Daring (13 page)

“Should These People Go to Jail?” Clay called out the headline. It all happened in a matter of minutes. The artwork was assigned to a brilliant British artist, Julian Allen. That story, like many others, proved that the editorial team was not tied to either political party but on the side of the citizens of New York. That was a good part of the magazine's success. (Auletta is renowned today as
The New Yorker
's window into our media democracy, in his influential column, “Annals of Communications,” and his many books, including
Googled
and
Greed and Glory on Wall Street
.)

Clay's approach also worked because he hired several brilliant editors to provide adult supervision of the wild-eyed wunderkinder he was hiring fresh out of college and graduate schools. Sheldon Zalaznick was his senior managing editor, an intellectual's intellectual with a dry sense of humor. He was a teacher to his perfectionist core. Shelley knew how to spot a story and help an untrained writer to weave it into a solid magazine piece. It was he who found Andrew Tobias.

In 1970, Tobias was a brainiac Harvard graduate who had already become vice president of a conglomerate, the National Student Marketing Corporation. The company used its inflated stock to buy up all kinds of unrelated businesses, and the scheme was wildly successful until its fraudulent accounting was exposed. Six months before Tobias could cash in stock options worth a small fortune, he watched the company's stock plunge. Quick to try to turn lemons into lemonade, Tobias wrote an amusing piece, on speculation, about his exploits. It was rejected by so many magazines, he forgot about it. He was a graduate student at Harvard Business School when the phone rang in his dorm room and a cultivated voice said, “Mr. Tobias, please.”

“I'm twenty-three, unshaven, sitting on my bed in shorts in Cambridge,” Tobias remembers.

“This is Sheldon Zalaznick at
New York
magazine. I am terribly sorry that it has taken us so long to see your piece. By any chance, is it still available?”

“Confessions of a Youth Marketeer” featured Tobias on the cover of
New York
teetering inside a bubble. Ten pages were devoted to the first magazine piece he'd ever written. It was a huge success. But there was a subject closer to his heart, the new gay culture. “I was going to Harvard Business School for something respectable to do while I went to gay bars every night,” he told me. Tobias planned on becoming a little tycoon.

“No, no, you should be a writer” was the advice he heard from Clay and Shelley. Tobias worried that his straight bosses would be put off by his admission of being gay; his parents didn't even know. “But Clay and Shelley took it in stride,” he recalls. They published an excerpt from his autobiography,
The Best Little Boy in the World
. Tobias did indeed become celebrated for writing amusing articles and books about investing and later as a powerhouse fund-raiser for the Democratic Party.

Clay had to lure Nick Pileggi away from the bosom of a flush wire service to take the leap into New Journalism. Pileggi's New York was the criminal underworld. He was a nimble AP reporter who often slept in precinct houses, waiting for one of the detectives to show up too drunk to go out on a call so he could take his place. Clay liked Pileggi's colorful stories. In his piece about Joe Colombo, a top Mafia boss, he described the “lump job” administered to his head by a couple of FBI agents in a street brawl. Pileggi was the first to suggest that Colombo might soon be taken out in a mob power struggle. Two weeks later, at the Italian Unity Day rally, Colombo was shot in the head; he ended up paralyzed and lived for the next seven years as a vegetable. Pileggi produced a dozen stories in the first year. Right behind Mario Puzo, he became a Boswell to the Mafia and later wrote the hit film
Goodfellas.

One morning Clay was supposed to be interviewed about the competition between
New York
and
The New Yorker
. When the doorbell rang early, he went to the door of his apartment in his boxer shorts. A tall, lanky Texan appeared in the doorway and pretended not to be startled. Aaron Latham, an Amherst man and an editor at
Esquire
, was known for his often lethal interview style. Deadpan, he would ask a question and then shut up. He had no trouble with awkward silences, patiently waiting for the hang-yourself quote.

Clay sat opposite him with a breakfast tray on his lap, a poached egg propped on an English muffin. During one long silence, Clay lifted the whole egg on a fork and bit off half. The egg exploded like a yellow grenade all over his face, all over his white shirt. Clay wiped off his face with a cloth napkin, ignored his shirt, did not laugh, did not speak. Aaron hid his own embarrassment. He proceeded to his next question as if nothing had happened. Clay admired his sangfroid. A few hours later, Clay called Aaron and offered him a job.

