'Smiling Through the Apocalypse' chronicles a man whose editorial instincts produced one of the greatest magazines ever: | dG1fWC1ETW0taGE0T0k
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00I remember seeing a huge magazine perched on our coffee table with the masthead Esquire stretching across the top.
00:12For me, he was simply dad. To the rest of the country, he was Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire magazine.
00:18Having been too young to understand what was going on, I embarked on a journey to find out what made him become what some have said the greatest post-war magazine editor ever.
00:27He brought together the greatest group of writers in that period, in that period that was the great period of magazine writing.
00:35And there was always a buzz around Esquire. It was a great gig.
00:38The Esquire offices on Madison Avenue was a free-thinking atmosphere where innovation could be baked and nurtured into what was uniquely Esquire's take on the story.
00:48I remember there was a five- or six-page color spread about chickens.
00:52Gradually, the magazine started to take a different shape. Non-fiction read like fiction, illustrations resembled old masters, and bold covers continually rocked the culture.
01:03It was a form that evolved and became known as the new journalism.
01:07What's new about it? It was the old journalism gone mad.
01:11Where contributors were encouraged to develop a voice that was fully their own.
01:15I never had an editor that I respected more, nor did I ever have an editor who got more out of me than Harold Hayes. He got my best work.
01:23The editorial risks Dad took made his magazine stand out against all others, like Gay Talese's profile of Frank Sinatra written through observation instead of interview,
01:32Tom Wolfe's introduction of his opulent and Baroque style,
01:36and Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell's soup to suggest a decline in the American avant-garde.
01:41I said, Andy, I'm going to put you on the cover of Esquire.
01:44And you could hear him on the phone saying,
01:46Ooh, ooh, George is going to put me on the cover of Esquire. Ooh.
01:50Then he said, George, wait a minute. I know you. What's the idea?
01:56And I said, well, I'm going to have you drowning in a giant can of Campbell's soup.
02:02And he went, ooh, I love it. I love it.
02:04Smiling through the apocalypse. Esquire in the 60s.
02:11I love it.
02:12You