The Prime of Mr. Neville Brody
A conversation with designer Neville Brody (The Face, Arena, City Limits, more).
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THIS EPISODE IS A SPECIAL COLLABORATION WITH OUR FRIENDS AT COMMERCIAL TYPE
“Once you have broken down the rules, literally anything is possible.’”
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In the business of magazine design, few names resonate as profoundly as Neville Brody. And, to this day, he lives by those words.
Renowned for his groundbreaking work and commitment to pushing design boundaries at magazines like The Face, Arena, Per Lui, and others, Brody is a true auteur in the world of design. We talked to him at the launch of his spectacular new monograph, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 3.
Nurtured on 1970s British punk music, which rejected anything that appeared self-indulgent or overwrought, Brody found the perfect launch pad at The Face, the London-based music, fashion, and culture monthly, created by editor Nick Logan in 1980.
The Face inspired an array of fellow magazine rule-breakers, including the late Tibor Kalman, David Carson, and Fabien Baron, who calls Brody’s work “powerful, aggressive, and simple.”
Since then, Brody's journey in graphic design has been marked by a relentless, almost unforgiving pursuit of innovation. His magazine design challenged conventional norms and redefined visual storytelling. Brody’s design approach is characterized by a rejection of conventional grid systems and editorial hierarchies, and a willingness to break free from established design rules.
And he thinks magazines today are missing a giant opportunity:
“That’s the beauty of print, that you can’t achieve in the same way digitally. Digital is so commoditized. We’re not expressing content anymore. We’re just delivering it.
Neville Brody's legacy in magazine design lies in his fearless approach to challenging the status quo and his ability to capture the zeitgeist of his time. By pushing the boundaries of traditional graphic design, he not only influenced the look and feel of magazines but also inspired a generation of designers to embrace innovation, experimentation, and a spirit of creative rebellion. Brody's work continues to be celebrated for its enduring impact on the evolution of graphic design and its role in shaping the visual language of contemporary media.
“Graphic design is all about manipulating the message in order to deliver it. You never have an innocent message.”
Patrick Mitchell: I want to start by asking you an offbeat question: Is it a burden being the spokesman for your entire field every time you take a stage?
Neville Brody: I think it’s more of a burden being in a place where you think that someone else is that spokesman. It’s a difficult question because I don’t see myself as a spokesman for an entire field ever.
Patrick Mitchell: No, I don’t think you do, but I think everyone else does.
Neville Brody: Oh. That’s interesting because there are certainly other spokespersons, -people. You know?
Patrick Mitchell: Everybody just expects gravity from you. And sometimes I would imagine you just want to say, “I just did this because I just did it.”
Neville Brody: Well, sometimes you just do it because you love what you do. And thinking about it, sometimes, is something that happens in retrospect. So it’s not always logical. But at the heart of what I’ve been doing has always been a kind of rigorous structure. And then you improvise within that framework.
So that’s been all the way through. But honestly, just to come back to that question, I think every graphic designer is in a place of being a spokesman. Because I think graphic design is all about manipulating the message in order to deliver it. So you never have an innocent message.
All messaging is about manipulation in one sense or another, even if it’s unconscious. And graphic designers are particularly, I’d say, guilty. But also blessed with that role of turning invisible ideas into tangible concepts. And each time a designer is involved in that process, you’re being quite political, actually, because you’re bringing the designer’s interpretation of that message to play.
So the font you choose, the colors you choose, the images you curate, all of this impacts the way anyone will look at the world. So, yeah, we’re all spokesmen. I’ve just put my neck on the line.
Patrick Mitchell: I was looking at the first edition of your first book, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, and I paid $85 for it in 1988. And your new book, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 3, is $85 on Amazon right now. You’ve actually given quite a discount, because in 1988 dollars, your original book is $225. So thank you for that. And now I will hand it off to Deb.
Debra Bishop: Well, I’m hoping that you don’t mind if we go back in time a little bit to start, as we typically do. So, Neville, you received your early education from Minchenden Grammar School, focusing on A-level art. Can you really choose a major that early on in the UK?
Neville Brody: Two things. One, it wasn’t a grammar school. Actually, it was what we call a ‘comprehensive.’ And a comprehensive wasn’t streamed in the same way as a grammar school. You didn’t have to do an exam to enter.
Patrick Mitchell: What age are we talking about?
Neville Brody: We’re talking about the age of 11 to 18. So it’s a proper secondary school and we did O-levels and then A-levels—O-levels at 16, A-levels at 18. And you don’t major either in UK secondary education, particularly. That’s a very American—or North American—thing.
But when you get to A-levels, you do start to be much more selective. And I did English, art, and technical drawing. So I learned how to do bits of machinery by hand, as bits of technical drawing. And that had a huge impact on the fact that, you know, graphic design is creativity and engineering.
But, in all honesty, I skipped school from the age of 14 to 16. And wasn’t exactly an innocent school child at that time. You know, it’s that ‘kidult’ thing of kids in inner cities growing up quite quickly. And doing things like starting smoking at 11, which we were doing here, et cetera. But we’re not going to go into that.
And then I crammed revised at the end of that and came fourth in the score at which point my teachers hated me because they felt that the only way to achieve anything is by applying yourself 100 percent of the time and they were not very flexible.
Patrick Mitchell: Were your parents aware you were skipping?
Neville Brody: I should ask them. I should ask my mom, you know. I think she trusted me to manage it the way I felt I needed to manage it, rather than try and suppress my instincts. She probably knew I was smoking at 11.
Debra Bishop: So you’ve always been pushing the boundaries as a young kid. What was your world like growing up in Southgate in the 1960s?
Neville Brody: Well, Southgate was a North London suburb that was created around an extension to the underground line. It was built in the 1930s, most of it, and it was all similar, patterned housing—very rural, suburban, urban. And at the same time, it was the center for a lot of misbehavior. And there were skinheads at the time—a lot of pre-punk stuff going on. There were hippies. So a lot of the sub-cults.
And I grew up at the tail end of the hippie movement. We weren’t proper hippies, but we weren’t other sorts of tribes. And Southgate itself was obviously boring. But there were a lot of pubs, and for some reason at that time we were allowed into pubs at the age of 12 or 13 without having to show identities, because we all looked a bit older for some reason.
So growing up there, it was an interesting space and a lot of my colleagues that I’ve met since, grew up in a similar area. John Wozencroft, who wrote [my] first few books, grew up about a mile up the road from me. And people like Keith Levene, who ended up as the original guitarist for The Clash, and then worked with John Lydon [aka “Johnny Rotten] on Public Image Limited. And he was a mate of mine growing up, so there was this sort of interesting thing about the suburbs being the center of creativity at that time.
Debra Bishop: It’s unusual. It sounds like the environment and what was going on there at the time was a catalyst for you loving art and beginning the idea of what you wanted to be.
Neville Brody: Well, to be honest, I was drawing before I was walking. So I was picking up a pen or pencil way before I could even stand on my feet. And so for me, there’d never been a question of what I was going to do. I was never going to be a train driver, or a doctor, or a lawyer. I was always going to be an artist. And then it was just a decision then of what form that would take.
Interior spreads from The Face
“Going to art school is all about finding yourself. But an art school is there to support the development, not to impose the development on any student.”
Debra Bishop: I think drawing is such an underrated skill. Today, especially. So were there any inspirations at that time that you can remember?
Neville Brody: Just coming back to the drawing thing, when I took over as head of program for visual communication at the RCA (Royal College of Art), the first thing I did was to try and reintroduce proper drawing. I think it’s such a critical skill, which becomes ever-more distant with digital technologies and social media. And the instant gratification of our cultures now means that, you know, sitting down to take the time over drawing seems a bit of an anathema, but around that time the biggest influence, I think, on me was what was happening in music.
From the age of 10 or 11, I discovered reggae. And that was really taking off in the UK. And not only was it a huge impact on music culture, but also visually with the record labels being very, let’s say, low-resolution, often done by hand rather than printed en masse.
And that, coupled with gatefold album sleeves. And that led me to become very interested in people like Roger Dean and Hipgnosis. And actually, I ended up, after leaving college, spending some time working with Hipgnosis.
Roger Dean, incidentally, I’d sent my record covers into a book called the Album Cover Album, of which he was the editor, and he looked at my work, apparently, and said, “God, any baby could draw this.” And he rejected it all.
Debra Bishop: I have both of those books.
Neville Brody: I actually did the book of Hipgnosis. Around that time I did a Pink Floyd cover, which I never put my name on. I shall share that privately one day. But in Britain, the music industry was the biggest opportunity for young designers to really find a platform that supported them and allowed them to publish their work. Especially when punk came along and in almost every bedroom in London there was a record label happening. It was an incredible time. At one point there were 200 reggae singles coming out every week in London!
Debra Bishop: I loved record album design. I aspired to that. But you know, by the time I got there things were becoming very small. In many ways.
Neville Brody: Yeah, the biggest influence around then was probably the Surrealists which would have been, you know, Dali. It would have been Escher, particularly. And that gradually got replaced by people like Richard Hamilton, who was a very major influence on my work, William Burroughs, Dadaism.
Patrick Mitchell: Yeah, I have to thank you, because I was not aware of Wolfgang Weingart. But, my God! I went off on a tangent after reading in my research about him being your influence and it’s just like, “Whoa!”
Neville Brody: Well, Wolfgang Weingart—if you look at all that was happening in California at the end of the ’80s or even the, kind of, mid 80s, was all coming out of Weingart’s influence.
Patrick Mitchell: April Greiman? People like that?
Neville Brody: Exactly. Well, she studied under him. And that set the whole pattern for all of the early digital work that was coming out at that time.
Patrick Mitchell: Jumping back to college, you attended the London College of Printing, which is now the London College of Communication, which our friend Alex Hunting attended. What age are we talking about now?
Neville Brody: It would be 19, I think.
Patrick Mitchell: Yeah, so you’re just finding yourself and you’re trying to feel comfortable about an approach to your future, and it sounds like your teachers were very harsh. They condemned the “uncommercial quality” of your work. But at that age, how does that not wreck you at such a vulnerable, fragile place in your life?
Neville Brody: Well, partly because I’d made the choice to go there. I thought if you’re going to learn about anything, you need to probably go to the most strict learning environment to be able to take that on board. And, you know, like jazz, you have to really learn your instrument and the tonal scales, et cetera, in order to then improvise.
And I thought, “Well, I’m not going to be able to undermine or challenge design if I don’t really understand the fundamentals.” I’d been to a foundation course at Hornsey College of Art in London. And Hornsey was the location in the late ’60s where all the student uprising started in the UK. It had been largely neutered by the time I went there, but there was still an undercurrent.
And the guy who sat behind me, he was going to the early Sex Pistols concerts, which I rejected completely at that point. But he turned out to be Mike Barson, who was the keyboardist and songwriter for Madness. So there was a lot of that going on.
The Slits punk band went to Hornsey and one tutor said the probably the best thing to me ever, which was that, “The difference between becoming a designer and becoming an artist is that a designer needs someone else to set the brief.”
And that made me understand that actually I needed to become a graphic designer. And have something to react with—either along with or against. Or use it as a provocation for thinking. To try and bring artistic sensibilities to a graphic design space. And then the decision was—London College of Printing had the reputation at that time of being the strictest environment for learning graphic design in Europe at that point.
Patrick Mitchell: Yeah, and I should say, it wasn’t all their fault. You invited this upon yourself. There’s a quote that says, “If my tutors said they liked something I was doing, I would go away and change it.”
Neville Brody: Yeah, well that was an evidence of me being accepted by a generation that I didn’t want to be accepted by, with the values that they held close. And London College of Printing was a very commercial graphic design environment. And it had rules. It said, “If you’re going to do this kind of project, in this kind of material, at this size, for these people, this is the way you must do it.” So it was all driven by a set of internal regulations.
And I was saying, “Well, you know, the world has changed. And the world constantly changes. So we need to change the way we communicate.” And that was not greatly accepted. And I think on two points they tried to throw me out once for putting the Queen’s head sideways on a stamp, which, now, you’d be like, “Well, yeah? And?”
But at that time it was seen as something incredibly sacrilegious. And they did try to push me out. And then at the end of the course, my tutors failed me and gave me an actual zero. A fail. But the external assessors gave me a first, so there was this complete misalignment between what was going on in the London College of Printing and where the world had shifted to.
And so much so that within two or three years a lot of the tutors I’d had actually pretty much stopped teaching, because they realized they didn’t understand this new space and couldn’t move along with it. And I remember speaking to students there who felt quite lost at that point because they neither had support nor opposition.
So yeah, I think going to art school is all about finding yourself. You’re not there for the art school. And a lot of art schools make that mistake. But an art school is there to support the development, not to impose the development on any student.
Patrick Mitchell: Do you have a sense of at what point that might have changed—maybe because of you?
Neville Brody: No. It’s cyclic, isn’t it? You know, the problem with design education right now is that, especially in the UK, it’s such a numbers-driven game now. Government funding in the UK has almost disappeared for both further- and higher-education. And we’re looking more and more like aiming towards an American model of endowments, of fee-paying gifts, and expensive courses. Incredibly expensive courses.
But the UK is moving towards that without the infrastructure, and structure, and culture that then allows people to be aware that a graduating student is for their benefit. For the benefit of the student. And in the US, I think that’s been taken on board more. That, you know, a good graduating student is good for the industry and for the economy, and for the nation. But here, we’re still putting all the emphasis and responsibility on the student who then has to pay back his or her education for the rest of their lives, pretty much.
Debra Bishop: Yes, it’s the same in the US. So, Neville you, at the age of 19, you had a crucial decision to make: stick with fine arts or change to graphics. What led you to your final decision to be a graphic designer?
Neville Brody: The reason I chose to move into a graphic design or a design field—there were two main reasons. Or three, probably. One was that I felt that graphic design and advertising were having a negative impact on people through their incredible ability to manipulate responses. And what I wanted to do was use my creativity to learn about those techniques and turn them upside down, turn them on their head.
And those are thoughts then that came into the way I approached magazine design and record cover design. The other reason was that I thought that fine art was dishonest and was ultimately about a market and sale value. And that wasn’t what it was wearing on its t-shirt. And that it was putting itself out there as something that was responsible for reflecting the underbelly of society and being able to pose philosophic questions, which it does. But by that point, it had become such a commercialized space.
And the third point was the idea that actually, painting reached a very small proportion of society. With graphic design, with the new access to wide ranging printing capability, meant that you could reach a far bigger audience and market that was moving faster.
The Face was a massive influence on fashion, music, and style for over two decades. Brody served as its art director from 1981–1986.
“What was great about The Face was the ability to use it as a laboratory to explore things and then have them published.”
Patrick Mitchell: Given how well-documented your music career was and the focus of our podcast, I think we’re going to skip that. But I would like to ask how—so you get out of college and you go almost directly into the music business, which is your first chance to really stretch yourself out and apply yourself to real things. I would love to know about the transition from—at a certain point you decided to go into The Face—what was it about what you were doing that made taking on the job at The Face so appealing. What did you learn doing music that made you feel like this was the next logical step?
Neville Brody: Well, a few revelations guided me on that. One of them was that when I was at London College of Printing, I really despised typography and type, because at the London College of Printing, that was the root of all good from their perspective. And I saw it as the root of all manipulation and evil, and it was very traditional. And I was just trying to break the rules. And one of the reasons I’d moved into doing record covers was because I saw myself very much as an image maker. Certainly never as a typographer.
And what I was doing in those record design years was treating type as image. Trying to explore the expressive qualities of typefaces, and typography, and words. And how can you actually treat that by unleashing its emotive quality. And not just assuming it’s just there on the page.
Treating type as image was the big breakthrough for me. And then incorporating that, processing it, experimenting with it. And when I left London College of Printing, the first job I did the day after I took down my graduation show was to work at Rocking Russian, which was Alex McDowell’s record design agency. And that was initially paid for by Glenn Matlock’s new band after he’d left the Sex Pistols. And Malcolm McLaren was involved in that.
So I joined that. And Alex had come out of a fine art background and had been introduced to Russian constructivist graphics by Terry Jones, who was at that time art director for British Vogue. And they came together to create i-D. So i-D was born at Rocking Russian. But by that time I hadn’t been paid for a number of weeks and had to get another job and was working at Stiff Records.
But before then, I’d gone to see Nick Logan at Smash Hits. He was editor of New Musical Express before then. He launched Smash Hits with EMAP—East Midlands Associated Printers—which is kind of a provincial printer that happened on these global titles. And Nick took the idea of The Face to that publisher, and they refused it.
So when I’d been to see Nick working on Smash Hits, he said, “I would never ever employ you for Smash Hits. If something else comes along, I’ll give you a call.” He probably did me a favor at that point. Then he launched The Face by taking out a small—not loan, but emptying his building society of the small amount of money he had in it. He launched it as an independent and I went to visit him after the launch. He was around the corner from Rocking Russian, in this damp basement where the carpet was just rotting with pools of water and ...
Patrick Mitchell: “Snow in the toilet”?
Neville Brody: Yeah, exactly. That was when I was squatting. We’ll come back to that. And nine or ten months in, he said to me, “You know, have a go. There’s this article about Kraftwerk. Here’s some pictures, here’s the type, it’s on these pages. Go and play around.” So I did. And I took it back and showed him, and he said, “You’ve got the job of designing this magazine. You’ve shown me you can do something I can’t do.”
And he gave me a completely free hand on it, which was incredible. He’d been working with Steve Bush before then, who had been doing Smash Hits. But Steve also had that other job. So, yeah. And it gradually became the art director position.
And don’t forget in those days we were putting the whole magazine together in a week. You know, three weeks I’d be doing other work and then suddenly everything came in and you had a week to do everything. There’d often be a bike messenger waiting at the door for you to finish your headline design then he would grab it and rush off to the printers. And often having to work all night drawing nearly every headline by hand at that time.
Patrick Mitchell: So it sounds like you were not making a living wage from The Face. Were you scrapping and doing all kinds of whatever you could find to work on?
Neville Brody: Yeah I was. It was hand-to-mouth at that time. And my dad, at that time, said, “Well, you know what?” He said, “Neville, why don’t you just give it all up and go and work in an ad agency?” And I just became even more stubborn as a result of that comment, of course, even more determined to make it. I didn’t want to sell out at that point.
And I chose four years of 24/7 work and abject poverty, rather than give in. And, you know, I’ve always thought that you have to be obsessed if you’re going to be in a position to make something work for you.
Debra Bishop: Absolutely.
Patrick Mitchell: I’m picturing Sid and Nancy.
Debra Bishop: Neville, when you sat down at your desk on the first day of The Face, did you have a plan? Did you have a plan or did the ideas come gradually?
Neville Brody: No, what was great about The Face—and, to be honest, on a huge amount of projects since especially in editorial—it was the ability to use it as a laboratory to explore things and then have them published. And then respond in real time, you know. What did you keep? What did you throw out on the next issue? What was working?
Wire, the band, at one point didn’t make any record beyond two minutes because they thought, Once you’ve done everything and put the chorus in, why repeat it? And that was something that I took on board very much. You know, once you’ve tried something, if it works, there’s no point in doing it again. Try something new.
And in theory, in digital media, this is what we could be doing right now. But it’s incredible how short the lifespan of a piece of content is on social media and how much it looks like everything else. You know, we could be using that as a real cultural ideological accelerator.
But actually, I think the more that gets out there, the more conservative it is. And we’re almost back at the beginning of the seventies again.
From 1987–90, Brody served art director at Per Lui and Lei, for Condé Nast Milan, as well as the French magazine Actuel.
Debra Bishop: Did you feel like magazines were the perfect platform for you to prove your theories?
Neville Brody: No, I hated typography, remember? So my rebellious approach was to treat it as image on the page. And luckily with The Face, it was possible to do that—to design by hand. A new typeface for every issue at some point. Or hand-draw a complete headline and add twists and experiments. Have headlines that deteriorate and evolve from issue to issue. Yeah, that kind of living laboratory.
And in digital media, it’s not really feasible to do that. So in a way, I discovered it. But by protest, in a way. So I never thought, “Oh, I must work on The Face magazine.” And at that time, record sleeves were shifting away from being ideological and ideas-based and experimental into, you know, what photographer and what hairdresser you picked.
So the shift was away from content and towards image. It was away from theory and narrative and ended up being all about haircuts. And ironically, you know, the band I really despised at that point, who summed it all up, was Haircut One Hundred. And they happened to be on the very first cover I did for The Face.
Patrick Mitchell: Did you want to quit that day?
Neville Brody: I did. I didn’t quit. I wanted to quit. Yeah, you had to take that time ironically, as well.
Patrick Mitchell: Yeah. You know, the way you’re describing the startup of The Face, I imagine it was not like most well-funded magazines, where there’s an issue lineup presented, then a slew of photoshoots assigned and illustrations assigned. It sounds like it was much more of a “throw everything into a blender and make it happen.” So you were, I assume, receiving promotional photos and things like that. You probably had very little control over the photography.
Neville Brody: We actually controlled most of the photography. It’s quite odd now. The Face magazine was 40 years ago, Patrick. You know, obviously there’s something still quite key about The Face, in that not much has happened in magazines since, in some ways. And I’m not saying The Face was great or that it was that pioneering, but it happened to have been produced at the time when it was possible to do that.
So it’s quite odd for me 40 years on to be talking about something that was back then. But the thing that identified it, and coming back to what you were talking about, the photography, was that it was a community of new, young creatives all coming together. And we used to hang out in The French House, which was a pub in the middle of Soho in the middle of London.
And nearly all the people that were writing or appeared in the magazine were frequenting that same pub. And, you know, there’d be, like, 200 people that were architects, or artists, or actors, or photographers, and stylists all coming together into one place. So it was an explosion that was generational that probably happened in the sixties as well.
Patrick Mitchell: I worked at Musician magazine in the eighties and we did 100-page issues and the photo budget was, you know, $3,000. But money was never an issue because nobody cared. They just wanted to shoot for the magazine. They wanted to shoot the people they were shooting. So I imagine it was similar for you.
Neville Brody: Yeah, it was very similar on The Face. People would turn up, people we trusted and worked with, would just turn up with shoots. Especially on the fashion stuff, we weren’t commissioning almost any of that. That was being brought in because people that were producing it saw the magazine also as a platform for getting their ideas out.
Patrick Mitchell: I found this quote, I don’t know who Paul Gorman is, but he said, “The Face was one of those extraordinary publications that not only recorded what was going on in culture, but also played a part in progressing it.”
Neville Brody: Well, Paul wasn’t part of the culture, he’s come along since and written about the culture. So yeah, I often say it was made by the people who would have read it. It was a magazine we made for ourselves, basically. It was a fanzine.
Patrick Mitchell: You’ve also said it should have died at the end of the eighties.
Neville Brody: Well, yeah, I think the role it was playing then—it should have been. I should have been made redundant like 30 years ago and replaced.
Patrick Mitchell: Just at The Face. Not in life.
Neville Brody: Well, no, I think in life, as a graphic designer. I think what I expected was that another generation would come along and smash everything we’d done and come with something that was new and relevant then. And that never happened, surprisingly. And now graphic design isn’t dead, but it’s really shifted.
Patrick Mitchell: And there’s a new iteration of The Face. Have you seen it? Do you have any thoughts on that?
Neville Brody: I don’t have any thoughts on that at all, Patrick.
Patrick Mitchell: You think it’ll make it?
Neville Brody: I don’t know what "make it" means to publish a magazine these days. Now there’s a shop in London called magCulture, put together by Jeremy Leslie, he used to be the art director on Blitz magazine.
And in magCulture, it’s almost like a looping back. And it’s filled with hundreds of independent magazines. Because printing has become more accessible and cheaper to do, especially in short runs. We’re almost now at the “luxury” fanzine time in publishing. And it’s just great to see all those magazines in there. Some of them are only produced in editions of 200 or 2000.
So we’re seeing a sort of circle. It’s not quite the same as the vinyl one. Last year was the most vinyl sold in the UK for 20 years or something. So there’s a return to kind of physicality and unique objects.
“On Arena, we wanted to see how far we could push the use of Helvetica into an emotional space, how we could try and create what we were calling ‘concrete poetry.’”
Arena was a monthly men’s magazine launched in London in 1986 by The Face’s founder, Nick Logan.
Patrick Mitchell: So you’ve had roughly a 10-year magazine career. You designed City Limits, The Face …
Neville Brody: It comes in and out, Patrick. You know, The Face was—that period was ’82 to around ’90, so that’s probably like an eight-year thing plus, and I was including Per Lui and Lei magazine ...
Patrick Mitchell: Yeah. All happening at the same time. But the one I wanted to ask you about, which was “one of these things is not like the others.” You worked for Tatler.
Neville Brody: Yeah, one issue.
Brody’s one—and only—cover for Tatler.
Patrick Mitchell: How did that happen?
Neville Brody: Well, I don’t know how it happened, honestly. No, honestly, I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know who introduced me to who or called me. But I suddenly found myself in the Tatler, office in the Condé Nast building.
Patrick Mitchell: For our listeners Tatler is, I would say, the most similar in the States is Vanity Fair. But a very high-end, gossipy, glossy rag …
Neville Brody: … Particularly about a specific sector in society, which is not necessarily the aristocracy, but something quite close to that. But I went in there with a remit to try and change things. And I realized very swiftly that it was never going to be possible. But the one thing we did was, we did the first-ever cover which had no cover lines. It just had a single image. So I’m proud of that.
And I’m proud of the fact that I got out really quickly. It was a great experience and hellish at the same time. And the great Mark Boxer, who was the editor at the time, I realized that he, no matter what I was going to do, he was still the real art director and wasn’t going to be open to change.
And we actually did something else. I worked with Mademoiselle magazine in New York. It happened over the summer. And I was coming in, redesigning the fonts, the headlines, the page layout. And Alexander Liberman, who had been on vacation, came back and the first thing they did was show him my new designs. And he actually tore it up and put it in the bin, and said, “How pretentious! Mademoiselle will never have its own fonts!”
Patrick Mitchell: That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that, but I would assume that at some point after the big success of The Face, American publishers would be coming to poach, no?
Neville Brody: Well, no, it never happened. Mademoiselle was the only foray.
Patrick Mitchell: Interesting. If it had been the nineties, they would have made you an offer you couldn’t refuse. British art directors were a hot commodity at the time.
Neville Brody: Yeah. Well, the work we do in the US is very different now. You know, it’s clients like the Mayo Clinic, which is one of our big clients. Coca Cola. We’ve done all their new typefaces.
Patrick Mitchell: No, but I’m thinking even back in the nineties, you know, Rolling Stone, where Deb worked, was the premiere magazine. Not like The Face, but there were magazines in the sort of wheelhouse of The Face that were starting here.
Neville Brody: Yeah, we’ve never been approached at all about that. And ironically, I was really influenced by magazines like Wet, which I thought was an incredible magazine.
Patrick Mitchell: Yeah. That was a California magazine.
Neville Brody: Yep. Very postmodern.
Patrick Mitchell: Well, there was a big British invasion of art directors, several years after, in the mid-to-late nineties.
Neville Brody: I think I dropped out of magazines by that point. No, I was never approached. Mademoiselle was the only American magazine I ever got contacted by.
Debra Bishop: Let’s just talk a bit about Arena. I’ll just quote Neville, “On Arena, I wanted to reject style and decoration and show that it is actually the design that counts. We were trying to force Helvetica, which I hated, to be emotional. It was also an ironic statement. Everything was over-designed, design was the content at that time. At Arena, we were saying, ‘Well, no, the content is the content.’ In the end, though, it failed.”
Neville Brody: Well, Arena, for me, was launched as a kind of an antidote to what had been happening at The Face, which was that people were buying each issue in order to look for something new. In order to be able to copy the style. And The Face for me was never about style. Ever. That was the least interesting thing.
It was all about breaking down conventions, looking at the structures of language and visual language in order to allow new things to happen. But people would just copy the surface style of that and treat it as a very, kind of, decorative thing. And, within a week, it would be fed back into advertising. And then appear in the next copy of The Face.
It was looking more and more like the content, and they were catching up. And I just thought, We just have to stop now. We just have to stop seeking the new just for the sake of seeking the new. So by making Arena magazine have the same visual system every week every month—actually, it was quarterly—and use something as industrial as Helvetica, which is the typeface that they’d been largely using at the London College of Printing. If you’re going to boil everything away in modernism, it’s Helvetica.
So I wanted to use Helvetica, which was the antithesis of that kind of exuberant culture in society at the time. But then we found ourselves getting bored with it. But what we didn’t want to do was—and what happened at The Face a lot—we’re bringing in new emotions by creating new typefaces.
But on Arena, we wanted to see how far we could push the use of Helvetica into an emotional space, how we could try and create what we were calling ‘visual poetry,’ or ‘concrete poetry,’ but in editorial terms, and trying to force Helvetica into becoming much more painterly. So instead of introducing a new font to bring, kind of, painterly thoughts, we were choosing a really basic industrial font and trying to make it emotional. And allowing the content to be the thing that led that.
So using scale, using white space, using the way you would crop an image, the way that you would frame the rest of the text around that. Trying to make the page itself express the content as much as possible. And inevitably in the end that also became drawn down as a style, at which point after four or five years I said, “We just need to stop now.” And I pretty much pulled out of magazine design at that point.
And then in 2010—I hadn’t designed a magazine probably for 16 or 17 years—Joanne Furness, who was the editor of Arena Homme+, approached me. And it took a few lunches, but she persuaded me to come back in. And for three great, emotionally exhausting, traumatic issues we managed to rethink the idea of how word, image, expression, headline, the page itself—how all that comes together as a dynamic force that can carry the reader along a journey.
So I’m loving print at this point. And I hate to say, but it’s a shame you guys haven’t seen the new book yet, because that’s something that I’ve taken into the book itself, where it’s been a very dynamic journey through changing pace, changing the way headlines and chapter openers should work, how pull quotes should work, how content juxtaposes with other content. So, hopefully, you will enjoy that when you get your copy.
Debra Bishop: I can’t wait to read it and see it.
Neville Brody: But that’s the beauty of print, that you can’t achieve in the same way digitally right now. Digital is so commoditized and it’s almost like having a fixed building and then all you can do is look in the windows. All we’re doing—we’re not expressing content anymore, we’re just delivering content.
Debra Bishop: Exactly. It’s a deploying mechanism.
Patrick Mitchell: The last magazine I want to ask you about is Fuse. I distinctly remember getting the first issue—delivered on a floppy disk! I have a quote from you from 1992—that’s 30 years ago! You said, “You can publish a magazine as a multimedia file on a disc, and this is undoubtedly the future. There is still a place for printed work, but I think we will have only just begun to explore the potential of electronic media.” And that was 20 years before the iPad.
When you said that, we had literally just started getting Mac IIs on our desks to produce magazines. But, obviously, you were 100 percent right. A question I want to ask you is, the iPad came along and promised to be the catalyst for digital, I guess, digital magazines, digital media. How do you feel that period went?
