by Gail Sheehy
THE MAHARISHI MADE AN APPEARANCE in a pastel two-hundred-seat hall. He took the lotus position on a goatskin. Sprigs of jasmine nestled in his flowing white hair and long beard. And what he did was—nothing. For ten minutes. He said not a word. He smiled beatifically. He looked upon each face, row by row. Soon everyone was smiling. Laughing. Bringing him flowers and fruit. Spontaneously, a dialogue began. For two hours it never palled.
Then we adjourned to a porch to practice with our guides. Signs were hung from the backs of bamboo chairs overlooking the Ganga.
DO NOT DISTURB—MEDITATING.
Teenagers with blankets over their heads sat beside middle-aged English ladies with cashmere sweaters under their saris. It looked like an old people’s home with young people. I was summoned to sit on the roof with a German-speaking guide. By evening, it was hot as hell. Peter and I blew a meditation and enjoyed another night of gin and sin.
Finally, the Maharishi summoned me to a private lunch in his “bungalow,” a marble-terraced, five-room villa. Skittering old women in stockinged feet brought trays of vegetables and chapatis hot off a handheld charcoal stove.
“I am chief guru of the Western world,” the Maharishi said with a beguiling blend of boyishness and barking mad messianic zeal. “I need one meditation center per every one hundred thousand population. Yes, so. To bring bliss consciousness to the whole world.” This was the message he wished me to take back to America.
I had to acknowledge that the Maharishi was the only thing about India that did not say, “You sit. You wait. It coming.” The Maharishi said now!
IN A SOFT SPIRAL NOTEBOOK I had recorded my wanderings in the foothills of the Himalayas and my audiences with the Maharishi. That precious notebook was wedged next to my rump in the back of my jeans all the way from India to JFK and on a subway into the city and on a final sprint up Lexington Avenue to meet my ex-husband and reclaim my daughter.
I swooped Maura into my arms and we twirled round and round and then skipped across Central Park. Somewhere in that dizzy reunion, the notebook left my person. It was never to be found.
While I played with Maura and made her favorite meals, in the back of my mind was the panic about returning from a hugely expensive trip with nothing to show for it. Once Maura went to sleep, I skipped dinner and lay on my “bed of nails,” playing Beatles and Beach Boys records. Gradually, I was able to return to the languid tempo of Rishikesh, recall the most vivid conversations, and finally feel the warmth of bliss consciousness again. This was one meditation I was not going to blow. Then I wrote the story.
“I’M JUST CRAZY ABOUT YOUR WRITING and I just have to have you in my magazine.” It was Helen Gurley Brown, gushing, which was how she won people over. “Pussycat,” she purred, “I can pay you fifteen hundred dollars a story if you’ll give me one story a month for the next year.”
I didn’t have to meditate on it. If it would pay the rent, I’d play pussycat.
CHAPTER 8
The New York Family
“LOOK WHO’S HERE!”
That was the sonic boom of recognition we all longed to hear from Clay, the welcome that made it worth it to climb the four flights of gravity-defying stairs to the top of the old Tammany Hall clubhouse at 207 East Thirty-Second Street to the garret occupied by the brand-new New York magazine. It launched in April 1968.
“What do you have for me?” he would demand, like a little boy expecting a chocolate bar. Everybody would look up from their desks: Who was the star of the day? Clay would be all ears. The poor wretch, marshaling every bit of bravado, knew he or she had just thirty seconds to make the pitch. If it wasn’t interesting, the next time that person appeared, Clay would have forgotten his name. I knew he wouldn’t forget my name, because I was one of only a handful of women at the beginning.
Milton Glaser, Clay’s partner in the start-up, owned the historic four-story building where his Pushpin Studio offices were located. He rented the top floor to New York. Messengers would appear breathless and ashen faced at the top landing, looking minutes from needing CPR. The historic patina came with a leaky roof, wavy floors, and a single closet of a bathroom. More than forty family members were squeezed cheek by jowl into a railroad-car-skinny space only twenty feet wide and a hundred feet long. This meant that a hive of staffers had to find perches wherever they could, but it worked.
