I sent my piece
to 12 magazines simultaneously (I was 23; I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to
do that) and got rejected by them all.
Weeks later, New York Magazine called – I had forgotten about
that one – I must have sent it to 13 – and had me fly down from Cambridge to have my
picture taken for the cover.
And that, in the
fall of 1970, is how I met Clay Felker.
He was old (to a
23-year-old, 45 is old), but erupting – always – with energy and enthusiasm and
urgency.
He was a
spectacular advocate for his writers, always putting them front and center and
reveling in their success.
And, for whatever
reason, he had decided to make me one of them.
My piece was
about a company I’d worked for called National Student Marketing. Its stock went from 6 to 140 in 18 months –
DLJ bought some, Harvard’s Endowment Fund bought some – but the “creative
accounting” the company had been practicing, it turned out, could really only
be fairly termed “fraudulent accounting.”
The CEO went to jail – as did a guy from Peat Marwick, the auditor – and
I went off to business school.
One thing led to
another, and MBA in hand, I found myself in the employ of Clay Felker.
Here are the
things I remember best about Clay:
He was passionate
about everything, but especially people and power. He would meet someone at a cocktail party –
real estate developer Sam Lefrak or music mogul Ahmet
Ertegun or British financier Sir James Goldsmith –
and the next day he would have me calling to profile them for New York.
(“It’s not hard
to make fun of a billion-dollar builder who can’t pronounce the word
‘condominium,’” the Lefrak piece began, “ – he
pronounces it ‘condominimum.’ But Samuel J. Lefrak . . .”)
He was irreverent
– the more outrageous, at least within the limits of an upstanding Missouri native, the
better. He had me write a piece about
OPEC – should we just go into the Middle East
and TAKE the now outrageously-priced $12-a-barrel oil? The thrust of the piece was, “no,” but it
landed me on an assassination list anyway, because he had illustrated the cover
Action Comic style, with Ford and Kissinger storming the desert with machine
guns.
He knew how to
sell magazines. He let me do a piece on
solar energy, circa 1974, and I was amazed to find that he not only had made
room for it -- he had made it the cover.
The cover?
Well, it was February, so used a shot of a gorgeous model on a pool
float, all but topless, soaking in the rays.
He allowed his
writers tremendous latitude. He once let
me do a piece called, “How Tall Is Robert Redford Really?” – the Times had said
he was 6’2”, others had told me he was 5’7”, and I just thought this was one
question, in a complex subjective world, we ought to be able to answer
definitely. (“About
five-nine.”) And the next week he
would let me do a piece about “Bank Capital Adequacy.”
He supported
writers every way he could. He helped Gloria Steinem launch
Ms.
He helped Judy Daniels launch Savvy. He helped Steve Brill launch American Lawyer. He ran the Aaron Latham piece that became John
Travolta’s “Urban
Cowboy.” He persuaded George J. W. Goodman
to adopt the penname “Adam Smith,” which led to the #1 best-seller, The Money Game, and the long-running,
award-winning “Adam Smith’s Money World” on PBS.
He was not great
with money. Personally, he was always
asking me (and others, let’s hope) for financial advice. Professionally, how could he stint on the
editorial package? The stories and
graphics and writing meant far more to him than profits.
And so it was he
once met a terrific young Australian publishing tycoon – “you’ve got to go meet
this guy,” he told me, sending me over to visit Rupert Murdoch – who soon
joined the New York Magazine board and then, to Clay’s consternation, grabbed
it out from under him.
But in even the
few years he had it, Clay made an enormous impact, not least on us, his
writers. I can’t imagine how different,
and less interesting, and less blessed, my life would have been if he hadn’t.
Clay died Tuesday
morning, at 82, in the loving care of another of his writers, his wife, Gail Sheehy.
“A visionary
editor who was widely credited with inventing the formula for the modern
magazine,” the Times obit
begins.
A great talent –
and, not incidentally on this July 4th eve, a great American – is
gone.