The Texan turned out to be a natural stylist for
New York
. His vivid depiction of displaced frontiersmen driven to displaying their manhood by riding a mechanical bull in a downbeat dive was the basis for his screenplay of
Urban Cowboy
, a hit movie. He would become Clay's adored surrogate son.

NEW YORK
WAS A WEEKLY
with the ambition of interpreting the news like a monthly. No independent weekly had attempted that before, except for
Time, Life
, and
Newsweek
, all with their massive corporate resources. Clay's operating theory was disequilibrium, guaranteed by the frenetic weekly tempo. You might be working on a piece for a month, and when you thought it was done, Clay would change the lead, cut it in half, or demand, “What the hell are you trying to say?,” and you would crawl back to your keyboard and force yourself to find out.

Clay did more reporting than all of us put together. He had very little time for a romantic life in those days. He was out every night cruising the latest openings, screenings, book parties, art galleries; then on to dinner parties with power brokers who dropped tantalizing hints about political scandals or Wall Street shenanigans; followed by drop-ins to East Village joints to hear Jefferson Airplane or the next-next hot music group.

He demanded that his writers and artists have a point of view. “Clay knew just enough about almost everything that he could give the writer some context,” noted Amanda (Binky) Urban, who started out as Clay's executive assistant and was promoted many times over until she launched her career as a high-powered literary agent at International Creative Management (ICM). Clay would send a writer off with several key questions: Why are things the way they are? (Sniff out the latest trend); What led up to this? (Give us the historical background); How do things work? (Who is pulling the strings or making the magic or making fools of us?); How is the power game played in your corner of New York, or in the White House with a new president?

What he never wanted was what journalism schools often teach—a “nut graf”—meaning a lead paragraph that sums up what the story is about. Clay's style was the opposite: tantalize the reader with a compelling opening scene but don't give the story away. He told writers, “Take me inside the world you know, where readers don't have any access, and tell me a great story.”

I came to understand that for Clay, for any influential editor, the instinct for spotting a story is inborn. It cannot be taught. His hunch was often more prescient, more edgy, more easily supported by anecdotes than hard reporting, and that could lead to arguments with his most independent reporters. This was particularly true with women journalists. Taking direction from a male editor, especially if the subject was the emergence of feminism, ran up against a built-in resistance. Julie Baumgold, a self-described Upper East Side Jewish princess, specialized in mocking feminism and arguing with Clay about it. Jane O'Reilly was a wild spirit who also resisted direction. She wrote a famous story about the click!—the moment of truth—that turned housewives into rabble-rousers for women's lib.

Along about this time,
Esquire
editor Harold Hayes grew jealous of Clay's success. “Felker's got a group of terrific women writers over there,” he told Lee Eisenberg, his assistant editor. “Why don't you take them out to dinner and try to steal them for us.” Eisenberg did indeed invite Julie, Jane, and me, separately, on consecutive nights, to “seduction” dinners. We might have felt free to fight with Felker, but when it came down to loyalty, he had us.

TALENT ATTRACTS TALENT:
that was another of Clay's secrets. It was how he persuaded Stephen Sondheim, already a matchless composer and lyricist who in the 1970s turned out ten hits with Hal Prince, to create puzzles for the magazine. The irrepressible Woody Allen wrote several stories for early issues. Clay even drafted the nearly eternal
Village Voice
cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who went on to write many plays and over three dozen books.

Michael Kramer was fresh out of Amherst and Columbia Law School when Clay asked him to come to talk. Kramer's book
The Ethnic Factor
had been well reviewed by the
New York Times
. When he came into the office, some of us chuckled: his suit and tie were incongruous with his cascade of unkempt hair. Kramer spoke in staccato bursts, but he had a lot to say about Clay's favorite subject: politics. Gloria was giving up the “City Politic” column to work full time on developing her own magazine,
Ms.
“I'd like you to take over the column,” Clay told Kramer.