Neville Brody: Well, I think it’s quite easy to understand what was happening 30 years ago, if we look at what’s happening now. And it’s almost like a reverse telescope. Thirty years ago, it was the advent of digital design, digital communication, and it was exuberant. We could just experiment. And publish it.
And soon after Fuse launched in Japan, I partnered with the world’s first digital gallery, which was Digitalogue. And that was in Harajuku, near Shibuya. And on Saturdays, Digitalog had Floppy Disk Day, where people would write short bits of program that could fit on a floppy disk and go in and swap with someone else’s floppy disk. And working with them we created the world’s first digital publisher. John Maeda’s first two or three pieces of work, Flying Letters, were published on floppy disks. And this is all related.
So what I’m saying is at that time, digital communication was the new frontier. It was the new wild west. And we could do anything. And now it’s become so structured and frameworked. I call it ‘utility bills with pictures.’ Because that’s what it feels like. It feels like you’re looking at your phone bill and there’s a few pictures on it. And this means that the whole framework is so controlled that all you can do is stick something in a small square or whatever.
Debra Bishop: Yes. We’ve become box fillers.
Neville Brody: Yeah. But then it’s not even exuberant. We used to be able to break out of those boxes and that’s what magazines can do so brilliantly that I think digital media has lost the ability of doing. And … I don’t know. I still love print. I still think print has got a lot of potential.
And you think about, Well, it’s using paper. Is that sustainable? You’re distributing physically. Is that sustainable? But then if you look at the server farms that are supporting our digital social media spaces and AI, they’re far less sustainable, in all honesty.
Brody was invited back to redesign Arena Homme + in 2009
“Friction and difficulty are good things that allow people to get off of the wheel and really think about stuff.”
Patrick Mitchell: Well, on the iPad, it ended up, I think, we learned that it just became the medium, not the message, just another way to look at stuff. Which is not what a lot of people thought when it came out.
Neville Brody: Well, even more than that, Patrick, I think that the real honesty about these platforms now is that the medium is much more important than the content. As a user, it feels like it’s the content, but actually, industrially speaking, it’s the medium.That’s the most important thing.
And it’s so generic and it’s all about numbers and not exceptions. And it’s not about content that really rocks the boat and it’s difficult. And AI is now here and we have to embrace it. I’d actually love to do a whole magazine that’s written, designed, and illustrated by AI.
Patrick Mitchell: Another iconic quote of yours: “Graphic design is an obstacle to what digital media is trying to do, which is to shift the user from an entry point to another page.”
Neville Brody: I think that still holds incredibly true. I think digital media is all about seamlessness. That it’s all about the well-oiled wheels of the journey. It’s not about letting people stop off anywhere. And the granularity of the content means that people don’t go back and look at content again. It’s gone. It’s gone below the bottom part of the screen and you’re never going to go scroll back. You might reshare it, so it may have a moment of extended life, but that’s it.
Patrick Mitchell: But literally every magazine online looks exactly the same. They have their unique logo, but then Helvetica headlines and some serif text.
Neville Brody: Well, the reason behind all of that is that brands today are not manufacturers. They’re manufacturers of narratives and content. So they’re not necessarily physical manufacturers. The physical product is almost like an outcome of the narrative product. And all brands are driven by the content they create. So they become kind of events and entertainment brands more than anything.
And the product happens to be that thing that happens, by the way. And then using the same techniques for selling that product. But graphic design, then, is all about delivering users to content. Or delivering content to users.
Whereas I prefer the idea, wherever possible, that graphic design is what I call ‘friction.’ That it gets in the way of that journey. And it actually allows people to stop, and question, and think.
Patrick Mitchell: You’re saying ‘friction’ in a good way.
Neville Brody: I’m saying friction in a good way. But it’s dualistic, isn’t it? It’s seen as friction by the platforms, because they don’t want it to get in the way. But I think friction and difficulty are good things that allow people to get off of the wheel and really think about stuff. I think we need to keep interrupting that—that process of scrolling—and have moments of thought and reflection.
Patrick Mitchell: I didn’t think I’d ever wax poetic about Flash, but when Flash was around, people did very creative things. And I guess it was a technological problem, but when it went away everything basically looked like a Squarespace site. Everything online is, as Deb said, “A collection of rectangles.”
Neville Brody: Yeah, that’s what I said. It’s a series of—it’s an office block and all the windows are the same size and on the same grid. I’m not sure—is it a hospital? Or an airport waiting room? I can’t work it out, but it is defined by its inability to break out of the box. How can we bypass that? How can we create spaces that are difficult? Or embrace difference? And embrace reflection and debate, proper debate. And maybe print is one of those spaces.
Patrick Mitchell: Yeah, we’re getting out of our element in terms of things that I have the ability to talk about. But based on what you’re saying, it seems like there’s an opportunity—you could say taking print magazines out of the equation probably plays some kind of small part in the way politics have gotten so fucked up around the world, right? Information is now genericized and it’s easy to ignore because it’s all the same.
Neville Brody: Yeah. It’s both generic and it’s entropic—it’s the dissolution of complexity into granular culture. It’s just little soundbites. On an Instagram post, it’s not a place of extraordinary complexity. It’s eye grabbing, iconic, and inevitably supposed to be another part of a journey. But in itself, it’s not a destination.
Debra Bishop: Neville, you are clearly a hugely influential designer and, obviously, a teacher. I feel like I’ve learned so much just talking to you. You’re now an educator at the Royal College of Art. You’ve talked about the “dire future” facing creative education. What do you think the challenges are?
Neville Brody: Well, the challenges are numerous. And the weird thing is there’s more graphic designers—there’s more graphic design students—globally now than there’s ever been. And there’s less job opportunities than there’s ever been. Quite often the graphic designer is bypassed and the people getting work tend to be more, kind of, software engineers or programmers.
And the graphic designer is like the way painters were liberated by the camera. So when the camera came along, it meant that painters were no longer needed to do portraits apart from for, kind of, very vain customers. And they didn’t need to record reality or even fantasy anymore because the camera could do it so much faster, and quicker, and more easily distributable. So we’re in that place that, then painters could explore impressionism and abstract forms. And Dada grew out of all of this. Dadaism, you know, this sort of “liberation.”
And in a way, we’re in that same sort of place now where the role of the graphic designer has been largely taken up by mechanical means, which was the camera. We’re still waiting for people to do extraordinary things with that, those digital mechanical means. But in the meantime, graphic design has the opportunity to do something quite extraordinary.
A lot of it’s moved into gallery spaces or short-run publishing. Or groups where they’re combining with architects and other sorts of disciplines. I call it ‘post-discipline.’ It’s not interdiscipline or transdiscipline—it’s post-discipline. Graphic designers today are communicators, they probably need to know about sound design, or spatial design, or material, or experience design.
So we’re moving into a space—and this is where we’ve been trying to teach at the Royal College, where you’re not learning how to put a font with an image. You’re learning about assessing what is the correct response and what are the right tools that you need. What is your intention behind what you’re doing? So what are the right tools and processes to deliver that intention?
Debra Bishop: So if you were to create a curriculum on your own, what are, maybe, the top three-to-five things that you think students need to learn today? In particular, would you have them learn how to draw?
Neville Brody: Well, there’s two sides to this, isn’t there? One is self-development, in terms of self-directing. And for that, you need to be able to liberate a student from convention by creating a ‘safe house’ for them to explore things within. And to learn that you need to let go of graphic design tools. You need to incorporate them in your learning, but you need to let go of them because they may not always be the right things. You know, maybe as I said, maybe it’s a piece of sound, or it’s a performance, or a piece of theater design.
The second thing I would say is, yeah, definitely learn the skills. Figure out how to do stuff. And the third thing is to understand your context, really. What is the world you’re living in? And how will what you do impact that world? What is the consequence of every single thing that you produce? So, yeah, I’d say self directing, learn the skills, and be aware of your impact.
Debra Bishop: Wonderful. I’ll make use of that.
Patrick Mitchell: Yeah. Deb teaches at SVA. You can apply that tomorrow. Shifting gears now to graphic design—Neville, after you published your first book, there was a big uproar. I know you’ve talked about that a bit. Your book was hugely influential. I remember the minute I saw it in the bookstore—Deb feels the same way—I just think it was career-changing for a lot of us starting out. So thank you for that. But when the book came out, you had a concurrent exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and there was this backlash. And I know this is true in some European countries, particularly in Scandinavia, but you said this about the British, that “hating people that raise their heads above the wall” is not an uncommon philosophy.
Neville Brody: Well, don’t forget that the book was never published in order to be influential. It was just publishing what was going on at that time. And I was so lucky to be in that place at that time. It was myself and people like Malcolm Garrett, and Peter Saville, and Vaughan Oliver, and then Designers Republic. And in the US it was Paula Scher, and April Greiman, and Zuzana Licko with Emigre. We were so lucky to be working at that point.
And so the book was, for me, it was just publishing the work I’d been doing and because we had to work so hard, not to prove a point, but to make it succeed or make it work. There was so much content that I’d produced by the age of 30, which was mad then.
You know, it was working around the clock, or working up until late evening, going and eating, going clubbing, then going straight back into work. And everything was happening in the center of London. It was an incredibly intense period. And then a lot of the reviews and reactions to the book were negative.
The British particularly love to destroy people they see as successful or opinionated. In other places it’s a bit different. I think in the US I have a sense that it’s actually allowable To celebrate yourself and your work.
Patrick Mitchell: It’s almost a requirement.
Neville Brody: It’s almost a requirement, but in the UK it’s absolutely not. If you want to talk about what you’ve done and promote it, that's not always received kindly.
City Limits was launched by former staff of the weekly London listings magazine Time Out in 1981.
“That’s the beauty of print, that you can’t achieve in the same way digitally right now. Digital is so commoditized. We’re not expressing content anymore, we’re just delivering it.”
Patrick Mitchell: Well, you’re, by definition, an icon. Which is, at least the way I read it, you took a path previously untaken. I don’t get the sense—this may be untrue, I’m just making an assumption—you weren’t influenced by a lot of stuff you saw. I think you felt like you were on a path and you knew what you wanted to do. And then, at some point, enough people see it, the feedback comes, and you know if you’re on the right path or not. At least for what they think, right? And very few people ever do that. And it’s a scary place to be. It’s very lonely, right? And it’s just really sad that the response was so negative.
Neville Brody: Again, Patrick, coming back to, you know, my reaction to my tutors, that if my tutors liked it, I would change it. And I think the book, whilst it was just being set up as a way of publishing what was going on, was also intended as a provocation.
I’ve always seen my work as a snapshot of what’s going on in the lab, in the laboratory. And it’s continually, hopefully it’s continually evolving and challenging itself. So that book was just simply, All right, there’s enough stuff here. Let’s get it out and let’s then move on to the next stuff.
And what happened after the first book, of course, was that the Mac landed. And then what happened after the second book was that we realized that the tools for producing graphic design were also the tools for receiving graphic design.
We never understood at that point that using a Mac would also be the platform in which we looked at what everyone else was doing. So it became the creator, the broadcaster, and the receiver all in one. And that was a unique place and a unique opportunity.
But after the first book was published, and within six months, we were almost bankrupted. We’d lost all our UK clients completely. And if it wasn’t for working with Japan and Germany, oddly, we would have been completely out of business. So the response in the UK was we lost all our clients, and the main people that were slagging off the book were an older generation of designers.
Patrick Mitchell: Do good work, lose your livelihood.
Neville Brody: Yeah, in a way. But, you know, we were never going to compromise in order to soften anything.
Patrick Mitchell: Well, what was that, Deb, that Picasso quote that you pulled out that seems appropriate?
Debra Bishop: Oh, “Learn your craft and then throw it out like an artist.”
Neville Brody: Well, we learn our craft and disrupt it like a jazz musician.
New Socialist burst onto the scene in the early eighties and was required reading for those who felt despair over the UK’s conservative political situation.
Debra Bishop: Okay. But you know, we’re rehashing a little bit. You’ve said, “I hate typography.” I’m personally obsessed with typography myself—I think obsession is a little bit of a love/hate.
Neville Brody: I want to correct you there—I said I ‘hated’ typography. I didn’t say I ‘hate’ typography.
Debra Bishop: Oh, okay. You hated it. Where are you now with that?
Neville Brody: Well, I had to really grapple with typography, grapple with its conventions, and then find I could use it like paint, really. Try and figure out ways to make it fluid, or poetic, or factional informational where it needed to be to find all those nuances.
But what I think we’ve done in the last 40 years is really liberate typography into being a much richer form. And, you know, coming back, Patrick, to what you were talking about before, the people I really admired were obviously kind of Dadaists, you know, Kurt Schwitters, Constructivists, [Aleksander] Rodchenko, [El] Lissitzky, et cetera.
And often when I was at art school, and then afterwards, I would imagine, What would Rochenko be doing now? Not copying what Rochenko did, but thinking what would he do with all these tools? What would he do with digital? And that became a really good way of reflecting.
Patrick Mitchell: It’s the most optimistic thing, I think. I think what you just said is really the right answer. We have to look at the tools now and—the need to express yourself through creativity is not ever going to change.
Neville Brody: No, absolutely.
Patrick Mitchell: But, we are in a rapid-fire change of the platforms for doing it. And I think we’re in a weird in-between phase where the answer isn’t here yet.
Neville Brody: Well, I’d love to see what you think of the latest lab paper, the third book. I mean, it’s been 30 years since the last one. And it’s exactly the same thickness as One and Two together. It’s been a six-year journey to get here.
Patrick Mitchell: We saw a little bit in Type Paris. I think you previewed some of that there.
Neville Brody: Oh, you were there?
Patrick Mitchell: No, I watched it though. It was really beautiful work. Really. And I think you referred to it then as painting and I, I agree. I think it is painting.
Debra Bishop: Graphic design is shifting towards the sort of engineering and system-building thing. It’s more about a delivery system rather than an expressive system. That adds drama to content. We’ve talked a little bit about this already, but...
Neville Brody: Well, I’ve talked about that a little bit, but, yeah, it’s definitely about delivering content more than expressing content now.
Patrick Mitchell: It seems like this is where your focus is now.
Neville Brody: Well, the magazines that we worked on, Patrick, and, you know, they were all about editorialization. How do you editorialize content? How do you bring it together as a narrative? And then how do you lay it out in such a way that it adds to the expression of that content.
And nowadays you can’t do that. You can’t redesign your Instagram page. It’s just boxes. And if we did a magazine in print that was just boxes—actually, maybe we should. Maybe we should do a magazine where the whole magazine is just a series of same-sized boxes.
Debra Bishop: I love it! I’ll work on it with you.
Patrick Mitchell: I watched a video of you talking about Samsung, and talking about Coca Cola, which seems like the essence of this question about systems. Am I wrong in that this is something that you’re really interested in?
Neville Brody: I’m very interested in this. You know, in graphic design, the central gravity is shifted backwards. We used to be brought in to express things, you know? Book covers, record covers, magazine pages. And now we’re much more in the system design where doing research, we’re creating strategies for the design language. And then we’re exploring, we’re building these systems.
But where it becomes quite interesting is that we’re now building components that these systems are built out of. So we’re constructing, you know, fonts—coming back to this kind of toolbox thing—fonts, colors, icons, all kinds of building blocks that someone’s going to need in order to construct their platform.
And then all the guidelines on how all that fits together. And we’re working with the Bundeskunsthalle, or Bonn National Gallery, right now on rethinking their communication space. And we’re trying to give them this sense of dynamic and stretch. Where can they be bold and dynamic. And how can that link into the physical space. You know, where can we put big titles on the wall or big arrows. And then where do we need to be quieter.
So we’re working hand-in-hand with them to try and create something that’s a content management system, but it works by stretching. So I think there’s hope, but it’s going to be kind of an educational process where I think designers are going to have to work quite closely with the clients And take them on that journey.
Patrick Mitchell: You’ve talked a little bit about AI. How does it feel knowing that someone out there could be prompting an AI bot to design like Neville Brody?
Neville Brody: Well, they are. I think I’m going to try and design a bot to design like an AI. I think it’s inevitable. I remember 20 years ago people were creating templates based on designers in InDesign where the templates would be based on people like Erik Spiekermann or Paula Scher.
Patrick Mitchell: Roger Black started a company doing that.
Neville Brody: Yes, exactly. So this isn’t a new thing.
Patrick Mitchell: Somebody was getting paid on every end there back then.
Neville Brody: Yeah, well, we didn’t do it, but people are going to copy anyway, you know, so might as well try and get it right.
Patrick Mitchell: Before I get to the Billion-Dollar Question, I’m just curious, what are you listening to these days, musically?
Neville Brody: Mainly jazz. It’s hard, isn’t it? Because music as well has become shallower, in a way. It’s become shallower at one end and more impenetrable at the other. So there’s been a kind of polarization, I think, where really experimental jazz has become quite difficult but necessary. And at the other end, pop has become so component-driven and engineered that there’s no real breakouts or friction. I think we need friction in every culture. So I often listen to, actually, to be honest, early-seventies experimental jazz more than anything.
Patrick Mitchell: No more Cabaret Voltaire?
Neville Brody: Yeah, but more Alice Coltrane. Or even Pharoah Sanders. It’s hard to find that place where people are prepared to embrace difficulty.
Brody’s ubiquity reached new heights when his Cabaret Voltaire poster appeared in 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Patrick Mitchell: So let’s get to the Billion-Dollar Question, which is, in your case, the royal family reaches out and says, “We have a blank check. The only requirement is that you use it to launch a print media product.” What would you do?
Neville Brody: Well, if the royal family had given a billion dollars, I would make sure that everything they do was about helping the unfortunate. As we saw even yesterday, it was quite interesting, Prince William was talking about building affordable housing on royal land.
So I think there’s several things we need before we launch a magazine, if there’s endless funds. But if I was to do a magazine, I think I would compile a magazine of all the Life magazines that your previous interviewees have proposed into one.
Patrick Mitchell: And shove them into little boxes.
Neville Brody: No. I do think a magazine that embraces real, deep reportage, as well as being a platform for new talent, new ideas, I think is the most important thing we can be doing. And something that embraces difficulty. And long reads, you know, how often do we embrace long reads?
Even me, I’m looking on my phone, I’m going, “Oh my God, how many scrolls is this?” And someone coming to Print Is Dead is going, “Oh my God, it says it’s an hour-and-a-half, this podcast!”
Patrick Mitchell: “Long listens.”
Debra Bishop: It’s riveting.
The Brody Trilogy
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Back to the Interviews
One Eye on the World
A conversation with editor and founder Tyler Brûlé (Monocle, Wallpaper*, Konfekt, more).
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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT COMMERCIAL TYPE
“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams, this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is, not as it should be!”
— Don Quixote de la Mancha
Monocle, the brainchild of the expat Canadian magazine maker, Tyler Brûlé, was born in early 2007, a relatively awful year for the magazine business, not to mention the entire world. In that year alone, more than 100 print magazines folded—or, as Wikipedia terms it, were “dis-established”—among them: Life (yet again), Premiere, Red Herring, House & Garden, Jane, Child, and Business 2.0. Months later, the global economy was hit by the Great Recession.
But Brûlé was coming out from under a rather lengthy non-compete agreement with Time Inc., after selling his previous startup, Wallpaper*, to the American media giant, and he was desperate to get back to the newsroom.
Given the times, and the stream of fading print publications, one could judge Brûlé’s resolve as “madness,” as Don Quixote cried in the opening clip. Digital was all the rage, the iPad was knocking on the door, and the radiation of the frenzied dotcom meltdown was still slowly killing legacy media.
“Madness”? Not if you know Tyler Brûlé.
In his world, “life as it should be” is rich—a morning espresso in a bustling cafe with a crisp newspaper written and edited in the romance language of your choice, sorting out weekends skiing the Alps or lounging on the Med while riding the night train to Vienna.
And then there’s the print—not only the magazine itself, printed on “upwards of nine different paper stocks, crammed with extremely niche articles about carbon-neutral airlines in Costa Rica and sleek Afghan restaurants in Dubai,” but also special edition newspapers, coffee table books, and Monocle-approved travel guides.
(Someone forgot to tell Brûlé and his brilliant team of collaborators that print is dead).
In a media culture traditionally obsessed with scale at any cost, Monocle’s modest 100,000 circulation belies a thriving multi-media juggernaut that confidently ignores the lure of social media. “We’re in a very fortunate position that we’re an independent publisher,” says Brûlé, “and we don’t have the commercial pressures of a big parent. And those commercial pressures can be two-fold: One is cost savings, but the other pressures are to go and chase after every new trend.”
In fact, Brûlé thinks of Monocle as a family business.
“We don’t set out to be pioneers, but also we’re a family company, and we can choose to do things quickly if we want to.”
That same culture has manufactured the pressure to establish one’s entrepreneurial cred. You’re not the editor, you’re the founding editor, the founding creative director, the founding director. But when asked about how he thinks of and refers to himself, Brûlé answers simply:
“If I think about ‘What do I do?’ I’m a journalist. I’m out to be a witness. I’m out to absorb, I’m out to interpret, and I’m out to communicate.
A print-centric media phenomenon, created as a family business, led by a journalist. Surprising? Not for someone who’s been building a life—as it should be.
Here’s our editor-at-large George Gendron with Tyler Brûlé.
Monocle’s premiere issue, March 2007
“Print is absolutely at the core of what we do and we’re unapologetic about that. ”
George Gendron: I have what might sound like a kind of juvenile question I want to begin with, but I know a lot of people would love to ask it if they were here in my place. How cool is it to be Tyler Brûlé?
Tyler Brûlé: I think it was cooler—and maybe that was when I was in my I still think I’m in my publishing prime—but maybe it was cooler, like we all were, when we were in our late twenties, early thirties, or something like that. But it’s still okay. It’s all right.
George Gendron: What do you mean in your “publishing prime”? You guys seem to be kind of peak performing for some time now, it seems to me.
Tyler Brûlé: I feel I still am in my publishing prime, a different phase of it. But no, listen, [it’s] all good. All good. Just not sure how “cool” it is, maybe. I’ve been living with it for a while. Yeah, maybe that’s it. We can come back to that.
George Gendron: Where are you right now, geographically? You travel 250 days a year, so where are you now?
Tyler Brûlé: Right now I am standing in the middle of our—we call it our “lounge space” at our headquarters in Zurich on Dufourstrasse 90. We have a wonderful setup for doing all kinds of audio, but also all kinds of events as well. And Dufourstrasse 90 is where you’ll find a beautiful little kiosk and a great cafe and bar space, and a little Monocle retail area, and a Trunk Clothiers (the menswear retailer owned by Brûlé’s life partner, Mats Klingberg) shop.
And on the top floor of this building you’ll find the headquarters for all of our global operations, our holding company, which owns a vast chunk—the majority share—of Monocle and our agency business. So this is, let’s call it home. You’re speaking to me from what has become our home base for the last five years now.
George Gendron: That raises an interesting question. If I didn’t know that you were headquartered in Zurich and somebody said to me where do you think Monocle is headquartered? I would’ve said London, Berlin, I don’t know, maybe Tokyo. But Zurich? I don’t know Zurich well, but I know Geneva and I have to say, I find those cities boring.
Tyler Brûlé: Oh, well, I guess you haven’t been to Zurich for a while. And maybe this goes back to your earlier question about “coolness” and all of those things. I sort of liken Zurich to Berlin for people over 40. It has all of the things that you want in terms of entertainment and evening delights and weekend fun times, et cetera.
But unlike Berlin, it has an airport that will connect you around the world. Maybe it doesn’t have the cyclist anger that they have in Berlin. It’s a happier city. There’s a better disposition here, so please return. And it’s also a city which is home to one of the world’s oldest newspapers, which still continues to innovate and buy up interesting things. So, as a media city as well, it’s a very interesting one.
George Gendron: That’s interesting. I think for some people, maybe many, that might come as counterintuitive. It always struck me as I think of Zurich and I think it’s one of the more expensive places to live, period.
Tyler Brûlé: It is, but I would say there’s a value for money that comes with it. There’s, I would say, a certain intellectual liberalism. There’s something going on here in media where the newspapers print things which would be unprintable on your side of the Atlantic, where there’s a proper, healthy debate that doesn’t get shut down.
We’re talking about journalism and we’re talking about print on this program, and there’s a real vibrancy here. And I find that exciting. We’ve got two newspaper groups down the street from us. I mean, one is really at the end of Dufourstrasse, which is the NZZ, which of course, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which is one of the oldest newspapers in the world.
You have the headquarters for Ringier Publishing. They do the tabloid Blick as well, and not far away you have another major Swiss media group as well. And for a tiny country, albeit a very rich country—and this is obviously one of the richest cities in the world—it should not surprise that there’s quite a bit of innovation going on.
But of course, in Switzerland it all happens in a rather hushed, quiet way as well.
Monocle launched its annual Quality of Life Conference in Lisbon, Portugal in 2015.
George Gendron: Yeah, that’s a good point. Let me switch gears here. You and Monocle have attracted more than your share—you could argue more than your fair share—of snark and much more glowing coverage of the magazine itself. But I wonder, maybe this is just my point of view and so correct me if I’m wrong, but I wonder whether, even now, journalists in particular really understand and appreciate the sheer originality of your media model. It’s really the first 21st century sustainable print-plus model of its kind. And people don’t talk about that much.
Tyler Brûlé: Yeah, maybe because people don’t talk about print that much anymore. Aside from where it’s being discussed, maybe in podcast forms like this. But maybe it’s also just the nature, of course, where the media conversation has shifted.
Because I think when I look around the world, there’s still many amazing things that are coming out on page where you still have incredible centers of where, I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily flourishing, but where you have a lot of new titles coming out. And I think about our neighbors around here, particularly the French—every time I’m at a French train station or at the airport where I’m in front of a French newsstand, I’m amazed that there’s always something new that I haven’t seen.
And yet I just came back from a big tour of North America and, as we know, at many travel points, the newsstand, the kiosk has completely disappeared. Or if it is still there, there’s nine titles for sale. And none of them are new. So, yeah, and I guess going back to us, yeah, people probably aren’t discussing us that much because there’s not many column inches being devoted to talking about magazines these days.
George Gendron: But what strikes me—I shouldn’t say “but”—and what strikes me as interesting and profoundly disappointing is that no one seems to have learned anything from what you guys have done.
Tyler Brûlé: Well, I don't know if that’s entirely true. I think there’s a couple of annoying titles out there which look to us and ape many things we do. And I don’t need to name them because they know exactly who they are. I do hear from the media grapevine that people take a copy of Monocle and they say, “Can you make our annual report look like this?” Or they take a copy of Konfekt and they say, “Could you create a similar magazine in Polish for us?”
So it is happening. But maybe what you’re driving at is the totality of our business model and how we function. And, of course, print is absolutely at the core of what we do and we’re unapologetic about that as well. I think that is one thing which is very different.
I think so many legacy companies, call them what you will, venture into an advertising meeting, a partnership meeting, whatever it may be, and they talk about, “Well, we’re digital first, but we still have a print business.” We’re completely the opposite. Like, we have a very solid and growing print business in all its forms.
The main magazine, newspapers, books, special editions, pocket books—whatever it is, we’re buying more paper than we’ve ever bought before. What’s interesting is that our partners—and those can be governments, they can be luxury brands, they can be airlines—people are looking for, I mean, I could even say even ministries in certain countries that are focused on AI still want a piece of print. Which is kind of remarkable.
But I think that’s partly because there’s a confidence about it. We believe in what we do and we’re not looking around the marketplace or looking around the room talking about other products. We’re talking about what I also see as super-core to driving the profits for our business as well.
George Gendron: And when you’re talking about non-traditional publishers—they’re governmental, whether they’re academic, whether they’re corporate—I still think there’s maybe an understanding about the power that print has to brand that still seems to be lacking in digital.
Tyler Brûlé: For sure. And we scratch our heads sometimes wondering, how is it that you can be speaking to a big technology company, a company which puts innovation, digitization at the forefront and you bring them a variety of ideas—and this has happened on a couple of recent occasions where just such a company, which is a global leader in engineering, and you bring them films, and you bring them a podcast idea, and you talk about events, and big digital partnerships, all within the Monocle realm—and they just pick up the magazine or they’ve come across another print spinoff that we’ve done and they say, “But this is what we want. We love all of those digital ideas, but actually we like this on page and we actually feel that this is true innovation.”
And I think we get back in the car after these meetings going, “Wow. Incredible.” When you look at the mission of what that company is, which is about trying to move away from cutting down forests and trying to be sustainable in so many ways, but yet they actually come back to the printed word.
And increasingly, I’m not sure if it’s boardroom gymnastics that drives it because I was also thinking there’s a certain commoditization of course that comes at a corporate level. If you have to go to your quarterly meeting and present to the board, alongside all of the other people who happen to be C-suite executives, maybe there’s an advantage to being that one person, because you’re in marketing, you can actually leave people with 10 copies of something that you partnered with Monocle for and that’s what you leave the room with because everyone else is presenting on the exact same screen.
And so there is this commoditization, which comes with digital in general. And there’s a way that print allows you to continue to stand out.
“There’s not many column inches being devoted to talking about magazines these days.”
George Gendron: Let’s talk about Monocle, the magazine, for a second from a variety of different perspectives. And I guess I’d like to start by saying you meet somebody—I think I’ve heard you interviewed where this came up—you meet somebody, and shockingly they’ve never heard of Monocle. If you didn’t have a copy handy, how would you describe Monocle, the magazine, to someone who’s never seen it before?
Tyler Brûlé: I think we talk in terms of—I guess we have to speak of the physical nature. I talk about something which is bookish. I say, “Don’t think of a magazine as you know it today. Think about something which is much more bookish and has loft and heft to it in format. Think about something which is going to challenge and surprise you, something that’s going to take you around the world.”
We started in the very beginning—if I look back, to 2005, 2006, when we were just really trying to whip this thing into shape, 2007 when we launched, we talked about this briefing on global affairs and business and culture and design. And we still use that. That is what we are.
And I think that has also become an extension of the medium we’re in now with our radio business. Certainly with our books business as well. But going back to the core product we do feel it is this global briefing and increasingly we’ve been speaking in terms of also just being a companion. This is something which you live with all month. Hopefully you live with it for a lifetime because there’s a whole other world of people who have been with us for 17 years, or going on 17 years, and they wonder, “What do I do with my collection of Monocles?”
I think there’s room for an adoption agency right now, because people might be downsizing or they're moving around the world—it’s a lot of magazines to ship. But they don’t want to put them in the bin either.
So I think we’ve gone from being this briefing, I think, to also a daily companion for people. And I’m not just talking about what we’re doing digitally, but I think also in the core print form.
George Gendron: So you’re reviving bookshelves, basically.