An office without walls was Clay’s idea. Everybody heard everything. He believed it reflected the egalitarian spirit that animated Americans to do their best work. There were no secrets, no favorites, no blood-on-the-walls rivalries like the contests he remembered from his days at the old Esquire. What there was in abundance was noise.
Clay’s enthusiasm for a sound piece of work—whether it was a photo, a drawing, or a piece of writing—was broadcast widely. He would roar “Fabulous!” or “Knockout!” or “Never read anything like this before!” He also roared when a writer refused to answer the phone as the deadline ticked away. He roared when the truck carrying storyboards to Buffalo bogged down in snow. He roared when the kid messenger showed up at the last moment with the printed dummy in hand. “Goddamn hero!” He roared for the helluvit. Clay was so superhumanly animated, some staffers wore earplugs or even earmuffs, which came in handy during winter days when the heat went off. I always layered up with sweaters and boots, but my skirts were short enough to reveal my blued knees.
FROM THE START, the new independent New York was a family. This family was unusual in that it had two fathers, Milton and Clay. Milton was the perfect grounding for Clay, whose personality acted as the lightning rod of creativity and animosity. The son of a tailor marinated in the knish culture of the Bronx, Milton would grow to become both a fine-arts painter and one of the most influential graphic designers in the world. Perhaps his best-known achievement was designing the ubiquitous logo I NEW YORK.
At first glance, he and Clay appeared to be opposites. Milton always wore jeans and big ties printed with fruit or vegetables, his black hair hooked over his big ears and what looked like foot-long sideburns to make up for the hairless highway running from front to back of his head. Clay bought his Turnbull & Asser striped shirts on London’s Jermyn Street with cuffs that required cuff links.
Milton’s eyes had become somewhat jaded by growing up street-smart in New York. Clay brought to the magazine the curiosity of a perpetual outsider. “Clay was obsessed with the city’s power establishments, the lives of the rich, the talented, and the perverse,” Milton said. “He never developed the thick skin of cynicism, as so many editors do.”
Milton, too, had other interests: the Lower East Side, left-wing politics, and cheap food. Milton and his writing partner, Jerome Snyder, founded a column, named by Clay “Underground Gourmet.” It continues to run in New York magazine to this day, fifty years later.
Clay and Milton argued often and loudly. Their shouting matches were usually about the same thing.
“Make it bigger!” No matter what it was, a photograph, the headline, the pull quotes, the text type, this was Clay’s recurring demand.
“It’s already big,” Milton would protest.
“Make it BIGGER!”
Before he lapsed into profanity, Milton would insist, “When everything is big, nothing is big.”
Commonly, the relationship between editor and art director resembles that of Cain and Abel. But the tight daily working relationship between Clay and Milton evolved into one of those mysteries of human affection that endure not despite but because of the obstacles. Both needed an opposing force with equal talent, and they came to understand they were better together than separate.
“Milton and I feel committed to one another in a personal way, beyond the professional,” Clay said one evening when the three of us had dinner together. Milton agreed: “It’s as mysterious as why people fall in love.”
Nonetheless, everyone was relieved when Walter Bernard was lured away from Esquire to join Milton, his teacher and mentor, to become the full-time, hands-on art directo
r. Walter’s emollient personality was the salve that healed rifts between Clay and Milton. With his infectious smile and blue aviator glasses and unflappable ability to solve design problems, Walter looked the part of the magic genie who pulled the magazine together. I remember leaning over the art table to look at any one of the covers to illustrate my stories and yelping with delight.
GLORIA STEINEM WAS THE SISTER everyone would have loved to have. She had started out as a receptionist at Esquire in 1960. Every man who entered that magazine office gaped at the long-stemmed beauty.
It was Gloria who was first to answer Clay’s plea for help in raising money to start New York. At an endless series of lunches, she “tap-danced for rich people,” as she called it, which meant being witty and charming. Clay wanted Gloria to write a story for the maiden issue. She came up with the idea of writing about Ho Chi Minh’s travels in New York and other parts of the United States as a young man. Oddly enough, she said, the Vietnamese leader had been an ally of Roosevelt’s and helped to rescue downed American fliers in the jungles of Vietnam during World War II. Clay liked the offbeat idea. Gloria tried desperately to contact the president of Vietnam, but Western Union operators couldn’t grasp the spelling of a name with all those consonants. When Gloria showed up late clutching her story, she found Clay flailing to pull together the issue.
