by Gail Sheehy
The men he had already bought picked up the cue. Board member Bob Towbin said he thought Clay was an editorial genius. Another board member, Tom Kempner, said he thought Clay was an editorial genius. Patricof added, “We all know Clay’s the best editor in the world.” Murdoch said, “I agree,” but cut back slightly lest this gush of hot air could get expensive, “Clay Felker is the best editor in America.”
Clay looked at Murdoch as he said evenly, “I, like you, am a publisher.”
Kempner said coolly, “I think maybe we’ve had enough of the writers. They shouldn’t witness this behavior.”
Stan Shuman, speaking for Murdoch, repeated the preposterous fiction, “Nothing has changed.” Kempner looked at our writers’ group as if at an eighth-grade civics class. “You people don’t understand,” he said. “In America, anyone can sell anything he wants at any time. You’re going to have to get that straight. That is just American capitalism.”
As Clay and I left for our apartment along with Milton, Patricof came running behind us. “Milton,” he called. “I’m counting on you, Milton, to protect the corporate asset.”
“There is no corporate asset, Alan,” Milton said, with factual indifference. “That’s the point. People—that’s all there ever was.”
WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT, Bob Pirie arrived at our digs with his full team of Skadden, Arps crisis troops. Looking as angelic as Casper the Ghost, the white-haired attorney came into the kitchen and kissed my cheek and whispered, “I’ve got a splendid settlement. You’re really going to like this settlement.”
I pulled back. “Who the hell asked for a settlement?” We were all ready to go to court the next day to hear the judge decide on Clay’s temporary restraining order. Pirie soothed us with sweet talk and called us to sit down together in the living room while he laid out the terms. When he was finished, I demanded, “But if we’re right, why are we giving up?”
Pirie was nonplussed. He explained what is rudimentary thinking in the law: one should try to cut a deal between this moment and court because that is the only time one has a negotiating position. Pirie suggested that Clay and Milton and I go off and talk it over in private.
“It’s unfair for anyone else to make a judgment on what Clay should do,” Milton chided me in the study. “No one else has the same to lose. Clay is the only one who can be castrated by Murdoch, financially ruined and left out in the cold with a noncompete clause for three years.” Milton had hit the central nerve. If Murdoch enforced the noncompete clause, in the publishing world, Clay would be a vegetable.
Pirie broke in on our private meeting. He concentrated his full powers of persuasion on convincing Clay that settlement was the only rational course. If Pirie lost a motion on the preliminary injunction, he said, the judge would form an opinion on the case, Murdoch could go ahead and buy the stock, and Clay would be left out on a limb fighting for months with his own funds. “If we have full-blown litigation here, it could cost Clay a half-million dollars.”
At 4 A.M. Bob Pirie left with the nod he wanted. Clay turned mournfully to his closest friend and partner, Milton. “They’ve stolen everything we’ve created. We have nothing left.”
“We have our talent left,” Milton said. “And our integrity.”
FRIDAY, JANUARY 7, 1977, was a long, dull ache of a day. A delegation of editors and writers met with Clay and Milton to save the senior members of the family. Ten people were given the protection of two-year contracts. As the joyless day deepened into evening, forty members of the magazine’s talent package walked out, quitting in support of Clay and rejection of Murdoch. They gathered at a restaurant ironically called Chicago, across from the magazine’s home on Second Avenue. There they waited for Clay and Milton to arrive and give direction.
I sat with the two men in Bob Pirie’s office above P. J. Clarke’s and watched as the last breaths of their offspring were stilled by a signature. Clay’s broad shoulders drooped. I had never before seen him give up.
“Let’s look to the future,” I said to Bob Pirie. “Neither of these men was born rich. But they have exceptional talent and they work very hard. What’s to prevent this happening all over again?”
“Nothing,” Pirie said. “The laws of this country are set up to protect the free flow of capital.”
The staff called to warn Clay to use the restaurant’s side door when he arrived. They wanted to protect him from a phalanx of press numbering about fifty and from a climate that came close to the hysteria of covering a politician’s downfall.