Tyler Brûlé: Sure. And that’s actually why we have a very small bookshelf business with the Swedish brand String. We just did a little capsule collection of more of a bedside bookshelf, but shelf nonetheless. You can hold two years worth of subscriptions.
George Gendron: Let’s go back to the early days of Monocle, in fact pre-Monocle, when did the idea first occur to you?
Tyler Brûlé: I mean, we could go way back. And we could go way back to pre-Wallpaper* days when …
George Gendron: Yeah. Go back.
Tyler Brûlé: … I was working for a variety of different titles, writing for Stern and Die Woche in Germany and writing for Vanity Fair and a variety of different titles. And I used to have one of those cellophane binder-folders. And I used to just pull out what I felt were great-looking news pages, what I felt were just great Q&A pages, and go and tear out wonderful reportage I might have seen in Der Spiegel or something. And I would actually just play. Sort of assembling this magazine, putting all these pages in between cellophane. And I still have those. They’re sitting in an archive somewhere.
Monocle’s “radio” station features an array of programming.
And that goes back to the early nineties, ’92-’93—a good three years before we actually launched Wallpaper*. So there was always this idea of doing something which was newsy, and global, and had an aspect of business to it, and wanted to be out there in the world on the real front lines, and also the front row in fashion.
And that was something I thought about for a long time, but somehow Wallpaper* got in the way in the meantime. But I would say that Monocle, as it is today, really is the magazine I always wanted to do.
George Gendron: That’s interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that the idea from Monocle actually predated Wallpaper*.
Tyler Brûlé: Yeah, for sure. And I realized at the time, this is the magazine I would love to do someday, but I didn’t know if I would just happen to land in a position to be a deputy editor, to one day become an editor, to convince a publisher to make it happen, or would I end up doing it on my own and be the publisher and the media owner.
It turned out rather differently because I think, early on, I saw myself as being an employee rather than the employer.
George Gendron: Oh, that’s interesting. I want to get to that in a minute, by the way, kind of magazine-maker/editor versus entrepreneur. But I do want to follow up the question about where the idea for Monocle came from with a different one, which is how fully-complete was your vision for Monocle when you launched?
And I ask that because Patrick and I have unearthed your original editor’s note where you say, Be a complete media brand with print, web, broadcast components. And you go down a list of, I think, 10. Open bureaux, so we have our own people on the ground. Not be given away for free.
Another one, which I love, which is: Be an oasis from celebrities and low production values. Do our bit to raise the bar. How complete was your vision for Monocle when you launched, and how much of it has developed organically since you launched?
Tyler Brûlé: It’s fascinating when you read those things back because I think it’s a manifesto that we continue to live by. And I haven’t heard those words for a while, but I can certainly remember thinking about the early days when we were having a conversation, of course with distributors and potential advertisers.
And that was, of course, that was part of the pitch. And I think we still come good on that. I don’t think you see a lot of celebrities gracing our pages, and we’re still committed to opening bureaus and having people around the world, and we believe in actually having people in offices with our own name on the front door as well.
So, yeah, I think that we’ve stuck to that vision. Of course we’ve expanded around the edges. We are broadcasting because we are running a radio operation now. We’re not doing maybe as much television as I thought we might have been up to, but watch this space. We might be back. Let’s see.
And I think there’s always been this commitment to making an effort on page, or making an effort when we do an event, or ensuring that we are delivering the absolute best whatever we happen to be doing. And of course there are many components to the business right now.
But you know, I still feel we’re measured by what was the quality of our September issue or our December/January issue.
Monocle’s iconic design remains consistent across the entire enterprise. Below, a sampling of interior pages.
George Gendron: So it’s still the touchstone.
Tyler Brûlé: Absolutely. It’s what creates a discipline. It’s what keeps you—honest is not the right word—but it’s certainly what keeps you focused, keeps your eye on the mission. And I think it’s ultimately what you’re measured by. The newsletter part of our business is, of course, very important and becomes more influential, but I still think it’s the core magazine that comes out 10 times a year.
George Gendron: I want to bounce an idea off you and you may not agree with this, but here goes and I don’t mean to sound judgmental, but I’m just going to put this out there, which is one could argue that if you really deconstruct Monocle the magazine, there’s not necessarily anything quite remarkable about the individual elements—the typography, the photography, the illustrations, the content, the prose—each element seems professional, but not remarkable. And yet the magazine itself is remarkable. Patrick Mitchell said to me recently, he thinks of the magazine less as an exercise in traditional graphic design and more as an exercise in industrial design. Product design. Does that make any sense to you?
Tyler Brûlé: Up to a point it does. And I think part of it speaks to maybe our heritage as well, because we had a five-year pause between doing—and I say we, because of course, there’s a team that did travel with me from the world of Wallpaper* on to the world of Monocle—but there was a five year, sort of, rest or pause period. We were hardly paused, though.
And that was when we were really building up our branding and design agency. And we were working on other editorial products. But I used the word “product.” And many of these things— whether it was painting the fuselages of Airbus aircraft or it was working on retail projects, or it was indeed working on packaging—these were exercises in industrial design, graphic design, building and creating environments that happened to be on rails or had wings.
And so that was a really interesting period to go through, because I was all set, at the end of Wallpaper* to maybe just pause for nine months and then bring out a new magazine. But having five years in between, I think, allowed us to really think about brand, and development of brand, and the codes around brand, and what makes a good launch succeed or fail. So it was a very interesting learning period, which has definitely informed where we are today.
George Gendron: What’s interesting—I want to see if I can marry that question with something that occurred to me earlier, when you were talking, and that is your vocabulary is really interesting. You don’t talk about “podcasting”—you talk about “radio.” You don’t talk about “video”—you talk about “television.” Explain that to me. That’s clearly very intentional on your part.
Tyler Brûlé: Yeah, it’s either intentional or it’s lazy or it’s because I’m a child of the 1970s combination of all. Yeah, sure. It’s … I mean, listen … I think one thing that keeps you sharp— because I do try personally, and I think on our editorial floor we try not to fall into language traps that I think many people sort of swirl around in.
And I think we do have our—I come back to that notion of codes and a tone that we try to speak with. And it’s interesting when you go back to your earlier question about, where in the world, if you think about Monocle, where are we based? Are we London? Are we New York? Are we Berlin? et cetera. And I always try to say that we, we don’t want to be any of those places, but we want to borrow from the best of all of those.
And when we think about television or we think about radio versus podcasts, it’s because there’s an intention and there’s an honesty to it as well. We said from the very beginning, we were probably one of, again,”legacy” or we were one of the first, certainly, print brands to get out there with a podcast very early on.
But I would say within the second or third podcast, because we were making this program in a studio around the corner from Broadcasting House in London, I thought, “Imagine if we took this show on the road and did this 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” And so we were thinking about radio and we do talk about bureaus because that’s what they are. Because we do have people in cities with the support of their own office and the equipment they need to do their job.
And yes, is there a romanticism to it? Is that part of the nature of why the magazine’s called Monocle? A little bit. But you know, I guess I sort of see it as part of this is also—maybe it was a little bit of a correction as well. When we came out in 2007, many things were pointing south. And were pointing south and moving at speed.
I think back to 2007, what was happening in print then. We had the digital surge already happening in terms of digital photography. And look back at magazines in 2007, 2008, 2009, when there was that move away from film—reproduction houses, post-production, the printers—no one really knew how to deal with these digital files and, and just look at the skin quality magazines in that period, in a lot of magazines. It’s dreadful.
It looks like everyone somehow had a front row seat to some kind of nuclear apocalyptic sunset or something. And that’s why, in the very beginning, we—and we still take pride in shooting stories on film. Not to be Luddite about it. Not to be overly romantic, but there is a certain quality that comes as shooting on film still.
We don’t do every story on film, obviously, but I guess, part of the language and part of, I think when we think about how we want to position ourselves in the world and on the newsstand it’s, yeah, it’s to be correct, I would say.
Monocle’s special issues on the world, business, and travel
“We were probably one of the first “legacy” print brands to get out there with a podcast.”
George Gendron: I think there’s something really powerful about vocabulary that people miss. I mean, if I have to be part of another conversation where people start talking about “content.” Oh my God! How bland and generic can you possibly get when everything becomes content? And that’s why I find your vocabulary really interesting. Including “bureaux”, which is E-A-U-X, by the way. And there is a romanticism to it, but it has a really powerful effect.
Tyler Brûlé: Yeah, and I would say that doesn’t come from a whiteboard brainstorming session with a consultancy. It’s what we all believe. And I think that speaks to the people that have, that we’ve all stuck together for a long time. Not because we don’t have any other places to go, but there’s a commitment to the mission and what we want to, of course, deliver on page, the copy that we want to commission and edit, and hopefully turn into great editorial, as much as the types of evenings that we want to host for readers who are in Bangkok, or in Hong Kong, or in Asheville, North Carolina.
George Gendron: You talk about something that really interests me at a time when we have become, at least here in North America, absolutely obsessed with scale and scaling for its own sake. And that is, kind of, what seems to me almost like a filter you must use strategically to determine what you’re going to do to intensify the relationship, the intimacy between you and—I’ll call it a reader, but it’s a customer, right? Because they’re readers, their purchasers are your goods, they’re frequent attendees at your events, they drink coffee at your cafes. And it seems to me this notion of trying to do things to create and sustain an intimate relationship is so completely at odds with our obsession with scaling these days.
Tyler Brûlé: Yes, indeed. And it’s a conversation that we’ve had—I would say a lot—over the last three years. We’ve had many approaches from, of course, other media groups and private equity and many types of organizations with financial muscle in between those two who have just come in right away and said, “There’s so many things you can do to scale this business, and we can supercharge your circulation and your cafes and all the aspects of your business. And we can really give you ‘reach,’”… and all of the jargon that goes with this.
And as you’ve noticed, we’ve been very cautious, of course. And we can talk about, “Yes, we’d love to grow.” And it would be wonderful to be in a place where I didn’t have to sit beside someone on a plane who’s never heard of us before.
But of course, every day that also still means there’s a lot of opportunity in the world. But scaling at speed or just even scaling at a considered pace comes with dangers. And it’s not just about scaling in terms of audience and what does that mean in terms of what it’s going to do for revenues.
But I think also there’s the scaling that you might attempt with technology and there’s a scaling that might come with also to broaden your editorial reach, et cetera. And also the dangers there as well. And we’re not cautious, I think. We don’t set out to be pioneers, but also we’re a family company, and we can choose to do things quickly if we want to.
There’s many other things we can’t do because our pockets aren’t that deep. But I would still rather be in a position where I know the depth and scale and how far we can go rather than trying to bet the farm, because there’ve been so many instances over the last decade where we’ve seen people run headlong after the latest trend, whatever it may be. And we see the media world littered—the roadside is littered—with all kinds of carcasses of people who wanted to scale and they’re no longer with us.
How it started, how it’s going
George Gendron: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And in fact, one of the things that interests me about talking to younger people, and I’m not going to break it down into Gen X, Gen Y, but is that there seems to be a sentiment among younger people that I find so encouraging that scale at any cost is the enemy of creativity. Period. End of story. And you could argue Monocle’s really interesting case study in that regard.
Tyler Brûlé: Yeah. And I don’t think we set out to be that brand or those people with their arms crossed over in the corner who don’t want to move. And...
George Gendron: Oh, no. I didn’t mean to suggest that.
Tyler Brûlé: No, but I’m just saying some people might think—and who knows, maybe there’s even a component of that. I don’t think so. But it is fascinating that there is that sentiment amongst younger consumers as well, who do want an intimacy, a conversation, who want to see the brand as “theirs.”
But at the same time, we know that of course we can be bigger in the US and we can do a much better job in many other markets around the world. But I also say the great thing is that we’re still here doing what we do and doing it on our own terms.
George Gendron: I want to take this opportunity to transition a little bit back to the young Tyler Brulé. It’s been reported that when you were young, you were mesmerized by a man by the name of Peter Charles Archibald Ewert Jennings. Now we know him as Peter Jennings, the anchorman. What was it about him that attracted you in the first place?
Tyler Brûlé: Well, when I was making the comment a bit earlier about being a child of the 1970s, I grew up in many cities across Canada, and there was a certain magnetism that the nightly newscast had for me growing up. And in Canada, unlike the United States—which is, I always think, is one of the defining differences—our national newscasts of record were never at dinnertime.
We didn’t sit down with our equivalents—Knowlton Nash, Lloyd Robertson—those were our Tom Brokaws, they were our Dan Rathers of the day. They were on at 10 or 11 o’clock at night. And I always found it kind of fascinating that the last word of the day, in terms of both domestic and international news, ran from 11 o’clock to 11:22 EST.
And so there was just something about that, sort of, bookmark at the end of the day, the look ahead into the next day. At the same time, of course, in the 1970s as cable came along, et cetera, and we were able to watch US channels, I was always fascinated, probably over the course of the seventies into the eighties to see how many of the names that I knew in Canada suddenly ended up at NBC, and CBS, and ABC, and of course, later on when CNN launched as well.
And I always wanted to, not always, but I would say certainly when I started my secondary school years, I knew that I wanted to go into journalism. I loved magazines and newspapers, but I saw myself in broadcast journalism. And then when I saw Peter Jennings jump across the border and become the foreign correspondent, and then really the face of ABC News, I thought, “This is the dream job.”
And especially in those golden years when you had ABC World News Tonight when it was anchored out of Washington and Chicago and London, that just seemed so modern. And it’s funny to think, Look where it’s all ended up today.
And I guess that goes back to the bureaus, and that sort of excitement. And it truly was. It did feel exotic. And you felt connected to something bigger. I mean, imagine now just to think that you’d be watching one of the big three networks, that that part of the newscast would come from the other side of the Atlantic. Kind of remarkable.
And that was the start of it. And that’s what I wanted to do. But here I am today not doing that.
George Gendron: And yet you could argue that portions of your career kind of did mirror Peter Jennings. You were a foreign correspondent. You were wounded in Afghanistan. And so again, there’s this kind of romanticism, I think, about your life and about some of the things and the people that inspired you that’s really quite extraordinary. But let me go back. Jennings started his career in radio, evidently, at the age of nine. What were you doing when you were nine years old?
Tyler Brûlé: Oh, when I was nine years old, I was—was I writing letters to the Ministry of Defense in Canada? Close to it. I think I was on the radio. I didn’t have a career, but I remember being on CBC Radio very early on with, I think, with the complaint because I felt that Canada’s defenses relied too much, or let’s say our poor defenses, meant that we relied too much on the United States. I think it’s still the case today.
And I did write a letter at one point to the minister and I told him that his selection of fighter aircraft was slightly misguided. Somehow it made it throughout the PR team at the ministry. But anyway, it made it to CBC Radio. And I can remember doing my first national radio piece—I must be nine or 10 or something like that—but I was quite young.
And it’s interesting when we talk about bringing up Peter Jennings today because, I have to say, I have Peter Jennings to also thank personally because I remember going to see a broadcast of World News Tonight in New York. And this would’ve been in the late eighties, I guess. And I ended up speaking to Peter afterwards, and he gave me a lift back to my hotel. And I was thinking at that time, God, to be in Peter Jennings’s limo and having a chat with him! And I said, “If you had one piece of advice for an aspiring young Canadian journalist, what would it be?”
And he said, “Get out in the world. Don’t go and work for a farm station in Canada.” He said, “You just have to get out there. Leave this continent. Go out, explore, take some risks, take some chances.”
And he didn’t say, “Don’t bother going to university.” But I think he almost said that in code, because he said, “As a journalist, you’re going to learn your skills and your skills are only going to be great based on what you’ve experienced and who you know.” And those are the words he left me with. And it was remarkable to have met him. And also of course have those words of guidance as well.
George Gendron: And obviously they had an impact on you, because that’s exactly what you did.
Tyler Brûlé: Yeah pretty much. Yeah. I certainly admired the man.
George Gendron: Who do you admire today?
Tyler Brûlé: Goodness. In the world of broadcast? Or just anywhere?
Monocle’s commitment to innovating in print led to the launch of seasonal newspapers.
“The roadside is littered with all kinds of carcasses of [brands] who wanted to scale and are no longer with us.”
Shortly after launch, Monocle began making coffee table books.
George Gendron: Yeah. It’s interesting to hear people talk about an individual who kind of mesmerized them. And I’m curious, are you mesmerized by anyone today that comes to mind? Journalists or not.
Tyler Brûlé: Sure. And just, like, on the fly at this very moment, I don’t think I’m mesmerized in the world of media by anyone in particular. But certainly I’m impressed, and have met many people that I look up to and like spending time with, particularly in the space of journalism.
And this is not to say that I’m blasé about it, it’s just because I think as we’re speaking, this has been one of these travel periods the last five weeks where I think I’ve been home for about four days. So maybe I could be a little bit sharper if we did this three days from now.
George Gendron: That’s okay. Well that raises an interesting question, which is—well first I want to ask you a big, broad question and then I want to pick up on your travel and on you as a magazine maker—and that is, which do you identify with more: founder/entrepreneur on the one hand, or magazine-maker/editor on the other?
Tyler Brûlé: I would even go—it’s not somewhere in between, and it’s not a step down—I would just say “journalist.” I still write for the newspapers. I, of course, write for my own title and I host programs. But it’s still driven by the foundations of being a journalist.
I always think the best measure is when you go into a country where you still have to jot down on a little yellow piece of paper “profession,” I write “journalist.” It just seems odd to write “chairman” or “editorial director” or “CEO.” It just doesn’t …
George Gendron: Yeah, I know what you mean. Of course.
Tyler Brûlé: But yeah, those are mainly functions, and I have those titles on various cards. But if I think about What do I do? I’m a journalist. I’m out to be a witness. I’m out to absorb, I’m out to interpret, and I’m out to communicate.
George Gendron: What I always love about journalism is it subsidizes one’s curiosity.
Tyler Brûlé: Absolutely. Especially when you have editors and publishers who are as curious as you and believe in the craft of journalism. And I have to say, I’ve been very fortunate over the decades to have worked with amazing publishing companies and outstanding editors. And it’s been great to be, hopefully, to be in a position as well where we’ve done the same for other people moving into or cutting across their career as well.
George Gendron: You say you travel 250 days a year. That has to have an impact on how much time you actually get to spend on an issue of Monocle. So is that true, number one? And if it is true, what are the things that you miss most about having more time to spend on Monocle?
Tyler Brûlé: So, first going back to the numbers game, obviously for this last period, it’s not been 250 days on the road. I do feel like I’m moving back to that. But yeah, you know, it’s interesting, if I think back before the start of the pandemic, I had shifted a little bit of my focus and my life to Zurich more than London.
I handed over the daily reins of the magazine to Andrew [Tuck]. Andrew became the editor-in-chief of the magazine, I took the title of editorial director. And that happened very naturally because, I think, on one side, we were just doing other things. There were so many other components.
And even though Andrew, of course, is across all of the content, things were becoming more complex in terms of the types of partnerships. I was playing a bit more of, I would say, the CEO role as well, looking after the brand in all of its aspects.
But who knows? We can revisit where I end up at the end of 2023, how much I’ve been traveling. But yes, I’m on the road a lot. And I don’t think it’s annoying for the rest of the team, but there’s one thing about going out there and knowing where we have either correspondents or we have bureaus, and arriving in a city and thinking and then I have to fire a note back to London saying, “Are we working on this story right now?” “Oh, no. No, we’re not working on it.” Or we might have passed on it—normally not passed on, they’re just not working on it. And I say, “How did we miss this? Why isn’t this commissioned already?”
And Andrew and I always have this conversation, in a really polite and forwarding way, about having done what we’ve done for a very long time that oftentimes other people just simply miss it. Of course we know the flip side of it all as well is if you’re in a market the whole time and your beat happens to be that Latin American city or that city in Southeast Asia, you just, you may not see it. But if you’re in Tokyo one day, then you’re in Taipei, then you’re in Singapore, then you’re in Bangkok and you’re like, “Oh, I was able to connect all of these things and isn’t it curious why this one thing is happening in Thailand at the moment.”
So I would say it actually helps inform what we’re doing. It allows Andrew and everyone back at base to get on with what they’re doing. And it allows me, probably, to be quite pointy and sharp and making sure that we’ve got the right stories going into the magazine and in a fashion which is, still, quite top-down you would say.
And of course that doesn’t inform everything we do. So I think it’s important. I think it’s a nice sparring match that I have between Andrew and the other editors. I’m sure it annoys them some days. Some days not. But I think it makes for a better product.
What do I miss? I miss the close of the magazine, because I’m normally not on the editorial floor in London. I have a set of walls here in Zurich, cork walls, where the issue does go up. But I’m able to look at the flat plan and look at the pace of the pages, et cetera.
But it’s not the same as the bar trolley being open on a Friday when you’re—or Tuesday is the hard close, I should say—Tuesday when you can flip through the book and you can open up a glass of wine, be with a team and celebrate that this has now been shipped off to Germany and it’s hitting the presses. That I miss.
George Gendron: That’s the best, isn’t it?
Tyler Brûlé: And that’s the power of the newsroom. And I think it’s the power of being together, and it’s the power of why we do what we do. And I think we were quite lucky—there were one or two issues that we weren’t all together properly, en masse, to get magazines out in that early spring of 2000 period. But, yeah, the good thing is we corrected that quite quickly. But that’s the magic of why we do what we do. And I think that’s the beauty of the editorial floor.
A natural spinoff has been a bespoke series of travel guides.
George Gendron: What, if anything, are you absolutely completely unwilling to delegate when it comes to the print edition of Monocle?
Tyler Brûlé: Well, I delegate many things, but I would never be in a situation where the cover goes without seeing it, without being able to look at the coverlines, without being able to contribute to the coverlines.
And, I don’t read every word anymore, but we’re in a situation where, if there’s something that Andrew thinks is critical that I need to see, I see it. But I have to see the entire issue. And when you see it pinned up on a wall, you’re not reading every word of the issue, of course.
But I can’t give that up. That is very important. And listen, it’s important to Andrew and Richard [Spencer Powell, Monocle’s creative director], and Josh [Fehnert, executive editor] and Sophie [Grove, editor of Konfekt] and all of the other people who are in the senior editorial mix that there’s also just a different set of eyes.
I mean, it’d be much worse if I didn’t make comments. But also if I didn’t see it, but then ranted about something because well, that’s down to me. Then why didn’t I see it? And, of course, we don’t catch everything and we have glitches and mistakes, like all media brands do. But that’s something, to me, which is essential and also makes me a journalist.
George Gendron: Listening to you talk, there is something—a kind of an authority and an aura—that comes with being a founder that you have to be aware of. People want your opinions. They want your input. They want your presence. Like it or not.
Tyler Brûlé: Yes. And that is, maybe, a little bit of the culture that also comes with being an independent publisher still, as well. We’re not part of a major conglomerate. And every success is our own. And every mistake is our own.
And there is also that sense of being an owner/founder that it is a high wire act every day. And there are no cables and nets. And no spotters on the ground, either. So it means that you really have to proceed with caution. But I think when you have the chance to do it, that you can also move forward at pace as well and with confidence.
In 2020, Brûlé and team launched Konfekt, “a deep dive into the worlds of fashion, craft, travel and design.”
“We’re not part of a major conglomerate. And every success is our own. And every mistake is our own.”
George Gendron: I want to talk about two things—one could be an entire podcast in its own right—and that is Monocle has a really interesting and I think, really healthy effect on a reader in the US which is that it’s interesting to pick up a publication or engage with a brand that is so non-US-centric.
Tyler Brûlé: So yeah. Discuss. Yes, discuss this topic. It is. And listen, it’s why the US is our biggest market, as well. Not just because it’s the biggest English-language market in the world. I think we could maybe sell more copies in the UK alone. And the UK is very close, but the US is our biggest market. Newsstand subscriptions. Radio listeners. People buying products from us.
And I think part of it is because it’s an oasis of a different dialogue. It’s a different conversation, it’s a different lens. Of course we do cover the US. But again, we’ve always done so on our own terms. And it’s been really interesting to read and engage with some of the correspondence over the past few years as things have become more divisive in the United States.
Andrew and I say we’ve always done a good issue if we’re able to annoy both Democrats and Republicans with one issue. And one thing we do talk about—and maybe it was when you were just reading out some of the values and the mission statement that we had cooked up back in 2007—I don’t think we were talking about being a voice of reason then, but I think we, again, it’s not written, it’s not in any brand book, but we want to be pragmatic, and we want to be measured, and we want to be a place of common sense, as well. And I think, obviously, that is something which we're constantly pointing out. That we need to have a real commonsensical approach to things.
And it’s funny how that’s what—even without us talking about it—that’s what we get from our listeners and our readers as well. People say, “Oh, I just thank goodness you just speak some basic truth,” which might be right of center, it might be left of center, but we’re not setting out to have any political agenda around it. We just want to be pragmatic.
George Gendron: When I think about Monocle, print in particular, but I think it’s true of the brand in general. In fact, it is true of the brand in general. It’s certainly true of radio. I think that you guys really revel in creativity, innovation, invention, resourcefulness, imagination. You really revel in it. I don’t know what other word to use. And that leads to an interesting question which—this is going to sound like a non sequitur, but it’s not—is New York City over?
Tyler Brûlé: I don’t think it’s ever been our position. And this comes back to, and I don’t want to revel in a house view, but Monocle’s a place about the positive. We come from, I would say, a position of looking forward. That doesn’t mean that you ignore atrocities, bad behavior, missteps of the past, but there is also a component of what we do, which is let’s be solution driven.
So has New York stumbled? Is New York the place it was five years ago, 10 years ago, over 20 years ago, when it was the editorial hub of the world? No, I don’t think it is that place anymore. But it doesn’t mean it’s out. Because listen, I mean, still some of the world’s most important broadcasts and newspapers are coming out of that city.
But are they the broadcast or journalistic benchmarks that they once were? No. I think you look at a number of titles or outlets or bulletins which don’t have the same level of clout. Now, of course, the media landscape is much broader and of course it’s much more dispersed. So people have more options. But I would also say at the same time, some of those flagship brands are not quite what they were either. So some of it is on their own watch. It’s not just because of what’s happened with competition, attention deficit, and everything else.
George Gendron: I’m also thinking though, and I don’t mean to turn it into an anti-New York City screed. I grew up there. I love the city, but a lot of creatives have left, and they’ve left simply because it’s not affordable. And that’s an issue, certainly in the US, for cities like Boston, New York, San Francisco, to a lesser extent, LA. I guess I’m also asking this question about, kind of, affordability and creatives.
Tyler Brûlé: And that you need to have an affordable environment to be able to cut your teeth as an art director, as a photo editor? Yeah, in part. But London was never cheap. And I think back to the magazines, the titles which were really so important to me growing up. Hamburg was never a cheap city. And it continues to be one of the most expensive cities in the EU.
But I think back to the glory days—and the Hamburg period is probably the same—late eighties, nineties maybe even up into the early two thousands, it was never inexpensive. So I don’t fully buy that a city needs to be completely affordable. I think, as a young journalist, you need to be in the best environment and you need to be learning from the best.
And yeah, you might be able to do part of it. But I go back to Peter Jennings’s comments, like, don’t think you have to be part of the farm team to make your way back to Toronto, to make your way to New York. Just get out in the world. And in that case, I left Canada, went to the other side of the Atlantic, and still am largely over here.
Monocle has opened branded cafés and shops around the world, including Hong Kong, Tokyo, Toronto, Merano (Italy), as well as London and Zurich, pictured here.
George Gendron: So if a young, recent college grad, who is interested in a creative field, not just journalism, but it could be design, anything that we would think of as a creative endeavor and they said to you, if you were me, where would you go right now?
Tyler Brûlé: First I would say, don't, as a 24 year old, say to yourself—or certainly say to a potential employer—that you “only want to work from home” or you “only want flexi-working.” This I don’t understand because you have to be around people. And if you really want to be a journalist and—listen, if you want to go out and chance it as a writer, great. Go for it. Go out in the world.
But if you actually want to be part of the editorial process—whether that’s making a radio documentary, or turning out a great magazine weekly, or a newspaper supplement on the weekends, whatever it is—you have to be surrounded by people, be in a great environment. The serendipity that comes with it, the camaraderie that comes with it.
But if you’re talking about someone who’s 23, 24, the learning, the mentorship—that’s the first thing. And then I would say why go for second best? If you were in a town or a city which has a newspaper or monthly magazine, which is on its last legs, probably not the place that you want to start.
So, yeah, you might have to make a few lifestyle curbs if you go to New York, or you move to London, or you find yourself in Singapore, wherever those titles happen to be. I think you want to learn from the best.
George Gendron: That’s great advice. To wrap this up, I have to come back to something that, having led the Inc. magazine creative team for 20 years, just fascinates me about this conversation, and that is your reference to Monocle as a family business. Can you say more about that? You don’t have a family. It’s not as if you’ve got five kids and you’re thinking about, “Which of my five”—you know, an episode of Succession—“which of my kids is going to take over?” Tell me what you mean when you say Monocle is really a family business.
Tyler Brûlé: I would say we’re a family business in almost the traditional—not quite mom and pop sense—but that it’s family money. But I should also be very clear that I’m not from a wealthy background. There are no silver spoons. A lot of this was self-financed. But nevertheless, of course, there was help from my mom along the way. And my mom holds a board position in the very small Canadian part of the business. And when we talk about blood that is one part of it.
But it’s a family in the sense that a lot of us have been together for a long time. And I think about Jackie Deacon [Monocle’s production director] or Richard Spencer Powell—Jackie is the master of understanding printing presses and paper tonnage. And talk about a skill and an understanding of something which is just … it’s golden what she does. We go back to the mid-nineties as colleagues. Same with Richard Spencer Powell, our creative director. So, listen, there’s many contemporary ways of defining a family, but I would say that this is one of the more older-school ways to define it.
And then I say it’s a family business because it’s also the other people who are invested. I mean, we hold, we, me, hold 70% of the company. The other 30% are families. So there’s no private equity. Two percent of our shares are held by Nikkei. But again, Nikkei is a private company as well. But everyone else—they’re family offices from Texas, from Thailand, from elsewhere in Switzerland, from Sweden.
So these are also other individuals who love media, they're passionate about what we do. And a lot of it has to do with quality. So when I talk in terms of a family, that is what it is. And there are no kids that are going to take over the business—at least none that I’ve spawned. But who knows? But who knows what happens with some of the other family members who are in the business. And what do we do with this moving forward?
George Gendron: Do members of your team, like Richard, do they have equity?
Tyler Brûlé: No. As we’ve built and brought in other investors we’ve done the best we can to cut people in, in terms of bonuses and done the best to do right by them. But no, it’s held by the other families and our shareholders.
George Gendron: I hate to end on a negative note, but I have to ask: What happens, in terms of succession, if you get hit by a tram today?
Tyler Brûlé: And it’s very easy to get hit by a tram in Zurich. I always say they’re the silent killers. Listen, there’s a very talented team in place. It’s a little bit like the same question, people say, “Oh, you know, what was going to happen to Wallpaper* when you left?” Well, Wallpaper*’s still around and seemingly doing okay.
