chaos, which as an artistic spirit he believed was necessary to create something new. His idea was to reproduce the excitement of an urban magazine in Los Angeles. He would call it New West. Nothing pleased him more than brokering movie sales for his writers from articles they developed for New York. California became a great romance for him, with its rawboned politics, its history and cultural heroes, its energy, its cults, and its crazy variations on the American dream.
The announcement of New West kicked up great excitement in L.A., where magazine journalism was a low-end product. Clay plucked one of the top business journalists in the country, Frank Lalli, from Forbes and made him the founding executive editor. Lalli’s talented wife, Carole, lost her reluctance to leave New York when Clay hired her as the magazine’s food writer.
Costs began to break the budget early on. Soon, Clay began calling to ask me to come out and write a cover story for his new magazine. I was still caught up in promoting Passages, but I welcomed the distraction. My Columbia mentor, Margaret Mead, was delighted to hear I had another news outlet. I must do an exposé on the dangers of nuclear power, she commanded. A little research uncovered a popular protest in the San Diego area against the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. It was discovered in 1973 that it sat on a seismic fault, a fault that had already generated a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. On the California ballot that year was a referendum on the safety of nuclear power plants. It was a made-to-order investigatory story. And it allowed me to take Maura to L.A. for spring vacation.
Maura sat at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel all day spying on stars, while I inhaled nuclear power publications, then swam with her and wrote half the night nourished by room-service salad. We met the designer Diane von Furstenberg in the coffee shop over perfectly made omelets; Diane was funny and real and we became good friends. Once Clay joined us in the bungalow, the magic really began. His friend
the moviemaker Peter Bogdanovich invited us to visit the Twentieth Century Fox lot to watch him direct Ryan O’Neal in Nickelodeon. Lunch at the Fox commissary was a further occasion for star spotting. And that night, we were invited to watch the Academy Awards at the home of Irwin Winkler, producer of the Rocky films, who was making They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? with Jane Fonda.
Why not move here? Winkler coaxed us. The next day a gaggle of New Yorkers gathered for lunch by the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, all of us splotched with two-day tans and red half-moons where our bathing suits had ridden up. Lunch over, we went back to our lounge chairs. “Time for turning!” chirped the cabana boy, pointing to a sun now at two o’clock. We all ran guiltily to our rooms, fearing that if we adopted the laid-back L.A. lifestyle, we might melt down to a dribble of Hawaiian Tropic tanning lotion.
BY AUGUST, PATRICOF WAS READY to move on a campaign to oust Clay. He arranged separate meetings with each board member and pushed the story that the company was in trouble because it had run out of cash.
“The idea that we were in financial trouble was totally preposterous,” insists Ken Fadner. “The board had voted unanimously to wipe out earnings to start New West, in order to allow the government to finance half of the costs.” Nonetheless, the board denied Clay a new contract. A brawl broke out at the September 1976 board meeting.
“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you fifteen times, Clay, you don’t have to be a superstar all over town for paying writers well,” Patricof scolded.
“New West has exceeded all our expectations in terms of circulation growth, advertising, popular acceptance,” Clay countered. “It’s making us temporarily victims of our own success—but just temporarily. It’s grown so rapidly that the costs have outrun the original budget.”
Glaser looked at the men around the room. “This has been a launch of unprecedented success,” he intoned, “and you guys are crying because there’s little money in the bank. The fact is, we are at the healthiest point in the company’s whole existence.”