“What have you got for me?” he moaned.
“Ho Chi Minh in New York.”
He grabbed the manuscript and without a glance handed it off to a messenger to take to the printer.
“But, Clay, you haven’t read a word. You might hate it,” Gloria protested.
“How could I hate it?” he said. “It’s here.”
WORKING ON THE FOURTH ISSUE, a worried Clay shoved a manuscript and a few photographs into Tom Wolfe’s hand. “Take a look at these, Tom, and tell me if you think we should run them.” The magazine was a newborn, only two weeks old. “The advertising department tells me if we run these photos, we’ll lose every high-end retail account we’ve got.”
Barbara Goldsmith’s article entitled “La Dolce Viva” was an inside look at the sadomasochistic world of Andy Warhol’s Factory. It featured Viva, one among the posse of models who appeared in his home movies, which the art world was now taking seriously. These movies were endless-loop bacchanals with no director, like The Lonesome Cowboy, where Viva was the focus of heterosexual seduction, homosexual sex, masturbation, talk, lots of stoned talk, and the target of a faux rape. Barbara was one of Clay’s star writers and an original investor, and here she was telling the world what it was really like in the roachy inner belly of Warhol’s infamous Factory with its indiscriminate couplings and wasted “superstar” models who enslaved themselves to the high priest of pop culture.
Barbara had become friendly with the ascending artist when she reviewed Warhol’s ghosted book for the New York Times, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. The last sentence of her review read: “Some people say that California is the bellwether of the nation, but I say it’s Andy Warhol.” A surprisingly insecure Warhol called her up and said, “You really think I’m a bellwether?” The New York School of Art was a fertile breeding ground for new talent—with Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Rivers, Jim Dine, and others—but Andy’s genius for marketing himself and the circus of his life would have the most lasting impact on the culture.
Clay had okayed the story on Warhol’s Factory and told Barbara, “Don’t be so careful.” He had assigned Diane Arbus as the photographer, whose eyes inevitably found a pocket of Marquis de Sade perversions beneath the most plain-brown-wrapper of a person. Goldsmith recalled for me, “Once, when we worked together on a story, she said, ‘I have a very loving eye; I don’t know why people say that I’m perverse.’ She was painfully shy. It was her own vulnerability that allowed her to penetrate to the dark side of another’s soul.”
Viva had greeted the writer and the photographer in her apartment in red slacks and a half-buttoned blouse with her delicately featured face unmade-up and a huge tangle of dark hair pulled back. After a long loopy monologue about the vicissitudes of her life, Viva casually stripped and lay back on a ratty Victorian couch with no part of her anatomy concealed. Barbara wrote down her desperate self-description: “I’m nude because Andy says seeing me nude sells tickets . . . I think I look like a parody, a satire on a nude, a plucked chicken.”
The article was dynamite. But the full-page photograph of Viva with her shrunken breasts and eyes rolled up under her skull like a stoned-out zombie was apocalyptic. It may have been the first photograph to tear down the wall between public and private identity. Both Clay and Tom sensed that Arbus would change the way we looked at photographs and cast them as art, and they were right.
Tom looked up from the photo at Clay and said, “I don’t see how you cannot run it.”
“That’s the way I feel,” Clay said. And he did run it. The full story and several photographs appeared in the third issue of New York.
The morning after the Viva issue appeared, Jane Maxwell, Clay’s executive assistant, was bombarded by furious phone calls. That was the morning that Jane, a zaftig redhead, became the mother of our fledgling family, protecting Clay from the raw rage of the advertisers, knowing full well he was not going to apologize to a single one of them. The advertising department reported that every high-end retailer on Fifth Avenue had canceled its ad buy for the full year.
