SMILING THROUGH THE APOCALYPSE Esquire in the 60s

The era of great and influential and stylish and witty and provocative magazines is long gone, and our culture is the sadder for it. There have been many historic publications over the years, but Esquire, the men's magazine, in the 1960s was the greatest of them all in my humble opinion.

I often tell my AP students that five national, commercial publications regularly offered quality fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in my lifetime. I'm not talking about small journals with a readership of a few thousand, but magazines you could buy on any rack at your local bookstore, airport kiosk, train station, etc. Those five were the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Harper's, Playboy, and Esquire. Only the New Yorker regularly offers all forms of great writing, though I think it currently falls well short of what it published during its glory years.

Below is the trailer for a documentary film about this cultural juggernaut.

Harper's and the Atlantic occasionally offer a short story or a poem or two, but they largely focus on non-fiction. Playboy is a shadow of its former self. It is inconceivable today to imagine Playboy introducing literary fiction like Fahrenheit 451, but that's where Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel first appeared.

Esquire had a glorious period in the 1930s, as the publisher of many works by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other literary lions. I was first exposed to Esquire while riding the yellow school bus on the way to St. Patrick's School. I remember my bus driver leafing through issues of an oversized magazine while waiting for kids to board. Mostly I remember him admiring photos and illustrations of glamorous women who seemed to have a low budget for clothing and who enjoyed posing in sultry and provocative positions!

But in the early 60s, Harold Hayes assumed the editor's position and transformed it into an MRI machine for modern culture. Its "takes" on politics, movies, music, fashion, art, sports, science, technology, humor and so much more reinvented what it meant to be a magazine. There were still some cheesecake photos of beautiful women, but they no longer defined the publication.

Esquire during that period is remembered for two things. First, is the introduction of a deeply personal kind of journalism in which the writer often plays a part of the story itself. Prose stylists like Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe became characters in the transformative events about which they wrote. I used to walk to my town's library three or four times a week during the period from about 1963-1969. I rarely came home without two or three issues of Esquire along with the stack of books I had chosen. I occasionally got the "hairy eyeball" from the librarian, who clearly viewed me as too young to be reading such material, but my library card was as good as the next guy's. I well remember, for instance, the six lengthy pieces from an embedded reporter in Vietnam, Michael Herr, whose war reportage would eventually be collected in a book entitled Dispatches. He also wrote the Martin Sheen voiceovers in the film Apocalypse Now. I remember reading those pieces many times. It was the greatest war writing I have ever read. Tom Wolfe on Junior Johnson or the Kandy Kolored, Tangerine-Flake, Streamline Baby! Truman Capote on In Cold Blood, his New Journalism masterpiece. The greatest magazine writer of them all, Gay Talese, whose profile of Frank Sinatra even when Sinatra wouldn't sit for an interview, was entitled "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold". Here is the link to what is generally considered the greatest story ever written for a magazine:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold-gay-talese/

At the end of each year, Esquire would publish its Dubious Achievements Awards--poking fun at the absurdities of our time and exposing the venal exponents of amorality and self-absorption. It always included a photo of a guffawing Richard Nixon with the caption: "Why is this man laughing?"

The second thing people remember about Esquire are the covers. Advertising guru George Lois found new ways to photograph celebrities that created an instantaneous buzz. Look at some of the most famous covers:

Muhammad Ali, prevented from boxing because of his stance on the Vietnam War was depicted as suffering the torment of St. Sebastian. A quote from a serviceman about the unintended atrocities of war.

Andy Warhol drowning in the Campbell's Soup can he made into a pop-art icon. Wiping away the tears from the face of John F. Kennedy.

What may have been a direct assault on the senses of White America--a picture of heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, who was convicted of armed robbery before he left prison and won the title---as Santa Claus. His was the most feared image of Blackness to a society embroiled in race issues.

And what may have been the most provocative and disturbing cover of all. Here we have Lt. Calley, who initiated the massacre of a small Vietnamese hamlet at My Lai, the most notorious atrocity of the War in Vietnam, smiling while surrounded by troubled Asian children. It was like a time bomb going off.

Here is a wonderful Vanity Fair story about Esquire in that period.

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/esquire200701

When eBay came into existence, one of the first things I did was purchase every issue from that period to read them all again. Thank you, Harold Hayes!