I think that’s the essence of a great brand, right? Magazines have written codes, and fonts, and grids, and a photographic style that needs to be maintained. And, of course, it has a team of people that knows how to uphold all of those things. It has editors who understand the types of stories that are going to be commissioned.
So I think we’ve put a very good framework in place. We did that in the last magazine we did. We’ve done that for lots of other clients—titles that you may not even know that we’ve worked on. And we continue to do it day in and day out with Monocle. So I think the title would do just fine.
Midori House, Monocle’s headquarters, is located in London’s chic Marylebone neighborhood, between Hyde Park and Regent’s Park.
For more information, visit Monocle.com, where, if you’re a subscriber, you can read articles, watch films, listen to radio, and buy all kinds of cool stuff.
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Back to the Interviews
A Style All Her Own
A conversation with editor and designer Stella Bugbee (The New York Times Style Section, The Cut, Domino, more).
A conversation with editor and designer Stella Bugbee (New York Times Style Section, The Cut, Domino, more).
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THIS EPISODE IS A SPECIAL COLLABORATION WITH OUR FRIENDS AT THE SPREAD
EDITOR’S NOTE:
This summer, our first collaboration with The Spread—the Episode 21 interview with former Cosmopolitan Editor-in-Chief Joanna Coles—became our most-listened-to episode ever. Now Rachel Baker and Maggie Bullock are back, and this time they’re speaking with another game-changing woman in media: Stella Bugbee, the editor of The New York Times Style section.
For our new listeners, Rachel and Maggie are a pair of former Elle magazine editors and “work wives.” In 2021, like many of you, they found themselves wishing for a great women’s magazine—and watching the old-school women’s mags drop like icebergs from a glacier. They decided to be the change they wanted to see—and The Spread was born.
Now, more than two years into publishing their dream weekly on Substack, rounding up juicy gossip, big ideas, and deeply personal examinations of women’s lives—from The New York Times and The Atlantic to Vogue and Elle to NplusOne and The Drift—The Spread is a cult favorite of media mavens and the media-curious.
Rachel & Maggie call Bugbee “a magazine-making unicorn”—we’re excited to be able to share their conversation with you.
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Maggie Bullock: Last month, the big, bad headline in the world of women’s media was the shuttering of the groundbreaking feminist website Jezebel. We’ve since learned that Jezebel could be revived, but who even knows what that means? Regardless, the “closure” unleashed a wave of mourning, even among magazine fanatics like us who’ve become a little bit inured to the decimation of the legacy magazines that Jezebel was invented to skewer. Rachel, Jezebel was supposed to be the radical “antidote to the establishment”—and it didn’t have to contend with the print and circulation costs that sink bigger ships. When that topples, you have to ask yourself: What era of women’s media are we in now?
Rachel Baker: That’s what makes it such an interesting time to talk to Stella Bugbee. Ask any 30- or 40-something today about the one women’s media brand that is absolutely a daily must-read, and she will say New York magazine’s The Cut—the site that, starting in 2012, Stella built. The Cut was not just a women’s magazine re-sized for the internet, but a whole-cloth reinvention of the form. Jezebel (which was founded in 2007) was as much its forebear as the Elles and Vogues of the world: The Cut had the irreverence and voice-yness and political savvy of new media and the high-caliber production value of old media. And it was built to last: While we may have lost Jezebel, The Cut is still operating, more or less, on the blueprint that Stella created—and going strong.
Maggie Bullock: What we’ve always found fascinating about Bugbee is that she started out as a designer—she worked at a creative agency and on the visual side of a ton of cool indie magazines (like Interview and Topic) and had a stint at The New York Times before becoming the design director of the original Domino. But then when that magazine folded, she somehow totally switched teams, becoming an editor and a really great writer. I can’t think of anybody else who did that, can you? It's no surprise that The New York Times tried for years to get Stella to come to run the Styles desk. Somehow, the middle of the pandemic—when most of the Times was still working remotely, when she was unable to meet her team in person—felt like the right time for her?
Rachel Baker: Now I think you can really see the Stella touch in the way they package their stories. Like, a couple weeks ago, when the section ran a cover story titled, “Ozempic vs. Thanksgiving.” The idea sounds almost obvious, but I’d argue that it’s a masterclass in headline writing—it demonstrates a specific Bugbee-an ability to survey the culture and zero in on the thing everyone is thinking about—like when Styles spotlighted the “girl dinner” over the summer. My group texts are still full of photos of “cheese plates for one,” how about yours?
Maggie Bullock: Totally. So should we stop yammering so folks can listen to what Stella has to say?
Rachel Baker: Let’s do it.
Maggie Bullock: Okay, so now we shall ask some questions. So Stella, thank you for joining us here. We’re super excited to have you and we are taping this on a Monday afternoon, it is 1:02 p.m., and we were wondering what’s going on at the Times at 1:02 p.m. on a Monday. What are you guys doing right now?
Stella Bugbee: Should I tell you the truth?
Maggie Bullock: Preferably.
Stella Bugbee: Normally at 1:02 on a Monday I’m catching up. Usually I’m probably eating lunch at 1:02, actually, because at noon there is this meeting called the enterprise meeting where a lot of desk heads come together with the masthead and we talk about the developing big story of the day or of the week.
And people kind of think about how their section might get in on telling that story or what they could contribute. Mostly, I listen in those meetings. But every once in a while, there’s a way that Styles could get into the story, and it’s really helpful to be at those. And then after those end, I usually go upstairs and eat a salad.
Maggie Bullock: Perfect. So you’re fueled. That’s important. And like, what’s the stressful part of the week in terms of your deadlines and Styles?
Stella Bugbee: Styles closes two issues a week. We have a Thursday edition and a Sunday edition. So we are closing Thursday on Wednesday afternoon, and we were closing Sunday on Friday morning.
But, we’re really digital-first as they love to say, but it’s true. So we’re really meeting every, we meet a couple times a week. One of those moments is Monday mornings and we look at the whole week and we sort of publish divorced from the print product. And then we look at what’s going to fill Thursday and what’s going to fill Sunday, but we publish way in advance, often, online.
So we’re looking at this big Airtable—I don’t know if anybody uses Airtable, but that has our whole calendar. And I try to have at least three or four things publishing every day, regardless of the print product. But we’re sort of in a real rhythm with publishing Thursdays and Sundays.
And mostly what we’re thinking about is like, what’s the cover of Thursday and what’s the cover of Sunday. And how are we going to spread out the stories that we’ve published all week into either one of those places.
Maggie Bullock: So we’re going to get more into the nitty gritty of that, but for now we’re going to back up a little bit. So you grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, correct?
Stella Bugbee: Where I still live.
Maggie Bullock: Where you still live. You went to the smarty-pants high school, Stuyvesant.
Stella Bugbee: Wow. You did your research. Yes, I did.
Maggie Bullock: And then you went to Parsons, right? And you majored there in communication design.
Stella Bugbee: Yes. Magazines, basically.
Maggie Bullock: In magazines? So it seems safe to say you’re a total dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker. Is that safe to say?
Stella Bugbee: I like to think so, yes.
Maggie Bullock: And how do you think that informs your editorial point of view—certainly your job now? Like, how key to your makeup is the fact that you grew up the way that you did?
Stella Bugbee: I sometimes think about, going back to Stuyvesant, like If you had said to people who knew me back then, “Someday she’s going to be editing the Style section of The New York Times,” I think people would have said like, “Oh yeah, that makes sense.” Because it was a huge interest of mine. Fashion was like a huge part of how I identified within my friend group and I was always super-interested in it, always had subscriptions to Vogue and Interview and a lot of interest in that stuff. And also in writing.
I think I took a lot of detours. I didn’t necessarily think I would end up here. But then I think if I told my high school self, “Oh that’s what you’ll be doing in 30 years,” I think I’d be like, “Oh yeah, I guess so.” It makes sense in retrospect. So I think growing up in New York, you’re just exposed to fashion all the time by just leaving the house.
You can’t help but see all the stuff around you. And I just naturally found it so interesting. I just loved the way people looked and I couldn’t stop watching them. And I think being on the subway every day, walking through Manhattan, it’s unavoidable.
“I don’t think a career in fashion was necessarily something that I thought was a valid career. Which is a shame because it truly is.”
Maggie Bullock: And did you grow up—I mean, every New Yorker really grows up reading the Style section.
Stella Bugbee: Yeah, I guess so. We had a subscription to the Times. I feel like I read the Book Review a lot. (I was a little pretentious). And I apologize to the people who knew me then. Yeah, I mean, it was around. It was, like, in the world. I don’t think a career in fashion was necessarily something that I thought was a valid career then. Which is a shame because it truly is. There’s so much you can do in fashion. I just didn’t have that awareness. My family didn’t work in fashion. I didn’t really have any examples of people who had careers in fashion. My parents were teachers.
Like it just didn’t seem like a valid direction. And then at Parsons, it’s obviously a huge part of the school, although I wasn’t in that program. So again, I saw magazines as this bridge between what I enjoyed about fashion, which is image making and culture creation and analysis, and writing. Like a magazine back then—this is, whatever, mid- to late-nineties—was this place where you could catalog culture in this way that was really permanent and relevant.
And I was looking to the magazines to give me the information about these communities that I really wanted to be part of or that I really admired. And so it just sort of felt like, well, that’s where I want to be working. I want to be doing that. And the communication design program was really about—you could pick a lot of different things within that. But for me, magazines were the natural crossover of my many interests: writing, and visuals, and culture. It wasn’t just fashion.
Maggie Bullock: But that said, when you got out of Parsons, you didn’t follow what we think of as the traditional path to magazine success, exactly. You went into advertising, right? Was that the first leap?
Stella Bugbee: Yeah. There were a couple of people that I really admired in the late ’90s. Some of them were my teachers and some of them were just people in the design community that were bridging this gap between designer and editor. Like, Tibor Kalman was a person that had been incredibly influential in New York City and he had employed most of my teachers.
So I’m, let’s just say, like, third-generation—maybe I’m second-generation? So all of my teachers at Parsons were working designers, that’s the way it worked. And they had all worked for Tibor. So he was, kind of, this grandfather figure in the city. And he had done Colors magazine. It was this very groundbreaking project where a designer could tell stories as an art director and it was super powerful and this huge commentary, but it kind of crossed this line between advertising/advertorial/content. But it really was independent of, I guess it was Benetton who was the company that put out Colors.
And so Tibor was this figure for me that I kind of wanted to emulate. And then in college, I worked for Roger Black, who is this seminal magazine designer. And at that point he had a firm where he redesigned magazines. And I loved it. I worked on Reader’s Digest, I worked on Men’s Health, I worked on all these magazines.
But what didn’t appeal to me about that was the sort of rigorous work your way up as an art director and have like no say in the content part of it. And there was just a little bit of fluidity between advertising and design in the people that I most admired, like [Stefan] Sagmeister or Tibor Kalman. And I ended up just taking a job that I got, which happened to be in advertising at the end.
And it was advertising for theater, so it felt kind of editorial in a weird way. Like I had to come up with art direction in the same way you might for a story. Because you’re reading a play, and you’re trying to come up with how to advertise that play. The other day I was in my basement and I found the Playbill for one of the plays that I designed right out of college, which was this play called W;t.
Maggie Bullock: Oh wow, I remember that.
Rachel Baker: Yeah.
Stella Bugbee: Yeah. And it had a semicolon instead of the “i.” It was advertising, but it was extremely creative, that part of it.
Rachel Baker: But you’re responsible for the semicolon?
Stella Bugbee: I’m responsible for that logo, yeah. It’s in the play. Like, I read the play and I was like, “Let’s make the “i” a semicolon.”
Rachel Baker: Right.
Stella Bugbee: The semicolon is like a character in this play. Anyway, it was a way not to have to commit to a linear work-my-way-up-to-being-a-creative-director type of move out of college. And when you’re out of college, if somebody offers you a job, you’re just like, “Yeah, I’ll take it.” And I loved that job. I loved my boss and it was a fantastic job. But I only did that for about a year.
Maggie Bullock: So, I want to talk about all of these things, but we also want to cover a lot of ground. So I’m going to leap forward to 2006. Is that the year that you got hired at Domino?
Stella Bugbee: Yeah. I had a brief detour working here at The New York Times for the summer. I was obsessed with Adam Moss and The New York Times Magazine. And there was an opening—somebody went on maternity leave in the art department. So I was like, “I’ve just got to go and try it out and see what it’s like.”
So I got to do that. I got to cover her mat leave. So I was here for like this minor tiny moment and I got to see just like, “Oh, that’s what it’s like to work at a magazine.” And then I took a couple more detours before going back to magazines. But it was cool.
“All of us were obsessed with Adam [Moss], and just dying to get to Adam.”
Maggie Bullock: So that’s where you met Adam then, and where that started?
Stella Bugbee: No, that’s where I met Rob Giampietro, who is another graphic designer who knew David Haskell. And he said, “This guy I know from college is starting a magazine and I think he could use some help on it.”
And so I was like, “Oh, I’ll do that. That sounds fun.” And we just kind of took it over from, not from David, but for David, like in terms of just trying to reimagine what it could look like.
And at that point, working on that, I was like, “I want to be the editor.” That was where I got this, like, “Well, I have more ideas for the stories than I actually have for the art and design of this.” And I got this bug.
Maggie Bullock: Is that Topic?
Stella Bugbee: That was Topic magazine.
Maggie Bullock: Can we just tell our listeners, briefly, what was Topic?
Stella Bugbee: So Topic was David Haskell’s literary magazine that he started when he was, I think, I should fact check this, but I think he was at Cambridge when he started it. And when he moved back to America, he talked to Rob. And Rob talked to me.
And then I brought on a photo editor that was a friend of mine. And it was just this small, quarterly, sometimes only twice-a-year, self-funded literary magazine. And it covered a different topic each time. So we did games, we did prison, we did money—kind of like a little prototype of what a special issue of New York magazine might look like.
And all of us were obsessed with Adam, and just dying to get to Adam. And then David actually did get to Adam first. And David started working at New York magazine. That must’ve been, maybe 2007, 2006, something like that. And at that point I had gone to Domino.
Maggie Bullock: So somewhere along the line, you also had a few babies in there.
Stella Bugbee: Yes, right around Topic. I bounced around between advertising, just working and learning how to be an art director and stuff. I got pregnant and was sort of like kicking around, not sure what to do.
I also did this project with Joanna Goddard. She did this magazine that was all about Italy. It’s called Bene. I took the same photo editor from Topic and we went over to help her do this. It was really kind of a fun dream project all about Italy, but for Americans. They don’t do projects like this anymore. It’s like one of those things that you hear about, you’re like, “People don’t do that!”
Rachel Baker: Yeah. Who was funding that? Where is it? Can we get a copy?
Stella Bugbee: I might still have some copies like in my basement. I think we only did four or three, I can only remember the three covers. But I did that for a little while. And I was out of work, technically. I was at home with my babies. And I remember saying like, “I got to get to Condé. I got to get, I just got to get—I just need to be, like, a design director somewhere.”
Maggie Bullock: Because you needed, like, stability, insurance? Or you had bigger ambitions? What was, "I gotta get to Condé?"
Stella Bugbee: Well, I was like, “Okay, it’s time. It’s time to go do that thing I’ve been avoiding doing and just actually do it. If I’m going to do it.” And a guy that I had gone to college with had designed the original prototype for Domino. And he just put my name up for the job and I went and got the job.
Rachel Baker: And you were 30.
Stella Bugbee: I was 30. Yeah. It’s crazy to think about, yes.
Maggie Bullock: So we love Domino. Rachel and I both loved Domino. And to me it really made interiors, which had been this, sort of, off limits, rich person’s hobby into, like, a shoppable, fun, younger—I thought it was really innovative. It was so fun to consume. But looking back on Domino what do you think was the brilliance of that publication?
Stella Bugbee: Well, I think Deborah [Needleman] was brilliant. I think Deborah, who also comes kind of from a visual background—she was a photo editor before she became an editor— understood how to tell the story about how a regular person could decorate their house.
And the genius of it is that I didn’t realize just quite how expensive everything was until I actually went to work there and got a deep education in interior design from all these brilliant, amazing women that I worked with. And you never felt that as a reader, which, I thought, was a really nice sleight-of-hand that she was able to pull off. Because actually designing a house is so expensive.
And somehow, as a reader, you’re like, “I could do this.” And I think that feeling of being invited in to participate was super-key to the success of that magazine. And it’s something that I feel is very important, especially for fashion, right? So it’s an ethos that I, like, took a big note from with Deborah.
And Deborah was obsessive about captions, which I think was also a great lesson for me. Like, she cared more about the captions than she cared about the actual long copy, because she understood that readers have all these different entry points into a story. And as a designer, like, who really was a reader first I think the way that I thought about design, and still think about editing, is like as a reader first.
So you’re sort of saying like, “I know that as a reader first, I’m going to go to the caption. I’m going to go to the headline, caption, and then I’m going to read the story.” Because it’s all these different entry points. And she really taught me the value of being obsessive about that small copy And that kind of what it contributes to the overall experience of a magazine.
Maggie Bullock: That is a hundred percent. Two, two hundred percent! Okay, but so this is a podcast called Print is Dead. So people are going to want to hear—tell the people about your experience just a few years later of watching that OG Domino be shuttered. What was that like from your vantage point and what did you learn from that?
Stella Bugbee: It was devastating, frankly, to have this project that everybody worked so hard on—I mean we were just finishing the book, The Domino Book of Decorating, which we had killed ourselves on. And we were doing that on top of the magazine, and I had this incredible design team of seven people, and they were just the loveliest, best people. And there was no warning. And they fired us all—like a hundred and some people—within 10 minutes.
I was out that day. I was sick at home. And I just got a whole bunch of phone calls. And they called everybody into a conference room, and when they got back to their desks, there were, like, “you’re fired” notices on their chairs. Then I pulled myself out of bed, andI went to work. And everybody was inconsolable.
It was really quite upsetting and disorienting for everyone because everywhere you went, people said like, “I love Domino. I love that magazine. It’s so great.” And you felt like you were working on something that people really were relating to. And then you get shut down in a mass firing.
So I was pretty discouraged. I’d finally committed to being in magazines, and I gave up on them almost immediately—well, that’s not true. I had a brief stint at Interview while Glenn [O’Brien] was there. And then he got fired. And I quit and went back to advertising. But this time in fashion, which was again, like kind of an incredible education. So every job that I had, I tried to use it as a way to just get a deeper understanding of how to do a skill.
And so when I went to work in fashion, it was really this, sort of, deep plunge into visual storytelling and brand building. And it happened to be working for Raul Martinez, who was a legendary Vogue art director forever with Anna [Wintour], and his husband Alex Gonzalez, who was also an art director at many Hearst publications.
And they had, in the Tibor model, also made their own magazines. One was called Influence. This was like long before the term “influencers” was broadly used. And II just kind of put myself at their feet and just learned everything there was to learn from them about how to tell a story.
And one of the most amazing things about working there is they had every issue of Vogue ever made. I mean, they had every issue of every fashion magazine. And there’s huge stacks of library magazine racks. And you basically spent all day looking through old Vogues. So, it was not only an incredible experience to work for these two great men who I loved, it was this immersion in the history of fashion photography.
So I really learned a lot of the cliches, a lot of the popular tropes, a lot of who the models were. It was kind of like a graduate thesis program, but instead I was also working. But it was great. And I’m so, so grateful for that time of just being able to like, literally spend hours looking through every Vogue ever made from the beginning to now.
“I saw magazines as this bridge between what I enjoyed about fashion, which is image making and culture creation and analysis, and writing.”
Rachel Baker: Wow. I mean, I’ve been sitting here this whole time being like, “I’ve got to get into Stella’s basement. I bet there are Dominos and Topics in there too.” And now I’m like, “Oh, I’ve got to call Alex and Raul and see their collection.”
Stella Bugbee: Yeah. Well, there used to be this place, I don’t know if you guys ever went there, called Gallagher’s. And they dealt in vintage magazine collections. And so when somebody would die—or I don’t even know actually how they came about these massive collections—you could get every magazine. Of any kind. And I discovered it in college.
And you would just go down there—and you have to imagine this is before Google image search, so you were kind of hoarding imagery, if this was your trade, because having access to historical imagery meant that you had references that nobody could find. So you were always building on this history of photography, and always building on this history of fashion and references, because no one else could find those things. It was cool.
Rachel Baker: In 2011, you came to New York magazine to work on relaunching The Cut. I was working at New York at the time, and I was so intrigued when you walked in the door—I’m still intrigued—but I just remember being like, “Who is this woman?” Because you were a designer, but you were also an editor, with all these amazing ideas. And I think your title was creative director. And then, Boom!—you were the editor of The Cut. How did all that happen?
Stella Bugbee: Well, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Adam Moss, who was the editor of New York magazine, who I think did one of these podcasts, right? I love him. I don’t know that many people might’ve said, “Oh, you can do this.” It’s hard, in our industry, to break out of whatever role you’ve been assigned early on. Which is maybe one of the reasons I didn’t want to take an early path that just “put me on a path” because I didn’t really want to be pigeonholed in that way.
But it was actually David Haskell who suggested that I come and talk to them about The Cut. I’d had another baby, and I was out of work. And he said, “We can’t quite find anybody that Adam feels really excited about to help with this project.” And I was really unsure about it.
But I thought the internet seemed really interesting, given what had happened at Domino. And I decided to come on as a consultant. I wasn’t sure and I didn’t have enough confidence frankly to just say, “I can do this.” And then I just loved it so much. And I got along with Adam. And, you know, I just like I just started to have so many ideas. And then I started to have a real vision for what it could be. And it was slow. It didn’t happen right away.
And even when I came on to be the editor in 2012, I would say for the first two years we were just trying a ton of stuff. I feel like we found our rhythm in 2014. And then from 2014 on, it built in ambition and in relevance. It was a very slow process. Seems like it wasn’t, but it really actually took a long time from when I came to when I felt like we were starting to really get going.
An anonymous note delivered with a box of donuts during the height of the #MeToo movement.
Rachel Baker: But when you showed up at The Cut, the ambition was so grand. The ambition was to reinvent the women’s magazine. How did you set out to do that? And what was the mandate from Adam? You mentioned your relationship with fashion magazines. What about traditional women’s magazine content? Did you read and like that stuff?
Stella Bugbee: I definitely read all that stuff. My whole life. So it was steeped in that. The internet allowed us to be voicey-er, and to be more immediate, and to reflect what the writers wanted to say, and how they wanted to speak in a different way than a magazine may have constrained the voices of some of the people working on it.
And there was just a feeling of like, “Well, you just put it up.” And you see, and then you react. It didn’t feel precious. I will say that. And we didn’t have any budget. It wasn’t like we had a huge media budget and we had all this stuff that a Condé Nast magazine had.
So with that came a lot of freedom. And I think right away I thought, there’s a way to talk about fashion that I’ve never encountered before, which is sort of “it’s a big party and you’re invited, if you want to come in.” It’s here for you. Anybody can participate. Anyone can, in theory, be stylish. But I think that the top-down message from a lot of fashion magazines, a lot of women’s magazines was, like, “Nope, you’re on the outside.”
And you didn’t really know what you had to do to get past that barrier. What, as a woman, did you have to do to be able to wear the clothes or be invited to wear the clothes? And I just thought that was all garbage. So right away, we just had a different way of talking about fashion, and about beauty, and about what was happening on the internet.
So It wasn’t that hard to “remake a women’s magazine” because women’s magazines had gotten a little bit stale. At the same time as we were doing that, there were other publications popping up that I think were addressing this, as well. Like The Gentlewoman, for example, which, right out of the gate, Penny Martin had this very crystal clear idea about how she wanted to talk about fashion and women.
And it was kind of simpatico to what we were doing, but in a very different tone. But it had a similar kind of motivation behind it, which is like, “I don’t really like what I’ve been seeing. I don’t really relate to that. But I still love this subject matter. And I think there’s probably a lot of other women who feel that way.”
One of the beautiful things about the internet is that you get feedback right away. So, if you feel like you’re on to something, you can hear right away whether people are also on board with it.
Rachel Baker: Yeah, one of the things about The Cut that felt so singular was that not only did you comment on the culture, you were really creating the culture, like normcore, millennial pink, BDE (“Big Dick Energy” for our listeners who don’t know what BDE is), Dad Bod. These were coinages and cultural touchstones made by The Cut. What was the secret sauce there and how were you able to establish such authority just to be, like, “We’re creating the culture”?
Stella Bugbee: I think New York magazine has a certain place in the culture where that’s their role. And we benefited from being part of the history of that place. It’s a provocative place. Its whole identity is to be on the cutting edge of culture and be lobbing provocations out into the world.
And we were, I think actually, just operating in that tradition. It’s a bold, scrappy place. All of it. Every single person who works there had that same—I mean, you worked there, so you know—you would take these big swings quite confidently. But those story ideas, and all of the things that we did, came out of conversations that were happening on the staff.
And it was very important to me to create a place where what we wanted to say was okay to say. And sometimes that was at odds with what was happening outside of our little pod. But I stuck very strongly to that feeling. I would say that the continuity between what I was doing at The Cut and now is [exactly] that. They get to say what they want to say in the way that they want to say it.
I think that’s the most important thing about that part of New York magazine. We just got to do it the way we wanted to do it. And I hope that continues. And I see Lindsay [Peoples] doing that beautifully. But I also felt like no one’s ever going to give me this chance again—or what if no one ever gives me this chance again? So you saying, like, right away “there was this ambition”—it was more that I felt insecure.
After going through Domino, I was like, “Well, you could have a really limited time to get to do everything you feel like doing. You’ve got to just, you’ve gotta do it. Because nothing in life is guaranteed.” And I just saw this bright, shiny thing and I was like, “I’ve got to just throw every single thing at this because you never know. You just never know what could happen.”
And I really didn’t want to miss a single second of it. And I hoped to communicate that to the whole team. It’s just like, “We’ve got this opportunity. We have to just go for it.” So that’s why I probably felt that way, too, coming in.
New York magazine’s bi-annual fashion issue featured Bugbee’s cover story about regional pride as a fashion statement.
Rachel Baker: Meanwhile, you guys were really finding your wings amid the wider cultural reckoning with gender, and race, and class, and #metoo, and Trump. And you wrote these brilliant and blazingly confident editor’s letters every step of the way. Maggie and I are still obsessed with the one about “skinny privilege”—by the way, we like, quote it. So what’s the best and the worst thing about helming a magazine that had become the voice of the generation during that upheaval—what was that like?
Stella Bugbee: So many of the things that you’re mentioning were just circumstantial things that were happening. I feel lucky to have been at a place like that, at a moment where those issues were what people wanted to talk about. Women’s issues were suddenly what everybody wanted to talk about. I don’t think that is the case anymore.
It’s like we’re in this total #metoo backlash moment. That wouldn’t be the place for—that would be harder for me, I think, as an editor. But the fact that everything that I wanted to do coincided with this cultural moment was just luck, honestly. And it was a lot of pressure to get it right.
And when we didn’t get it right, which happens, there’s a great amount of disappointment in our audience. And again, they let you know right away. And it felt like every mess up was so colossal for me. I felt personally on the line for every mistake, every wrong idea. And it didn’t just coincide with all these political moments. It coincided with this incredible social media moment where mistakes felt very permanent. They felt very colossal.
So if you did a story that people hated—I know this is still the case—you just felt like, “Oh my God, I can’t get up. I can’t keep going.” And it was a lot of pressure. It was very dramatic. Very dramatic. There were a lot of things that happened, like the [Shitty] Media Men List and publishing E. Jean Carroll’s accusation.
We really benefited from the broader New York magazine brain. I don’t think I could have done it without all those incredible editors that were also working on the magazine, in the room talking these things through. I could never have done it without a big group of people. It was a very big group effort.
Rachel Baker: So then in 2017, there were rumblings that The New York Times had offered you the Style section job, but you stayed at The Cut where you were promoted from editorial director to editor in chief and president and the to SVP. You must be a master negotiator, Stella! I need you to teach me how to negotiate. I’m curious about where you learned to negotiate like that, and also to what degree money has driven your decision making throughout your career?
Stella Bugbee: Well, If money had driven my decision making throughout my career, I probably wouldn’t be in this career, to be honest. And I have always chosen the opportunities that I think are going to get the best work and be around the people that will enable that. And the relationship I had with Adam at New York magazine really pushed me in a way that I never had been pushed before.
And it was whatever I needed at that time. And I just needed it and it unlocked some kind of feeling of possibility. So I would say I was much more motivated by opportunity than salary. And as far as staying at New York magazine. Again, I just saw the opportunity and it was, we were going to relaunch again.
And that relaunch was really exciting to me. I’d already put a ton of work into that relaunch. Strategic thinking, not just editorial thinking, but business thinking and strategy. And it was an acknowledgement that the job that I had been doing had grown into something that was more than just an editor, because I was really involved in a lot of the business decisions. I don’t know if I “negotiated” it that much. It was an acknowledgement, I think, more than a negotiation.
“I remember saying, ‘I gotta get to Condé. I just need to be, like, a design director somewhere.’”
Maggie Bullock: But in 2021, you did make the leap to Style. And you’re a person who’s on the record saying “print is dead.”
Stella Bugbee: Did I say that? I probably did.
Maggie Bullock: You have said it, yeah. Which works very well for this podcast.
Rachel Baker: We listen to every podcast.
Stella Bugbee: I disavow everything I’ve ever said. What did I say? Where did I say it?
Rachel Baker: Refinery29. But times change.
Maggie Bullock: You are a person who, perhaps at one time, thought that print was dead, and now you are a person sitting at the Grey Lady as we speak. So what made you decide to make the change when you did, and what was the opportunity in your mind that you couldn’t turn down at that time?
Stella Bugbee: Well, at that time I had already stepped down from The Cut, so I was at New York magazine as, I think, the title was Editor at Large. And I was debating, “Should I be more of a writer?” I think editor-at-large is kind of a funny title, and you’re like, “What am I doing?” And then the Styles job opened up and it was like, “Oh. I had missed that opportunity back when and maybe I should try it.”
And it’s so funny because I don’t think of this as a “print job” primarily at all. I love the print product and it’s very fun to think about how these things translate, but I don’t think about this as a print job. This is a journalism job. It’s like journalism happens online. It happens like what you guys are doing here. It happens on Tik Tok. It happens in print.
And Styles just seem like a natural place to get to do some of the things that I was still really interested in doing. And one of the things that’s super appealing about it is that it’s not just print and it’s not just women.
And that felt like this opportunity to do a lot of stories that I hadn’t gotten to do before. I don’t know. I mean, it’s kind of cool to work at The New York Times. It just feels really interesting to take this leap, journalistically. To be at a news organization primarily, as opposed to a magazine, feels really interesting and kind of suits my pace, that I actually prefer.
