LUNCH WITH MILTON: The early days of New York Magazine
On iconic designer Milton Glaser's web site, among the
intriguing notations are three separate versions of his biography. The first is
listed as "brief." The second as "medium." The last
one—which of course is the most interesting—with his typical self-deprecating
humor, is described as "interminable." I met Milton years ago when I
was trying to talk his co-founder of New York Magazine, Clay Felker, into doing
one with me called Gotham. A couple of things got in the way of that, but not
before he set up a certain meeting with Milton Glaser.
"You have to meet him," was how Clay put it.
"He's brilliant," he said with a decibel of enthusiasm that was
unusual even for him. As I paved the way for this interview, I mentioned that
first meeting with Milton, and he confessed he had forgotten about it. But he
seemed genuinely pleased that I had such a fine reminiscence.
Owen Lipstein: I would like to start by asking about Clay
Felker. What do you think are the salient characteristics that made him what he
was?
Milton Glaser: Curiosity. It's hard to reduce anyone to a
single characteristic, obviously, but he really wanted to understand how the
world worked, and particularly in those areas that he didn't have a lot of
experience in. He was kind of the kid from the country who came to the big city
and pressed his nose up against the pane and wanted to see what was going on.
OL: I remember that he'd quiz people as if they'd just shown
up for an exam—you could almost never stop being questioned, especially if you
were younger.
MG: Especially if you came from a different experience than
he did. Most of us tend to be curious about things within the realm of our own
self-interest that will benefit us in some way. Clay was just generally curious
about anything from cleaning a sewer to writing a novel. It was this
generalized curiosity that was most unexpected from him.
OL: I knew him when he was in his 50's and 60's, but to me
he seemed almost boyish.
MG: Boyish. That's good. It was almost a kind of innocence.
What happened with Clay was that even though he wasn't a journalist for a very
long time—and the characteristic of journalists is to get cynical after a
while, because they've heard it all—Clay never got into that state of mind. He
wasn't the kind of guy who you'd go up to and say, "I have this and this,”
and who would reply, "l’ve heard it before." Quite contrary. Anything
outside his interest could be equally compelling to him. That, I have to say,
is not a frequently encountered attitude, particularly among people who are
involved in editorial work. It's very easy to feel you know it all, you've
heard it all, and now it's just a question of finding somebody who will tell
you something you don't know. Clay was not that way.
OL: What are some memories from the early days of starting
New York Magazine that now stand out in your mind?
MG: What I remember most was the fact that we were so
unprepared to do the magazine: we had made a lot of plans for the launch issue,
but without really thinking that the following week we were going to have
another issue. [Laughter]
The first five or six months we were scrambling like mad
because we hadn't fully anticipated what doing the magazine would mean,
although we all had magazine experience. What I remember more than anything
else was the confusion, the disorder, the improvisation that came out of doing a weekly, which is very different
than doing a monthly. We were always under the gun, and we had to be
resourceful enough to compensate for our bad planning.
Back then we were also putting it together in a really crude
way compared to now in the age of computers. Everything was done by hand:
cutting overlays, doing lettering, piecing it together in the most
opportunistic way. We were sending out mechanical boards that were pasted up
with little strips of type, and words were edited by being cut out with a razor
blade and replaced with another little tenth of an inch piece of paper. Then we
would hope that it would all hold on long enough to get over to the engravers.
It was really the delightful amateur nature of the
experience that was so compelling. When you're kind of improvising and you have
to do things at the last second, you really feel enormously good if you can
make it. Of course, we had our failures as well. It was also the intimate and
simple nature of doing it. We'd sit around. We'd have a sandwich. Somebody
would say, "How about doing a story on duh, duh, duh?" And before you
knew it, somebody was out on the street doing the story. This lack of
professional competence, I think, was the most intriguing thing about doing the
magazine for the first two years or so—and then the discovery that people liked
it, that they liked, I suppose, this extemporaneous unprofessionalism.
OL: Doing a start-up weekly—which in New York City must have
felt like a daily—before all the computer technology arrived, never mind the
fact that there were all of these incredibly brilliant people walking around,
must have been exhilarating.
