A beast of an editor: The Harold Hayes papers

In the late 1950s, Esquire magazine had turned to pulp. The 20-year-old men’s literary institution once ran commentary, fiction and features by the likes of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But it had veered more towards content appealing to the lowest common denominator: pin-ups, war stories and true crime.

By 1956, Hayes had finished a stint in the Marines, worked for United Press in Atlanta and moved to New York City to work in magazines. That year Esquire’s founding publisher Arnold Gingrich hired him as an assistant.

It was the Golden Age of the American magazine. Postwar affluence and a rapidly developing American culture gave fodder to the medium, more sophisticated than a newspaper, more intimate than the burgeoning medium of television, more satisfying than film. And Esquire was asserting itself as a major player in the game.

By the end of the decade, Gingrich would take on two other noteworthy assistants. One, Hugh Hefner, would abscond to Chicago with the more salacious threads of the old Esquire and weave them into Playboy. The other, Clay Felker, would become Hayes’ rival for control of the magazine.

By 1962, Gingrich was 59 and had been at the helm of Esquire for 29 years. And both Hayes and Felker had designs on his position.

The old man perpetuated the competition, playing the men off each other in what must have been a fascinating intra-office drama. Hayes would come out the winner, named managing editor of the book that year, while Felker spun off to start the Sunday supplement for the New York Herald, recruiting writers such as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem and Adam Smith to carry the flag. The freebie supplement would eventually become New York magazine, still the best weekly in the business.

Hayes worked his own desk, putting out the kind of magazine writing still analyzed in journalism schools and creative nonfiction classes today.

But in truth, nobody won this competition for the top chair at Esquire. Hayes hung on as managing editor and editor but would never be publisher He left in 1973. Felker actually bought the magazine in 1977 but sold it two years later after a failed attempt to turn it into a “fortnightly.”

Hayes took a few turns on television and did some writing — most memorably a series for Life magazine about animal researcher Dianne Fossey that would become the film Gorillas in the Mist. 

His contribution to the new journalism, however, lives forever in those boxes on the sixth floor.

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The writer Gay Talese spent most of 1965 chasing down Frank Sinatra so he could file a profile for Esquire under Hayes’ editorship.

After a few years of boozy irrelevance, Sinatra was becoming hot again. Talese, fellow Italian-American from the New York area, thought he might be able to pin down the man with a long-form profile.

Trouble was, Sinatra was being kind of a dick about it.

He ditched interviews, had his goons run interference, hid behind velvet ropes and closed doors. Talese was getting frustrated, and in November he typed a letter to his editor from Los Angeles asking for guidance.

“Yesterday I saw Frank Sinatra very briefly. He did not have time to talk — he never seems to have time….

“The disappointments and long wait of this assignment are frustrating, but perhaps we’re making progress. Frank S did allow me (with a half-dozen other of his followers) to accompany him to his dressing room yesterday and he was unself-conscious enough to remove his toupee in my presence.

“The money is holding out… because I am charging things to this hotel bill. I checked around at other hotels and apartments, and the savings would not, I think, be that substantial. Everything is expensive in this goddamned place…. It’s a real gamble, I realize, and yet I have a feeling things will work out. I might not get the piece we’d hoped for — the real Frank Sinatra — … but perhaps, by not getting it — and by getting rejected constantly and by seeing his flunkies protecting his flanks — we will be getting close to the truth about the man.”

The piece, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” ran in the April 1966 edition of Esquire. It remains one of the most important pieces of journalism in the last 100 years.

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Hayes’ letters include hundred of missives like this: editorial wranglings between writers and sources, personal words of encouragement, negotiations, criticisms and the deflections thereof.

In April 1965, he turned down a long-form essay about St. Louis by celebrated Beat writer William S. Burroughs, saying, “[I]t’s a mite incoherent for us, I’m afraid. We’ll have to pass up the opportunity of buying it.”

In 1966 he critiqued a piece by Peter Bogdanovich, who at the time was a film critic but would two years later turn to directing and, in 1971, make The Last Picture Show, a coming-of-age masterpiece set in a small Texas town that would be nominated for eight Academy Awards and win two of them.

But in 1966, he was just another journo taking guff from his editor.

“Well, I think this is vastly improved — at least 35% better than it was. But I still can’t use it. Because I do not relish the idea of being called at home and chewed out, let me set forth my reason for this reaction as succinctly as possible: the rendering of Sonny and Cher as apt representatives of teenage fantasy, and the concordant revelation that their own personal existence is a state of near vacuity, insufficiently progress our editorial coverage in this area….”

That same year, Hayes offered the novelist Thomas Pynchon an experimental column seven years before Pynchon would publish his first masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon did not get the gig. Hayes wrote:

“All of us felt it was strong and thoughtful, and very close to what we are after. As I mentioned, I believe, I had asked several other writers to try too, and our choice has come down to Wilfrid Sheed.”

I’d never heard of Wilfrid Sheed, but he would win a National Book Award the next year, in 1967. His only other award came 20 years later, a Grammy for the liner notes on the album The Voice – The Columbia Years 1943-1952 by none other than Frank Sinatra.

The photographer Diane Arbus, before her suicide in 1971, earned her reputation by shooting “marginal” people — transgender folks, circus freaks and others on the cultural fringe.

In the 1950s she endeavored to shoot the inmates of a women’s prison in New York City for Esquire. An official from the NY Department of Corrections told her she would have to make a “donation” of at least $50 — “CBS gave us $350” he told her — in order to gain access.