And it’s just something that I’ve realized over time is I really love that online cadence. I know that it burns a lot of people out, but I love being able to do things quickly. This is somewhere in between—you can do things really quickly, you can take a lot of time. We’re not a magazine, so we don’t have to come out in this sort of weekly cadence quite the same way. Like we do have these print products, but it has a very different energy than a magazine.
Maggie Bullock: So when you started there, I think, are we right that things were still pretty pandemic-y? Like, were people even coming to the office? What was that like for you to start that kind of job under those circumstances?
Stella Bugbee: That was very challenging. That was one of the most challenging experiences I’ve ever had at a job, where I didn’t even meet some of these people that I worked with for seven or eight months. Some of them I never even saw their faces, they didn’t turn their cameras on.
I think every one of us had been going through a lot for like over a year by the time I joined. Emotions were high, people were stressed out, people were burned out. Just everybody, the whole world, was feeling that way.
So it’s hard to have a sense of how to direct anything from afar. And at that point, not even as a team, you couldn’t meet your team. It was challenging. It was really challenging. And I think all of us were also highly emotional to begin with. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.
Maggie Bullock: How long did you actually have to run it before people started coming back into the office again?
Stella Bugbee: We’re really just starting to come back. I mean, by this point obviously, I’ve met my whole team. It’s been over two years since I started. And I made a lot of hires and you know, there was one person I didn’t meet for like seven or eight months.
Maggie Bullock: That’s so crazy.
Stella Bugbee: Yeah. And she’s like one of the most important editors on my team. We just communicated remotely. I do think that it was helpful that we’d all been doing this for over a year by the time I joined. Some people were in the habit. We all knew how to do it. It just wasn’t that much fun to do that with a new team. It was very hard to build consensus, to just get people excited. It was really hard.
How The Cut gets it done
Maggie Bullock: So in addition to that, you were also in a very different environment. And a wildly different type of publication. At The Cut, as I understand it, it was really very much a blank slate to reinvent the women’s magazine, as we’ve said, for a new era. But the Times is so different from that. How is running a section there different from pretty much anything you’ve done before?
Stella Bugbee: It can’t be overstated how totally different it is. It’s like night and day. New York magazine, The Cut, were these fairly new, very open, undefined—well, New York magazine has more of a legacy. But The Cut really didn’t. So it’s building something versus fitting yourself into a legacy publication with a lot of expectations around it internally and externally.
I met with somebody when I first came here, and she runs another desk and she’s been here for a while and she said, “Well, I’m new.”
And I said, “Really? How long have you been here?”
And she was like, “About six years.”
And I was just like, “Oh my goodness.” And it started to dawn on me that a big part of the job is learning about this institution and learning how to make work inside of it so that you are getting to the reader again. I always think about the reader.
But the reader of The New York Times is very hard to figure out. And the reader of the Style section is many, many people—different kinds and for different reasons. And so, whereas I had this really hardcore understanding of the reader at The Cut, I had to relearn what that was here at the Times. And I had to try to understand how to work with the newsroom a lot more.
That’s been the fun challenge. That’s why I go to that enterprise meeting—to listen and to hear what their priorities are every day. And like, “Well, I’m here. I run this desk. What do I contribute to that larger story of the day, if possible?” Or just like, “How does what we’re doing on the Style desk fit into the larger mission of The New York Times? And that, again, can’t be overstated how totally different that project feels than The Cut.
Maggie Bullock: So when we were talking about doing this episode, Rachel and I both agreed that 2023 for us feels like a very stressful time to edit a legacy section, a legacy desk like Styles which still has the last vestiges of being like society pages—somewhere back in its DNA it’s still that—and where people are still coming to you for, like Vows. Plus it’s always been sport for people to go bonkers on any Style story for being out of touch in one way or the other. That’s a New York tradition. It just feels like the stakes are incredibly high. I guess the first question there is did Style need reinventing when you came in?
Stella Bugbee: Well, I think Styles always needs reinventing, right? That’s the nature of Styles. And I think I’m reinventing it week to week, which is good. That’s sort of the point. But no, total reinventing? No.
I think Choire Sicha, who had the job before me, did a lot of reinventing and loosened up a lot of the expectations. And there was this big project underway, that started before I came, to reinvent Vows. And there’s a new editor on Vows, Charanna Alexander. And, if you pay close attention, you’ll see that the type of people that are featured are totally different. They started Mini Vows. It's a very different energy than it had maybe 10 or 15 years ago. That predated me.
And in terms of parties, it’s probably not totally evident unless you’re a super close reader of these things, but we really have talked a lot about what kind of parties we cover, what we’re trying to get out of party coverage—there’s this crazy, amazing legacy with Bill Cunningham and what he was doing and why he was doing it. How do we build on that? What do we preserve from what he wanted to be doing?
I don’t think it’s like a crazy, terrible time to be doing any of this stuff. I think it’s really a fun section where we get to play with what’s happening in the culture. And, of course, some people are going to hate it.
I think you have to have a rock solid sense of just, “It’s okay if people hate things.” And maybe, to go back to your earlier question about The Cut, people hated what we did at The Cut too. I got a lot of criticism all the time. I mean, people loved it, but people hated it. And when you work on the internet, you become a little bit numb to the ebb and flow of people hating things.
So that’s a good place to be when you get to a place like Styles where people love to hate on the Style section. And that’s part of it, I guess.
Maggie Bullock: Do you have what you consider to be like a formula, a mix—like we’re x percentage of this and y percentage of that? Or if you were bringing in a new editor, how would you describe to them the way that you want the section to feel and what you want it to embody?
Stella Bugbee: That’s a great question. So Styles is funny because it’s like, don’t quote me on this exact ratio, but it’s like 30 percent fashion beat reporting, maybe 30 percent love, marriage, relationships, advice, and, like, 40 percent this other stuff that’s totally up to whomever is editing it—the group of us—to fill. Like, “Well, what words are people using? Are people smoking cigarettes? How are people treating their children? Who’s interesting? What did Shannon Abloh have to say once she became independent? Who’s the hot designer? Which book is everybody sharing around town?”
It’s much more about the way we live and what’s fun to talk about. That is a kind of amorphous sensibility thing. And the challenge I’ve found is like when to time those things. Because for a Times reader, they may not have heard of something that maybe The Cut reader had definitely heard about three years ago. So you’re always kind of trying to say like, “Well, for the broader Times reader, this will be new.”
And that’s when you get into maybe being annoying to some of the people who are a little bit more ahead of the curve because they’re like, “Oh, how come the Times is just getting to this thing?” At the same time when you’re covering online culture, we will be early to things all the time.
‘Girl Dinner’ for example, was a recent thing that was happening on TikTok that we wrote about. When the Times turns its lens on a thing, it has a bigger reach. Like, broader than TikTok, in some ways. Obviously, I don’t mean like it’s going to get as many views as TikTok, but it’s going to get people who aren’t on TikTok to talk about Girl Dinner.
“It was upsetting and disorienting because everywhere you went, people said like, ‘I love Domino. It’s so great.’ You felt like you were working on something that people really were relating to. And then you get shut down in a mass firing.”
Maggie Bullock: But also broader than The Cut. I mean, I don’t know what the eyeball comparison is, but it’s a much wider swath of the population. And also, Boom! None of us can eat crackers and cheese anymore without thinking it’s a political act.
Stella Bugbee: Exactly.
Maggie Bullock: It’s very complicated now.
Stella Bugbee: I’ve hired a bunch of people that I’ve worked with from the New York mag era, and they bring a certain amount of that hunger for that cultural moment stuff. We just did, “What are men thinking about? The Roman Empire.”
But what’s fun is we can also do an investigation into CoolSculpting and expose the fact that they knew that they were harming people—long before they admitted that they were harming people—in partnership with the actual Investigations desk. And we can do a deep profile of Cheryl Hines, and she doesn’t know she’s about to get this treatment because she thinks she’s in the Style section.
So there’s a real kind of eclecticism. And how I think about Sunday covers is like each week should be really different. Each week should be like, “What is all this? What are they doing?” And if I’m creating that feeling in a reader, either when they open the app or when they look at the paper, then I feel like I’m doing my job.
Maggie Bullock: So, what should Thursday be then?
Stella Bugbee: Traditionally, Thursday has been more fashion news focused. It’s the more hardcore fashion audience. That’s the way we had been doing it for years. I’m actually trying to sort of break that up a little bit, and just say we should just do more of a mix in both. For me it’s all about the mix. You want every day, and every print product, to be a really weird mix of stuff. So you’re getting some advice, you’re getting maybe a little bit of celebrity stuff, you’re getting a little bit of something serious. It should feel like a Girl Dinner of editorial [laughs].
Maggie Bullock: Nicely done. Well played. So, we want to know how many nights a week you have to go out in order to have this job. Like, in order to be the person in charge of Styles. How visible does that make you? How—I don’t know. Rachel and I never leave the house, so this sounds very taxing to us.
Rachel Baker: Because you have this busy life, you have three kids and a long-running marriage, and—I don’t think we said earlier—you live in the same Brownstone in Park Slope that you grew up in.
Stella Bugbee: I do.
Rachel Baker: So, so amazing. It’s the best detail. But you’ve got this rich and complicated life. What is required of you socially and how do you get it done?
Stella Bugbee: I go out less for this job than I did before because we have incredible reporters and they go out. And I have an incredible party editor—that’s Katie Van Syckle, who actually was a New York magazine party reporter herself. She came to the Times before I did. And when I came, I really wanted to reinvent how we cover parties. And we’ve been working on that for like a year.
So, no, we have reporters. That’s the superpower of The New York Times, right? It’s not the editors, it’s the reporters. And the editors are amazing, and they’re super fun, and they all have ideas. But the reporters come back with the information. And they tell you what’s relevant, and they tell you what’s good.
So I go out, but I actually had to go out more, I think, at The Cut, to be honest. It’s a manageable life. It’s good. It’s a good job. It’s a good life. I’m not complaining.
Rachel Baker: Sounds great. So 11 years ago, you were charged with reinventing the women’s magazine, as we’ve said several times throughout this conversation. You did it! You reinvented it. Check! But here we are in 2023, and it’s a totally different media landscape. What do you think is ripe for reinvention now?
Stella Bugbee: I would just love to see somebody reimagine a celebrity profile because I cannot read another one. They’re just deadly. And I think we should just stop doing them. I would like to never read one ever again.
I think, with the invention of social media, they are the most passé form. Because the minute that the celebrity could control their own narrative, and create their own content, and have their own direct relationship with an audience, the form of a celebrity profile, just feels mannerist. And so boring to me. So I’d love it to be reinvented, or maybe to go away, or just to—I don’t know.
I mean, even with all the fantastic celebrity podcasts that there are out there, I just don’t think we need them anymore. One publication that I think is still able to do that really well is The New Yorker because for some reason, people still let The New Yorker follow them for a year and a half, or whatever it is. They still have that.
But other than that, most of us should just stop. I say that and I’m sure we’re going to do like 20 more this year. So take what I said with a grain of salt. But what, yeah, what else? I mean, what needs to be re imagined? Probably social media.
Rachel Baker: Yeah, reinvent that, Stella! Speaking of, we know from Instagram that you love to cook, and that you do so beautifully. So, for The Spread Lightning Round, if you could make dinner for three magazine greats, dead or alive, who would they be?
Stella Bugbee: Are they all together at the same dinner, or is it like one-on-one?
The Cut staff, circa 2014
“If money had driven my decision making throughout my career I probably wouldn’t be in this career, to be honest.”
Rachel Baker: Yeah, they’re together at the same dinner.
Stella Bugbee: I think Diana Vreeland would be really fun as a guest. I would love to just see her up close. Legend. I’m a big Martha Stewart fan. I wouldn’t mind having her over. We could have some potatoes or whatever. One of my favorite magazines of all time was Nest magazine. A brief magazine from the ’90s. And so maybe Joseph Holtzman, who was the editor and founder of Nest. That might be a weird group.
Maggie Bullock: What would you serve?
Stella Bugbee: Oh, Jesus. Actually, maybe serving food to Martha would be pretty—I don’t know. I’ve been really into making pasta, like hand-making pasta lately. So maybe that.
Maggie Bullock: That would find favor even with Martha.
Stella Bugbee: I don’t know. I’m sure she’d be critical. I feel like no matter what I served Martha, I would want, like, the honest—oh, you know, who would be really fun, speaking of food, is Ruth Reichl. I love her.
Rachel Baker: Stella, thank you so much. We really appreciate it.
Stella Bugbee: Oh, it was so fun. Thanks for making me think about magazines again.
Maggie Bullock: It is really hard doing this because all I want to do is interrupt—the amount of energy I’ve spent muzzling myself! You were talking about being at The Cut and how much freedom there was to say what you thought. And I am somebody who started just, like, one generation earlier than that at Vogue, and I had my voice really hammered into that Vogue voice.
And it was such a shock to my system. And I was threatened and confused by all these people—at The Cut specifically—writing so beautifully in their voice, with their point of view. And I can kind of do that now. But I just remember that being in my brain, like, “Why are you allowed to do that now?” And I was told—literally told—that I had to learn the Vogue voice.
Stella Bugbee: But yeah, New York magazine, that’s what they prize. Voice, right? That’s the tradition of that place. And every vertical had that. Vulture had it. And Grub Street had it. That was the name of the game: develop your voice. Spend some time doing that, and then go out into the world.
The Times’ Style section covers a little bit of everything.
See Stella Bugbee's work every Thursday and Sunday in the print edition of The New York Times or online every day at nytimes.com.
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Back to the Interviews
It’s the Journey, Not the Destination
A conversation with photographer Albert Watson (Vogue, Rolling Stone, Harper’s Bazaar, more).
A conversation with photographer Albert Watson (Vogue, Rolling Stone, Harper’s Bazaar, more).
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THIS EPISODE WAS MADE POSSIBLE WITH THE SUPPORT OF MAGCULTURE
Today’s guest, the celebrated photographer Albert Watson, OBE, is a man on the move.
This is not a recent development. Watson’s professional journey began in Scotland in 1959, where he studied mathematics at night. His day job? Working for the Ministry of Defense plotting courses—speed, altitude, distance, payload—for British missiles pointed towards Cold War Russia.
Watson’s affinity for the mathematical gave way to his interest in the arts when, in school, he dove head-first into all of them: drawing, painting, textiles, pottery, silversmithing, and graphic design.
Later, on his 21st birthday his wife bought him a small camera. He became obsessed:
“All I know is that I clicked the shutter, and suddenly, magically, I got negatives back, that I could learn to process myself. And then, even better, I got into a dark room with a piece of white paper under an enlarger, and you put it in some chemistry, and lo and behold, up comes an image. Magic! Black magic! I called it. Amazing, insane, beautiful.”
Then came the magazines: Harper’s Bazaar, Rolling Stone, GQ, Mademoiselle, Entertainment Weekly, Details, and Vogue. All of the Vogues. And the ad campaigns: Prada, Chanel, Revlon, and Levis.
And yet, after all that, talk to the man about his work, any facet of his career, and the conversation invariably comes back to the print—the math, the chemistry, the graphic design involved—and about the journey the print takes, from camera to magazine, from magazine to gallery and, sometimes, from gallery to museum, as so many of his have.
Our editor-at-large George Gendron talks to Watson about all of it—day rates, social media, and that stunning apartment in TriBeCa.
George Gendron: I want to go back to a conversation you and I were having just yesterday. And I said to you I think there are a lot of people, even veterans of the magazine industry, who look around and think that if you had to sum up the effects of the internet and technological change on the magazine industry, you’d say, “Oh, well, magazines, the ones that are still around, have fewer ad pages, and therefore their budgets are smaller.” But you were telling me about the fashion magazines, and you did a great job of comparing a shoot that you might have done for a fashion magazine, let’s say back in 2000, and what the economics of that might have been, compared to how that works today. Could you do that for us here?
Albert Watson: Sure. Basically, I would get a call—different times of the year—and of course, it related to collections. And we are speaking about fashion magazines. I would get a call from a magazine and they would say, “Where do you want to go this winter?” Now, what they mean by that is, “Where do you want to go where there’s some sun?” And that you can get up in the morning at 7:30–8:00, and then work until, you know, 4:30 in the afternoon. And you do summer clothes, and it’s somewhere where you can work outside. So they end up with outside pictures, you know? And sometimes we’d go to the desert Southwest. You might go to New Mexico or Arizona. You go to White Sands or to Death Valley. You go to Palm Springs, perhaps.
And you would go to these locations, and, basically, what would happen is a model would be flown in from Paris, maybe New York, could be London. Makeup artists could come from Paris or New York. Once in a while there’d be somebody in LA, and you fly them all into, let’s say, Death Valley. And we arrived there on a Sunday. And then on Monday we’d do try-ons. And in the olden days we did Polaroids—or nowadays you do a digital file—and you try on all the clothes to see where you’re going, what you’re doing. You would have a heads up about that.
So now, going to the economics of that, of course, there’s a hotel, there’s food, there’s road transportation, there’s the hiring of a vehicle that we would be in. Sometimes it was better for us to be in a van, not, you know, a Winnebago-type, large vehicle but more flexible. But there was a large budget and in the end, I’m sure it cost the magazine thousands of dollars to do that.
George Gendron: What was your day rate back then, Albert?
Albert Watson: The day rate for a magazine could vary gigantically. Back then you would probably be looking at, maybe $750/page, and then maybe $1,500 for a cover or something like that. And you might do 18–20 pages. So in the end, of course, it was nothing like an advertising rate.
The important thing was it didn’t cost me anything. Nobody ever said, “Oh, by the way, you have to pay for this shoot.” And, although we’re now laughing, that, unfortunately, is where we are now. Magazines don’t have any money at all. Because the advertising is down. Magazine numbers are down. Things are at a critical state right now where magazines have a very hard time.
And there are small groups that do independent magazines, that do art magazines. And they might do them with quite nice printing. And sometimes they do four magazines a year, sometimes two a year. They’re underground magazines. And you have a lot of freedom. But, of course, for them also, you have to pay for the shooting. And that’s one thing that’s changed. So sometimes a young photographer has to save up, and he has to beg favors, and ask assistants to work for nothing, and models to work for nothing, and hairdressers to work for nothing. And you’re certainly not flying to Palm Springs and staying in a hotel. So, that’s changed.
Now, another side issue of all of this, we’re discussing Print Is Dead, and magazines, and so on—magazines are failing now all the time. And their numbers are catastrophically low. But another slight issue is that the fashion business in general is on life support. There’s a problem right now because a lot of the fashion business is dying and a lot of it is dying because young people in general are not so interested in fashion. They’re a little bit more interested in styling.
And I think I mentioned to you that I photographed in a high school 20 years ago, and there’s a high school near me right now. And when you look at what the kids were wearing 20 years ago—I still have the pictures—and you see what they’re wearing now, guess what? It’s pretty much the same thing. And now, the vast majority of the girls in the school, of course, wear jeans. And they wear hoodies. Or an anorak, because it’s obviously warmer than a hoodie.
Basically, fashion is slowly but surely grinding to a halt. And what you’re seeing right now in fashion is recycling is going on a lot, but the overall mass change of fashion doesn’t happen anymore. So if you start looking at the way kids dressed in 1952, and look at the way they dressed in 1963, and then 1968, and ’69, there is a vast difference between the overall style of young kids and what they’re into and what happened with the change in music and so on.
So, going back to everything, print is dying for different reasons, you know? And the internet is sometimes amazing and doing amazing things. Other times it’s very strange to me—and sometimes things like Instagram. Someone that I’ve worked with quite a few times, like Gigi Hadid, is very famous. She has, whatever it is, 80 million followers. And when she posts what I would consider not a great shot of herself trying on a new pair of sneakers, you get 3.8 million people saying, “Fabulous! Amazing! Incredible! You’re a goddess! You’re amazing! Incredible! Wow!”
Watson in Manhattan Beach, Calif., c. 1971
George Gendron: Well, the point’s well-taken. To go back to what you were saying about the fashion industry, which is, it’s not just the fashion magazines being impacted by magazine trends. The whole industry is changing. And, of course, the same thing is true in music.
Albert Watson: It’s stuck in a weird kind of rap, hip hop, disco-influenced dance kind of thing. You look back at my generation right now, which looks old-fashioned, of course, you look at a performance by Led Zeppelin, or the Rolling Stones, basically they came out on stage and they sang and that’s what they did. They played their guitars and sang.
Now, if you get Rihanna at a Super Bowl, there are not 20 dancers—my God!—but 260 dancers, all dancing the same routine. And all of this, of course, is fluff, and adding, and so on. And, of course, people realize that. If you just stick Rihanna out there on top of a platform, nowadays that isn’t going to cut it. Especially since she was five months pregnant. That’s not going to cut it at all. She’s not going to be able to dance much. And, therefore, there’s a lot of stuff right now that’s covered up with fluff and decoration, a bit like a Christmas tree, you know?
George Gendron: So, when you step back and think about this, from your point of view as a photographer—as I would dare say a fine artist—what impact does this have on you creatively?
Albert Watson: Well, many photographers are different—there are different types of photographer. And the fashion business very often attracts two types. It attracted people who really wanted to be fashion photographers. I mean, they loved fashion. They loved the fashion business. They love the buzz of fashion, the glamor of fashion.
Where it all began: Alfred Hitchcock for Harper’s Bazaar, 1973 (above); the world-famous Cheryl Tiegs poster, 1978
“Sometimes a young photographer has to save up, to beg favors, ask assistants to work for nothing, models to work for nothing, and hairdressers to work for nothing.”
George Gendron: What photographer comes to mind that really symbolizes this kind of photographer for you?
Albert Watson: I would say someone who loves fashion, and loves the fashion business, and could easily be a fashion editor, and who is a brilliant fashion photographer, is Stephen Meisel. Because he understands the difference between a bronze eyeliner and a charcoal eyeliner. He would research things very carefully from the fashion perspective.
Now, another type of photographer that worked in the fashion business, a good example of it, would be Richard Avedon. Richard Avedon, strangely enough to me, was not a fashion photographer. But he was a photographer that enjoyed photographing fashion.
What am I saying? Is it not the same thing? It’s actually different. Because in the end, Steven might’ve had a hard job doing the In the American West project that Avedon did. Or Steven might’ve had a hard time photographing New Guinea warriors that Irving Penn did. Irving Penn was another photographer that enjoyed working in the fashion business.
George Gendron: Let’s put you in this category. He would have had a hard time doing Vegas, the Strip.
Albert Watson: I was somebody who enjoyed photographing women and the fashion business was an obvious entree to that. And I did a lot of homework with fashion to understand fabrics, the light on fabrics, and the obvious difference between, you know, a silk chiffon and a polyester nylon chiffon and so on. I did do the homework on that.
My photographs in fashion were always based on pure photography. And sometimes I had difficulty with fashion editors. Grace Coddington once said to me, “Be careful with your pictures. They’re becoming, sometimes, too strong.” I’m a big fan of Grace Coddington. She was a brilliant fashion editor. And she was really in touch with fashion and I knew what she meant because there is a certain point where there is a key ingredient that should really be in a fashion picture. Where it should have a sense of “fashionability.” In other words, the photography should have a sense of fashionability.
And maybe the best compliment I ever got, from Franca Sozzani, who was a great editor of Italian Vogue, when I had an exhibition in Milan. I had done so many pictures for her. And she was never a big fan of the pictures—she would always prefer a Steven Meisel picture—but the biggest compliment I ever got from her, she said, “When you did the pictures for me, I was never that crazy about the pictures. But now that I see them in the Museum of Modern Art, I think they look better!” This is a funny thing because at that point, you say, “What is the difference?”
The difference is there’s a journey that a photograph takes from the camera to a print that’s printed in a magazine. You can do a picture for a fashion magazine and it can be totally successful. Everybody loves it. Hairdressers love it. Makeup artists love it. Fashion editors love it. Everybody loves it and it’s successful. And I had done a lot of that work. The work was, at that time, very successful. And it wasn’t so photographic, it was more driven by what a magazine liked. I found out what they liked, and I would do that.
The problem was the journey a photograph takes from the camera to a magazine. And then there’s a big quantum leap. Something can look fabulous in a magazine. And then you say, “Okay, now I’m going to put it in a coffee table book.” Right? What I suddenly realized was that lots of the pictures—when I came to doing my first book, Cyclops, I looked at all these fashion pictures that were so successful, and I suddenly realized that when I put it into a book format, it didn’t look so good.
And I was like, “Why is that?” I did a good job on it, I think. Everybody loved it. But it doesn’t look fabulous. It doesn’t look amazing. Quite honestly, it’s not good enough for a book. And the journey that photograph takes—it then takes another quantum leap and ends up in a frame on a wall in a gallery. That’s another leap it takes. And then it suddenly looks different there.
And then it takes the final leap, you might say, onto a museum wall. And a museum buys it, you know, whether it’s The Getty or the National Portrait Gallery or something like that, that it makes it all the way. So there could be a point that you might say to a fashion photographer that he may not have that interest in a coffee table book, the gallery, and museum.
And if it does make the final journey that way, then he might say, “Well, yeah, that’s pretty good. I’m happy with that.” That it made the journey. Whereas there are other photographers, that was their goal right from the beginning. Every time they picked up a camera to work for a fashion magazine, that was their goal. They were hoping that every damn picture ended up on a museum wall. And so you were always looking for that.
And I made the transition into that in the eighties. So my handheld, snappy “Girl Eating a Banana”-type of picture, that everybody loved, suddenly developed into stronger pictures. Hence the comment by Grace Coddington. And in other words, “Your pictures are looking a bit heavy.”
So the good news is your pictures are getting heavy. The bad news is, your pictures are getting heavy.
George Gendron: So, several times, you talked about “the journey” of a photograph which was really interesting. I’ve never heard it put quite that way before. But now I want to talk about your journey. And I want to start in Scotland. In your book, Creating Photographs, the book opens with a wonderful statement. You said, “I was born in Scotland, and I went to school outside of Edinburgh, and I had a very ordinary childhood, and my mom was a hairdresser…”
Albert Watson: “…my father started as a professional boxer, but then he became a physical education teacher.”
George Gendron: Yeah, well, in the book it just says, “My mom was a hairdresser and my dad was a boxer.” And I thought, “Well, where I come from, that’s not an ordinary upbringing—having a father who was a boxer.”
Albert Watson: Yeah. But then, a little bit later of course, he became a physical education teacher. So that was a little bit more normal.
George Gendron: So you have, if you move on to your education, a very interesting and unusual education, in terms of your background, that you can see manifest in your photographs even today. And so could you talk a little bit about graphic design and filmmaking—your education—and the impact that it has on your photographs?
Albert Watson: Sure. I’ll do this very quickly in less than 60 seconds. The first job I had in leaving school, I worked for what was called the Air Ministry, which is the Ministry of Defense. And I was very good, when I was younger, at mathematics. and I worked with a slide rule and a very primitive computer and I was plotting missile courses between the east coast of England aimed at Russia.
This was 1959. My first job was to plot altitude, distance, speed, time allotments, and the weight of the payload, the war load, the bomb load, and things like that for something called the Blue Streak missile. I had two scientific officers above me and I worked with them doing lengthy complications, equations, and things like that.
Albert Watson x Supermodels
George Gendron: Is that where all great photographers get their start?
Albert Watson: Yeah! I think so. And I did that for a year and then decided to go back—I got married when I was 18—I decided to go back to Scotland. And I got a job working in a laboratory in a chocolate factory, doing chemical analysis of chocolates. And I did that for a year.
But during that year, I went and I took three night classes, two night classes were in mathematics. And I qualified then to have the opportunity to go to Edinburgh University and do math. I spent one night a week for some obscure reason, I can’t even remember why, to do painting classes and drawing classes at the Edinburgh Art College in the evening, for students that were outside of the normal curriculum.
And I got into Dundee College of Art, it was part of St. Andrews University. And I went up there to begin a four year course with my wife, and by that time I had a child. I started there in 1962 and I had a very disciplined education in different aspects of art, which involved drawing, painting, textile design, graphic design, and pottery and silversmithing. And at the end of two years, you had an opportunity to specialize. I loved graphic design and I chose graphic design.
That was my third year. And at the same time, for the first time ever, they had a class in photography that was available to you as your craft subject. So here, I had a disciplined beginning. I then continued the studies with graphic design, specializing. And as a craft subject, one day a week, I had photography.
That was my first real connection with photography. And my wife bought me for my 21st birthday a small camera, and the minute I got that camera, I became really obsessed with photography.
George Gendron: What was it about that camera, Albert? Can you try to go back?
Albert Watson: I’ve got no idea. All I know is that I clicked the shutter and suddenly, magically, I got negatives back that I could learn to process myself. And then, even better, I got into a dark room with a piece of white paper under an enlarger, and you put it in some chemistry, and lo and behold, up comes an image. Magic! “Black magic,” I called it. Amazing, insane, beautiful. The control that you had over it—you give it too much exposure, it went black. Too little, it was white.
And I was heavily involved with graphic design. I was still getting a heavy education in that. I did that for two years, and then I got into the Royal College of Art to do a master’s degree, and they put me in the film school. So now I’d had three years’ education in film…
George Gendron: …So you didn’t select film school?
Albert Watson: I selected graphic design school and the head of the school requested that I consider film school because he felt that, due to the photographic nature of my graphic design, that I would enjoy film school more and that I could make a very interesting filmmaker.
And during that period of time, between 1966 and 1969, I studied film and television. And to this day, if you look at all of the work that I’ve done, you can see those seven years stamped on everything. There’s art (we hope) and there’s photography, there’s graphics, and there’s film. And that should be a connecting factor because that was my education, what I loved, and what I held on to.
George Gendron: Now, shortly after this, you, Elizabeth, and your first son, you pick up and you go to LA.
Albert Watson: She got a teaching job in LA, and I went in as her dependent.
George Gendron: So that answers my question. I was going to say, “Why LA? Why not Paris or London or New York?”
Albert Watson: Because that was what was offered. And one thing I didn’t mention, that was an important part of my life, in 1966, between finishing at the Art College and going to the Royal College of Art, I won a traveling scholarship to come to America.
That was by IBM. And I flew into New York for the first time in my life, of course. And I met a lot of interesting people in New York: Push Pin Studios, Milton Glaser, a lot of graphic design people. Interesting people. I flew from there to the design conference in Aspen.
And then I went from Aspen to LA, and met people like Charles Eames. I met John Cage. And I met a lot of industrial designers, famous ones—Henry Dreyfus, the industrial designer. So it was very informative.
Then I went to San Francisco, then to Chicago, then to Washington DC, then back to Scotland. And then I packed up my bags and went down to the Royal College of Art.
Model Kate Moss, photographed in Marrakech, Morocco (c. 1993) for German Vogue. Prints from this session can found at auction for upwards of $35,000 US.
