HAROLD HAYES, ESQUIRE

CHARLES KAISER

He was the presiding genius of the New Journalism's golden age in the Tangerine-Flake sixties

Postscript

In January 1962, everyone who was about to fall in love with the Beatles and everyone (a little older) who had been in love with Mort Sahl began to laugh when they reached page 70 of the new issue of Esquire magazine. There they found the very first Annual Dubious Achievements Awards. Though not even mentioned on the cover that year, they became an instant legend, their iconoclasm a perfect match for the spirit of the emerging decade. The trademark of the awards, which was repeated on the second, third, fourth, seventh, and eighth pages of this first edition, was a picture of Richard Nixon, smiling dementedly above the question: "Why is this man laughing?"

The awards were like everything else in the magazine where Harold Hayes was managing editor: funny, fresh, irreverent, invigorating, and vigorous. By the end of 1963, this Southern Baptist preacher's son had the top job at Esquire, and soon became almost everyone's favorite editor, in what was to be a glorious period for American journalism. The magazine had covers by George Lois—always impish or outrageous—and all those amazing matches between reporter and subject: Gay Talese and Joe DiMaggio, Tom Morgan and Sammy Davis Jr., Norman Mailer and Jack Kennedy, Robert Benton and David Newman on The New Sentimentality, James Baldwin on Harlem, and Tom Wolfe on That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, as well as contributions from the eight thousand other writers the magazine claimed to carry in its "active file."

Esquire had bulk and speed, which made it unique for a moment, until so many others began to emulate everything that made it work, including something called the New Journalism. But no one else did it all quite so well at once. By the time he left Esquire in 1973, after ten years as its editor, Hayes and his magazine had become icons for everyone who had ever hoped to be hip. Gordon Lish, then an Esquire fiction editor, thought "everybody, regardless of gender, wanted to be like Harold." Charles Michener, who longed to work for Esquire but ended up at Newsweek instead, loved the oversize monthly because it was elegant and aristocratic and "fully masculine without being macho"; it said "you could be both hip and well scrubbed at the same time."

The departure of Hayes was an unpleasant shock: in 1973 his fans were cheering for Nixon's resignation, not Harold's. Nevertheless, the invitation for the editor's farewell party carried the picture of a broadly smiling Harold Hayes. "Why is this man laughing?" it naturally asked.

Hayes died last spring of a brain tumor at the age of sixty-two. After 1973 he had worked in television, and even got to edit another magazine, but he could never re-create the perfect fit of editor and staff and era that Esquire had in the sixties.

The young Hayes was the discovery of Arnold Gingrich, the legendary figure who helped create Esquire in 1933, when there were no "men's magazines." Gingrich recruited Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos for his pages, and when Fitzgerald couldn't write, Gingrich suggested that he describe that experience; the result was "The Crack Up." It was also Gingrich who decreed, "He who edits least edits best."

In 1956, Esquire was hemorrhaging circulation and Gingrich was searching for ways to fight off competition from two young upstarts called Playboy and Sports Illustrated. It was then that he hired Hayes, who very shortly became part of a new, savagely competitive editorial triumvirate. The old man immediately recognized the twenty-nine-yearold's unlikely combination of talents. "I took him in like the morning paper," Gingrich wrote, "knowing that in a Southern liberal who was also a Marine reserve officer I had an extremely rare bird. Here was a young Turk I could count on, I figured, to take it as well as dish it out."

On January 2, 1957, Hayes was joined by Clay Felker, thirty-one, recently of Life, and Ralph Ginzburg, twenty-seven, who had been circulation and promotion director of Look. Rust Hills was the other key editor, but he occupied himself mostly with fiction. This was the beginning of "some of the most intense and bitter fighting that ever took place among editors of the same magazine," according to Joseph Vincent Rebello, who wrote an unpublished master's thesis on the great days of Esquire.

Felker went on to help invent New York; then he edited Esquire himself in the late seventies, and now he edits Manhattan, inc. But none of those places was anything like the Esquire of the late fifties. The editor's office was empty when Felker got there because the position was officially vacant. Hayes was on one side, in a cubicle with a window, and Felker was on the other, in a slightly larger office, but without a window. Every Friday, Hayes, Felker, and Ginzburg met in Gingrich's office. Each of them would be armed with a dozen ideas and the writers ready to execute them. It was war. "I've never seen anything like it," says Felker. "We could be very cutting about each other's story ideas. It had to do with the way Gingrich set it up. He wanted to preside over this. And it was a very good thing to do, but it took a lot of strong nerves. And it gave you confidence in the end in learning how to think up a story that would hold up, not just through a story meeting, but for a long time. It was exhilarating—I mean, if you could survive it."

Every Friday, Hayes, Felker, and Ginzburg met, armed with a dozen ideas and the writers ready to execute them. It was war.

