Daring (11 page)

Finally, the Maharishi summoned me to a private lunch in his “bungalow,” a marble-terraced, five-room villa. Skittering old women in stockinged feet brought trays of vegetables and chapatis hot off a handheld charcoal stove.

“I am chief guru of the Western world,” the Maharishi said with a beguiling blend of boyishness and barking mad messianic zeal. “I need one meditation center per every one hundred thousand population. Yes, so. To bring bliss consciousness to the whole world.” This was the message he wished me to take back to America.

I had to acknowledge that the Maharishi was the only thing about India that did not say, “You sit. You wait. It coming.” The Maharishi said
now!

IN A SOFT SPIRAL NOTEBOOK
I had recorded my wanderings in the foothills of the Himalayas and my audiences with the Maharishi. That precious notebook was wedged next to my rump in the back of my jeans all the way from India to JFK and on a subway into the city and on a final sprint up Lexington Avenue to meet my ex-husband and reclaim my daughter.

I swooped Maura into my arms and we twirled round and round and then skipped across Central Park. Somewhere in that dizzy reunion, the notebook left my person. It was never to be found.

While I played with Maura and made her favorite meals, in the back of my mind was the panic about returning from a hugely expensive trip with nothing to show for it. Once Maura went to sleep, I skipped dinner and lay on my “bed of nails,” playing Beatles and Beach Boys records. Gradually, I was able to return to the languid tempo of Rishikesh, recall the most vivid conversations, and finally feel the warmth of bliss consciousness again. This was one meditation I was not going to blow. Then I wrote the story.

“
I
'
M JUST
CRAZY
ABOUT YOUR WRITING
and I just
have
to have you in my magazine.” It was Helen Gurley Brown, gushing, which was how she won people over. “Pussycat,” she purred, “I can pay you fifteen hundred dollars a story if you'll give me one story a month for the next year.”

I didn't have to meditate on it. If it would pay the rent, I'd play pussycat.

“
LOOK WHO
'
S HERE
!”

That was the sonic boom of recognition we all longed to hear from Clay, the welcome that made it worth it to climb the four flights of gravity-defying stairs to the top of the old Tammany Hall clubhouse at 207 East Thirty-Second Street to the garret occupied by the brand-new
New York
magazine. It launched in April 1968.

“What do you have for me?” he would demand, like a little boy expecting a chocolate bar. Everybody would look up from their desks: Who was the star of the day? Clay would be all ears. The poor wretch, marshaling every bit of bravado, knew he or she had just thirty seconds to make the pitch. If it wasn't interesting, the next time that person appeared, Clay would have forgotten his name. I knew he wouldn't forget my name, because I was one of only a handful of women at the beginning.

Milton Glaser, Clay's partner in the start-up, owned the historic four-story building where his Pushpin Studio offices were located. He rented the top floor to
New York
. Messengers would appear breathless and ashen faced at the top landing, looking minutes from needing CPR. The historic patina came with a leaky roof, wavy floors, and a single closet of a bathroom. More than forty family members were squeezed cheek by jowl into a railroad-car-skinny space only twenty feet wide and a hundred feet long. This meant that a hive of staffers had to find perches wherever they could, but it worked.

An office without walls was Clay's idea. Everybody heard everything. He believed it reflected the egalitarian spirit that animated Americans to do their best work. There were no secrets, no favorites, no blood-on-the-walls rivalries like the contests he remembered from his days at the old
Esquire
. What there was in abundance was noise.

Clay's enthusiasm for a sound piece of work—whether it was a photo, a drawing, or a piece of writing—was broadcast widely. He would roar “Fabulous!” or “Knockout!” or “Never read anything like this before!” He also roared when a writer refused to answer the phone as the deadline ticked away. He roared when the truck carrying storyboards to Buffalo bogged down in snow. He roared when the kid messenger showed up at the last moment with the printed dummy in hand. “Goddamn hero!” He roared for the helluvit. Clay was so superhumanly animated, some staffers wore earplugs or even earmuffs, which came in handy during winter days when the heat went off. I always layered up with sweaters and boots, but my skirts were short enough to reveal my blued knees.

FROM THE START,
the new independent
New York
was a family. This family was unusual in that it had two fathers, Milton and Clay. Milton was the perfect grounding for Clay, whose personality acted as the lightning rod of creativity and animosity. The son of a tailor marinated in the knish culture of the Bronx, Milton would grow to become both a fine-arts painter and one of the most influential graphic designers in the world. Perhaps his best-known achievement was designing the ubiquitous logo
I
NEW YORK
.

At first glance, he and Clay appeared to be opposites. Milton always wore jeans and big ties printed with fruit or vegetables, his black hair hooked over his big ears and what looked like foot-long sideburns to make up for the hairless highway running from front to back of his head. Clay bought his Turnbull & Asser striped shirts on London's Jermyn Street with cuffs that required cuff links.

Milton's eyes had become somewhat jaded by growing up street-smart in New York. Clay brought to the magazine the curiosity of a perpetual outsider. “Clay was obsessed with the city's power establishments, the lives of the rich, the talented, and the perverse,” Milton said. “He never developed the thick skin of cynicism, as so many editors do.”

Milton, too, had other interests: the Lower East Side, left-wing politics, and cheap food. Milton and his writing partner, Jerome Snyder, founded a column, named by Clay “Underground Gourmet.” It continues to run in
New York
magazine to this day, fifty years later.

Clay and Milton argued often and loudly. Their shouting matches were usually about the same thing.

“Make it bigger!” No matter what it was, a photograph, the headline, the pull quotes, the text type, this was Clay's recurring demand.