When Hayes got wind of it he wrote the official directly in characteristic prose:

“[Y]our organization is the first one in the city in which we have encountered such a proposal in subjects which we assume to be open and of concern to the general public….

“Therefore we are unable to meet with your requirements, and I wonder if this is really a proper reason for your exclusion of us.”

When Hayes dispatched Arbus to shoot Joan Crawford, the notoriously difficult actress declared that she had never heard of Arbus. An Esquire secretary wrote, “Personally I wonder if the great Miss Crawford might not scare the living daylights out of Miss Arbus,” and suggested a more traditional fashion photog for the shoot. Hayes remained true to his vision in his reply.

“Nix. Call Arbus and find out what she’s published in Fashion Mags, get tearsheets and send to Crawford.”

A few months later, he revisited the subject with Arbus.

“[L]et Crawford go,” Hayes wrote in a short note. “Will get someone else.”

In one of her final pieces of correspondence, Hayes sent her a tiny newspaper horoscope clipping affixed to his personal notepaper.

It reads: “Those who hold the reins have the advantage and you resent it. Your turn will come. Just be patient.”

The Tom Wolfe folder teems with back-and-forths, Hayes’ typed on Esquire letterhead, Wolfe’s quite often handwritten in ink-dipped calligraphy.

It was in 1963, under Hayes’ editorship, that Wolfe took on an assignment to write about the new phenomenon of custom cars. Crippled by writer’s block, he compiled his wild and fanciful notes — with lots of italics, odd::::: punctuation and random exclamations! — and submitted what would become “The kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamline baby,” one of the very first published pieces of new journalism.

But it was another piece, “Post-orbital remorse,” for another magazine, Rolling Stone, that elicited the highest praise from Hayes.

“Post-orbital remorse,” about the depression astronauts felt after returning to Earth, eventually became the book The Right Stuff in 1979; a film version came out in 1983.

Hayes took an edit of the book before it went to print, and was clearly blown away:

“I really can’t tell you how impressed and admiring I am of what you are doing with this. I expect anything you do to be distinctive, original and compelling but with this you have a theme (many themes!) that touches the lives of everyone, gives them a priceless perception and understanding of the history of their time — and all with whatever artistic skills this terribly complex world requires for us to understand. I am just terribly proud of you.”

I can tell you: Editors rarely talk like that.

His connection to his writers was legendary, but one letter in his files testifies to it directly.

The writer Nora Ephron worked at Esquire in 1973, when Hayes lost his job. She was then a young journalist but would go on to write, among other things, the essay collection Wallflower at the Orgy, the novel Heartburn and screenplays for When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and Julie & Julia.

In a note typed on pink paper, she wrote to her favorite editor:

“I have had two months here, and I have loved it, largely because of you, and I’m not talking about how much fun you are, or how cute, or any of that, but about… the goading you mentioned at lunch, how extraordinary it is to watch you pull out of people what they didn’t know they could do.”

He saved his most effusive charm for Dorothy Parker, the onetime denizen of the Algonquin Round Table and America’s foremost woman of letters of the 20^th Century.

By 1957, the year of Parker’s letter to Hayes — written in loopy, schoolgirl script — she was 64, had been blacklisted in Los Angeles for her perceived communist leanings and was living and drinking in an apartment on the Upper East Side. She wanted to write book reviews, and the first one, it seems, went well. Hayes delicately asked her to cut 31 lines from it.

By 1959, however, the doyenne was having trouble making deadlines.

In November 1959, Hayes wrote to thank her for allowing him to visit her home and for the “elegant bottle opener.” He went on to say:

“I didn’t have the nerve to say that your column is due next week. Outside the hospitality of your home now and only slightly less cowardly, I find the production editor more formidable than, last evening, I ever would have suspected. Is this coming Monday too much of a drag?”

Jan. 2, 1962:

“Your piece never came and there is a good possibility that I will be strung up by the thumbs by the accounting department unless I can get you back in the magazine forthwith.”

May 14, 1962:

“We need a column by Wednesday the 23^rd. Would you write it to us and send it to us this time? We will be willing to take dictation over the phone indefinitely rather than not have it at all. But this is bound to be wearing on you. And even if this is not the case, I fear the column suffers too much. As you know, we tend to garble your meaning and sabotage your phrases, neither of which occurs when you are able to send us a manuscript.”

Sept. 4, 1962:

“The enemy is at the gate. I’ve been forced in recent weeks to an agonizing reappraisal of the inventory and discover that we’ve paid you roughly 5,000 bucks for columns we haven’t received.”

Oct. 22, 1962:

“I checked immediately on our payments to you in order to see if we had fouled up in some way…. I told them you had failed to receive checks for the months of September and August. They are unable to account for this discrepancy since they have received your cancellations of these checks from the bank for these two months. The only thing this can point to is robbery or forgery in the mail room, which I hope to Christ isn’t the case.”

March 8, 1963:

“Guess what, by God! Management has got to the point of missing you so sorely they are holding me responsible for your absence….

“They asked me then what could we do? Send her $750, I said hopefully, to convince her how much we want her back.

“And they agreed. Your check will arrive within a week or so, no strings attached. How about that! And if you just get me one column — just one… I can send you another.”

Aug. 28, 1963:

“The check went out yesterday….. To facilitate this, I delivered to our Accounting Department seven pounds of my flesh. They will return it if I get a column from you in two weeks. Don’t worry unduly about this since I am slightly overweight.”

Based on this exchange alone, Hayes is the greatest editor in the world.

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