When Clay at last appeared inside Chicago, he jumped up on a table and stood tall in a suit and tie. His first words were those of the father looking out for his flock. “I cannot tell you how much it means to me to see you all on this side of the street, but”—and suddenly his voice kicked up half an octave with conviction in it—“don’t quit on my account. Stay and get some money out of these bums!” That’s a man, I thought, looking out for his progeny before himself. He expressed his affection for each and every one there and promised to help find good positions for those who were determined to leave. He finished by saying, “Rupert Murdoch’s ideas about friendship, about publishing, and about people are very different than mine. He should know that he is”—now the voice of leadership broke—“breaking up a family, and he does so at his peril.”
Men and women wept. “Impossible,” people murmured. “This can’t be happening.”
Clay walked out the door into the crazy neon of Second Avenue, into the leer of transient bars, TV lights, the heave of shoulders and elbows. His body lurched through the reporters, looking for a hole, a dignified way out.
“The publisher once feared for his piercing attacks was pinned, crucifix style, against a no-parking sign,” the NBC reporter shouted into her microphone.
“Look, I haven’t been thinking about what I’m going to do next, but it’s going to be in publishing,” Clay replied to the cacophony of questions. “I’m a journalist and that’s what my life is.” His face was waxen—a mixture of humility and humiliation.
“What kind of day was today for you?” he was asked.
“A terrible day. It’s also the best day of my life.”
“Why is it the best day?” a reporter interrupted.
“Because of the support and the love these people have shown me.”
I hoped the cameras would not pick up the streak of his tears.
A WEEK AFTER HIS LIFE was kicked apart, Clay awoke next to me on a Caribbean island and shuddered. “I realize how fragile my life is,” he said.
Saint Martin’s was a refuge from all the friends and curiosity seekers who wanted a replay of the disaster with full dialogue. I had persuaded Clay to turn down offers of hideouts from Barry Diller, Kay Graham, and others. Why be obligated to anyone? He was a free man. Why not hole up in a bungalow on some beautiful deserted beach and forget the world for ten days?
A silent-footed waiter had left a glistening pineapple wrapped in orchids at the foot of our bed. A fist of sun punched over the horizon and stretched its fingers into our eyes. We kissed. Clay sat up and rested against the headboard, opening a history of Napoleon and Talleyrand across his chest, and began to fight the panic of age, fat, self-doubt.
Clay believed in the great-men version of history. He needed to believe that greatness could be his. He was dispassionate and mostly correct in judging the value of other people’s work. About the lasting value of his own work he was now uncertain. Would the stamina be there to start all over again? Was there time to dream the great magazine of the 1980s?
Yes, of course, I said.
We began running the beach. We swam a mile in the morning, another mile in the afternoon. A storm built up for two days. The sea turned wild and communication to the island was severed. I opened the fat package of letters of cheer and condolence that Clay had received before we left New York. I read some aloud. Clay was moved. It was the first step toward healing.
I wanted to make love. I could not bear to see my man
unmanned by events. My motive was not exclusively therapeutic. He had bought me a string bikini in Philipsburg. Its red and white checks were deceptively innocent. A large keyhole peeped at the inner swell of my breasts. The strings of the halter begged for loosening. I backed close to him as he lay reading on the bed. Cupping the tanned half-moons beneath my full white saddle would be, I knew, irresistible. He rose and drove me to the full-length mirror. His hands explored every curve and crevice of my body. My knees went weak. He turned me.
“Are you having a trembler?”
“What do you think?”
We both loved these surprise stand-ups that made our knees tremble. In the middle of a noisy summer party he often pulled me outdoors and pressed me against a dark side of the party house. It might even happen in Paris, well, okay, that’s Paris, but in an alley in London, too. I loved being wanted so urgently that Clay would forget his normal propriety. We were lost in rapture when I heard a sound. Opening my eyes, I caught the waiter standing in the doorway, frozen, stiffer than a deer in headlights. Clay saw the waiter in the mirror. In his old voice he boomed out his familiar welcome:
“Look who’s here!”
