Clay Felker dies; editor of New York magazine led New Journalism charge
OBITUARY
The Manhattan-based 'writer's editor' was considered one of the great post-World War II magazine figures whose signature publication spawned countless imitators across the country. He was 82.
Clay Felker, the innovative founding editor of New York magazine who was widely considered one of the great post-World War II magazine editors in America and a key figure in the emergence of New Journalism in the 1960s, died today. He was 82.
Felker, who had been married to best-selling author Gail Sheehy since 1984, died this morning at his home in Manhattan, New York magazine reported on its website. Felker reportedly had been battling cancer of the mouth and throat for some years.
As an editor, Felker was known for having what Newsweek magazine once described as "a Gatsbyesque drive, a zest for power and an uncanny knack for riding the trendy currents of Manhattan chic."
He began his rise in the magazine industry as the enterprising features editor at Esquire, beginning in 1957 after several years as a writer and reporter for Life magazine.
"Clay was always widely enthusiastic about writers and ideas," John Berendt, a former editor at Esquire, told Marc Weingarten, author of "The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight," a 2006 book about the New Journalism revolution -- journalism whose practitioners used literary techniques to produce factually accurate stories that read like fiction.
Felker, Berendt said, "could sniff out a developing story before anyone else. He was always out, going to parties, schmoozing, trying to match the right writers to the right stories. He had his finger on the pulse of things, just an amazing sixth sense about trends."
After seeing singer Sammy Davis Jr. perform on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1959, for example, Felker suggested that writer Thomas B. Morgan spend time hanging out with the entertainer for what became an insightful profile, "What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?"
Felker also tapped novelist Norman Mailer -- and gave him free rein -- to cover the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, at which John F. Kennedy was nominated for president and Mailer produced a lengthy, thought-provoking piece of literary journalism, "Superman Comes to the Supermart."
And Felker gave Gloria Steinem, then a little-known freelancer, what she calls her "first serious assignment" as a writer: a report on the then-new contraceptive pill.
After researching and writing her story, Steinem recalled in a 2005 piece on Felker in California magazine, a publication for UC Berkeley alumni, "Clay blue-penciled my pages on the history of the pill, told me I had left people out, and made the memorable comment: 'You've performed the incredible feat of making sex dull.' "