When Ginzburg quit to start his own magazine, the competition for the top job narrowed to Felker and Hayes. Felker remembers one evening in the spring of 1960 when he walked into the Five Spot, a jazz place in Greenwich Village, and the owner sat him down at Norman Mailer's table because he assumed they knew each other. But Felker had never met Mailer before. Everyone had been drinking a lot, and Mailer and his wife Adele "were having the most blazing argument" Felker had ever seen between a man and a woman. "Actually it was Adele who was attacking Mailer, Norman wasn't having the fight. He was just sitting there with this kind of benign smile on his face." When Adele finally left, Felker didn't know what to do. "And out of desperation, not knowing what to say to him, * sa*d' Have you ever wr*tten about politics?' Because I was so embarrassed by this incredible fight. And he said, 'Well, not really,' and I said, 'Well, what would you think about covering the Democratic convention?' So I made an assignment in the midst of this nightclub under these conditions, because I was so ill at ease that didn't know what else to say to him." When it was published, Mailer's piece became one of the most talked-about articles of the year.

The competition at the magazine became so fierce that Hayes actually began to doubt his own competence, so with Gingrich's encouragement he went off to Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship, to broaden himself a bit. When he came back, he kept getting offers from The Saturday Evening Post; it was the knowledge that he might lose him which finally spurred Gingrich to give him the managing-editorship. After Felker left to go to the New York Herald Tribune, Byron Dobell, now the editor of American Heritage, arrived to be Hayes's new deputy.

To Dobell, Hayes "was a very driving, stimulating, demanding perfectionist, who forced us to come up with ideas we never thought we had. And taught us to bring them to realization by not letting anything stand in our way. 'Go to the author directly. Never go to the agent if you can help it. If you can't get through to the author on the phone, go knock on his door.' At the same time, he encouraged a tremendous openness to what was happening. The first thing Harold said to everybody when he saw them was: 'What's new?' But it wasn't metaphorical. It was like: 'O.K., what's new? What's new, old buddy?' He had this southern manner which he could turn on to be charming. But underneath he was ice. He was the perfect editor in the sense that he was interested in you only insofar as you could help the magazine. He absolutely didn't want you reading in the office. He thought, You read manuscripts? You can do that at home. He wanted you on the phone, either working up ideas, or on the phone reporting, so you'd get enough information to bolster one of your ideas, or on the phone assigning that idea. But reading a manuscript? Are you kidding? We're not paying you for reading manuscripts!"

It was the only time in Dobell's career when he didn't mind working seven days a week. Because "I felt that there were five hundred guys in America who would give their eyeteeth for my job. It was the best job—or the secondbest job—in America. Harold having the first."

When Dobell arrived at Esquire, the New Journalism was already being experimented with, but no one had yet put that name to it. The earliest postwar examples were Lillian Ross's profile of Hemingway and Truman Capote's dissection of Marlon Brando, both in The New Yorker and both in the fifties, and what made them unusual was simply their frankness. The New Journalism was really much older than that, of course—Dobell traces it back to the mid-nineteenth century, when British reporters disguised themselves and went into flophouses to write about the lives of the poor in a realistic fashion. But by the 1950s the tradition of candid journalism had lapsed long enough in America that it was startling when someone wrote a celebrity profile that wasn't merely celebratory. The New Journalism was part of what Esquire writer Tom Morgan calls the "deconstruction of America," a process which accelerated rapidly through the sixties as a new generation discarded some of the conventions and hypocrisies of the Americans who had preceded them.

Thus it was a shock when Morgan profiled David Susskind in 1960 in Esquire and put in his "goddam"s, and his partner's stomach problem and nausea, and Susskind's wife hissing at her husband in the control booth: "What have you got? No money, bad shows, no guts, no integrity and Diana Lynn in Philadelphia Story." Morgan's manuscript also quoted Susskind's wife as saying "Bullshit!" to her husband, but Esquire's, owner was not quite ready to cross that Rubicon, so the second syllable in her epithet was blacked out after the piece was already on press. When the article appeared, Susskind told Morgan he had ruined his life. He also recommended that the writer seek the care of a good psychiatrist. But there was more than honesty to these "new" techniques. The best pieces of this period were factual but read like great short stories. "Because we used novelists to do journalism, they used the classic techniques of writing," Felker recalls. They started off "with a theme and a point of view, using some kind of structure, usually a narrative structure of some sort. Scene setting, characterization, dialogue—the classic techniques of English literature." Gay Talese "just thought that the real writing was fiction, it wasn't nonfiction."

In 1960 it was a shock when Esquire's profile of David Susskind put in his "goddam"s, and his wife hissing, "What have you got? No money, bad shows, no guts, no integrity."

The New Journalism attracted a large audience. In 1956, the year Hayes arrived at Esquire, circulation was just 776,278; ten years later, it was over a million, and the magazine's parent, Esquire, Inc., earned a profit of $3.5 million. It had finally found its niche— "between the morning papers and the Cronkite show," as Hayes put it, where "there is often very little to add but ...attitude." The headline which came closest to capturing that attitude was this one, which Dobell says he wrote and which many critics consider the best in the history of American magazines:

"JOE," SAID MARILYN MONROE, JUST BACK FROM KOREA,

"YOU NEVER HEARD SUCH CHEERING."

