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lay Felker defined New York, the magazine he founded out of the ashes of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper in 1968, as concerned with “how the power game is played, and who are the winners.” This was a dynamic innovation. By charting the status anxieties and baubles of the Manhattan middle classes, Felker reinvented aspiration as spectator sport, forging the template for the modern city magazine. Feisty, avaricious, and attuned to the self-image of an audience of highball sipping urbanites, New York combined a steely commercial sensibility – restaurant reviews, lifestyle pieces, ‘best of ’ lists, all of which were uncommon at the time – with wild, imaginative feature journalism. The best writers flocked to the title, lured by Felker’s fabled enticement – “I’ll make you a star” – and not very much money; Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Nora Ephron, Jimmy Breslin, Gail Sheehy, Ken Auletta, George Goodman, Nik Cohn, Nick Pillegi, and Mark Jacobsen. They used New York as a launchpad for glorious careers and what Tom Wolfe would come to characterise as ‘New Journalism’: hard reporting that read like literary fiction. It wasn’t long before the magazine’s writers were breathing what Wolfe later described as Felker’s “own mental atmosphere of boundless ambition, his conviction that we were involved in the greatest experiment in the history of journalism.” New York announced itself to the world by lobbing a pipe bomb at a venerated rival, the New Yorker, a literary giant that, despite having access to the most famous writers in the world, had lapsed into a creative narcolepsy. “We start the week the same way as The New Yorker, with blank paper and ink,” Felker would tell his staff, “There’s no reason why we can’t be just as good as they are… or better. They’re so damned dull.” It struck him their torpor was a story in itself, so, after an initial request for an interview with editor William Shawn was pompously rejected, Wolfe was dispatched to gatecrash the New Yorker’s 40th Anniversary party. He returned with a stick of dynamite entitled ‘Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead.’ Running at 10,000 words, the article scandalised the Manhattan media world, intimating as it did that the most esteemed editorial vessel of the age was nothing more than a ghost ship populated by pusillanimous librarians. Furious, Shawn threatened Jock Whitney, New York’s then publisher, with libel, and recruited a phalanx of famous contributors to write venomous letters – E.B. White, Muriel Spark, even the reclusive J.D. Salinger weighed in. Time and Newsweek lapped up the east coast literary feud, reporting it to a national audience of millions, and New York’s ad sales were doubled in one stroke. More controversial feature stories would follow.
‘La Dolce Viva,’ Barbara Goldsmith’s seminal exposé of Andy Warhol’s mistreatment of Factory ‘superstar’ wannabes caused a sensation – and also revulsion, as the magazine’s high-end Madison Avenue retailers pulled their advertising from New York in protest, precipitating an investor crisis that almost sunk the title. Then there was ‘Radical Chic’, another Wolfe zinger that skewered a benefit party held by Leonard Bernstein for the black panthers, and Nik Cohn’s ‘Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,’ a penetration of the Bronx disco subculture that became the basis of the film Saturday Night Fever. Felker was at the centre of it all, goading his writers, coaxing narratives, untangling ideas and endlessly generating new ones, forever interrupting conversations at the dinner table to scribble notes
“We start the week the same way as The New Yorker, with blank paper and ink,” Felker would tell his staff with his gold ballpoint pen. He was already a glamorous figure at this stage; a native of Webster Grove, Missouri, he had worked as a reporter for Life magazine before becoming features editor for Esquire. His second wife Pamela Tiffin was a famous film actress, and he often kept glittering company – John F. Kennedy, Jake Javits, Sammy Davis Jr., Norman Mailer. Felker’s proximity to power and celebrity was intensified by his rising stock at New York; when the magazine launched as a standalone title in 1969, its circulation rose from 50,000 to 240,000 in a single year, jumping it out of debt and into a public flotation. New York’s rapid growth suited Felker’s own expansive ambitions, and he assumed the role of publisher as well as editor; in 1974 he oversaw a takeover of the Village Voice, a leading alternative weekly, and then launched New West in 1976, a Californian take on the New York formula. Felker’s grand designs would prove his undoing however – he made the mistake of discussing business plans with a friend, Rupert Murdoch, at a dinner party, and soon found himself powerless to avert a hostile takeover bid from the Australian. Going public had proved fatal: Felker was forced to sell his shareholding for US $1.4 million, and was ejected from the magazine he had built to greatness. The high watermark of his career was over. Thereafter, he had career successes as the editor and publisher of Esquire in the late 70s, a producer at
Out Of The Ordinary
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