Daring (12 page)

The board called Clay, on the carpet of Armand Erpf's Park Avenue apartment, fuming that their investments were certain to be wiped out. They were ready to fire him. Erpf elevated the discussion to a moral plain and praised Clay for his vision and balls. This was his boy, his wunderkind, and he was putting more money into the magazine; he wanted Edgar Bronfman and the others to follow suit. “This magazine is going to be a big success, so don't thank me,” he said. “You're going to love this investment.”

Over the summer of '68 hung the fear that cash-flow problems would hold up people's paychecks. Fashion writer Priscilla Tucker was hired to lure back the retail advertisers. Still, chatter on the street persisted: Would the magazine fail? It was a scary time. Yet no one quit. Clay's writers and photographers were moved by the evidence of this editor's loyalty to them. Clay was rare among his ilk, willing to brush off the business side if he believed in a great story and startling photographs. We all began to breathe the elixir of Clay's own ambition. It was our own dolce vita.

I WAS LUCKY TO HAVE STARTED PREVIOUSLY
with Clay at the scrappy Sunday supplement in the
Trib
. Now, at the independent
New York
magazine, there was a new manifesto: No more limits to nonfiction . . . if you have the stamina and the courage to do the reporting and the talent to tell a story as compelling as a literary short story, do it!

Inspired by Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, some of my colleagues and I began borrowing the dramatic techniques used by novelists—scene-by-scene construction, dialogue, and use of status details to denote social class. We treated the protagonists of nonfiction stories like characters in a novel. What was their motivation? What were they thinking? What was it like living inside their reality?

The New Journalism would grow into a movement. But the form wasn't really all that new. Clay had stumbled upon it back in the Duke library when he came upon bound volumes of the Civil War–era
Tribune
, Horace Greeley's famous nineteenth-century newspaper. He began to read gripping accounts from the Virginia battlefield, not from a disinterested correspondent, but vivid stories with narrative structure written by soldiers in the trenches.

Most of us were on the cusp of a new generation, precursors of the counterculture. We began setting the agenda for the jumbo-size baby-boom generation that came on our heels. Mostly fugitives from the suburbs or small-town Midwest, we wanted to escape the conformity and cookie-cutter marriages and the materialist fixations of our parents and explore the new urban lifestyles. Each of us brought with us a fantasy of New York. We projected those fantasies through our writing and the art direction of the magazine. Clay sought writers and artists who reflected the many different New Yorks.

My New York was the Lower East Side. I saw myself as half hippie/half striver. I did have a very clear dream. I wanted to be a journalist because that would give me license to ask questions of anyone about anything I wanted to know. One of my first attempts at literary journalism I wrote while I was in graduate school at Columbia University in 1969. Clay asked me what I thought about the student “revolutionaries” uptown at Columbia. “What are these privileged kids revolting about?” he wanted to know. “Why are they playing with violence?”

After weeks of hanging out in meetings of affinity groups, I gave Clay my perspective. Young white liberal males, handsomely supported by the very suburban elite parents they were expected to repudiate, were desperate to be taken seriously as revolutionaries. They felt themselves shamed by the Black Panthers, men with warrior Afros and Cuban shades who were actually prepared to die to expose racial oppression.

Clay gave me an idea for how to tell the story: “Seek out a young bomber struggling with this challenge and follow him, try to get inside his head.” I found Marc, a mild-mannered graduate student from St. Louis whose wife was on the radical feminist fringe and goading him into violent activism. Recently, Ted Gold and his companions had played with dynamite while planning a violent action and were entombed in a town house on West Eleventh Street. Poor Marc was losing weight and preparing himself to die.

For some young white radicals it was enough to participate in the chic of rage and the ecstasy of despair. Not long after the excitement of trashing Columbia, some of the participants called another tactics meeting. I sat next to one of those despairing radicals. He dropped his head into his hands: “We'll never have a revolution in this country. Too many people are happy.”

Clay loved that line. He never believed for a moment that the United States would allow another revolution, but he had a natural nose for spotting new trends at least ten minutes before history. And the '60s and '70s spawned more new lifestyles than could be contained in any magazine. Only in retrospect did we appreciate our good fortune in being part of a utopian experiment in American journalism. At the time, we were too busy having fun.

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.

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.