"YES I HAVE,"

JOE DIMAGGIO ANSWERED

In this period Harper's and The Atlantic were mixes of fiction and essays with rather traditional reporting, and Life, then a weekly and the biggest of the "big slicks," was keyed to the news. What none of them could match was Esquire's combination of graphic power and sheer diversity—New Journalism, plus serious intellectual essays by writers like Dwight Macdonald, who also did a stint as the magazine's movie critic; wry commentaries on the culture; Dubious Achievements every January; and the very best war reporting of the era from Michael Herr in Vietnam. To maintain quality, it also had a remarkable rejection rate for the manuscripts it commissioned—50 percent, an unheardof figure for the time.

Since its heyday, "there's been a lot of perversion about what the New Journalism was," says Felker. Most commonly, many magazine writers now tend to assume that all pieces of New Journalism require the frequent presence of the pronoun "I." But that was never a convention of the best practitioners of this form. "You could or you couldn't put yourself in it," Felker says. "It didn't make any difference."

What was crucial to the best pieces is also what is most frequently absent from the New Journalism of the 1980s—intensive reporting and the presence of a critical intelligence. Felker feels the writers "out-thought people, and by outthinking them you were able to maintain the originality and the freshness of the piece." Talese thinks that already by the end of the sixties "younger journalists were more like pamphleteers than researchers. When we were their age, we didn't have a strong position on anything. We had a strong position on maybe writing and finding out what was going on, but we were ignorant and knew it. The generation that followed us had a strong point of view. And then looked for the scant evidence that would support it."

Hayes himself was a liberal, but never overtly political—his son, Tom, says he was unaware of his father's politics. To his widow, Judy Kessler, Hayes wasn't a "political man—but he always came out on the right end because he was so smart." To Garry Wills, "Harold was good at nudging others out toward the edges of [the sixties] rapid stream, where they could steer instead of being carried along. His instinct was centrifugal—get to the sidelines and watch."

But after he won the first great personal battle of his life and became the editor of the magazine he loved, Hayes was never as good at assessing his own political situation as he was at defining the nation's. In 1973, he badly overplayed his hand when Gingrich offered to make him publisher and Hayes insisted on keeping the title of editor as well. When Hayes's demand went to the magazine's board of directors, they voted against him three to one, with only Gingrich supporting his protege. When the board called him in, "I just said something like 'Well, I guess that's it,' " Hayes told a reporter for Newsweek. "What's happened now is that an ambivalent relationship ultimately turned into a soap-opera situation that we all regret. Nobody feels vindictive or bitter. Today is my last day here and I'm very sad to be leaving."

Hayes tried television, but he never thrived there. For about a year, he did an interview program five nights a week on the public-television outlet in Manhattan. Then he went to ABC, where he and art critic Robert Hughes anchored the very first 20120. When the show was pilloried as "trash television," ABC News president Roone Arledge decided to make his anchors the scapegoats; they were out in a week. Hayes retreated to his country house to write a musical comedy about the experience, but the project was never completed.

He spent three years as a vice president at CBS Publications, where a friend says he was content, but never ecstatic Then, in 1984, he moved to Los Angeles to become editor of California magazine. Old colleagues were excited because he would finally have his own magazine again, but it never became the soaring experience they hoped for. His widow says he couldn't get the resources he needed, while some of his colleagues feel that his legendary decisiveness had deserted him. "It didn't become better and more serious," says Jamie Wolf, a contributing editor of the magazine, "and it didn't become slicker and more glitzy—it just sort of floundered around." After three years he was gone from the magazine for good.

What excited Hayes most in the final decade of his life was a new passion for Africa. In 1977, he published The Last Place on Earth, a portrait of the Serengeti national park in northern Tanzania—"the last place on earth where large herds of wild animals gather in sufficient profusion to suggest the way one part of the world must have looked in Pleistocene times." And long after his brain tumor was diagnosed, and practically until the day he died, he continued to work on his final book, The Dark Romance of Dian Fossey, which Simon and Schuster will publish next year. "He finished it except for the finishing touches," says his editor, Alice Mayhew. "It's a wonderful book: a wonderful portrait of another human being and a wonderful thing to have as your last work."

"His involvement with this book was unbelievable," recalls his widow. "It was like Dian Fossey was living in this house for the last three years. He had found a voice that he never had before. And when he couldn't work on it, I read it to him. Certain parts of his brain were affected, like his vision, but his ability to edit stayed with him. He could still hear and say exactly what was wrong. That part of him wasn't affected."

Back when he had been in New York, Garry Wills remembered, Hayes "retained an edge of country-boy wonder in that cynical city of miracles." At one of three memorial services held for him, Hayes's son read the rest of Wills's recollection: "The word I remember most, from our telephone conversations, was his pleasantly incredulous 'Really?' Like others, I began to look for things that would elicit that particular inflection from him. His gift was to feel, ahead of time, what he wanted the magazine's readers to feel. The implicit attitude was, always, 'Tell me more'— which made writers scurry about to find more things to tell him."