Remembering Clay Felker

Like so many other sons and daughters of the Midwest who fell in love with New York City long before they laid eyes on it, Clay Felker was happiest at the center of anything glamorous. As the inventor and editor of New York Magazine, he lived at the pinnacle for only eight years before Rupert Murdoch snatched his signature title away from him. But Felker launched the careers of scores of marquee names in journalism, from Tom Wolfe and Gloria Steinem to Aaron Latham and Peter Kaplan. Last night, 400 writers, readers, and editors gathered on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to celebrate a man whose greatest pleasure came from spotting talent—then making it work.

Felker's partner, Milton Glaser, the greatest magazine designer of the past 50 years, remembered that the arguments were always the same at New York's first headquarters in 1968, a fourth-floor walk-up on East 32nd Street, where Felker had the only office, with its own door but no ceiling. "Make it BIGGER!" Felker constantly bellowed. To which Glaser always replied, "When everything is big, nothing is big!"

When Felker died last summer of cancer at age 82, he left only one other larger-than-life editor from his generation behind him. That is Arthur Gelb, Felker's equivalent at the New York Times, whose boundless energy and breathtaking imagination helped to reinvent the newspaper in the 1970s (partly by borrowing some of Felker's best ideas about service journalism). But the most important capacity the two men shared is the one that Renata Adler identified in Gelb a quarter-century ago: "He has that surprisingly rare quality in an editor," said Renata. "He makes you want to write."

Felker was much more generous than the typical journalist. When Gloria Steinem wanted to launch Ms., he bound it into an issue of New York—when New York was the hottest magazine on the planet. And when Michael Kramer was scrounging for money to keep the journalism review [more] alive, Felker had a three-part strategy for the former New York "City Politic" columnist. First, he convinced Kramer that he had to take money from Philip Morris ("Your first duty is to survive"); then he arranged a meeting between Kramer and Philip Morris' chairman. Kramer was riding high when he came back to tell Felker he had secured a $10,000-a-month ad contract from Philip Morris. But Felker was furious. "God, Michael," Felker shouted, "you haven't learned a thing!" Then he called his pal at Philip Morris and explained that [more]'s rate card "didn't apply to a company as flush as yours." Abracadabra: The $10,000 contract was now a $30,000 contract.

To Felker's daughter Maura Sheehy, he was a "magic man" who always snared a Checker cab whenever his arm went up on East 57th Street, in an era when those bigger conveyances were already an endangered species. She also remembered him as "sensitive, guileless, and honorable," and as a man who spoke in "headlines and exclamation points." The door to his famous duplex was always propped open, "because Clay didn't need a door. He just needed a portal—the world was supposed to come in."

Sir David Frost, who met Felker at PJ Clark's in 1964, was the master of ceremonies for the memorial service, and his presence accentuated the otherworldly feeling that permeated the event. Sir David emulated Felker by never hesitating to travel any distance to find the funniest possible anecdote. He recalled that Felker had been a consultant to the David Frost Show, which had a "what if" segment in the early '70s. Felker suggested, "What if Krushchev had been assassinated instead of Jack Kennedy?" Frost's producers recruited the editors of Time and Newsweek and a representative of Tass—the Soviet news agency—to ponder the question. "Well," said the Tass man, "I'll tell you one thing: Aristotle Onassis never would have married Mrs. Krushchev!"

Naturally, the memorial mostly portrayed Felker as a "sweetheart." Afterwards, one of his affectionate acolytes observed that part of the editor's personality had been missing. "He was a sweetheart," said Felker's good friend, "but he was also Clay."

Like many other reporters who came of age in the golden era of New York (and New York), Clay's sensibility was imprinted on mine. So it was a special thrill when I took the manuscript of my first book to him and said, "If you start here, and go here, you'll have the perfect excerpt"—and Clay instantly agreed. At the time, Clay was editing a magazine about New York business called Manhattan,inc, and my book was about America in 1968. Plenty of editors wouldn't have seen the fit. But the excerpt was about the night Bobby Kennedy was killed, and Bobby had been a senator from New York, so Clay decided that made it Manhattan-inkish enough for him—perhaps because it was also the most dramatic passage I had ever written.

It was that kind of confidence in his own taste that produced thousands of memorable moments, inside the covers of every magazine he ever published.

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