Fishman Steve - New York stories: landmark writing from four decades of New York magazine

To
CLAY FELKER
19252008

GAEL GREENE How Not to Be Humiliated in
Snob Restaurants

JULIE BAUMGOLD Unanswered Prayers: The Death
and Life of Truman Capote

JAY McINERNEY The Death of (the Idea of)
the Upper East Side

NORA EPHRON Critics in the World of the Rising Souffl
(or Is It the Rising Meringue?)

GEORGE PLIMPTON If Youve Been Afraid to Go to
Elaines These Past Twenty Years,
Heres What Youve Missed

ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST The Headmistress and the
Diet Doctor

RON ROSENBAUM Sid Vicious and Nauseating Nancy:
A Love Story

RICHARD REEVES Jerry Ford and His Flying Circus:
A Presidential Diary

*

I TOOK A SECOND LOOK I was right the first time. The mans shirt had a button-down collar and French cuffs with engraved gold cuff links a boys lolly boarding-school collar and a set of cuffs from a partners meeting at Debevoise & Plimpton This shirt had to be custom-made had to be. Likewise, the mans jacket Catch the high armholes and the narrow cut of the sleeves. They clear the French cuffs by a precise eighth of an inch. Theyre just short enoughjust so!to reveal the gold cuff links and not a sixteenth of an inch shorter. Check out the shoes!brown leather cap-toed English oxfords custom-fitted so closely to his high-arched feet, they look absolutely petite, his feet do, as if he were some unaccountably great strapping Chinese maiden whose feet had been bound in infancy to make sure they would be forever tiny at teatime I could not imagine how a man his size, six feet tall and two hundred pounds at the very least, with a big neck, a burly build, a square-jawed face, could possibly rise up from his chair here in a little bullpen slapped together out of four-foot-high partitions in the sludge-caked exposed-pipe-joint offices of a newspaper not long for this world, the New York Herald Tribune, and support himself, no hands, teetering atop that implausibly little pair of high-arched bench-made British cap-toed cinderella shoes.

Yet rise and stand he did. He introduced himself. His name was Clay Felker. He had a booming voice, but it wasnt so much the boom that struck me. It was his honk. The New York Honk, as it was called, was the most fashionable accent an American male could have at that time, namely, the spring of 1963. One achieved it by forcing all words out through the nostrils rather than the mouth. It was at once virile and utterly affected. Nelson Rockefeller had a New York Honk. Huntington Hartford had one. The editor of Newsweek, Osborn Elliot, had one. The financier Robert Dowling, publishers Roger Straus and Tom Guinzburg had the Honk, and so did Robert Morgenthau, who still does, as far as that goes.

Unfortunately, Clay Felker didnt even rate being in the same paragraph with toffs like them. Custom-made toffery he was clad in, BUT he was also pushing forty and jobless, on the beach, as the phrase went, panting, gasping for air, a beached whale, after coming out the loser in a battle for the editorship of Esquire magazine not to mention the corner suite with north and east views of 1963s street of dreams, Madison Avenue in the Fifties, that came with it.

Yet in less than six months from that same day, in that same jerry-built eight-by-ten-foot bullpen at a doomed newspaper, he created the hottest magazine in America in the second half of the twentieth century: New York.

IN OUR STORY, the shirt (Turnbull & Asser of Jermyn Street, London), the suit (Huntsman of Savile Row, London), the shoes (John Lobb, also of Jermyn Street, London), as well as the accent, are not thrust into the readers face idly. All provide microscopic glimpses into our storys very heart. And the duplex apartment Clay Felker lived in at 322 East 57th Streetwell, from up here the view becomes what has to be termed macroscopic. The living room was a twenty-five-by-twenty-five-foot grand salon with a two-story, twenty-five-foot-high ceiling and two huge House of Parliamentscale windows, overlooking 57th Street, each twenty-two feet high and eight feet wide, divided into colossal panes of glass by muntins as thick as your wrist. There was a vast fireplace of the sort writers searching for adjectives always call baronial. Fourteen status seekers could sit at the same time on the needlepoint-upholstered fender that went around it, supported by gleaming brass columns. When you arrived chez Felker and walked out of the elevator, you found yourself on a balcony big as a lobby overlooking the meticulously conspicuous consumption below. Guests descended to the salon down a staircase that made the Paris Operas look like my old front stoop. Standing on the gigantic Aubusson rug at the foot of the stairs to welcome you, on a good night, would be Felkers wife, a twenty-year-old movie actress named Pamela Tiffin, who had starred in the screen version of Summer and Smoke. She had a fair white face smooth as a Ming figurines. She was gorgeous. She had something else, too, a career that was taking off so fast she had not one but two personal managers, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff. She could afford them and two more like them, but there were no two more like them. Fifteen years later Chartoff and Winkler would win an Academy Award for a movie they produced called Rocky. For a man on the beach, Pamela Tiffin was a lovely helpmate to have. Clay Felker was broke.

So what inna nameagod was all this? He who had staged this style of life, Clay Felker, was a Midwestern boy, from Webster Groves, Missouri, which always made me think of Grovers Corners in Our Town. Like the two great American magazine founders of the first half of the twentieth century, Harold Ross of The New Yorker, a real Colorado boy, and Henry Luce of Time and Life, born to missionaries in China, Felker grew up far from the magnetic pull of New Yorks much-vaunted glamour and excitement. His obsession with New York seems to have begun so early in his life that no one, not even the man himself, can remember what set it off. Introducing him many, many years later at a fund-raiser for the Felker Magazine Center of the University of California, Berkeley, I claimed his sister had told me Baby Clays first complete sentence was Whaddaya mean, I dont have a reservation? At the time I thought I was only making a little joke.

The standard line about boys from Missouri is, Im from Missouri. Youve got to show me, meaning, Dont you glib city slickers try to slick-talk me. Youve got to prove it. But to Clay Felker it was the Dionysian cry of a Midwesterner who had come to New York to swallow Americas great City of Ambition whole, slick talk and all. Youve got to show me!all of it, the very process of status competition, the status details, the status symbols, the styles of life, everything that indicated how one ranked. The posh details of his private life were the reverse, like the reverse surface of a silk le smoking, an inside look at his obsession with status as the drive that runs the worldcertainly the New York part of it.

At Esquire our man had produced an article comprised mainly of elaborate illustrations of the interiors of Manhattans most fashionable nightspots21, El Morocco, Sardiscarefully designating where the social ringmasters, the matre ds, seated VIPs and where they stowed very unimportant people, the nobodies, usually out of sight in the rear of the room. At 21 they took no chances. They put the poor devils up on an entirely separate floor. Either way, these dead zones were known in the business as Siberia. As soon as Felker published it, the term spread like a smell to swell restaurants all over the country. To this day unsteady souls enter such joints in a state of dread, resentment on the hair trigger, fearful lest the wardens, i.e., the matre ds, icy smiles of welcome frozen on their faces, lead them straight to the gulag. Such are the status details that intrigue the human mind and, once inside it, never leave. They get under your skinso much so that there would come a day when one author would write in