Clay Felker

The visionary editor who changed the face of magazines

Clay Felker

1925–2008

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When the legendary New York Herald Tribune folded in 1967, its Sunday magazine editor, Clay Felker, secured more than $1 million in financing to keep the supplement alive. As an independent venture, New York would publish some of the best nonfiction writing of the 1970s. Its combination of long narrative pieces and service-oriented consumer features would inspire a generation of city magazines nationwide and enshrine Felker in the pantheon of journalism’s great editors. He succumbed last week to throat cancer.

“The supercharged atmosphere of New York was a long way from Webster Groves, Mo., where Felker was born,” said The New York Times. A Duke University graduate, he had previously worked for Life, Sports Illustrated, and Esquire. At New York, he came into his own, cultivating the so-called New Journalism, in which literary techniques and first-person narrative were used to shake up the often-bland conventions of traditional reporting. Under Felker, the magazine “was hip and ardent, civic-minded and skeptical. It was preoccupied with the foibles of the rich and powerful, the fecklessness of government, and the high jinks of wiseguys.” Its pages featured the colorful writing of Pete Hamill, Nora Ephron, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe, and Gail Sheehy, who would later become Felker’s third wife. In June 1970 Wolfe famously chronicled “a fund-raising party given by Leonard Bernstein in his glamorous Manhattan apartment, attended by rich liberals and Black Panthers.” Written “with unsparing detail and barely concealed mockery,” the 20,000-word article and its catchphrase, “radical chic,” captured the decade’s zeitgeist. Another feature article in the magazine chronicled the then-emerging disco lifestyle and was later transformed into the film Saturday Night Fever.

New York’s vivid coverage of Gotham’s “trends, horrors, and delights” made it a hit, said The Washington Post. “Yet for all his success in defining an era, Felker was just as often derided for what could be called his feats of Clay.” New York’s articles about food, real estate, and the material side of life often overwhelmed its more serious subjects. In 1977, Rupert Murdoch acquired the magazine and booted Felker. He would later edit Esquire, an afternoon edition of the New York Daily News, and other publications, spending “the rest of his life trying to regain his magic touch, though seldom with the same success.”

“I’ve been criticized for being an elitist,” Felker once remarked, “but that’s who, broadly speaking, consumes print. That was our set of values—our attitude—to understand how to make life more interesting, to explain New York life.”