George Gendron: What’s interesting about what you just said is that every time I’ve seen you talking to a group of designers, and presumably, it seems as if you’re really addressing in particular young designers, you emphasize the importance of go to galleries, go to museums, go to the opera, listen to music, listen to jazz go to the movies all the time. The importance of having kind of a liberal education, if you will, when it comes to culture.
Albert Watson: Yeah, I’m actually shocked these days, that I meet a lot of hip people that are sadly lacking, unfortunately, in a historical education. They don’t have a great knowledge of painting. They don’t have a great knowledge of music from the past. They know famous things from the past like the Beatles, of course.
Going back further than that, they have no idea, really. You can mention to a young person now Tchaikovsky and they have no idea who Tchaikovsky is. They have no idea who that is. They’ve never heard the name. Nobody’s said to them the word Tchaikovsky.
And people listening to this podcast would say, “Well, that’s ridiculous.” I can tell you it’s true. That’s a true story. And then they can say things like, “I’ve never heard of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.” And then they say to me, “Ah, well, that was before my time.” Well, I can say, I’ve got a shock for you. It was before my damn time. Yeah. It was way before my time.
“I was kind of astonished that every year Peter Lindbergh took six weeks off. Six weeks! That’s 42 days!”
George Gendron: Kids look at you and I and think there was nothing before our time.
Albert Watson: So, you know, everything is available to you. Everything. If you don’t know what impressionism is, you can hit a button and you can get 2.8 million pieces of information on Impressionism. At seven o’clock in the evening, you can switch on your computer, and if you want to study for five hours, you can cram quite a lot of information on Impressionism, and that can help you in your own work.
George Gendron: Now let’s go back to you, Elizabeth, your son. You moved to LA. You moved because she has a teaching job there. It sounds as if, from the way you describe it, you had one significant introduction when you got to LA, and that was to somebody at Max Factor.
Albert Watson: I had a connection at an advertising agency and that person knew the head of the international division of Max Factor. And he gave me that introduction.
George Gendron: Okay. Now you’re with this guy, and tell the story about what led, basically, to the first work you had ever done and gotten a US dollar for.
Albert Watson: I went in and I had a little portfolio of slides and things. And he said, “I love these pictures, but there’s one problem.”
I said, “What’s that?”
He said, “You don’t really have any beauty shots here, and this is Max Factor and we sell cosmetics. But I like your pictures.” And he said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll pay for a model for you for an hour. And there’s a lot of dresses in the closet there. You can take a dozen dresses if you want. And book a model for an hour. And let’s see what you can do.”
So he said, “Go to the advertising agency.”
And I picked a model, a blonde, and I said, “I’d like to meet her.” So the following day I went back and I met her and I said to her, “Is there any chance we could work a whole day and I’ll give you some pictures for your portfolio?”
So she said, “What time do you want to start?”
I said, “Eight o’clock.”
So I was there with my camera—no assistant, no lights, nothing, except a model who did her own makeup. So I had dresses, a model and my camera and invested all of the money that we had available, which bought 60 rolls of film. And I had a car. And I had done a little bit of location driving around because I’d only been there for a couple of months, and I came across a beautiful field of yellow grass. And I started off there.
And I did close up shots. I did wide shots. And I went down to the beach and I did these shots with her in a dress in the ocean. I shot all 60 rolls of film in about 10 hours. And two days later, I went into Max Factor with the 60 rolls. And of course the obvious silly question was, “How did you manage to do 60 rolls of film in an hour?”
And I said, “Why, to be honest, I didn’t. She’s just charging you for an hour, no more. And I talked her into [shooting for] the whole day.”
And he looked at the pictures, and he said, “Just sit down now, I’ll be right back.” And he left for a long time. And all I was concerned about was if he was going to pay for the 60 rolls of film and the processing, which was all the money we had.
And he came back, he said, “I have good news for you, we will buy three and the national division is buying two of these shots because we have a new product coming out called “California Blonde.” And we can use these pictures. Then he said, “I’ll give you a PO for the pictures and your expenses. And any gas receipts that you have, we’ll pay for.”
But he didn’t tell me how much, and I left there with a piece of paper, and I opened it up, and when I looked at it quickly, I saw that it was expenses, plus $150 per shot, times five—$750. Which I was very happy with. I thought that was great. I was very excited.
I got home and I asked Liz, my wife, if she could borrow a typewriter and type the bill out. And when she was typing the bill out, she said, “Wait a minute. It’s not $150, it’s $1,500! And at this point, her salary a year was about $3,500 a year. So therefore, doing the math on that, you’ll see it was $7,500. And that was a fortune.
And at that point, we said, “Well, we can’t charge him that. It’s obviously a mistake. Nobody would pay that much money.” And I said, “We don’t want to be deported. So I’ll go in and speak to him.”
So I went the next day and asked for an appointment, and I waited for him for half an hour. I saw him and I said, “I just want to talk to you about the money that you paid me.” And then he said to me, “$1,500 a shot is all I have at the moment. But next time I can pay you more.”
George Gendron: Welcome to advertising, Albert!
Albert Watson: So in other words, that was the beginning of my financial career. And that was shocking, of course. When I got back to tell my wife, and by that time we had two kids, we went out and went to McDonald’s as a celebration.
George Gendron: So you go on to become a pretty big deal. You have, I think, one of the largest studios in LA. But no sooner have you done that, then you, Elizabeth, and your two sons, you pick up and you move to New York.
Albert Watson: Yeah, but the story I just told you is approximately 1971. And in 1973, I did the shot that’s quite well known of Alfred Hitchcock holding the plucked goose. That began to change my direction and fortune. And we were running this huge studio in Los Angeles, and in 1974, I got an agent in New York. And I had a small studio in New York and a large studio in LA. And I would say 5 percent of my work in 1974 was New York, the rest was LA. By the time it got to 1976, about 85 percent of my work was New York, and only 15 percent was LA.
George Gendron: Was that intentional on your part?
Albert Watson: Yes. And then what happened was we decided to sell the LA studio and we moved to New York. And then we bought a townhouse on the Upper East Side and converted the townhouse into a two-floor studio and a two-floor apartment. And by the end of 1977, we were 100 percent in New York.
Casey the chimp, photographed in New York, c. 1992
George Gendron: Now, given the theme of this podcast, Print is Dead, we have to go back and point out that in the mid-seventies, you’re in the middle of one of the real heydays, if not the heyday, of magazine publishing in the United States.
Albert Watson: Well, there was money everywhere.
George Gendron: There was money everywhere. People were starting new ventures constantly. I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about the work you did, for not so much the fashion magazines, but the mainstream magazines, general interest magazines, the Rolling Stones of the world, for example, and some of the art directors and photo editors that you worked with.
Albert Watson: There was—starting with Alfred Hitchcock—I’d always held on to portraiture. I was interested in portraiture. At that time I was doing about 80 percent fashion. I was doing lots of different things. I was doing still lifes for Clinique, photographing perfume bottles. I was photographing a drop of water exploding on top of a lipstick, which was not easy in those days. Now it would be a piece of cake. But in those days you were putting it on one piece of film. Nowadays you just shoot a water explosion and stick it on top. They were different times.
So I was doing that, plus I was doing lots of portraiture, and the portraiture led to Rolling Stone magazine. And I began working heavily with them and doing a lot of covers for them. I was working with Laurie Kratochvil, who was the photo editor there, and Fred Woodward was the art director. He was a brilliant art director and typographer. Very smart guy. He won award after award for the design of the magazine.
And in parallel, I was working for Vogues all over Europe. And then I got a contract for three years to shoot every single cover of French Vogue. To do every one. I was the only one that was shooting cover after cover for them. And I was working in Paris and the kind of people I was working right alongside were Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, and guest photographers like Cecil Beaton.
George Gendron: Let’s go back for one second to Rolling Stone and Fred Woodward. I’m curious, what was your ideal relationship when you were out doing an editorial assignment—which is very different from working commercially?
Albert Watson: The editorial assignment: “We’d like you to photograph Mike Tyson, up and coming boxer. He’s 18, but he’s slated to become a big name in boxing. And we’d like you to photograph him, and he’s in the Catskills. You have to drive up there and photograph him.”
George Gendron: Who is this for?
Albert Watson: Rolling Stone.
George Gendron: Rolling Stone, okay.
Albert Watson: So, that’s how the commissions are done. I shot for that issue, which was the 25th anniversary issue, which we did the cover for called the “Heroes of Rock and Roll.” And every photographer was allocated a certain number of people to photograph. I got Mick Jagger, Chuck Berry, and BB King. They asked me to photograph Graceland. And I photographed Elvis Presley’s gold lamé suit, which is the one they put on the cover.
And a lot of these things were different kinds of commissions. You had great freedom. They just expected a great shot of Mick Jagger, or something interesting of Mike Tyson, or BB King. And I suggested to them that I photograph him in concert. So I went up to Connecticut where he was playing and I did concert footage.
George Gendron: Albert, for younger listeners who never saw the Mike Tyson cover, explain that shoot, because that was brilliant.
Albert Watson: I don’t think they used it on the cover because at that point, Mike Tyson was a big-ish name—he was an up and coming name. So the Mike Tyson shot, basically, he had an amazing physique, and he was easy to photograph. I did a portrait of him, and just towards the end, I got the idea—because my father, who was a boxer, had once said, “A really good boxer has a really good, strong neck. And if you have a good strong neck, there’s less chance that you’ll get knocked out.”
So I asked Mike to turn around and I photographed the back of his head with his neck. And he’d been working out, there were water droplets in his hair and sweat on his neck, and I did it as a silhouette from behind. And it went on to become a well-known shot because, strangely enough, you recognized it as Mike Tyson from the back.
George Gendron: Yes, I remember that.
Albert Watson: And as time went on, European magazines picked up that shot and began to run it. And they ran it as a cover. So at that point the shot became very famous.
George Gendron: That comes back to your emphasis on the concept.
Albert Watson: Yes, sure. An idea. In the same way that Harper’s Bazaar, when they asked me to photograph Alfred Hitchcock, they asked me to photograph a goose. Because he was giving a recipe for a goose for the Christmas issue of Harper’s Bazaar to the magazine because he was a gourmet chef.
And they asked me to photograph him holding a plate with a roast goose on it. And that’s when I said to them, “Isn’t it better that we take a plucked goose and he’s holding it by the neck like he strangled it himself? It seems more Hitchcock. And I can also put some Christmas decorations around the neck of the goose to make that a little bit more interesting because it’s a Christmas issue.”
And the magazine loved that idea. But that’s “concept.” Also, for a young photographer you’re just happy to get a damn job. So in the case of Alfred Hitchcock holding the plate, in the end I would have tried to get it together to have the plucked goose with the head and all of that, as well as the plate, if they’d insisted on it.
But luckily enough, they said, “We just love the plucked goose! Forget the plate.” So I was able to concentrate on that. Graphic design training was part of what that was. In other words, it’s concept training. And I’m not saying that every single damn thing has to have a brilliant concept behind it. It comes in handy once in a while.
George Gendron: But a lot of your shots—one of the most-photographed actors in Hollywood is Jack Nicholson. And I think my favorite photograph of Nicholson ever taken was a Rolling Stone cover you did—it might have been your first Rolling Stone cover—and you photographed him up in Aspen. It’s snowing. He’s sitting outside covered with snow. And you captured that Jack Nicholson shit-eating-grin that he gets, that little boy grin.
Albert Watson: It was taken in the garden of his house in Aspen. I turned up in the morning at the time that we were given and he answered the door and he was like in kind of a rumpled t shirt with shorts with his hair all over the place.
And he said, “Who the hell are you?”
And I was there with my assistant and I said, “Well, we’re here from Rolling Stone.”
And he said, “What for?”
I said, “To photograph you.”
And then he was like, “Really?” And he said, “God, that’s right. That’s today?”
I said, “Yeah, it’s today. We came from New York.”
And then he said, “Oh, you’d better come in. Do you want a coffee?”
So it was nice. And then just as we came in, we arrived, he looked out the window and he said, “Oh my God, thank God.”
And it started to snow. Aspen had a problem because they didn’t have enough snow. And Aspen without snow was not good. And it just started to snow heavily and he was just jumping up and down. He was like a kid with the snow. And we then went out in the garden, he put on a jacket and a scarf, and his hat, and he went out in the garden and he was sitting there.
And I said, “I need a little bit more snow to make sense of it.”
He said, “Sure.”
Then he went into the house, and his housekeeper had arrived. And he said to the housekeeper, “Cook these two boys some bacon and eggs and give them some coffee”—which they’d already given me—“and I’ll go out and sit in the snow.”
So I actually sat in his kitchen, having breakfast, while he’s outside sitting in that chair, just quite still. And I went out a couple of times and said, “I’m almost finished!”
He said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.”
And then I went out. And of course, by that time he had quite a lot of snow on him and the snow was lying in the ground a lot and so on. And I did that shot. That was the scenario behind it.
Albert Watson x Hollywood
George Gendron: That was a great photograph.
Albert Watson: I’ve photographed him several times. And I did the multiple-mirror shot—which is, I think, equally well-known—where you see him blowing a smoke ring. And that was a “concept” shot.
When you set up eight mirrors like that, and Jack Nicholson’s face suddenly appears on eight mirrors in your camera at the one time—the concept—you can do that shot and he can come in and you can get them out of there in five minutes, and you have the shot. In other words, when you have a concept like that, then. It helps you create a powerful image that’s original.
George Gendron: That came in very handy with somebody that we were very close to at Inc. Magazine, Steve Jobs, who notoriously hated seeing images of himself and hated being photographed. He detested it. And you ended up with an iconic image of him that was everywhere when it was announced that Steve had died.
Albert Watson: They used that as the obituary picture, Apple did. And he loved that picture. He told me he loved it. And of course, I thought he was just being nice, you know, like, “Oh, I’m glad you like it.”
But then, apparently, he kept that Polaroid on his desk and he said, “When I go, use that picture.” And then they called us the day he died for the picture and then later that night it popped up in my phone that he had died.
George Gendron: When I mentioned to people that I was going to be having a conversation with you for the podcast, everybody said, “Man, if you have never been to his studio, when you go, you have to ask him to see his diaries. You will not believe them. You’ll think they’re fiction.” And I said, “Why?” And they said, “Because nobody alive can get that amount of work done.” And when you and I were talking, you said, “Well, this is not a typical day, but let me tell you about one day that started in Paris and ended in LA.” You started with a shoot with Catherine Deneuve. Can you tell that story?
Albert Watson: It started in Paris, ended in LA, but by the way, there was an advertising job in New York in between.
George Gendron: So how do you pull that off?
Albert Watson: I think if I did it now, that might be the last job of my life. I wouldn’t be able to do it now. And how did I pull it off? I slept on the plane. That’s how I pulled it off. Because the flight from Paris into New York was a Concorde flight. Three hours I slept on the plane. And then there was a flight, six-and-a-half hours from New York to LA. And I slept on that flight. So I did it by sleeping. That was the secret behind it.
No, but it was a lot of stress. And to do an advertising job after, you know, getting up in Paris at six o’clock in the morning to set up the studio for Catherine Deneuve, and then do an advertising job in New York, and then get to LA and so on to do that is not...
George Gendron: So you go from Catherine Deneuve to, I believe, your LA shoot was with Frank Zappa and Beefheart?
Albert Watson: Yes. Captain Beefheart.
George Gendron: Captain Beafheart. Yes.
Albert Watson: Who I photographed a couple of times.
George Gendron: You and I were talking about your studio and you use that as a vehicle to talk about how your business—the business of being Albert Watson—has really changed, thanks to your son. Thanks to your photography and your son. But that’s an astonishing story. Can you tell the story about your son coming to you, after he comes to work for you, and hiring you for two days?
Albert Watson: Well, I think the idea was that people, over the years, were asking, “Can we buy a shot from you?”
And I would say, “Sure.”
And then they’d call me three months later and say, “What happened to the shot?” Sometimes a month later, sometimes six weeks, and sometimes three months.
And they said, “I never got that shot. I’m happy to pay you for it.”
And basically, I was shooting all the time. I love printing in the dark room, but just to get to that print in an evening to print a series of orders for prints, it took me forever. And I did do it. It wasn’t well organized, particularly. And my son came on board. He was already a very successful journalist. He was the head editor at Associated Press for sports. And I offered him a job and I was so happy he took it. And he realized early on that there had to be an idea of booking me to get into the dark room and say, “Right, you have a job. Here’s the money. Get into the dark room and print.”
George Gendron: So he was paying you to print your own images.
Albert Watson: He wanted me to allocate the time to make a transition from working commercially and editorially. To make a transition that I was happy about. I was not forced. I wanted it. That’s why I brought him in.
And to make that transition into getting into the darkroom to print, making prints, and selling prints. So, at that point I would say that was 5 percent of our business, because everything was geared towards shootings and making money from shootings.
George Gendron: And you had a huge studio back then, right?
Albert Watson: Huge studio. We had 14 people working for us. It was a big operation. I loved it. We were shooting all the time. We had a really beautiful studio. We had a building that was 26,000 square feet. The apartment was 13,000 square feet and the studio was 13,000 square feet. So I could work until 10 o’clock at night. I just had to go up the stairs and I was in my apartment. It was a workhorse of a place.
George Gendron: So, fast forward to today, you downsize your studio, and what percentage of your revenue today comes from prints?
Albert Watson: It’s probably closer to what I said the other way around. I think now it’s about 70/30 now. I don’t have exact figures on that. But, obviously, from time to time we still do some big jobs. Big jobs come in—it can be a big project with the city of Rome, or it can be a Pirelli calendar—a big job comes in so, therefore, the income is still very good from photography.
“You say you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. To do what I did, all the eggs were in one basket. And that was the photography basket.”
George Gendron: You’re also legendary for personal projects. Las Vegas, which becomes the book, Strip Search. Morocco, an astonishing story, if you want to tell that.
Albert Watson: They wanted to do a book on Morocco. They wanted to call it Morocco. I talked them into calling it Maroc, which is the French name for Morocco. It just made it a little bit more interesting than just putting Morocco on it.
And it’s a very tricky thing—let’s say you were asked to do a book in Paris. Then you’ve got to photograph the Eiffel Tower. If you do a book in London, then you’ve got to do Big Ben. If you do a book on Rome, you’ve got to do the Colosseum, and so on. So you’ve got to do Morocco, then you’ve got to do camels or something. So to do an intellectual book on something like that, you have to be very careful. You have to have a plan. You have to do a lot of research.
That was the last big job I did on film. You know, a big job. I did lots of jobs on film after that, but this was a bigger job. And it was sponsored by the then-Prince, who was shortly to become the king of Morocco. And he was involved in the project and very supportive. And it was great fun to do. He said, “I have two jets. If you need one, why don’t you just fly all over Morocco in my jet? It’s much quicker for you to do that.” So the project was well-financed and well put-together. We organized it well, and we had very good support. So it was kind of a dream project.
And the interesting thing that happened at the end of it, they had done a book the previous year, a photographer had done Cuba and this was meant to be part of the series. And when I was working on the post production, the Cuba book came out and I thought it was terrible. Not the photographs, but I thought the production on it was horrendous. It was a kind of a cheap paperback, and it was not good quality. The printing was not good quality. I was shocked.
And fees had already been allocated for me to do the project, so the only way that we could get out of it was we took our fee and put it into the book itself. So we turned it around. And instead of this being printed on a cheap lithographic system, it went on a 10-color press. It went on a press that had a 4-color black and white, it had the four colors, and it also had two plates of varnish.
So we put the money back into the project, didn’t make any money from the project at all, but we ended up with a very well done project. Even the cover was what they call a French-fold cover, which is folded back on itself so that it doesn’t tear at all. It was actually a beautifully printed book, beautifully put-together. I did a lot of the design, but I didn’t do the typography. I had a very good typographer come in and do that.
George Gendron: Given the span of the kind of work that you’ve done, in almost every category of photography, you look at your career and how can you not ask the question, what advice do you have for a young person today who has discovered that “black magic” that you talked about the first time he or she picked up a camera, and wants to pursue a career in photography. Editorial. Commercial. What advice do you have for them?
Albert Watson: Well, that’s quite a difficult question, really, because are you prepared to give up just about everything? You say, you know, you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. To do what I did, all the eggs were in one basket. And that was the photography basket. So there’s a basket there labeled “photography” and all the eggs went in that basket.
I remember speaking with Peter Lindbergh once and he said, “What are you doing this summer?”
I said, “Oh, I’m doing this job, that job. And then I have to go to LA and do a movie poster.”
And he said, “But what are you doing for your holidays?”
And I said, “Oh, I don’t do holidays very much. I take a week off at Christmas. And sometimes if I’m lucky the first week in January.”
And he said, “You don’t take six weeks off in August? September? July?”
“Six weeks?” I said, “I’ve never done that in my life.”
And he said, “Oh, I can’t do without that. I need those six weeks to do no photography.”
And of course, I’d never done that in my life. I was kind of astonished that every year he took six weeks off. Six weeks! And you say six weeks—six times seven, that’s 42 days!
Albert Watson x Music
George Gendron: Where did this come from? You hardwired this way?
Albert Watson: I think part of your life, you’re pretty destitute and poor and worried about food for the family. When you’re destitute and worried about money year in, year out, year in, year out. And that goes on for 11 years. 365 times 11 equals a lot of stress.
So therefore, I almost never turned down a job. And someone would say, “Well, your son graduates from university tomorrow, are you going?”
And I said, “Well, I’d like to, but I’m busy.” You know?
As far as my kids were concerned, the bad news is your father’s not going to be there. But the good news is you won’t have a student loan program. You know? That’s the good news.
George Gendron: How did Elizabeth handle all this?
Albert Watson: I could never have done it without her. And I could never have done it out with the support of the whole family. But especially Elizabeth. She was the one that was always encouraging, and working, and loved it when I was busy, and helped me, and did the casting, and she was the agent, and booked in jobs, took care of all of the difficult stuff. And without Liz it would never have happened. It would never have happened. I might have been an art teacher back in Scotland or something without my wife.
George Gendron: Now, speaking of you and Elizabeth, I mentioned yesterday that I was absolutely enamored of your home on Warren Street, which I’ve never been to—I’ll just repeat one more time, Albert, you’ve never invited me—but I saw it in the pages of The New York Times real estate section when you put it up for sale in, I don’t know, 2016 or something like that. And what I loved about it was not—you know, there are a lot of lavish places in places like New York—but it looked as if every square inch of that home you and Elizabeth intentionally designed. And then I was ecstatic to hear yesterday when we were talking, you said, “Oh, we didn’t sell it. We took it off the market.”
Albert Watson: Yeah, well we didn’t because, you know, it’s 650 feet off the ground, and from it I can see the Hudson. I can see the East River, the Empire State Building, and the new Freedom Tower. I can see the Brooklyn Bridge and there’s a huge, 2000-square-foot terrace. And the problem was we couldn’t find anything that was as fabulous as that, really. That was the problem.
And, eventually, you come to the point where you say, “Why are you moving at all?”
And you say, “Well, I want to move to a bigger place, a better place.”
But it was already a big place. It was already 4,000 square feet, you know? With a terrace that was 2,000 square feet on top of that. It was enough. Enough was enough. We just didn’t sell it. We’re very happy we didn’t sell it. And right now, I’m just redoing it, actually. It’s going to be redone for the first time since we did it the first time. So it’s now going to be done again.
George Gendron: I can’t wait to see it in person [laughs].
Albert Watson: It’ll be spectacular. Very beautiful. A little bit more zen and Japanese looking.
George Gendron: What images of yours hang on the wall in your place?
Albert Watson: There’s only actually three shots. I never pushed to put anything up on the wall. But there were three that my wife liked, which is a comic-strip series that I did of monkeys. And it looks like a comic strip of monkeys. And there’s a big print of that. There’s another monkey in a mask. Where I persuaded the monkey to shout at me, you know, to scream at me.
George Gendron: Oh, I know that image.
Albert Watson: The combination of the monkey screaming at me with a gold mask on, I did a graphic treatment on that, an ink treatment. I’ve done a lot of work with inks and paint and so on, and combined the two. And that’s up at the end of a corridor as a big print.
And then in our bedroom, which is next to the Warhols that I have, there's a large print of something called the Tod Motel in Las Vegas. In color at night. And that’s large in the bedroom. And if you remember the pictures below it is a Bugatti couch.
George Gendron: At one point, if I recall The New York Times article, you also had another photo from your book, Strip Search, which was the car in the junkyard. Remember that one? Oh, yes.
Albert Watson: Yeah. I think that at one point it was kind of pinned in the wall. We never had it there permanently like the other ones. And there’s a beautiful Chinese painting, which I just adore, of a street scene in China at nighttime. An oil painting. And I love that, it’s beautiful. And then I have a couple by Cortez on the wall. Beautiful. There’s the tulip in Mondrian’s apartment. That’s beautiful. I have that. And I also have a Eugene Smith. So I have some photography, but not a lot.
George Gendron: So here’s my final question: When I was getting ready for the podcast. I revisited The New York Times piece about your co-op and there was that photo from the junkyard, kind of a beautiful, dark maroon color, and it reminded me a little bit—don’t be offended by this—of a Hockney. And it made me wonder, what photographers do you love? What photographers have you been influenced by?
Albert Watson: I was always fascinated and impressed by Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, like most photographers. I was very impressed by them. But after that, there’s about 320 photographers that are my favorites. There’s so many photographers, historically, when you go back, you know? I mean, I always liked Guy Bourdin, because he was so unique. I always liked him in Paris, and some of these guys became the victim when there was that transition.
Irving Penn was the only one that they held on to. But if you remember, there was a period there where Vogue didn’t use Richard Avedon and Guy Bourdin’s contract with French Vogue was not renewed. And that, of course, that instruction came from New York and they said, “We don’t want these kinds of pictures in there anymore.”
And the big thing that was beginning to happen was the cult of the celebrity. And that’s something that we didn’t speak about, but then you understand, you look back at Vogue covers, from the seventies and a lot of them were models. You know, it would be this model, that model, and so on.
But bit by bit, the cult of the celebrity began to creep in there more and more until celebrities began taking over. That might be a supermodel, but it was never an up-and-coming model that nobody had ever heard of. It would have to be Beyonce or something like that.
And it began as I was doing the contract I had with French Vogue. It began to come into that. And then it began to be me photographing Isabelle Adjani, or photographing Catherine Deneuve, and so on. The cult of the celebrity began to creep in everywhere. To every magazine.
And, as a piece of trivia for you, Alexander Liberman was so excited he told me about Vanity Fair, and he said, “Vanity Fair is going to be “The Bible of the Arts.” It’s going to be stories of every museum in America and every important gallery. And it’s going to be about artists and the life of artists.” And he said, “Of course we’ll also do musicians and opera singers and things like that.”
And they brought the magazine out, it was a reissue, of course, but when they brought it out, it was thick, and then next month it was thinner, and then next month it was thinner still, and it was going nowhere. And of course they realized at that point that People magazine was selling, whatever it was, four million a week.
And so they decided to turn Vanity Fair into a celebrity, sophisticated gossip—with good writers—but there had to be something gossipy. And it ceased to be “The Bible of the Arts.” It became “The Bible of Gossip.”
George Gendron: Yeah, that’s pervasive. The last vestiges were business magazines. You had to have a “business celebrity.” You know? It’s everywhere now.
Albert Watson: Yeah. It had to be Musk or Steve jobs. Listen, I did a project for Fortune, it was fascinating, where I did the most powerful people in America. And Steve Jobs was one of those people. I did Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet, and Bernanke at Treasury, Condoleezza Rice. I did portraits of them. It was The Power Issue. So yeah, it was all about celebrity.
South Sudanese model Ajak Deng for Paper Magazine, (white background) 2017; Somali model Waris Dirie in Morocco, 1993
For more information visit Albert Watson’s website, or follow @albertwatsonphotography on Instagram.
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Back to the Interviews
Designing Her Life
A conversation with designer, educator, and author Gail Anderson (Rolling Stone, SpotCo, SVA, more).
A conversation with designer, educator, and author Gail Anderson (Rolling Stone, SpotCo, SVA, more).
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THIS EPISODE WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY AI-AP
Portrait by Paul Davis
It’s impossible to look at Gail Anderson’s body of work and not be reminded of the limitless potential of design.
A traditional biography might pinpoint her education at the School of Visual Arts in the early eighties as her launchpad. But Gail actually kicked off her career much earlier when, as a kid, she created and designed her very own Jackson 5 magazine.
What followed was a series of career moves that also happened to coincide with major inflection points in the history of American graphic design:
After SVA, where she was mentored by Paula Scher and Carin Goldberg, Anderson accepted her first job, at Random House, where Louise Fili was reimagining book cover design.
Next, Gail made the move north to join Ronn Campisi and Lynn Staley’s team at The Boston Globe, at a time when the paper, and its internationally-renowned Sunday magazine, filled design award annuals.
Building on that experience, Anderson was summoned back home to New York to help Rolling Stone’s brand new art director, Fred Woodward. The two would spend the next 14 years showing the rest of us how magazine design is done.
Upon Woodward’s departure for GQ, Anderson exits stage right to join her SVA classmate Drew Hodges at SpotCo, a firm that specializes in work for theater. This, naturally, happens to be the precise moment Broadway was learning new ways to present the magic of the stage to new generations of audiences.
Also, just a quick sidebar to point out that in the middle of all of the above, Gail was collaborating with Steven Heller as he was ramping up his “side gig” as one of the world’s leading design-book authors.
And now, Gail is back at SVA working with aspiring designers, yet again at a moment when everything about the design world is rapidly changing.
It’d be implausible—and wrong—to suggest that Gail Anderson “Forrest Gump’ed” her way through her career. You could call it luck. (She does). But the reality is that Gail has made her own choices, created her own opportunities—“designed” (there we said it) herself a life, all the while bringing to the world what everybody loves about her: her sense of self, her joy for life, her humility, and her standards of excellence.
Patrick Mitchell: Alright, so in all this research I’ve done you come across as a person who just seems like you walked out of the womb fully formed. Which is usually a statement on the kind of family you grew up in, but if you don’t mind, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your mom and dad and your siblings growing up in the Bronx
Gail Anderson: In the Bronx. Yeah, my family’s from Jamaica in the West Indies and came to the Bronx. We were the first family of color on our block and got a lot of resistance to our presence. And I don’t think of my folks as pioneers, but in a way they sort of were. And they rolled with it.
And as kids, my sister and I didn’t realize that something was different. But we kind of kept to ourselves a bit. And I think the neighbors soon realized that we were harmless and that we kept our house as nice as everybody else. My father mowed a little strip of grass out front.
Our next door neighbors—we had a shared driveway—they wouldn’t use the driveway if we were outside. They wouldn’t sit on their back porch, stuff like that. Neighbors across the street, we had alternate side pick up for garbage, and they would put their garbage on our side of the street. And my father would walk it back over and say, “No, tomorrow’s your day, please put your garbage in front of your house.”