MG: Well, those were some of the rewards of doing a
magazine. It was 1968 and things were very different in terms of how you
produced these things. This magazine had a very nice characteristic, which was
that we would have lunch with ten or 12 people who were sort of regulars, part
of our community of participants. We would say, "Well, what's happening
out there? Anything interesting?" The photographer would say, "Well,
you know, I noticed there's a new excavation on such-and-such," and Clay
would say, "Well, bring us a couple pictures." And so on. I have to
say, that kind of collective assembling of the magazine was a lot more exciting
than what happens now where you have a couple of big brains, the
editor-in-chief and the publisher and so on saying, "Let's do a story on
X. Joe, you take care of it," where it becomes more of a question of using
others to produce things for you, but not using their brains.
In our case, for a long part of the earliest issues of the
magazine, it really was a collective assembly and a lot of different people
were involved. The ideas came over the transom. A lot of them were really good
ideas. Again, it was part of the amateur nature of doing it—but it produced
great vitality.
OL: I've been reading a lecture you gave in London
concerning ten rules you keep. My favorite one is, "Some people are toxic.
Avoid them."
MG: Well, that wasn't really my rule. It came out of a book
by Fritz Paris, who you may remember was a great guru of the '60s. A lot of
what he had to say was nonsensical, but in this case I thought he had hit on
something that paralleled my own experience, which is people are not necessarily
universally toxic, but some combinations of personalities become toxic. Usually
you can tell before it starts, if you believe your instincts. Somebody comes
into a room, you can make a decision saying "yes" or "no"
about them. Most of the time you're right.
OL: I wish I'd applied that rule earlier in my life.
MC: Yea, me too.
OL: The second rule is, "Doubt is better than
certainty," despite the fact that people are always saying that we should
be confident.
MG: Well, you know, you grow up and you are trained to
believe in things, whether it's in God or in aesthetics or in politics or
anything else. My experience in life is not to believe anything. Basically, you
hold onto a belief for as long as it's convincing or useful. But as soon as you
begin to understand that there are almost no things that deserve your constant
approval, you begin to realize that everything has to be examined, including
religion, politics and economics. There is no certainty about anything,
including the things you believe in most.
I think basically, the less you are certain of, the more you
have arrived at a point where your understanding has increased. Open mindedness
is perhaps the most desirable characteristic of getting old, because it's so
easy to close the door on your own beliefs and to re-experience everything.
OL: How did the "I Love NY" campaign happen?
MG: A guy came in named Bill Doyle, who was the assistant
commissioner of commerce. He had just stepped off the plane from Hong Kong
where he was working in some capacity. And he said, "I've been hired by the
city to get this campaign going.” I said, "What campaign?" He said, “’I
Love New York.' We have the phrase and we need a visual equivalent for
it." That's how it happened. The guy came in off the street.
So I submitted something. He approved it, then we got the
commissioners together. They approved it. Then a day later I was in a taxi and
I thought, You know, that's not enough. I think there's a better way to do it.
I made a little note to myself on an envelope, then called him up and I said,
"I have a better way of doing it." He said. "Oh, please don't
bug me. It's hell to get those people together." I said, "Yeah, but
come over here. Let me show you this thing." He came over. He looked at
it. He said. "Yeah, you're right, that's better." So we called the
commissioners and they replaced what they had already accepted with this other
little icon, and the rest is history.
OL: On the subject, you think that the art and science of
actual sketching is something that more designers, and more kids, should learn
about, as opposed to relying so much on computers.
MG: My new book, called Drawing Is Thinking [Overlook, 2008]
is all about the issue of attentiveness. Very often, if I don’t draw, I don't
see what's in front of me.
In drawing, it's not so much that you are replicating what's
in front of you, but that you are forced to observe what is in front of you.
Otherwise most of us are on what I call cruise control as far as observation
goes. You don't see what's in front of you; it is only when the mind shifts
into attentiveness that you begin to understand what you're looking at.
OL: How do you account for the incredible energy of your
career—for the amazing, diverse things that you have, and still are, accomplishing?
MG: Oh, I don't know. As someone said, "The mind is a
very poor instrument for the examination of the self." All I know is that
since I was a kid all I wanted to do was make things. That impulse to make
something out of wood or clay or through drawing was something that I had ever
since I was about four or five years old.
When I was eight I had rheumatic fever and I was in bed for
a year after I got out of the hospital. In the morning my mother used to bring
me a big wooden board, and a pound of clay. I would spend the entire day making
an army or a city or a horse out of the clay. Then, at the end of the day, she
would take it away—and I was so happy that I could look forward to the next day
where I would pound the clay back into a ball and start all over again.
I realized that of all the things that kept me alive and
engaged, that just spending time, making little things out of clay was very,
very important in developing my whole sense of what life was about.
