Clay Felker, 85, Trend-Spotting Editor
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Clay Felker, who died of natural causes Tuesday morning at 85, created New York magazine as a package of trend-spotting, reporting, slick writing, and journalism that spoke directly to its readers and, in the process, set the standard for city magazines across the nation.
In recent years, he had battled cancer and pneumonia, and moved to a home for the aged in 2006. He died in his Manhattan home. New York magazine announced his death on its Web site.
Mr. Felker gave a forum to a new generation of writers, from so-called “New Journalists” such as Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe to the feminists who founded Ms. magazine as an insert to New York magazine in 1971. He became an editor with his finger on the pulse of the city and his hand on the cashbox as New York grew to a circulation of a quarter-million within two years of its founding in 1968.
It was a trend-spotter’s bible — Mr. Wolfe christened the 1970s “The Me Decade” in New York’s pages in 1976, to name one example of its influence. Yet it was also a practical guide to the puzzle that is New York City, from its “best bets” shopping choices to Jack Newfield’s muckraking 1972 article, “The Ten Worst Judges in New York.”
Mr. Felker himself was known for a stream-of-consciousness style as distinctive as anything out of Tom Wolfe’s pen. Loud and abrupt, Mr. Felker was known for giving writers mere seconds to pitch articles. He would bound from dinner parties to dive bars, not drinking, but scrawling article ideas on napkins that he stuffed in his pockets.
But in an iconically New York City turn of events, he lost his beloved magazine in a business deal gone sour. In an ambitious move, he expanded his holdings to include the Village Voice and New West in the mid-1970s, only to be blindsided in 1976 when an up-and-coming Australian press maven named Rupert Murdoch went behind Mr. Felker’s back with a hostile — and successful — bid for all three publications. Ironically, Mr. Murdoch got the idea, according to one account, from listening to Mr. Felker complain about his lousy relationship with his investors.
Having become a bit of a non-story by his own definition of what a story should be — he had always told readers that his magazine was about “how the power game is played, and who are the winners” — Mr. Felker went on to pursue success at several other publications, including Esquire, the New York Daily News, and Manhattan Inc. However, he never quite caught lightning in a bottle again the way he did at New York.
Born in St. Louis, Mo., on October 2, 1925, Mr. Felker was the son of the managing editor of the Sporting News. He attended Duke University, graduating in 1951 after a stint in the Navy and a short-lived job as statistician for the New York Giants.
Mr. Felker’s road to journalism soon reached the heights of 1950s magazine publishing. He worked as a political reporter at Life and helped develop Sports Illustrated. In 1957, he joined Esquire as features editor. There he developed a distinctive style of story, aimed at ambitious social climbers. One iconic story was “The Compact Yacht,” which informed Esquire readers “how to be rich at the cost of hardly anything.” He left the publication in 1962 when he was passed over in a bid to be the top editor. He soon joined the New York Herald Tribune, where in 1964 he was named editor of its new Sunday magazine, called New York. After several mergers and a printers’ strike, the paper — by then renamed the World Journal Tribune — folded in 1967. Mr. Felker used $6,575 of his severance pay to buy the rights to the “New York” name. With backing from Wall Street investor Armand Erpf, he brought Tribune veterans Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe on board with his new magazine. He also snagged designer Milton Glaser, who would give the new magazine a distinctive look Mr. Glaser described as not beautiful but one meant “to convey energy, compression, density, information.”
Launched on April 8, 1968, New York went through a short adolescence before emerging at the end of the year with its rich mix of gravity, style, and service. In addition to Mr. Breslin and Mr. Wolfe, early writers included Gloria Steinem, George Goodman, and Gail Sheehy, who would marry Mr. Felker in 1984. She survives him, as do an adopted daughter, Mohm Sheehy, a sister, Charlotte Gallagher, a stepdaughter, Maura Sheehy Moss, and three step-grandchildren.
Other writers whom Mr. Felker brought on included Pete Hamill, Nora Ephron, Ken Auletta, Mike Lupica, George Plimpton — in short, the lion’s share of the people who defined that era of New York City writing.
Among the magazine’s early sensations was Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic,” a story about a dinner party featuring Black Panthers at Leonard Bernstein’s Park Avenue apartment. “Redpants and Sugarman,” Ms. Sheehy’s account of a prostitute and her pimp, demonstrated the sometimes-rickety underpinnings of New Journalism when it was discovered that the portrait of the prostitute was a composite.
But Mr. Felker always defended his creation. “Young journalists … were attracted to this form of new journalism,” he told the Washington Post in 1993. “We were using the classic forms of English literature to tell nonfiction stories. But — and this is the big ‘but’ — it really takes talented people to pull this off.”
When Mr. Murdoch made a 1976 bid to take away the Voice, New West, and New York, Mr. Felker didn’t give up without a fight. Alongside Washington Post owner Katharine Graham, he made a last-ditch counteroffer to Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp., but ultimately lost out. However, Mr. Felker did not walk away empty-handed. He left the takeover with $1.5 million.
“What happened with New York will never happen again,” Mr. Felker vowed after the loss, only to face another setback in his next venture. In 1977, he used money from a British publisher to buy his old stomping grounds, Esquire, which he tried to transform from a conventional men’s monthly into a New York-like path-breaker. But just two years later, in 1979, his British backer sold the magazine, and Mr. Felker left. He then made another vow, this one to Time magazine: “In the end, I’m going to do something else in journalism,” Mr. Felker said. “I’m a journalist.”
Mr. Felker lived up to that promise, although it was a bumpy road. In the 1980s, he attempted to make the New York Daily News a more trend-spotting publication, and did consulting for US News & World Report. Just before the Wall Street crash of 1987, he took on an editorship at Manhattan Inc., only to see the publication go under in 1990. One last venture, M magazine, died in 1992.
Mr. Felker lived quietly for the remainder of his years. In 1994, he moved to California. A year later, the University of California, Berkeley’s graduate school for journalism set up the Felker Magazine Center in his honor. He spent his time lecturing at the school and living what he called “a life of ideas.” He also began a 10-year battle with throat cancer in 1994, eventually beating the disease. He moved back to New York in 2004.
A longtime friend and the international editor in chief of Reader’s Digest, Frank Lalli, said yesterday that Mr. Felker’s essence was that of a leader.
“People talk about his eye for talent, and his tremendous respect for writers, and his curiosity, and his energy, but ultimately, he was a leader,” Mr. Lalli said. “We all followed him.”