Word: felkers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Clay Felker, the creator and curator of this ineffably rewarding world, screams a lot. He insults people. He falls asleep at dinner parties. His wispy, graying locks go uncombed, his custom-made Savile Row suits look as if they had been bought at a manufacturer's fire sale-they do not disguise his paunch. He is variously described by associates and acquaintances as autocratic, devious, dishonest, rapacious, egotistical, power mad, paranoid, a bully and a boor. Almost in the same breath, the same people call Felker a genius. "He's always been tough, restless and driven," says George...
Nonetheless, Felker's weekly Almanac de Gotham lays down standards of aspiration, acceptance and rejection as rigid as any set by Louis Quatorze. Along with genuinely useful "urban survival" features, it gives the insecure a superior feeling of being inside, offering them a blend of fact and fantasy. It portrays an unreal stream-of-consumption world whose Gucci'd, Pucci'd denizens glide between Parke-Bernet (the t is not silent) and La Grenouille (the maitre d's name is Jean), send their children to the Dalton School, winter in St. Maarten or Gstaad, summer...
...Felker is, above all, according to one longtime staffer, "a collector and a climber. If you're not important or have nothing interesting to say, Clay won't remember you, even if he's met you 20 times." Milton Glaser, the gifted designer who is responsible for New York's hip, hyped visual package, concedes that his longtime friend Felker is "very abrasive, very argumentative," but insists that "the chemistry works. It's all a great mystery." Bestselling Author Gail Sheehy (Passages), Felker's steady companion, considers him a fascinating talker but adds...
...Felker is an idea editor, not a pencil editor. He has had remarkably accurate antennae for coming fashions -and a knack for catchy headlines that are often better than the articles and make each fad seem momentous. The list of writers for whom he has provided a springboard is also impressive. As features editor of Esquire from 1957 to 1962, he helped steer Norman Mailer into reportage and published some of the first so-called New Jourrialists, most notably Tom Wolfe. On the old New York Herald Tribune, where he edited the Sunday magazine that was to be reincarnated...
...Felker does not add to his credibility by listing his birth date in Who's Who as Oct. 2, 1928, when he was actually born on Oct. 2, 1925. As adamantly as Harry S. Truman, he has refused to disclose his middle name-possibly because Schuette rhymes with "snooty" in Missouri honk. His father, Carl Felker, now 82, was a veteran newsman who became the editor of the immensely successful Sporting News (circ. 330,000). Carl Felker never won a single share of stock in Sporting News, a failure that still weighs on Clay's mind. When Clay...