And, you know, we grew up not turning our bikes in other people’s driveways and things like that, thinking we were being polite and not really realizing that we just had to sort of be extra careful.
Patrick Mitchell: That can really have a long term effect on a person.
Gail Anderson: It does. It made me feel like I’ve got to work ten times as hard, you know? Sort of “Jamaican with three jobs.” And same for my sister. And sort of stay under the radar and don’t make a fuss and all that. It really sticks with you for your whole life.
Patrick Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah. So sad. Were either of your parents in creative fields?
Gail Anderson: No. My father, by trade, was a watchmaker. He learned that from his father, who was a jeweler in Christiana in Jamaica. And my mother, when she started working when they came to New York, she was in a steno pool. And she hated that. And then she had us, and then later was taking classes at a local high school taking steno classes and refreshing her typing and thinking, “Okay, time to get back out there.”
And then ended up working for the Salvation Army store in Mount Vernon near where we grew up in the Bronx. And she was a sales clerk till she retired and they moved to LeisureTowne in New Jersey—“Where Every Day is Sunday!”—and lived out their lives there.
Patrick Mitchell: Alright, well, so watchmaking, you know, I could see how that could catch a girl’s eye. I mean, again, you’ve got all the traits of a thoroughbred designer. And I understand you made your own little magazines as a kid.
Gail Anderson: I did. I wish I still had them! I’ve got everything else and somehow I don’t have those magazines.
Debra Bishop: That’s a shame. Well, maybe you could make one for us.
Patrick Mitchell: And I saw an interview you did with one of your classmates from Cardinal Spellman, and sort of got the impression you might have been that art kid that we all had in school.
Gail Anderson: Oh, I was the art kid. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Debra Bishop: Were you the art kid?
Gail Anderson: I was the art kid, yeah. I won the art award when I graduated. Val DiFebo, who’s CEO at Deutsch, she was president of our student body, and we worked for her. I was one of her advisors on the president’s council and yeah, Val’s going off to do great things. She’s the boss.
Patrick Mitchell: So Cardinal Spellman—hotbed of creativity.
Gail Anderson: Yeah. Tom Woodruff, the illustrator went to Spellman, Sonia Sotomayor—an unusual group of people are Spellmanites.
Patrick Mitchell: Amazing.
A page from Anderson’s 8th-grade notebook
Debra Bishop: When I was little I had a thing, I’m still little, but I had a thing for The Monkees. Davy Jones. Peter Tork…
Gail Anderson: …Mike Nesmith.
Debra Bishop: And also this TV show called Bewitched. And now I hear that you had a thing for teen magazines…
Gail Anderson: I still have my teen magazine. I still have my Spec and 16 magazines.
Debra Bishop: … And a group called the Jackson 5?
Gail Anderson: The Jackson 5—yes! My scrapbook is at the Smithsonian now. Held together with Elmer’s glue that’s still held up over these years.
Patrick Mitchell: You get to pick one Jackson 5 member to spend the rest of your life with. Who is it?
Gail Anderson: You know, when I was a kid, it was Michael. And then I was like, yeah, maybe it’s Marlon.
Patrick Mitchell: Marlon’s a little more complicated. A little deeper.
Debra Bishop: I thought Marlon was pretty cute.
Gail Anderson: Yeah. And he’s aged nicely. Got a mustache. He’s alive, so that counts.
Debra Bishop: Gail, was there a eureka moment in your life when you realized that graphic design was the thing that you wanted to do?
Gail Anderson: Well, since you’re my peers, you know that it was called commercial art then and not graphic design. But at high school at Cardinal Spelman there was a book, Careers in the Visual Arts that Dee Ito wrote for SVA. A little black book. And I borrowed the book from our art school library, and I was like, “Huh, this is what I want to do.”
So that book and Paul Davis’ To Be Good Is Not Enough When You Dream of Being Great poster for SVA, that was in my art room at Spellman. I was like, “I’m going to go there. I’m going to do this.”
And years later, meeting Dee Ito, Marshall Arisman’s wife, and being friends with her now in my dotage, I said, “That book changed my life. And that “To Be Good Is Not Enough When You Dream of Being Great” line that you wrote Dee!”
You know? Whew!
“Our editor would always talk about this guy, Fred, who she’d worked with. And she said, ‘You’re very much like him. And you would like him.’”
Anderson (left) with Fred Woodward
Debra Bishop: Wow. You ended up going to SVA. Were your parents supportive of you being a graphic designer? Did they know what that was?
Gail Anderson: No.
Debra Bishop: Commercial art?
Gail Anderson: No. We were first generation, so they just wanted us to go to college. In New York, in commuting distance. And I wanted to go to an art high school, and they said, “No. Get a well rounded education.”
And when I said I wanted to go to SVA, [they said] “Are you sure? Is it a college?” And it counted as college, and I went. And I don’t even know if I visited the school but I certainly know they didn’t. I don’t think they even knew where it was. They came to graduation and that was about it.
Debra Bishop: Well, it was money well spent and clearly set you off on the right track. During your years at SVA in the eighties, let’s talk about the women who were in graphic design at that time. Some of them were your teachers and your mentors. Among them: Paula Scher, Carin Goldberg, and Louise Fili. What made them so influential to you—and really to everybody?
Gail Anderson: I didn’t meet Louise until I started working at Random House. But that was, you know, a minute after school. Paula and Carin, of course, were our teachers and the fact that they were women, first of all, and they were kind of sassy, and bold, and cool. And the work that they were doing, we all copied it and we all thought it was great. And, it was well, “If they can do this then we can all do this too!”
Debra Bishop: Absolutely. [They were] women who were cool. I don’t think I knew too many. They were hugely influential in their inspirations. They worked for record companies and were inspired by the history of graphic design, which I think is very important to you as well, in terms of your style and what you like.
Gail Anderson: Yeah. I feel like I inherited that from all of them, and certainly from Louise, when I got to know her at Random House and the books that I looked at on her shelf, everything that Paula had, just being in Carin’s orbit—these women knew history. And we weren’t taking the history of graphic design or anything like that in school.
We were taking European Painting and World Art kind of stuff. And so this was, oh my goodness, getting Print magazine and Communication Arts and Upper & Lower Case—those were our Bibles then. And these were expensive magazines, so you held onto them. And the annuals!
Richard Wilde in his visual literacy class gave us the Art Directors Club Annual. I still have mine from 1980 or ’82 that he gave us. And there was no internet, so you’d just peruse those annuals. And stole from them. Oh my goodness. So much good stuff. And going to Rizzoli and The Strand—oh, God!
Debra Bishop: I think we all became bookaholics. I was obsessed. And now I have all these books and I don’t know what to do with them!
Gail Anderson: Yep. And I still buy books, and more books, and they are stacked up there. I bring them into work now and scan stuff and share it with students and Jim Biber has promised Carin Goldberg’s design books to the school for making a Carin Goldberg Library for faculty. And I’ve been buying. Some contemporary books to add to that.
And there’s such value in them. I give books to the sophomores now as in my class and they’re like, “What?” And some of them leave them.
Like, “You don’t want this?”
“It’s too heavy.”
“Oh, it’s too heavy.” The world’s changed.
Patrick Mitchell: All right, I have a non sequitur here, but I read this and I just can’t leave it alone. I’m sure it must have been a real conundrum for you when you were at a fork in the road of, “Which career do I pursue?” You did not pursue the nurse’s aid job.
Gail Anderson: Nurse’s aid! Oh my god.
Patrick Mitchell: The wrapping of the dead bodies.
Gail Anderson: The wrapping of the bodies!
Debra Bishop: I had no idea!
Gail Anderson: My parents, God rest their souls, how could you let your daughter—a teenager—be wrapping bodies as a part-time job? But I made $6.35 an hour up to when I was leaving, $7 and change an hour. Minimum wage was $2.65, so I was, you know, banking bucks there. But I was wrapping dead bodies!
Patrick Mitchell: If that was me I’d still be washing my hands every five minutes—to this day.
Gail Anderson: There was no Purell back then. But I knew from that experience, those years from junior year in high school right to the end of college, I am never going to work that hard again. Physical labor. I enjoyed what I was doing in school. I would sit in the break room and do my work and people would come in and say, “Yeah, you study hard and get out of here.” And, “Go out there.” And all that sort of stuff. It was very inspirational. I was like, “I am exhausted.” And I’ve got varicose veins at, like, 16 from doing this work—lifting people up, and toilets, and all that.
Patrick Mitchell: All right. Well, so you’re a lifelong New Yorker. You were born and raised there. You went to school there. You’ve lived there almost forever.
Gail Anderson: Almost forever. Yeah.
Anderson launched her magazine design career at The Boston Globe Magazine in 1985.
Patrick Mitchell: I want to talk about Boston. You went to work at the Globe, The Boston Globe, in 1985. Can you talk about what it was that drew you here? Let me preface that by saying the Globe was kind of a design “thing” back then.
I’ve been looking at a lot of old design annuals and the work Ronn Campisi was doing at The Globe Magazine was super influential. And so that’s what started it. But then, you know, all of these people that I’m about to name passed through the doors around the time you were there: Ronn Campisi, obviously, Lynn Staley, you, Richard Baker, Terry Koppel, Lucy Bartholomay, and others I maybe don’t remember. But I’d love to hear what drew you to Boston and what that experience was like.
Gail Anderson: I wanted to work in a magazine when I was in school and ended up at Random House as my first job and was really enjoying it.
And Terry Koppel got in touch. And he said there was a job in Boston, that Ronn was looking for someone, and he told me about the Globe. I knew of his lineage there, and I thought, “All right. Yeah, let me just meet them.” And I went up and I thought, “Okay, I’ll do this for a few years.”
It’s an opportunity to work at a magazine. I thought a Sunday magazine was going to be really fast paced, where book publishing was very slow. And I’m going to learn a lot quickly. And on Terry’s recommendation, and Paula’s, I moved up there for a couple of years and worked with Richard [Baker], and Rena Sokolow, and Lucy Bartholomay, and Katie Aldrich and, my goodness, so many wonderful people. The nicest people you could imagine.
At that point in my life, it felt like family. And I had a wonderful roommate, and I had a car, and we lived in a good-sized apartment in Somerville, in a triple decker, on the top floor. And it’s, like, a wooden house. And I think Lucy and I paid $365 total. It was nothing.
Patrick Mitchell: We’ve all worked on Sunday magazine-type things, and it is accelerated. In two years you can knock out a hundred magazines. But looking back, after that experience, it seemed like you came out of school open to any kind of future career, but this Globe thing must have sort of pushed you in a certain direction.
Gail Anderson: I loved assigning illustrations, and I loved the pace, and what I was learning being away from home, and exploring a new state and area. New friends. It was really exciting. And working for Lynn Staley on the Sunday magazine was life changing. And I only sort of dipped my toe on the idea of coming back to New York because our editor, Ande Zellman, would always talk about this guy, Fred [Woodward], who she worked with, I think, at D. And he was doing Texas Monthly, and I’d look at that and say, “This is really cool.”
Patrick Mitchell: He was doing a Sunday magazine at the time [Westward at the Dallas Times Herald].
Gail Anderson: Yeah. He had done a Sunday magazine as well. And she said, “You’re very much like him and you would like him.” And then he was doing Regardie’s. And I subscribed to that and I was like, “Oh, this guy does great stuff.”
And one day I saw the George Harrison cover of Rolling Stone. And it was like, “Well, this looks different.” And I was like, “It’s that guy again. It’s Ande’s friend, Fred.” And I said, “I’m going to reach out to him and see if he’ll look at my portfolio.” And I had slides made—35mm slides—of all my raggedy Globe stuff, and sent, like, pages of it. I had so much work because I’d done so much in a couple of years. And I can’t believe I did that!
And I called one evening and nobody else was there and [Fred] picked up the phone, because he was young and naïve enough, and he was like, “Hello?” At night! And he’s like, “This is Fred.”
And I explained I was Ande Zellman’s friend, blah, blah, blah. And he’s like, “Well, you know, you can send me some work, and I happened to be looking for someone.” I was like, “Okay, thank you very much.”
And I thought, “Well, maybe everybody picks up the phone when you call them like that.” And I sent work. And he called. And I hadn’t said anything to Lynn, to anybody. And when Fred called, our secretary picked up and she said, “Fred Woodward’s on the phone for you.”
And I was like, “Huh?” And I’m like, “Fred? What? For me?”
So that was that. And I flew down after work and met him and was so wowed. And he was so lovely—a big giant smile, and his fancy clothes, and all that hair. And he didn’t hire me, but he kind of left me hanging for quite a long time.
And of course I assumed, while I was waiting, that he was going to hire me. So I was like wrecked with, you know, “What am I going to do?” And meanwhile, nobody’s calling me. But I’ve kind of figured all this out, and up all night. And so finally, I’m like, “I’m calling him.”
And finally, I just sort of gave up, and I was going on vacation with my roommate and her family, and he called my house, and said, “Well, you know, I had to go with somebody else who’s more experienced because I’m still new and I can’t take on somebody junior.” I’m like out the door going to Maine. I was like, “All right, good luck. Bye.”
I had given up at that point. I was like, “Oh, that was nice of him to call me back, but I’m going on vacation now.” And I didn’t give it any more thought. Joined the gym. I’m going to change my life. And he calls a couple months later, he says, “Well, things have changed.”
And he’s just such a gentleman that he called Ande—he called the editor and said, “I’m going to call her. Is that okay?” A thing that nobody would do now. So everybody else knew but me.
Debra Bishop: Like a marriage proposal...
Gail Anderson: That was his friend. And that was the right thing to do, you know? It was probably to find out, like, “Is she a freak? Should I not do this?” And Lynn, she’s not even there. Her husband took her to London for her 40th birthday. I’m like, accepting this job…
Debra Bishop: … And you were so close to Lynn.
Gail Anderson: Oh my God. I called her that Sunday so that she wouldn’t find out from anybody else. And she’s just like, “What? I’ll talk to you on Monday. Bye.”
Patrick Mitchell: Well, it was very kind of you to give Fred a couple months to...
Gail Anderson: ... change his mind.
Patrick Mitchell: No, to catch that Gail Anderson wave.
Gail Anderson: So then I get there and he has no place for me to sit! I spent the first couple months in his office with him because there was somebody freelancing, who was my old roommate from school, and she wasn’t going anywhere. So I was like, “Where am I going to sit?”
And he was like, “You can sit with me.”
I was like, “Ohhh.” We were like two strangers making small talk for months.
Patrick Mitchell: Who was in the art department then?
Gail Anderson: Joele Cuyler, Karen Simpson, me. It was the three of us and Fred.
Patrick Mitchell: And if I recall my Fred timeline correctly, this was ’88, ’89?
Gail Anderson: I started there in 1987. I think. Yeah.
“I’d been [at Rolling Stone] for 14 years and I was done. I knew that I had to do something totally different, that I didn’t have another magazine in me.”
Patrick Mitchell: Really at the very beginning. Rolling Stone was just, my God, you know, a once-in-a-lifetime event. Really for all of us. For people like both of you who were part of it and for all of us watching from a distance. I just would love to step back and hear you both talk about those days, because that’s really just, I mean, it was a moment in magazine history that needs to be preserved.
Debra Bishop: What can we talk about?
Gail Anderson: We were working so hard, Deb, that we didn’t even realize that it was a moment in history.
Debra Bishop: One of the things I remember the most—clearly I learned so much—it was my first editorial job. Everything was done by hand. Or on the copier. Do you remember that?
Gail Anderson: Oh yes.
Debra Bishop: Until, of course, we did have to switch to computers. For me it was sort of, like, in the middle somewhere. For you it was probably in the beginning. But what do we miss most about the pre-computer days?
Gail Anderson: You really thought about your decisions. You thought about your letter spacing. You thought about the typefaces you were getting “Reverend Jim” to set on the typositor. When we were still at 745 Fifth Avenue, you went up and down the stairs to make copies, to try to get a degraded copy of something or to blow something up five percent, 15 percent.
Debra Bishop: Yeah. For the younger listeners, it was coveted to have that sort of “worn” type look. And the way we used to do it was on the Xerox machine, our copier machine. And we would actually just stick it down on our mechanical board. Speaking of mechanicals...
Gail Anderson: I had some of the mechanicals when I left. Again, because I had everything. And I donated them to the library at school. And some of them were still hanging together. And they show them to students. And they’re like, “What?”
Debra Bishop: One of the things that I remember about Fred, who I enjoyed working with so much, and have so much respect for, as well as Gail, was he would come up to you very gingerly with a photo or an illustration, as though it was like his only child and hand it to you as though to say, “This is precious. Now go away and design.”
Gail Anderson: Yeah.
Debra Bishop: But at the same time, I felt Fred was very generous with his assignments. Once he gave you an assignment, it was yours. And you had to get final approval. But we would have, what, three days to conceive a spread and then three days to execute it?
Gail Anderson: Yeah. While you were working on the departments. So it wasn’t like you were just laser-focused on the feature.
Patrick Mitchell: Was Fred assigning these illustrations?
Debra Bishop: Gail was assigning a lot of them.
Gail Anderson: That I came equipped to do from the Globe, because I assigned so much art there with Lynn, and I had a good sense of who was out there at the time. And we’d look at American Illustration and the Society of Illustrators Annual, and we got all those samples in the mail and had them pinned up on the walls. I really enjoyed that. And I was sort of managing deadlines and other stuff. So I had administrative stuff to do and probably a little less design, at times, to my liking. I wish I could have done even more.
But I really enjoyed working with the artists. And I was always on the phone, and you made these wonderful friendships, these phone friendships that I can’t imagine exist now. And getting the art, getting the FedEx package or the messenger package and opening it gently opening the piece. Oh my goodness! The piece of art. Wow! Amazing.
Patrick Mitchell: I want to say this as gently as possible because you worked with genius illustrators who probably needed very little direction.
Gail Anderson: I worked with genius illustrators, yes.
Patrick Mitchell: And you gave them very little direction?
Gail Anderson: And the editors were appreciative and into it and we, maybe, talked about sketches a little bit, but it was sort of our show. And that was the genius of Fred—that Fred was a journalist, and Fred was an editor. And so he was a peer.
And we all learned that and took that into our careers, later, that we weren’t “subservient.” We were equals, and we had opinions, and we had questions. And that came from Fred. Writing headlines, just being really involved. And, you know, Deb’s made a whole career of being a collaborator in magazines.
So yeah, that was Fred. For me that was Lynn Staley at the Globe, the same kind of like, “Why don’t we do this?” And it was never, “This one’s in charge.” We’re just making it.
Patrick Mitchell: Remember AIGA Graphic Arts Weekend? You would get studio visits with art directors. It was usually on a Saturday and a Sunday and you would pay a fee to come to New York, and you’d get three studio visits over two days. And my first studio visit was to see Fred.
So I came to the Rolling Stone office, and he gave me a takeaway that I have lived with forever, which was he said he would wait until the art came in to design. And you know, that’s partly his confidence that he could come up with something. But I know he was super respectful and his main mission was just, “Don’t fuck up this art.”
But looking at both of your work—so intricate and so ornate—it’s hard to imagine that the process of assigning the art was independent of the design. Did you have layouts sketched out to work the illustration into? Or was it really just like, “I’ll get this back and then I’ll…”—what did Deb say—“Go make a masterpiece?”
Gail Anderson: We weren’t part of the photo assignments at all. So we received something to scan and then work with it. So it was a surprise.
Patrick Mitchell: So it was entirely a response to the photo.
Debra Bishop: Yes. I call that “reacting.” And I think we learned a lot about doing that. That was the game.
Gail Anderson: Even the illustration, right?
Debra Bishop: Yeah, I think it was a lot about reacting. And we had to do it fast.
Gail Anderson: When I got to Spot later on, it was assign multiple artists to do the same thing and give them lots of direction. And I was like, “Oh my goodness. This is so different. And difficult. And needs so much more, kind of, diplomacy.” That was a whole different beast.
But the Rolling Stone “moment” was opening the piece, and seeing something beautiful, and then responding. And always working with a headline, working with live copy as much as possible. You weren’t just sort of making it up and then putting something in place later.
And that came from all of us being unfamiliar with the technology and all coming from the old school way of doing it. And I’m sure now it’s quite different, but at the time, you waited until you had the elements and then you came up with an idea. You didn’t just, sort of, place things on a page.
Patrick Mitchell: But as an observing party, I would say that speaks a lot to your confidence, both in your own skills and your confidence in selling what you’re doing to your editors
Gail Anderson: There wasn’t really selling.
Debra Bishop: Yeah, we didn’t have to.
Gail Anderson: Right? We were so lucky.
Debra Bishop: Yeah. Fred did any selling, if there was any selling. But they trusted him. And that was his job. Visuals were his job. The one thing I will say about Rolling Stone design, which I think you would concur, Gail, was that we had a very strong format in the Oxford rule. So we could play. Almost anything would be fine within those parameters, within that Oxford rule. You still knew you were in Rolling Stone.
And it was such a strong brand framework that we could really play within. So oftentimes our type was separate—it was much harder to create a sort of seamless spread where you were reacting to the photograph. And we did that all the time, but oftentimes we could have a sort of a separate type piece opposite something else that was in that rule.
Gail Anderson: They became posters. You know?
Patrick Mitchell: In addition to the incredible photography and illustration—your typography! I mean, you guys had all of this custom type done. I know you worked with a lot of outside people, but you probably did a lot in house too. Unbelievable.
Gail Anderson: I know. Who’s got the energy now? What were we thinking?
Debra Bishop: I know. And a lot of times it was in person. And Gail dealt with them. Do you remember our visits from Jonathan Hoefler and Dennis Ortiz-Lopez? And illustrators! In those days there was no internet to send your artwork over.
Do you remember Philip Burke sending his piece—or walking it in? You know, he’s from Buffalo. And part of the joy that Gail was talking about was opening up the FedEx package. Right?
Gail Anderson: Yep. I remember meeting Marshall Arisman for the first time, and him telling stories about being a witch. And I’m like, “Who is this man, Fred? What?” And Paul Davis coming to the office. And these legends were coming in and Fred was always like, “Oh, you’ve got to meet, like … Oh! What?” That was so cool.
Patrick Mitchell: It was like a Renaissance, you know? Rolling Stone was ground zero for magazines. So great.
Gail Anderson: The one thing I remember though, that has nothing to any of this, was we were still in the old office. Deb, were you there then? Maybe not. David Cassidy came to the office. And all of us—of a certain age—we were kids, but we were all of a certain age, and he came in and people were like, “Who’s that?” And we’re like, “It’s David Cassidy!” And he was so tickled that we were just like, “Oh my God.”
Now of course people would’ve had their phones out.
Debra Bishop: I remember John F. Kennedy Jr. And we followed him around. He came in for a visit when George, his magazine, was just starting. And he came in and we followed him everywhere.
Gail Anderson: Oh yeah. Like you’d hold up some paper and go like, “Oh, good. Go down the hall.”
Debra Bishop: And one time, Madonna came in, but I, unfortunately, was on vacation or something. I missed it.
Patrick Mitchell: Well, this is before all of our time, but if you read either Jann Wenner’s book or Sticky Fingers, the non-Jann Wenner book, there’s a great story in there about Annie Leibovitz shooting David Cassidy nude for a cover. Very young David Cassidy.
Gail Anderson: Yes. I remember that cover. I remember that little bit of the cut there that you saw, and there’s a little hair [showing]. Like, “What? David Cassidy?” I remember.
Debra Bishop: Wait, one more story, Gail. Tell your favorite story about Rolling Stone. Do you have one?
Gail Anderson: I remember NSYNC was there, and [Fred’s son] Hank came in. Fred brought him in hoping to meet them. And I sat out with Hank for the morning as they traipsed by and went in the conference room and did whatever they were doing. And Hank had a cover for them to sign. And he just sat there.
He was like three or four years old. And they came out to go to the bathroom, and they turned and everybody just kind of looked and Justin Timberlake said, “What’s up, chief? And Hank was just like, “What?” And then when he came back from the bathroom, he made the rest of them stop and sign autographs for Hank. And that was so sweet, “What’s up, chief?”
Patrick Mitchell: Gail, a lot of us, you know, again, watching on the outside, it seemed like if and when Fred ever left that you would be the obvious choice to step in there, but that didn’t happen.
Gail Anderson: He left. And I knew my days were numbered. It was going in a different direction. The real estate was getting smaller and smaller for what we did. And Jann wanted to, sort of, be more of a newspaper. And all the fancy stuff was, kind of, done. So I knew my days were numbered.
Patrick Mitchell: Yeah. I’ve heard rumors that Jann was maybe a little threatened by the massive success of the design of Rolling Stone.
Gail Anderson: I still worry sometimes when the design of anything is so successful, that whoever the boss is will start to believe that what the designers are doing, they’re just doing for the sake of awards and for the sake of design. And that they’re not on the same mission as everyone else.
So I don’t know if that’s sort of what was starting to happen a little bit then. But just the time was changing and there wasn’t the real estate to do the big openers. And Fred wasn’t really up for going in the direction that it was heading. And I only knew that direction, so I wouldn’t have been able to do anything else. And it needed a new voice. So it wasn’t a matter of promotion.
Patrick Mitchell: And you’d been there 14 years, right?
Gail Anderson: I’d been there 14 years and I was done. And I knew that I had to do something totally different. That I didn’t have another magazine in me at that moment because I felt like I had the best job ever. And how am I going to top this?
I need to just try something else because I have no obligations and let’s see what doing something else is like. And I put that out there into the world a bit and something wonderful and exciting happened that challenged me, and scared me. And I needed a good scare because I was starting to coast.
And going into a new job where you have no reputation to precede you, that it’s sort of starting over, was really hard. But it was what I needed. And working for a [former] classmate … at first I thought, “Well, this is going to be weird.” But it turned out to be okay.
Patrick Mitchell: Before we leave Rolling Stone, and maybe a bit inspired by Jann’s recent implosion, would you say women have been treated fairly or been given the same opportunities? It has come up often in our podcast and Deb has talked in the past about women being stereotyped in terms of what kinds of magazines they can design, which is incredibly unfair.
Gail Anderson: It felt like a man’s world. But I didn’t know or expect otherwise because, you know, it was a different era, and it was just the beginning of some women having a voice, some power, all of that. And so all of those people who were sometimes seen as difficult which is so wrong because they were working extra hard. That was really inspiring to see those women.
And looking back now, it’s like, wow. In my own little way, I hope I was, as the years progressed and I got older and older there, that I was one of those to an extent. People like Laurie Kratochvil, she was kicking ass there. And you thought, “Oh, like, she’s tough.” It’s like, really? Was she tough? Or was she just this woman doing this job and that’s what you needed to be to do that job.
Debra Bishop: … which you had to be.
Gail Anderson: Which you had to be. Exactly. And my fear now, even now in my old age is being seen as difficult or all those things that aren’t ascribed to a man when they kind of have to buckle down and mean business or do something difficult. All that. Sadly, it does still exist.
Patrick Mitchell: It’s unusual in creative work where you are in a real way in communication with the audience. You’re actually putting things out there to get a response. People are absorbing your work in their daily lives. Did that figure into your calculation for the next phase of your career in terms of doing work, maybe a little bit more in a vacuum? What part of the joy of your work was knowing that it was going into people’s mailboxes, real people around the world, directly to them?
Gail Anderson: I loved that the magazine was out there in the world. When I was at the Globe, Ronn would say, “It’s fish wrap.” And we’d sort of giggle. And then I was getting off the T and walking to, I was in Dorchester, and I saw the magazine on the ground. And then I was on the Green Line going home from Brookline. And I was like, “Wait, this is my Sunday magazine on the ground again!”
And I was like, “This really is fish wrap.” You look at it on Sunday and then you get rid of it. And that was like, “I can do whatever I want.” Because this is so ephemeral. And because Rolling Stone was every two weeks, it was sort of the same thing. We were just cranking and you didn’t really have time to, sort of, sit back and think about this. You did it for a few days, you put it out. Some of them are great, some of them aren’t. But they came in and they went.
Doing books and other things that sort of live forever, you’re like, “Oh God! I’m going to live with this mistake for a long time.” But the magazines just came and went and it was on this supercalendered paper. And I loved that I didn’t have to think about it too hard after the fact. And your mistakes went away and you tried something new. You just kept learning and learning.
“Who would say ‘no’ to making posters? It’s like, ‘I’m going to make Broadway posters? What?’ Of course I’m going to do that. Of course I’m going to say ‘yes’ to that.”
Patrick Mitchell: So you left Rolling Stone and you went to Spotco, which was a really amazing agency that focused on design for the entertainment business, especially Broadway. I saw a video of you talking about Spotco and in the video they taped you walking through Times Square.
Gail Anderson: Oh, yeah. I did that!
Patrick Mitchell: And it showed all of your posters and, you know, I’m killing the question I just asked because that exemplified how you can be in the middle of your own work out in the real world. Although those of us who aren’t on Broadway don’t see it. But what was it about Spotco that felt right after leaving Rolling Stone for you in your next phase?
Gail Anderson: It seemed like, “Who would say no to making posters?” And that’s what I saw that job as, initially. It’s like, “I’m going to make Broadway posters. What? Like, of course I’m going to do that. Of course I’m going to say yes to that.” And it turned into so much more and was so much more complicated than posters. Posters were the least of it at a certain point. I thought, “This is something I love. I know theater. I want to stay in entertainment.” And the company was growing.
Drew Hodges, my classmate from SVA, wasn’t really able to manage the design part of it anymore because it was leaps and bounds there. And he had to sort of be the “showman” to talk about the work and to work with the clients. And had gone from Spot Design, which was a design studio to Spotco, which was an advertising agency.
And so I was sort of charged with the design folks. And there was another creative director, Vinny Sainato, who actually just passed away, who was the advertising art director. And the two of us worked together-but-separately, and he and his folks took what the designers made and then did the advertising. But Drew learned that the money was in the advertising and not in the design.
And it was brilliant, and I saw so many shows, I visited so many interesting places, I learned so much. I had my work ripped to shreds by so many producers and had the designers work ripped to shreds and had to learn how to defend the work and how to be polite to those I wasn’t that fond of.
And I saw Drew present work to clients and I was like, “Where’d you learn to do that? It was brilliant.” And he was so gifted at that. And I thought, “I can’t do that.” Like this is going to take years. And he invested in me and eased me into that part of the job. And I was never great at it in the end, but I could get by and the clients liked me and trusted me.
And so that was good. And there were some really wonderful people, but also some very difficult people. And after years of the Globe and all my wonderful friends, and then Rolling Stone, where everybody was like, “We’re all doing great stuff together.” And then this was like, “Wait! Like I have to defend this? I have to show eight, nine versions of something? Are you kidding?” And have it up pinned to the wall. And we take three of them down and we take three more down. And then that was so anathema to the Rolling Stone days.