“It's already big,” Milton would protest.

“Make it BIGGER!”

Before he lapsed into profanity, Milton would insist, “When everything is big, nothing is big.”

Commonly, the relationship between editor and art director resembles that of Cain and Abel. But the tight daily working relationship between Clay and Milton evolved into one of those mysteries of human affection that endure not despite but
because
of the obstacles. Both needed an opposing force with equal talent, and they came to understand they were better together than separate.

“Milton and I feel committed to one another in a personal way, beyond the professional,” Clay said one evening when the three of us had dinner together. Milton agreed: “It's as mysterious as why people fall in love.”

Nonetheless, everyone was relieved when Walter Bernard was lured away from
Esquire
to join Milton, his teacher and mentor, to become the full-time, hands-on art director. Walter's emollient personality was the salve that healed rifts between Clay and Milton. With his infectious smile and blue aviator glasses and unflappable ability to solve design problems, Walter looked the part of the magic genie who pulled the magazine together. I remember leaning over the art table to look at any one of the covers to illustrate my stories and yelping with delight.

GLORIA STEINEM WAS THE SISTER
everyone would have loved to have. She had started out as a receptionist at
Esquire
in 1960. Every man who entered that magazine office gaped at the long-stemmed beauty.

It was Gloria who was first to answer Clay's plea for help in raising money to start
New York
. At an endless series of lunches, she “tap-danced for rich people,” as she called it, which meant being witty and charming. Clay wanted Gloria to write a story for the maiden issue. She came up with the idea of writing about Ho Chi Minh's travels in New York and other parts of the United States as a young man. Oddly enough, she said, the Vietnamese leader had been an ally of Roosevelt's and helped to rescue downed American fliers in the jungles of Vietnam during World War II. Clay liked the offbeat idea. Gloria tried desperately to contact the president of Vietnam, but Western Union operators couldn't grasp the spelling of a name with all those consonants. When Gloria showed up late clutching her story, she found Clay flailing to pull together the issue.

“What have you got for me?” he moaned.

“Ho Chi Minh in New York.”

He grabbed the manuscript and without a glance handed it off to a messenger to take to the printer.

“But, Clay, you haven't read a word. You might hate it,” Gloria protested.

“How could I hate it?” he said. “It's here.”

WORKING ON THE FOURTH ISSUE,
a worried Clay shoved a manuscript and a few photographs into Tom Wolfe's hand. “Take a look at these, Tom, and tell me if you think we should run them.” The magazine was a newborn, only two weeks old. “The advertising department tells me if we run these photos, we'll lose every high-end retail account we've got.”

Barbara Goldsmith's article entitled “La Dolce Viva” was an inside look at the sadomasochistic world of Andy Warhol's Factory. It featured Viva, one among the posse of models who appeared in his home movies, which the art world was now taking seriously. These movies were endless-loop bacchanals with no director, like
The Lonesome Cowboy
, where Viva was the focus of heterosexual seduction, homosexual sex, masturbation, talk, lots of stoned talk, and the target of a faux rape. Barbara was one of Clay's star writers and an original investor, and here she was telling the world what it was really like in the roachy inner belly of Warhol's infamous Factory with its indiscriminate couplings and wasted “superstar” models who enslaved themselves to the high priest of pop culture.

Barbara had become friendly with the ascending artist when she reviewed Warhol's ghosted book for the
New York Times, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again.
The last sentence of her review read: “Some people say that California is the bellwether of the nation, but I say it's Andy Warhol.” A surprisingly insecure Warhol called her up and said, “You really think I'm a bellwether?” The New York School of Art was a fertile breeding ground for new talent—with Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Rivers, Jim Dine, and others—but Andy's genius for marketing himself and the circus of his life would have the most lasting impact on the culture.

Clay had okayed the story on Warhol's Factory and told Barbara, “Don't be so careful.” He had assigned Diane Arbus as the photographer, whose eyes inevitably found a pocket of Marquis de Sade perversions beneath the most plain-brown-wrapper of a person. Goldsmith recalled for me, “Once, when we worked together on a story, she said, ‘I have a very loving eye; I don't know why people say that I'm perverse.' She was painfully shy. It was her own vulnerability that allowed her to penetrate to the dark side of another's soul.”

Viva had greeted the writer and the photographer in her apartment in red slacks and a half-buttoned blouse with her delicately featured face unmade-up and a huge tangle of dark hair pulled back. After a long loopy monologue about the vicissitudes of her life, Viva casually stripped and lay back on a ratty Victorian couch with no part of her anatomy concealed. Barbara wrote down her desperate self-description: “I'm nude because Andy says seeing me nude sells tickets . . . I think I look like a parody, a satire on a nude, a plucked chicken.”

The article was dynamite. But the full-page photograph of Viva with her shrunken breasts and eyes rolled up under her skull like a stoned-out zombie was apocalyptic. It may have been the first photograph to tear down the wall between public and private identity. Both Clay and Tom sensed that Arbus would change the way we looked at photographs and cast them as art, and they were right.

Tom looked up from the photo at Clay and said, “I don't see how you can
not
run it.”

“That's the way I feel,” Clay said. And he did run it. The full story and several photographs appeared in the third issue of
New York.

The morning after the Viva issue appeared, Jane Maxwell, Clay's executive assistant, was bombarded by furious phone calls. That was the morning that Jane, a zaftig redhead, became the mother of our fledgling family, protecting Clay from the raw rage of the advertisers, knowing full well he was not going to apologize to a single one of them. The advertising department reported that every high-end retailer on Fifth Avenue had canceled its ad buy for the full year.