Tom Wolfe: A City Built of Clay

[DeepModem Mom]

New York Magazine: A City Built of Clay
An exile from Webster Groves, Clay Felker saw a town of power mongers, status seekers, yipsters, bagels, art birds, and hot pants. New York would never look at itself the same way again.
By Tom Wolfe
Published Jul 6, 2008


Clay Felker in 1967 (David Gahr)

....So what inna nameagod was all this? He who had staged this style of life, Clay Felker, was a Midwestern boy, from Webster Groves, Missouri, which always made me think of Grover’s Corners in Our Town. Like the two great American magazine founders of the first half of the twentieth century, Harold Ross of The New Yorker, a real Colorado boy, and Henry Luce of Time and Life, born to missionaries in China, Felker grew up far from the magnetic pull of New York’s much-vaunted glamour and excitement. His obsession with New York seems to have begun so early in his life that no one, not even the man himself, can remember what set it off. Introducing him many, many years later at a fund-raiser for the Felker Magazine Center of the University of California, Berkeley, I claimed his sister had told me Baby Clay’s first complete sentence was “Whaddaya mean, I ‘don’t have a reservation?’ ” At the time I thought I was only making a little joke....

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Clay’s eye for styles of life and the status groups that created them, his journalist’s awareness of such things as hot news, profoundly changed magazine and newspaper publishing in the United States and, for that matter, England. So-called “city” magazines doing their best to imitate New York cropped up all over the country. Newspapers created sections called “Style,” “Lifestyle,” or using the new corporate jam-bam style of logo, “LifeStyle,” all to try to capture some of the New York mojo. The New York Times would seek to duplicate New York by slipping a multitude of new sections into the newspaper daily and on Sunday—the jumbo Sunday Times might contain three or more of them—with titles such as “Styles,” “City” (more styles), “Escapes,” “Arts” (consisting of two subsections, one for the Fine and one for the Fun), “Dining Out,” “Dining In,” “Circuits.” But the city magazines, the newspaper jam-bammers, and the Times’s one-a-day magazine (if not two- or three-a-day) quickly degenerated into coverage not of styles of life in the Max Weber sense but styles of living in the Martha Stewart sense, the right kitchenware, the right party planning, the right trips abroad, the right décors, neighborhoods, nanny services, iCommunicators, fitness programs, and “parenting.”

Throughout the thirteen years he ran New York Magazine, Clay Felker oversaw sociological studies of urban life that academic sociology had never even attempted: the culture of Wall Street, the culture of political graft in New York, cop culture, Mob culture, youth cultures in California as well as New York, New York’s self-aborting, dysfunctional, deconstructed power structure, capital-S Society and its discontents. And yet no one ever thought of it as sociology. That was thanks to one of Clay’s finest instincts. He demanded—or, better said, inspired as well as required—such depth of reporting that his writers came up with the same sort of scenes, status details, and detailed dialogue that in the past had rarely been found except in novels, short stories, and the most outrageous form of fiction, as Orwell put it, which is autobiography. (Autobiography is like Wikipedia: Some of it may be true.) And although it remains controversial, Clay’s writers often used the other favorite device of fiction writers: namely, putting the reader inside the skin, inside the head, behind the eyes of characters in the story. The New Journalism, c’est moi, Clay could have easily claimed.

One could argue—and I don’t hesitate to do it—that in those thirteen years, 1964–1967 and years 1968–1977, Clay produced a huge sprawling Vanity Fair himself … only having it written, chapter by chapter, by his writers … all of them absorbed in, exhilarated by, a Missouri boy’s wide-eyed obsession with New York as the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the capital of the world … the radiant City of Ambition....

http://nymag.com/news/media/48341/

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