“I've never been a journalist before,” the young man confessed.

“Don't worry about
that
. Here's my advice. Just write like you talk.” It was the energy and rawness that Clay wanted in political columns. Kramer's first was due in ten days. Terrified, he called his father: “What can I write about?” His father, who'd worked for two New York governors, suggested he interview his old friend former mayor Bob Wagner. Kramer groaned. “But he's never given a single quote worth printing.” His father tipped him off that Governor Nelson Rockefeller had just appointed Jerry Finkelstein, a fat-cat businessman, to the board of the New York Port Authority. This was a powerful fiefdom that controlled every form of transportation on land, water, and underground in both New York and New Jersey. Kramer went into his interview with Wagner not knowing that beneath the mayor's hypnotic monotone there blazed a vicious hatred of Finkelstein. Innocently, Kramer lobbed a last question. “What do you think of Rockefeller's appointment of Finkelstein to the Port Authority?”

Wagner sucked in a breath and let go. “All I know is, if I were Nelson, every morning when I woke up I would count the bridges and tunnels to see if they were all still there.”

“What have you got for me?” Clay demanded when Kramer strode into the office. The greenhorn delivered the ex-mayor's punch line with the same cold scorn used by Wagner. Mouth agape, Clay marveled: “You're the greatest reporter of all time!”

BYRON DOBELL WAS THE EDITOR
Clay hired away from
Esquire
with the promise that he could come up with one fresh cover story idea every month. Byron had an antic mind, attuned to art, history, love styles of the rich and famous, you name it. I recall laughing until my sides hurt when Byron and I got up a wicked fantasy piece for the Valentine's Day issue of
New York
, about a radical woman holding up a sperm bank, titled “The Great Valentine's Day Uprising.”

Jack Nessel was the quirkiest of the three line editors. A rumpled Berkeley graduate with a California sensibility, he was first to embrace the edgy humor of Lenny Bruce. I loved working with Jack. His DNA tended toward the sarcastic, but if you could make him laugh, you had him. He never gave up on me when we suffered hours of prose scrubbing and line cutting on pieces that then ran as long as eight thousand to ten thousand words.

Clay spotted Steven Brill while he was still on scholarship at Yale Law School. Brill was a poor kid from Queens, but when Clay took him to lunch at the Four Seasons, the kid puffed up and talked with jaw-jutting bluster about the business of law. Clay hired him on the spot. Why? Because, as Clay told me, he wanted to find out more about Manhattan's powerful law firms. Brill's most memorable story for
New York
dug into the anti-Semitism that prevailed within white-shoe WASPy firms. Brill predicted that with the advent of hostile takeovers in the 1970s, it would be two Jewish lawyers—one a fat, habitually farting proxy fighter named Joe Flom, the other the son of a Jewish immigrant factory worker named Martin Lipton—who would elevate their respective firms to the pinnacles of success within ten years. Indeed, as corporate raiding become the rage on Wall Street, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz would become the go-to firms. And Clay would later turn to both Flom and Lipton to save himself.

Brill asked Clay to help him launch his own magazine,
American Lawyer
, and one of the first reality shows,
Court TV
. All Clay had to do was call the moneymen who would later back his purchase of
Esquir
e and tell them he was sending over one of his writers with a terrific idea for a new magazine. It took Brill all of thirty minutes to persuade the British press lord, Vere Harmsworth, to invest in the young man's winning idea.

THE FAMILY HAD TWO MOTHERS.
Jane Maxwell knew the boss, literally, inside and out. He told her to go into his pockets after lunch and pull out his Hermès diary to note his guest in his expense record. “His entire life was the magazine then.”

The other mother figure was Dorothy Seiberling, a senior editor at
Life
when Clay started out as a young reporter. Dottie had taken Clay under her wing and together they had made a romantic grand tour of Europe where she tutored him in the masterpieces of art and architecture. She was able to soothe the ruffled feelings of staffers on whom Clay unloaded one of his cloudbursts of pique. “Don't take it personally,” Dottie would say, “he's already forgotten about it. Clay is just so passionate about what he's doing, he expects everybody else to be the same way.”