Clay Felker died today and the tributes are pouring in, as it is right and good and true that they should. I met him a few times, but didn’t know him. Yet, like many writing today in Los Angeles, I passed through the portals of the late, great New West, Felker’s mid-1970s attempt to create a magazine in LA that would inhabit and reflect our complicated city in the way that New York was trying to do for Manhattan.
At the time, I’d just begun calling myself a writer although, from the perspective of skill, I can’t say that the label was terribly accurate. Yet Felker’s glorious, if not particularly profitable creation (Felker was known for his unwise and profligate spending habits), had an open door for people with energy and the desire to tell good stories. Along with Esquire’s Harold Hayes—and later Rolling Stone’s Jan Wenner—early on Felker recognized the importance of the fledgling literary form that was then being called New Journalism and he quickly became its godfather and ardent champion, helping launch such stars as Tom Wolfe, Pete Hamill, Nora Ephron, Richard Reeves, Ken Auletta, Jimmy Breslin, and his third wife, Gail Sheehey. “My philosophy is that you have faith in the writer’s point of view,” Felker once told The Washington Post. “You pick the writers you believe in and give them their freedom. As opposed to most editors who want to mold the writers into what they want, make them a tool of the editors.”
When he came to LA, this meant that even for a neophyte like me, the atmosphere at New West was redolent with creative opportunity. It is unlikely I produced anything even marginally worth remembering, but in my time spent in that early fertile ground, I came to understand at a fundamental and, to this day, indelible level that the ability to lay out a fact-based but vivid human story nearly always told a deeper and more important truth than a supposedly objective but bloodless recounting of the facts.
In these dark days for Los Angeles print journalism when Sam Zell actually believes a writer/reporter should be evaluated as one would a bolt of cloth, by column inches of output, not talent (and the ability to use said talent), it is worth remembering that some people once thought otherwise.
The pedant in me wants to point out that you mean Sam Zell, not the wanker former Georgia senator who thinks he’s a cross between Foghorn Leghorn and Yosemite Sam.
Thank HEAVEN you saw that truly scary blooper. Thanks, Randy. (Whew! fixed.)
Now Randy – you went and got me all nostalgic for Zell Miller. My only hope is that Joe Lieberman can bring on the crazy like good old Zell used to.
AC,
With Joe’s soporific voice, ain’t no way he can top Zell in the crazy department.
It’s a real stretch to connect Zell Miller to Sam Zell. How does your mind think? Also, Sen. Zell Miller at least represented Georgia rather than New York and California, as did Sen. Max Cleland.
I mentioned Felker on the thread below honoring Ken Reich. A correction though it was, as Celeste points out, Harold HAYES, not Hughes (a former Iowa Senator – so we’re even on confusing solons with journos) who edited the great ESQUIREs of the sixties and seventies. I’d recommend going to the library and getting the Anthology “Smilin’ thru the Apocalypse” a collection of the best of that pub in the sixties – Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, John Sack, Gay Talese, and so much more.
And a word about the, still living, Jim Bellows, who gave felker his head at the Herald Tribune to start NEW YORK. Along with Morris at HARPERS and Shawn at THE NEW YORKER it must have been a great time to work in magazines in the Big Apple.
Thank you, friends, for your sharing your ideas