Clay Felker

The man was a sponge. Creating and editing New York Magazine, he soaked up the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and 1970s and gave it back to readers as a heady brew of New Journalism and cultural chic. Clay Felker, who died today at 82, was one of a kind.

Between jobs as a magazine editor, I wrote for him and witnessed the workings of his restless mind and insatiable curiosity. Visits to his office were a montage of people popping up at an open door with gossip, news and rumors and his prowls through the corridors, asking everyone who passed, "What's new? What's new?"

Magazine editors are unique among journalists in that they invent their readers. Rather than covering news over which they have no control, they fill their pages with whatever interests or obsesses them and, like magnets, draw the attention of those who find the results to their taste. Felker's contemporary, Harold Hayes of Esquire, called it delivering an attitude toward the world on a regular basis.

Between them, they gave birth to the New Journalism, which mirrored a new kind of politics with a new kind of reporting. In New York, Tom Wolfe wrote about Radical Chic and Gloria Steinem profiled the man who was moving into the White House in 1968 ("When Richard Nixon is alone in a room, is there anyone there?")

Almost single-handedly, Felker made journalism a subject of popular interest. Wolfe satirized the New Yorker, and everybody reported on the New York Times. Even I got into the act with a piece titled "The New York Times Discovers Sex" while writing about literary auctions ("What Am I Bid for Lyndon Johnson?"). Ralph Ginzburg going to jail for what he published ("The Punishment for Bad Taste Is Three Years") and the melodrama surrounding the death of the Saturday Review.

Writers became celebrities, and Felker nurtured their fame but stayed out of the spotlight himself. After he lost New York to Rupert Murdoch in 1977, he moved to California and tried to duplicate his success there, but LA was too shallow for his kind of in-depth reporting and he turned to teaching journalism.

I would see him for lunch out there every so often, and he was still asking, "What's new? What's new?"

Grand Old Man of the New Journalism

At 78, Tom Wolfe is being immortalized with the reissue of ten of his books in covers "designed to appeal to a new generation."

But before he is embalmed as a writer of satirical novels like "Bonfire of the Vanities," someone should remind readers how he helped change the face of American journalism and, in no small degree, politics.

In August 1966, a Tiffany-engraved invitation arrived in my mail to have cocktails and canapés in the Park Avenue duplex of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein to meet the Black Panthers. A sense of the ridiculous prompted me to decline.

But Tom Wolfe went, notebook in hand, and wrote "Radical Chic" for New York Magazine, a classic of the New Journalism that skewered the pretensions of upscale liberals parading their sympathy for the downtrodden in a setting of ostentatious luxury. ("The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny's duplex like a rogue hormone...These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three times too big...)

Along with Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Norman Mailer and others, Wolfe invented the New Journalism in the 1960s to open space for human expression in the growing thicket of corporate journalism.

Reporters became novelists, novelists morphed into reporters to break through the limits of who, what, when, where, why and how. Mailer's story of the march on the Pentagon to protest Vietnam filled an entire issue of Harper's and made newspaper and TV accounts look like tracts on whaling compared to "Moby Dick."

But it was Tom Wolfe who epitomized the best of I-witness journalism. Unlike imitators, he adhered to the traditional rules of reporting while using a fictional style to show what people did and why with an eye for the telling details. For better or worse, his influence is visible in magazine and newspaper reporting to this day.

Recently he sat down with editors of the New York Times Book Review and gave them an oral history of his part in inventing the New Journalism. Even if you disagree, as I do, with many of his social and political views, the Man in the White Suit is an historic and fascinating figure in 20th and 21st century American life.

The Posthumous Diary of Heath Ledger

In an era of fake memoirs, Esquire now gives us a new variation on masturbatory journalism--the fictional diary.

For "a conceivable chronicle of Heath Ledger's final days," the editors explain, "writer Lisa Taddeo visited the actor's neighborhood, talked to the store owners and bartenders who may have seen him during his last week, and read as many accounts and rumors about the events surrounding his death as possible. She filled in the rest with her imagination. The result is what we call reported fiction."

Others might call it exploitation, but the magazine has been inventing new ways of excavating reality for half a century since the days of the New Journalism, when Harold Hayes turned novelists like James Baldwin and Norman Mailer into reporters, and journalists like Tom Wolfe into novelists.

In those days of digging for more than surface truth, there was a minor figure named A. J. Weberman, who can be seen now as a media prophet. Starting with Bob Dylan, Weberman's way of deconstructing celebrities was to scour their garbage for clues to their essence. It got to the point where J. Edgar Hoover was reported to be having agents surreptitiously remove his and put out fake garbage to throw reporters off the scent.

Ms. Taddeo's "diary" is in that tradition, an attempt to turn detritus into journalistic art, starting with an invented warning by Jack Nicholson to "stay away from the god damn pills" to a coda on celebrity:

"I don't know how it will be for you, but for me, you wake up one more time and everything is really bright, like a flashbulb. Everything is clear as vodka. And then you go back to sleep again. One last punch-drunk opening of the eyes is what you get, and guess what--it's enough.

"So hey, buddy, why so serious? Chin up. It's all part of the plan."

Esquire's circulation plan perhaps, but we can only hope they don't start teaching this stuff in journalism schools.

Mailer

He wanted to write The Great American Novel but changed the face of journalism instead. He died today at 84, leaving behind a torrent of words and an outsized public persona.

Norman Mailer was the opposite of shy. At a cocktail party, drink in hand, in front of a TV camera and, above all, on the printed page, he poured out opinions and indelible impressions for half a century. An early collection of essays was aptly titled, "Advertisements for Myself."

His World War II novel, "The Naked and the Dead," made him famous but he will be remembered, along with Tom Wolfe, for the New Journalism of the 1960s. Coming to it from opposite directions, Wolfe, a reporter by trade, and Mailer the novelist created something as different from traditional journalism as "Moby Dick" is from a tract on whaling.

In 1968, Harper's turned over a full issue to Mailer's account of the Vietnam protest march on the Pentagon, which later as a book titled "Armies of the Dead" won both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

The next year, after a beery lunch and boozy dinner with a few New Journalist friends, Mailer decided to run for Mayor of New York and, in a put-on campaign, drew over 40,000 votes.

A decade later, he won another Pulitzer for "The Executioner's Song," about the last year in the life of Gary Gilmore, a remorseless killer. In between and afterward, he wrote ambitious novels, feuded with Feminists, stabbed one of his wives and fathered nine children.

A contemporary of mine, he was the ultimate opposite in temperament. A year ago, on a documentary about Marilyn Monroe, I was interviewed about my experiences in working with and getting to know her in the 1950s, but much more of PBS' time was devoted to Mailer who never met her but whose fantasies had filled a book and were vividly fascinating.

He never wrote The Great American Novel, but he did change the way several generations of us see the world.