The absurdity of it relaxed us. The next day the storm withdrew. We were feeling loose and even a little homesick when a stranger approached our hotel terrace where Clay was answering more letters. “Congratulations,” called the American with his hand forthrightly extended. He must have recognized Clay from TV coverage of the takeover. “From what I read, that’s what’s in order,” he said. “Guess you won’t be running New York anymore. It won’t be quite the same, but it’ll keep going all right.”
Clay forced a slight smile and nodded.
“So what’s this new publication you’re going to start?” the stranger asked innocently. “If you need any money, Alan Patricof is a close friend of mine. I know he’d be interested in investing.”
ON OUR LAST DAY, we sat on the terrace and studied the surf, rolling its great barrels of energy into the shore. We watched it leave behind a silken sheet of water relieved of tension. The sea surprises us with what our ears have never heard, our toes have never touched, our eyes have never seen before; it is a place of endless beginnings. Each moment is a miracle, and we have to be present for it.
Just then we heard the phone ring from inside the bungalow. I ran to pick it up.
“Mr. Felker has a call from London, from a Mr.—I beg your pardon—from a Lord Harmsworth?” said the operator with a note of awed surprise. “Yes, put him through.” Vere Harmsworth, the third Viscount Rothermere, was a British newspaper magnate who had founded the Daily Mail. He had talked to Clay in the past about searching for a new American magazine to buy, possibly Esquire. Clay saw me beckoning. When I mouthed the name of his caller, he ran. I held out the phone for both of us to hear.
“Vere?”
“Let’s go!”
WHEN THE BOARD SOLD NEW YORK MAGAZINE, the Village Voice, and New West to Murdoch in 1977, the value generated for the shareholders was only about $15 million. By 1992, Murdoch’s News Corp. had amassed huge debts and sold off many of its American magazine interests, including New York, which then had a value of $150 million, and the Village Voice, which then brought $55 million. Ken Fadner pointed out to me later the board members’ limited understanding of the media business: “They claimed that Clay was no businessman. But the man who was not a businessman created properties worth well over $200 million, while the ‘businessmen’ sold out cheap.”
CHAPTER 25
For the Love of Editors
AN EDITOR WITHOUT A PUBLICATION is like a jockey without a horse. New York was the equivalent of Clay’s only child. It was hard to imagine that he would be able to pick himself up and find another winning horse. There were nights when he awoke with a sob snarled in his throat; one night in particular, when he dreamed of falling down a bottomless black hole and bolted upright gasping for air. He could not talk to me about the terror. Only years later did he admit that he decided that night to throttle all thoughts of murdering his betrayers. The terror and anger would fester in his throat with consequences we could not imagine.
But on he galloped, excited by the prospect of partnering with Vere Harmsworth to buy the only other publication he had loved, Esquire. Those negotiations, begun in 1977, would take almost two years. Meanwhile, he found a hometown shopper to buy in Northern California, the Advertiser, and tried to pretend that selling discounts on day-old bread had some redeeming value.
With the success of Passages continuing unabated, I was being pursued by literary editors to write the next book. I must admit I fell a little bit in love with every editor who worked with me over the years. Not surprising. Pairings between writer and editor are naturally intimate, a dance between dominance and submission. The writer is the vulnerable one, always wishing to say, “Do you love it?” Translation: “Do you love me?” To risk surrendering some creative control, the writer must have faith that the editor wants to enhance the author’s book, not turn it into the editor’s own. It takes polite lunches and panicky late-night phone calls and missed deadlines and making up to build the necessary trust.
