The Big Man

“The secret of a magazine is passion.”

So said Clay Felker, a giant of journalism who died Tuesday morning in Manhattan at age 82. And the passion which most animated Clay was New York, the city he loved and understood so much that he founded a magazine by that name and mentored more than one generation of the city’s best writers. And while the names he minted—Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin—may loom large, Clay’s true legacy rests in his tireless and electric commitment to young journalists; where other editors saw employees, he saw passion that could be plumbed for new ideas, and channeled into the deep gorge of ambition that rumbles day and night beneath the city.

The colossus of the city was perfectly matched by the colossus of the man. Tall, tenor-voiced, unapologetically volcanic yet unabashedly softhearted, Clay Felker grew up in Webster Groves, Mo., the son of two editors. His vision, which would eventually transform modern journalism, was already taking shape at Duke University. As he told an interviewer in 1995, “Wandering around the stacks one day, I came across some bound volumes of Horace Greeley’s Tribune. It was right after the Civil War period. And I discovered that the writing was as fresh and as dramatic as anything being written and I said, How come I don’t read daily newspapers with the same fascination as I read this stuff? … And so I said, Hey, there’s another way to write, and I began looking for writers who could write that way.” He climbed the ladder rapidly: reporter for Life magazine, features editor at Esquire. His “aha” moment came when he founded New York magazine, first as a supplement to The New York Herald Tribune in 1964 and then its own magazine. He launched a brilliantly effective two-pronged attack on the stale preconceptions of what a magazine was, by loading the front of the magazine with punchy and pungent deconstructions of the city’s social, political and cultural power structure, while offering top-notch service—where to eat, shop and drink (and classified ads to pay the bills)—to add ballast in the back pages.

As his stature soared, and the magazine prospered, Clay found himself embroiled in the kind of juicy story his magazine was famous for: an Australian mogul named Rupert Murdoch mounted a takeover battle for New York, and won. Rather than nurse his wounds the traditional way—by becoming a consultant or that dreadful late creation, a pundit—Clay plunged back into the fray: editor of Esquire; editor of an afternoon edition of the Daily News; editor of Manhattan, inc. He had zero interest in sitting around with his peers at the latest restaurant du jour, retelling war stories. Young staffers who were expecting a grand old man growing misty over memories instead found themselves barked out of the office and onto assignments by a roaring modern-day Ahab in rainbow-striped Turnbull & Asser shirts. Many feared him; the smart ones feared him and loved him. All felt lucky to know him.

In the mid-1990s Clay and his wife, Gail Sheehy, moved for part of each year to San Francisco, where Clay taught his craft to a new generation of students at Berkeley among the eucalyptus and Spanish moss. True to form, he himself enrolled in a course in Chinese history.

For a fitting epitaph to Clay Felker’s passionate and remarkable life, one might turn to T. S. Eliot, who wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”