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 the U.S. and a key figure in the emergence of New Journalism in the 1960s, died Tuesday. He was 82.
Felker, who had been married to bestselling author Gail Sheehy since 1984, died at his home in Manhattan after a long battle with throat cancer, said a spokeswoman for New York magazine.
"American journalism would not be what it is today without Clay Felker," Adam Moss, the magazine's current editor-in-chief, said in a statement. "He created a kind of magazine that had never been seen before, told a kind of story that had never been told."
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 ranks with Henry Luce of Time, Harold Ross of the New Yorker and Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone in that these are all people that brought out magazines that had a new take on life in America," writer Tom Wolfe, a New York magazine alumnus, told The Times on Tuesday.
Describing Felker, Wolfe said, "He at first seemed very bluff and even could be gruff, but he created an atmosphere in which everybody wanted to do their very best for Clay.
"Everybody said he'd tell a writer he liked, 'I'm going to make you a star.' I never heard him say that, but that was the atmosphere he created in your mind."
Felker 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?"