Need I say that in the ’70s few men in senior positions respected any boundaries between professional relationships with women and the desire for conquest of any attractive female who moved through their daily orbit. The most amusing effort was made during a hiatus in my romance with Clay. He was a senior editor beloved around Random House as a brilliant mind inside a shambling recluse. Joe Fox could hardly be seen behind the two-foot-high wall of yellowing newspapers that sat on his desk, behind which he chain-smoked and pored over the manuscripts of some of the finest writers of his generation, including James Salter, Peter Matthiessen, and Truman Capote. But that barrier disappeared once he invited me to dinner to discuss my next book.
Our dinner conversation veered off topic and into the usual first-date questions and answers: his divorce, my divorce, our dreams and disappointments. The restaurant was around the corner from Central Park South, which allowed Joe to make the casual suggestion that he show me his dramatic apartment in the Gainsborough Studios.
The façade of the Gainsborough was unique, lavishly ornamented with classical sculpture and carved latticework on the lower floors, but breaking out into intensely colored tile work above. Inside, Joe’s duplex gave a dazzling view through double high windows of Central Park’s soft yellow lampposts glowing between spongy trees. Over snifters of brandy, Joe gave me the history of the building, designed to reflect the status of well-established artists. Then he excused himself to prepare the surprise. Ten minutes later, he reappeared sartorially transformed in a white tie and tails, perfectly pinched bow tie, a top hat rakishly tilted to one side, dancing shoes, and confidently twirling a cane. His hunched spine was upright, the lead shaken out of his feet. Shod in tap shoes, he was transformed into a suddenly graceful, light-footed artist of the dance, and he was not bad! He wanted to show me his secret self—Fred Astaire.
That performance led to a brief flutter of a romance, but not to an editorial marriage. My heart still belonged to Clay. But I never again thought of Joe Fox as “shambling.” Sadly, in 1995, while smoking, the secret Fred Astaire expired at his desk behind the wall of yellowed newspapers.
HILLEL BLACK, THE EDITOR IN CHIEF of William Morrow, made his own unique impression in 1978. He invited me to lunch at Tavern on the Green. A warm man with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes and a crooked smile, he made me feel good within our first hour. He did this by listening, his body language always leaning in, his gentle prodding, “Tell me more,” conveying genuine interest in me as a writer.
“I want to show you something you have written,” he said. “Take a look and see if you like what I do.” He had taken a copy of one of my magazine pieces and pencil-edited it, to demonstrate, he said, “that I get your writing and I can make it even better.”
I was humbled; he did make it better. And I liked Hill. We talked about my concept for a bo
ok about people who make successful passages through failure and heartbreaks and the normal vicissitudes of life. In the couple of years since publication of Passages, its thesis was not only being absorbed by popular culture, it was being adopted by academia as a part of the growing field of study of adult development and healthy aging.
With the boomer generation approaching the dreaded “middle age”—then thought to begin in the forties—and intensely interested in itself, important longitudinal studies of midlife were launched. I was eager to pursue my research in a similar fashion. There were now more Americans in their forties and fifties than had ever existed in any country of the world, and no one had closely mapped such a population to see who prospered in health and enjoyed well-being, who among them was negotiating the treacheries of tough passages and finding uncommon paths to growth in the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions of their lives. These were the people I would call pathfinders.
By the spring of that year I was still desperate for money. It’s always a struggle to get paid as a writer. My new literary agent, John Hawkins, discovered a killer clause in my Passages contract with Dutton. It so drastically limited the amount of yearly income I could take from royalties on the book sales that I wouldn’t see the full proceeds from a bestseller until I was too old to care. Clay sent me back to his friend Tom Baer, the lawyer. During the seemingly interminable weeks that Baer tore into the Dutton contract and disqualified the income holdback, Hill and I played tennis and got to know each other.
I believed I had to validate the success of Passages. I used at least a third of my large advance for the follow-up book to fund an academic-level study. Only later did I understand how women often think we must justify success. Men don’t second-guess being rewarded monetarily, but I was still dragging along my ’50s socialization behind my ’70s radicalization. I took three years to travel and research Pathfinders. It paid off with many vivid stories of people who had made passages successfully and achieved high well-being.