The board called Clay, on the carpet of Armand Erpf’s Park Avenue apartment, fuming that their investments were certain to be wiped out. They were ready to fire him. Erpf elevated the discussion to a moral plain and praised Clay for his vision and balls. This was his boy, his wunderkind, and he was putting more money into the magazine; he wanted Edgar Bronfman and the others to follow suit. “This magazine is going to be a big success, so don’t thank me,” he said. “You’re going to love this investment.”
Over the summer of ’68 hung the fear that cash-flow problems would hold up people’s paychecks. Fashion writer Priscilla Tucker was hired to lure back the retail advertisers. Still, chatter on the street persisted: Would the magazine fail? It was a scary time. Yet no one quit. Clay’s writers and photographers were moved by the evidence of this editor’s loyalty to them. Clay was rare among his ilk, willing to brush off the business side if he believed in a great story and startling photographs. We all began to breathe the elixir of Clay’s own ambition. It was our own dolce vita.
I WAS LUCKY TO HAVE STARTED PREVIOUSLY with Clay at the scrappy Sunday supplement in the Trib. Now, at the independent New York magazine, there was a new manifesto: No more limits to nonfiction . . . if you have the stamina and the courage to do the reporting and the talent to tell a story as compelling as a literary short story, do it!
Inspired by Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, some of my colleagues and I began borrowing the dramatic techniques used by novelists—scene-by-scene construction, dialogue, and use of status details to denote social class. We treated the protagonists of nonfiction stories like characters in a novel. What was their motivation? What were they thinking? What was it like living inside their reality?
The New Journalism would grow into a movement. But the form wasn’t really all that new. Clay had stumbled upon it back in the Duke library when he came upon bound volumes of the Civil War–era Tribune, Horace Greeley’s famous nineteenth-century newspaper. He began to read gripping accounts from the Virginia battlefield, not from a disinterested correspondent, but vivid stories with narrative structure written by soldiers in the trenches.
Most of us were on the cusp of a new generation, precursors of the counterculture. We began setting the agenda for the jumbo-size baby-boom generation that came on our heels. Mostly fugitives from the suburbs or small-town Midwest, we wanted to escape the conformity and cookie-cutter marriages and the materialist fixations of our parents and explore the new urban lifestyles. Each of us brought with us a fantasy of New York. We projected those fantasies through our writing and the
art direction of the magazine. Clay sought writers and artists who reflected the many different New Yorks.
My New York was the Lower East Side. I saw myself as half hippie/half striver. I did have a very clear dream. I wanted to be a journalist because that would give me license to ask questions of anyone about anything I wanted to know. One of my first attempts at literary journalism I wrote while I was in graduate school at Columbia University in 1969. Clay asked me what I thought about the student “revolutionaries” uptown at Columbia. “What are these privileged kids revolting about?” he wanted to know. “Why are they playing with violence?”
After weeks of hanging out in meetings of affinity groups, I gave Clay my perspective. Young white liberal males, handsomely supported by the very suburban elite parents they were expected to repudiate, were desperate to be taken seriously as revolutionaries. They felt themselves shamed by the Black Panthers, men with warrior Afros and Cuban shades who were actually prepared to die to expose racial oppression.
Clay gave me an idea for how to tell the story: “Seek out a young bomber struggling with this challenge and follow him, try to get inside his head.” I found Marc, a mild-mannered graduate student from St. Louis whose wife was on the radical feminist fringe and goading him into violent activism. Recently, Ted Gold and his companions had played with dynamite while planning a violent action and were entombed in a town house on West Eleventh Street. Poor Marc was losing weight and preparing himself to die.
For some young white radicals it was enough to participate in the chic of rage and the ecstasy of despair. Not long after the excitement of trashing Columbia, some of the participants called another tactics meeting. I sat next to one of those despairing radicals. He dropped his head into his hands: “We’ll never have a revolution in this country. Too many people are happy.”
Clay loved that line. He never believed for a moment that the United States would allow another revolution, but he had a natural nose for spotting new trends at least ten minutes before history. And the ’60s and ’70s spawned more new lifestyles than could be contained in any magazine. Only in retrospect did we appreciate our good fortune in being part of a utopian experiment in American journalism. At the time, we were too busy having fun.