Debra Bishop: So, it was much more iterative. It was much more repetitive. Drew says, “Gail is a true Broadway baby. She brought her brilliant sense of style and typography to the theater and moved forward how sophisticated those visuals can be.”
Gail Anderson: Aww.
Debra Bishop: So, what was the process of a theater poster, just, kind of quickly?
Gail Anderson: Reading the script, and actually learning for me, learning to read a script and let it stick in my head. That was the hardest part because it was so different from reading a story. And I’m, like, reading in two voices and three voices and I’m like, “Who’s saying what?” And sometimes I’d read out loud to myself at home because I was like, “I don’t even know what’s going on anymore.” So there was that.
And then working with the designers—I tried to pair people because sometimes some of these were like, “I’m smart, but I’m not that smart.” And some of the stuff was … it was pretty heady. Like, “Give me a musical!” But when we got into the plays, we worked together so that nobody ever felt like, “I alone must fix this.” You know, people work together to solve a problem because we were showing so many versions.
You couldn’t expect anybody to come up with 10 great versions, nine of them which will be ripped to shreds and one that’s going to be pieced together with a piece from the one at the other end of the hall. It was tough. And there were so many comps and so many good comps. And we would keep the comps like, “Let me save this idea because I can try it again at some point.”
Debra Bishop: It was a library of comps.
Gail Anderson: Library of comps. Yeah. That was a hard job, but I learned so much. But I also learned why people stay in their lane and go from magazine to magazine or whatever, because making the shift is really hard.
When I was at that farewell for Fred at SPD, people were like, “You’re so smart! You got out of this. How did you know? You tried something else.”
Patrick Mitchell: It feels like you and Paula maybe started this theater poster situation at a similar time. Is that true?
Gail Anderson: Well, no. She started it, started the groovy stuff with The Public. And she’d even done something that transferred from The Public to Broadway. But I had to redo something that she’d done, that they didn’t want to use for Broadway. And I was like, “Oh, no thanks!” And I’d think, “Do I have to, like, write her a letter and tell her?” That was a little scary.
Patrick Mitchell: I’m not a historian of Broadway theater design, but it seems like that was the beginning of a new way of creating, designing...
Gail Anderson: Oh yeah, definitely. Yes. Oh yes, yes, yes. And there were just a few people who did the posters. A guy, “Fraver” [Frank Verlizzo] was a name that always popped up. And things were very glossy. And the stuff that Spot was doing was not as shiny, and that was very appealing to me.
Patrick Mitchell: And one could draw the conclusion that you sort of brought editorial thinking to that kind of work.
Gail Anderson: Yeah.
Patrick Mitchell: Storytelling.
Gail Anderson: Storytelling. Yeah. But, all of a sudden, I had these bigger budgets to work with. And so many people to please. And that was very different. And time, all of a sudden. With the magazine there wasn’t time to do it over and over again. And with this, it was like, “Well, let’s go back and spend a week.”
“Oh my God, really?” And just get somebody else on board to crank out the 15th version of something. And, you know, these were new ideas, not just a little tweak to something. And it was a great lesson and something that I do in school now. It’s like, “We’re going to do lots of these.”
Debra Bishop: Let’s talk about your decision to leave Spotco. Did you know what was coming next?
Gail Anderson: It was, like, that was kind of ending. In the same way that’s it’s like, “Ah, it’s time for something new.” But really it was that I had elderly parents who required care, and my siblings and I were going in circles, and I realized I just couldn’t work full time anymore.
I had to be down there and do something that allowed me to put in my time, since I was the farthest away of the siblings from their retirement community in Jersey. It was hard, you know? I had had those in-between years of, “What do I do?” And the consistent thread was teaching.
Debra Bishop: So you chose to go to the School of Visual Arts, obviously, when you were young. Did you ever think, that you would end up being the head of design in the very program that you went into?
Gail Anderson: No. But when I came on, Tony Rhodes called—this was after, again, a random call—Tony Rhodes, the executive vice president, called after my father died. And I’d done some posters for the school and he called on a Friday and said, “What would you think about working here?” And he told me the salary to run the design studio for the school. And he said, “Just give me an answer on Monday.”
I was like, “Wait! What?”
And the next week I went to talk to him and I thought, “You know what? Like, why not?” Again, like, let’s just try something totally different. And, once again, I was lucky that it turned into something.
But I never thought about Richard Wilde’s job. I was running the studio and enjoying that and teaching, and again, you have that moment like, “I’m going to join a gym, and I’m going to ….” And then life changes again. The gym goes out the window. The first thing to go, of course, is the thing that’s good for you.
And people thought, “Oh, well, Richard’s going to retire. Gail’s the successor.”
I was like, “No.”
And then Richard came in one day and said, “I’m going to retire, and I think you should have this job.”
I was like, “Yeah.” So, out the door went the gym, and I moved across the street
A sampling of Anderson’s work at Spotco
Debra Bishop: So sometimes on this podcast we talk about magazines as if everything’s, you know, the way it used to be. But we’re curious, as a teacher at a school that has turned out its fair share of magazine makers over the decades, does anyone still talk about magazines there? I mean, are magazines part of the curriculum?
Gail Anderson: We added an extra class because there’s been a renewed interest. Bob Best was teaching editorial, and still is. And Matt Lenning started teaching a couple of years ago because they were like, “We want more magazine stuff.”
I’m like, “Really? Yes, please.”
And so now Matt’s done and I’ve got to find someone. Anybody out there who wants to teach an editorial design class?
Patrick Mitchell: What does this new thing look like? What are their interests?
Gail Anderson: They sometimes see it as these sort of “sullen” journals. You know, of the sort of sad-looking, thin people standing there looking in their clothes. So it’s like, let’s try something else. And not just the...
Patrick Mitchell: Like Unhappy Hipsters? Do you remember that?
Gail Anderson: Yes! Unhappy Hipsters! Yeah! But they’re into the architecture of the page. They’re curious about that. And some of them are actually into the storytelling, which has been wonderful.
Debra Bishop: Storytelling and editorial systems, because that’s very helpful when you’re designing things like websites, etc.
Patrick Mitchell: Well, also throw in the fact that, unlike when we were in school, they can actually produce a fully-printed, full-color, stitched magazine … for nothing.
Gail Anderson: Nothing. Yep. And you can do it from the printer at school, from the copier. And it binds it and staples it and just like, there’s your magazine right there. And then there’s a zines class because they love that too. And it just started to happen a couple of years ago, so that’s been wonderful.
Debra Bishop: Well, there’s a lot of indie magazines out there. So Steve Heller, the wonderful Steve Heller, who you have done at least 14 books with, authored with Steve Heller. How did you ever fit that into your busy career?
Gail Anderson: The first one, because I’d gotten to know Louise and met Steve when they were dating, so that’s how long ago this is. He would come to the office at Random House and scoot by. And I was like, “Who’s that man?”
And she’s like, “That’s my boyfriend.”
I was like, “What?”
And he just loved her so much. And I said, “If he ever needs help with a book, I would love to help him.”
And she was like, “I’ll tell him.”
And then he got in touch and was like, “I could use some help with the book.”
Debra Bishop: So where were you working when you started the first one?
Gail Anderson: I was at Rolling Stone.
Debra Bishop: Oh my goodness! Okay.
Gail Anderson: And I was living with my parents. It was very early on, so I was in the Bronx again. And he’d say, “Okay, meet me at 6:30 [am]. So I’d go down at 6:30 or 7, because he would meet illustrators then, and go through their portfolios, like rapid fire. And then say, “No, I can’t use you.” And then look at the next person. It was so ballsy and they were just, like, lined up.
And then he would talk to me and we would talk about, we were working on a book called Graphic Wit. And this is, again, pre-internet, so it was like faxing people and sending mail and getting packages. And I really enjoyed him. And he was smart and funny, and I didn’t know what he was talking about most of the time, so I was always taking notes.
And you make no money with books, but working with him I learned so much. And I learned about design outside of New York City, and then outside of the state and outside of the country, and then around the world, and...
Debra Bishop: You must have been working 24/7! Steve says, “She is a perfect fit for BFA”—meaning Bachelor of Fine Arts at SVA—“as she was a perfect fit for the Visual Arts Press. Her typographic playfulness is without equal. It’s what she lives for.”
Gail Anderson: Yeah. Aww.
Debra Bishop: Yeah. I remember you being very shy and soft spoken.
Gail Anderson: Still am.
Anderson’s poster work for SVA
Debra Bishop: And so how did you overcome it and end up traveling all over the world speaking and lecturing about graphic design? I need to know this.
Gail Anderson: Because it’s easier to talk to a bunch of strangers than it is to a few people. I learned that instantly. I can talk to a sea of people I don’t know, but if I’m in a room with a few people I do know, I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to say something stupid. Ugh.” And it’s one of those things that you just keep doing it and you know, you get better at it. And then you get old and you don’t give a shit anymore and you’re like, “Well, this is what I think.”
Debra Bishop: Where have you been? You’ve been all over the place. What’s your favorite place?
Gail Anderson: I was in Ireland this summer in Connemara, on the West Coast with the sheep. It’s so much fun and you’re just making stuff by hand. And I was just there sort of visiting and I did some talks, I spoke in Galway and in Dublin, and there was a radio show, and then I was at the program [Design West Summer School], and I’m going to go back this summer and teach and it was life changing. And I’m like, “Those are sheep!”
First of all, I’m driving on the wrong side of the road. You know, so stuff like that, it’s to visit someplace you wouldn’t otherwise. I spent time with Carin and Jim, with Carin Goldberg and her husband, Jim Biber, in Slovenia, years ago. We were in Ljubljana speaking at a conference together. And so you end up making these little connections to people in a different way and getting to know them.
And it’s been really nice to meet folks and to visit places that I may not get to otherwise. Yeah. I’ve been really lucky. And because I still am ‘Jamaican with three jobs,’ I’m like, “Okay, I’ll do it. Yeah. Okay.” So if I don’t say yes, they’re never going to ask me again.
Debra Bishop: I hope you have time to relax once in a while, Gail.
Patrick Mitchell: Gail, you’ve talked about therapy a lot and I don’t want to pry into your personal business …
Gail Anderson: … I could have gotten her on the call, too …
Patrick Mitchell: Can you share what, you know, maybe the most valuable lesson you’ve learned or what’s maybe changed your thinking after doing all this work?
Gail Anderson: Oh, yes. A little less putting myself down, you know? A little more confidence. A little less ruminating, and blaming myself, and taking everything personally, and all that.
Having somebody who isn’t in the thick of it, who will listen to it, but who doesn’t have to be like, “Okay, I gotta go now,” until she literally has to go now, so I’m not burdening a friend with my whining. I was like, “Oh, that’s what this is for.”
And that’s been great, to work with someone through all these different transitions who’s been really supportive and who knows the whole story at this point, because it’s been so many years!
Patrick Mitchell: Same person?
Gail Anderson: Yeah.
Patrick Mitchell: That’s great.
Gail Anderson: Yeah, it’s really funny. And in person, Zoom, whatever.
Debra Bishop: Has she helped you with a habit that we both have, which is collecting, hoarding?
Gail Anderson: We’ve spent some time discussing that, yes. At one point she’s like, “You want me to just come over and help you?” She just threw back the curtain. It’s like, “Oh, for God’s sake!”
Debra Bishop: I need to do some Marie Kondo-ing myself.
Patrick Mitchell: What was in your hoarding/collecting wheelhouse? What was “the thing”?
Gail Anderson: It was salt and pepper shakers. Hundreds. And they’re really fun and silly. All that stuff that we all collected that I just kept going with. And now I’m just like, “Nope, I don’t want anything.” I still have all this stuff that I still love, but I kind of don’t really want at this point. But nobody else wants it.
Debra Bishop: Brimfield is up and going again. We can each do a booth. I have many tins—you remember I used to collect type tins?
Gail Anderson: Yes, I remember.
Patrick Mitchell: Are you at least able to navigate to your bedroom, through your apartment?
Gail Anderson: Okay. Where I am now—I’m up in Woodstock—and there’s a lot of stuff here. In my apartment [in the city], there is a couch that I sleep on, and some boxes, and that’s it.
Before the pandemic, they were doing electrical work, and everybody had to move all their stuff to the middle of the rooms to do the electrical work. And then the pandemic, so all the stuff stayed for a year in the middle of the room, but I’d gotten rid of a lot of things because I was in my like, “Okay I’m done.”
So I had almost no furniture left. And I thought, “Well, I’m going to live simply there.” And I don’t even unfold the couch. I’ve just been sleeping on the couch for the last year. So I’ve also gotten lazier. But just to have these bare walls, and no stuff …
Debra Bishop: Yeah, it’s kind of what happens naturally as you get older. You just don’t need it.
Patrick Mitchell: We wanted to hear about your house in Woodstock, though.
Gail Anderson: Oh, that’s been my sanctuary these years.
Patrick Mitchell: Milton [Glaser] played a role in this, didn’t he?
Gail Anderson: Milton. Milton! Yes. Milton connected me with the architect, chose the colors, looked at the plans, looked at photos. He was, “Here’s what you’re going to do.”
And I was like, “Okay.”
Debra Bishop: Wow, Gail. Little known fact!
Gail Anderson: Yep. And I remember sending him pictures because I was mocking up colors in Photoshop and he’s just like, “Nope. No.”
“Okay!” And he never came over.
Patrick Mitchell: Was Milton in Woodstock too?
Gail Anderson: Yes, Milton was at the other end of the road on, like, 50 acres or something with this Italian sign. And I would go there. And he sold that house to downsize and bought a smaller house, of course, a beautiful house and had that renovated.
But we would have lunch sometimes and he said, “Well, I’ll be dead soon. So I’m going to give away all this.”
I was like, “Oh my God!” Not, “I’m dying. I’ll be dead soon.”
And so he was giving away all the stuff, and right before he died, gave me a couple hundred posters to give out at school. And these were on foam core, some of them signed, some prints. And he’s just like, “Yes, give them to faculty”
So I’ve been giving away Milton posters for the last couple of years. But I have to like, “Do you know who this is? Do you know?” Like, “I’m not giving it to you unless you take care of it.”
Debra Bishop: I hope the kids appreciate that.
Gail Anderson: No, not the kids. Faculty. Faculty. Not the kids. And I’ve been framing some of the really rare ones and hanging them at school. But, yeah. He made all the choices and I just went along.
Patrick Mitchell: What a neighbor to have. We’re going to get to the big question in a minute, but I sort of want to wrap it up here by saying, you know, you have really lived a design life. It’s so awesome to hear about and to learn about. What is the one thing that you’ve made that you’re the most proud of?
Gail Anderson: Both the biggest and smallest thing was the postage stamp in 2012. It was released in 2013 for the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. That was so cool. To, again, do something that so many people saw, you know, because my world had gotten a little smaller and then it got bigger again by having a stamp out there.
And since then I started serving on the Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee for the Postal Service and I just came back from Des Moines, where I was judging the federal duck stamp competition. And so I have turned into this philatelist late in life. I have a new vocabulary word.
Debra Bishop: Yeah, can you translate that?
Gail Anderson: I’m a stamp person!
Patrick Mitchell: But that particular stamp that just had so much extra meaning.
Gail Anderson: Yeah when I got the call to do that, I was just like, “Do you want me to come down to Washington tomorrow?” It was just like … it was the thick of the worst of dealing with my parents, and I left them in LeisureTowne and got on Amtrak and went down to DC.
And the one thing that Antonio Alcala, the art director, said was, “Don’t do type.”
I was like, “Wait. What? I can’t really do anything else.” And then I did type.
Patrick Mitchell: All right. Our tradition, at the end of our Print Is Dead episodes, is to ask the Print Is Dead Billion-Dollar Question. And that is that a very rich person, take your pick—Warren Buffett—has an offer that you can’t refuse. He wants to give you a blank check, but with one caveat: you have to use it to create and launch a print magazine.
Gail Anderson: I have to take my money to launch a print magazine? What?
Patrick Mitchell: Well, it depends. When does it become your money? That’s a good question.
Gail Anderson: Well, it just did.
Patrick Mitchell: What would you make?
Gail Anderson: What would I make? Well, I kind of want to bring back Spec or 16. Can I bring back MAD magazine in all its glory? Can I use my money for that? MAD magazine affected everything. You know, just, “Yes, please!” A combination of SPY and MAD. That would work for me.
“I’m a stamp person!” Anderson was selected in 2013 to design a stamp for the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Below, her collaboration with Hatch Show Print to make commemorative posters of the stamps.
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Back to the Interviews
The Accidental Editor-in-Chief
A conversation with editor and author Terry McDonell (Rolling Stone, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, more).
A conversation with editor and author Terry McDonell (Rolling Stone, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, more).
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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY AIGANY.
Today’s guest, Terry McDonell, is the kind of editor you fear based on reputation, but would probably run through a wall for at 3am on deadline day.
As for that reputation, we’ve never worked with McDonell, but a simple Google search fills the screen with an undeviating set of impressions like these:
“he helped define American masculinity”
“one of the last of the larger-than-life magazine editors”
“the manliest of literary men”
And indeed, his corps of collaborators includes a rogue’s gallery of literary tough guys: Jim Harrison, Edward Abbey, Tom McGuane, George Plimpton, and Hunter Thompson.
But missing from all that testosterone, until now, has been the true hero of McDonell’s life and career, and the subject of his beautifully-crafted new memoir: Irma: The Education of a Mother’s Son.
But read his other book, The Accidental Life, and you’ll discover a true editorial savant—an engaged partner to his colleagues, whose adventurousness knows no limits.
And apparently, neither does his resume. McDonell, an ASME Editor’s Hall of Famer, has topped the masthead at more magazines than anybody we know.
And those magazines have been nominated for 29 National Magazine Awards, winning in 2003, 2005 and 2010.
“Terry is one of the legends of our craft,” says ASME’s executive director Sid Holt. “He’s a supremely talented editor whose legacy to magazines will include not only unforgettable stories and images but also an inspiring vision of what magazines can be both in print and on digital platforms.”
McDonell attributes his firing from Esquire to this controversial 1992 cover (above), and this Spike Lee feature (below).
Sean Plottner: Well, Terry, I thought we could start before we go way back to the very, very beginning, just take a look back at 11 years ago when you were inducted into the Editors’ Hall of Fame during the annual National Magazine Award ceremony (see video, above). It’s not long ago, although in the context of media evolution, it may seem like an eon.
Anyway, it’s May 2012. You’re standing before the magazine industry’s best and brightest giving your induction speech. Here’s what you said:
“It is the most interesting time to be an editor because of all the possibilities that are coming. I think it’s absolutely going to rip. And, in that sense, change is going to be very good, especially when the challenge is ‘Change or go home.’ My response to that is ‘No fear. Bring it.’ There’s just so much interesting stuff to do.”
Do you still feel the same way?
Terry McDonell: Sure.
Sean Plottner: Has the last decade changed anything? Does it make you feel at all different?
McDonell in his AP days.
Terry McDonell: Yes. There’s been all kinds of change. People have learned a lot. I think, though, that what still remains problematic is enough confidence in the content of media to actually charge enough for it to sustain it. What I mean is, way back in the, when we were first starting all this stuff, we should have built commerce into the original browsers.
So when the “bros” in Silicon Valley convinced various traditional media executives that they should put it up for free. And, basically came up with an advertising model. It was almost all over right there. No one understood that if you could not charge for what you were making, if you did not have enough confidence in your editorial, you might as well not even be in the game.
And that was an argument that was had all across all traditional media companies. It was very frustrating, if you were on the side that I was on, saying that we’ve got to charge for this.
Sean Plottner: Yeah. Interesting. Because it’s certainly hard to start charging once you’ve been giving it away for free.
Terry McDonell: Well, now that’s the biggest cliche that there was at the time, too, as we went through all those years. And now look what The New York Times is doing, they were in a deep hole when they were giving it away for free. They had the confidence, and the firepower, and the strategic wisdom to stand by what they were really about.
Sean Plottner: That speech was really interesting, and to me, knowing what you’ve done, it’s certainly not just a bunch of macho bluster. Your career proves that you’ve embraced change heartily, you’ve done it all working in the era of pasteup, an early adopter of computers, desktop publishing, creating the first magazine for the iPad, you helped launch a digital hub for lovers of books and literature recently. And I don’t think you’ve stopped working. Terry McDonell is far from being a print “dinosaur.”
Terry McDonell: Ha-ha! Thank you, Sean!
Sean Plottner: But just to give listeners a sense of where you’ve been and what you’ve done—journalism, and writing, and magazine editing has taken you to quite a few places. And I’m just going to list them here real quickly and forgive me if I forget a few, but the Associated Press, San Francisco, City Magazine, Outside, Rocky Mountain Magazine, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Smart, Esquire, Sports Afield, Men’s Journal, US Weekly, Sports Illustrated, and Time, Inc. We got startups and launches, new platforms, new appliances. Not to mention your books and your poetry and your various other projects, to which I just say, “Wow.” You really have done quite a bit and you’re keeping at it. But let’s go way back to the beginning. What was your first exposure to magazines as a child?
Terry McDonell: I remember magazines being around. I remember Life magazine being around and liking to look at it, but I remember my mother bringing home a copy of Life magazine that had Ernest Hemingway on the cover, and it had “The Old Man and the Sea” inside. And she told me that I would like it before she read it to me, and I did.
And it turned me on to a kind of reading where I, as a little boy, I imagined that if I could read something, maybe I could do that stuff. Maybe I could go see the lions playing on the beach. It opened me up. It made me wide open to whatever I saw in magazines.
And after that, I was constantly going through them, looking at the pictures, at first, and then I began to be more interested, like I had been with The Old Man and the Sea, that there was really something wonderful in these packages. And I wanted to make them. I remember wanting to do that when I was in high school.
“When the ‘bros’ in Silicon Valley convinced traditional media executives that they should put it up for free, it was all over right there.”
McDonell got his start at LA, the “Village Voice for LA.” There he met designer Roger Black, with whom he would collaborate for the rest of his career.
Sean Plottner: In your lovely new memoir about your mother, Irma, you described where you’ve got books stashed in the car.
Terry McDonell: Yeah. I had a problematic stepfather. They used to go out and go to bars, and they would leave me in the car. So when I’m in the car, if I had a book, I was much happier than without. But he didn’t want me to keep books in the car, so I would hide them under the seat.
Sean Plottner: Do you remember any titles that you had there? Any favorites?
Terry McDonell: I remember all of those. Like Custer’s Last Stand, The Alamo, The Lewis & Clark Expedition. There was a whole series of Random House books. I loved those, especially.
Sean Plottner: In the book, you describe what comes across as a pretty tough, rugged childhood. Fatherless, hardscrabble. Before you’re 10, your mom’s boyfriend puts out a cigar on your forehead. Another one calls you a “panty waist” and grabs you by the nuts. There’s a cowboy kid who sucker punches you right in the gut. It’s tough stuff. And finally you get out, there’s a little incident with a bench that you used against your stepfather and move on. But it sounds pretty tough.
Terry McDonell: Well, yeah, maybe from a distance. But I had my mother. And everything that we went through together—and I thought about it that way—was something that affected me and taught me something. When I got to Time Inc., Or when I started moving up, like, the corporate ladder or whatever, I would remember her telling me, “You don’t have to talk all the time to get people to listen to you.” Stuff like that.
“Never raise your voice if you want people to listen to you.” And, “Always be thinking what it is you are really trying to accomplish, because sometimes it will not be what you’re thinking about in the moment. You have to constantly refresh yourself about what you’re doing.” And I would never have been who I turned out to be if I had not learned things like that from her.
Sean Plottner: Where, primarily, did you grow up?
Terry McDonell: The Santa Clara Valley, now Silicon Valley. I was just becoming suburban and then it became mass suburban and Silicon Valley all at the same time. But when I was there, it was orchards, fruit trees, and a lot of vacant lots.
I could ride my bike from where I was, like three or four miles up the valley towards San Francisco, to Cupertino, where Steve Jobs was from—20 years behind me—but they were just starting to build houses. It was just cherry orchards, and open fields, walnuts, apricots. It was wild, nature. It was a really a wondrous, beautiful place.
Jann Wenner, when he read the book—he’s from Northern California too, from Mill Valley—he said that he had learned a lot about me, because I was down in those “lonely, gray suburbs.”
That was the way they viewed it if you were a sophisticated kid from San Francisco or Marin County. But down there, I didn’t even know about Marin County. But it was a beautiful place to grow up.
Sean Plottner: And you ended up with a football scholarship to [University of California] Berkeley, correct?
Terry McDonell: I did. But I didn’t stay there. I “joined the revolution,” I guess is the way to put that, you know. A columnist for the San Francisco Examiner named Charles McCabe, after the spring game, called me "the fastest of the slow." I was okay, but I was not going to be a football star, that’s for sure. I was just pretty lucky in high school.
Sean Plottner: So you must have played and played fairly well in high school.
Terry McDonell: Yeah. That was a good part of my identity in high school. That’s what I did.
Sean Plottner: When you play at the local club, the club championship in golf, if you’re in the last flight, and you win it, you can say you’re “the best of the worst.”
Terry McDonell: That’s good.
Sean Plottner: So you ended up doing some work abroad. Can you quickly tell us what you did?
Terry McDonell: I wanted to be in journalism, and I’d gone to art school, and I had learned about some cameras, and so I thought, “I’ve got to get out of here.” I was working construction and said, “How do I get to become a journalist?”
So my mother loaned me enough money to buy a good camera—an H16 Bolex, used, for $700, and a ticket. And I left. And I wound up in Beirut during what was then called Black September. This is the way back in 1970. Yasser Arafat was organizing the PLO. And that’s where they first hijacked an airplane and blew it up on the runway. And that’s what I did.
But I was, like a lot of freelancers at the time, anyway, I was faking it. I was acting like I was some real correspondent and I was just sort of bouncing around.
But I was good enough, because I sold some pictures that got picked up by the Associated Press, and I got to work in New York in news features, making film strips, if you remember what those were. They were like single-frame things that would click through and there’d be a narration with a little bell that would tell you to move to the next slide.
[You] shot the pictures, you wrote the script, you recorded it. Stuff like, “Alienation and Mass Society,” was [one of the] titles.
Sean Plottner: So you dove right into it and then you’re back in the US and tell us about how you got your first job in magazines. I think someone you knew at LA Magazine moved to San Francisco?
Terry McDonell: No, I just, I heard about this thing in LA that a guy named Karl Fleming had started. He had been the bureau chief for Newsweek and he wanted to do his own idea of what a magazine would be like for Los Angeles. He loved Los Angeles.
And he hired a guy named Bob Sherrill, who was a friend from the South where Karl was from. Bob had been at Esquire for a number of years. And so I wrote to them and they said, “Okay, come on out. You’re hired.”
Because I was working at the Associated Press, I think they thought they were getting a hardcore, AP, on-the-nose journalist. And they weren’t, they were getting me. But it worked out.
And it was from them that I learned that I might want to be an editor, because it was all about ideas and it was wide open, and it was just fun to ride around LA with Bob Sherrill and talk about this story or that story or whatever came to our minds.
Sean Plottner: I know we’re cutting through a lot of things here quickly, but you then end up in New York City at Outside magazine, at its founding. And that’s, of course, a Jann Wenner-owned publication. This is 1977. How did you end up there?
Terry McDonell: Well, actually, what happened was Jann could not wait to get Rolling Stone to New York, but we launched Outside out of San Francisco, right as Rolling Stone moved to New York. So Outside remained in San Francisco. And that’s what happened. But I’d been in San Francisco, and I was out of work and I had written a novel and I couldn’t get anybody to buy it.
And there was Outside magazine, and I went in there and talked my way into a job. And then I knew that was what I was going to do. It was about the work. [I was] more serious than I had been before.
Sean Plottner: And that was when you first met Jann?
Terry McDonell: Yeah. Yeah.
Sean Plottner: And he’s the one you talked into hiring you?
Terry McDonell: No, it was William Randolph Hearst III. Will Hearst, who now sits on top of the Hearst Corporation. He’s the chairman of the board.
Sean Plottner: And how was it at Outside?
Terry McDonell: It was great! The idea was that the outdoors were about a lot more than, like, the Sierra Club. But what we really did was invent the adventure travel genre.
Sean Plottner: Okay, so Wenner sells it just two years after launch. And apparently you hadn’t had enough of that genre and you dive into Rocky Mountain Magazine.
Terry McDonell: That wasn’t about the outdoors and adventure travel that was a regional magazine for what we call “the deep west.”
I was a big fan of Texas Monthly and Bill Broyles. They had done that. And when I was in New York, I was in awe of Clay Felker. I didn’t know him until later, but I had watched him. And what he had done was put two things in the same magazine that, at the time, were very surprising: shopping and politics. And suddenly, it was a big “click” in the minds of New Yorkers.
That was exactly what they were interested in. Shopping—including real estate. That was the quintessential city magazine for me. And I thought, “Well, this is a new thing.”
Sean Plottner: And where were you based?
Terry McDonell: Denver. Cherry Creek. But I traveled all over the west. All over New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado, many times, Montana—where I wound up living—Idaho, Utah. Wonderful places.
Sean Plottner: Well, it’s really sad there’s no digital footprint for the publication. I was hunting around and I kept finding Rocky Mountain Bride, which I don’t think has anything to do with it. Your art director, Hans Teensma, who appeared on this podcast in Season One, says you guys went out there and drove all over the place and said you were freaking out because there really wasn’t much out there. And he said one of you took a photo of dead rabbits—I’m not sure which one of you—and that you fell in love with it and turned it into a full spread/full bleed image in the magazine. Do you remember that?
Terry McDonell: Well, there was no more symbolic image of a particular part of Wyoming than that. And that was sophisticated. And ironic. And Hans was brilliant at that. He gave that magazine a look that translated beyond the visual that gave you an attitude about how you loved where you lived, and you embraced all of the ironies that went along with that. Including roadkill.
Inspired by Clay Felker’s New York magazine and the recently-launched Texas Monthly, McDonell moved to Denver as the founding editor of Rocky Mountain Magazine.
Sean Plottner: And that magazine won a National Magazine Award in the General Excellence category. Pretty impressive. So you ended up, again, with all these Jann Wenner connections, I think next you went on to Rolling Stone?
Terry McDonell: Yeah. And then I was in New York.
Sean Plottner: And how did you evolve what Rolling Stone was at the time?
Terry McDonell: Well, three things happened. The bottom fell out of the music business. The Cars were the biggest hit—they were the band. And The Police were not even on the scene yet. So I talked Jann into putting the music reviews in the back and putting something we called Art & Politics in the front, and then the features.
And we started putting movie stars on the cover: Jack Nicholson, Goldie Hawn, Meryl Streep. And that all really worked. So Rolling Stone kind of took off again. And Jann spent part of that time in the movie business. So I had probably more autonomy for a while than most of his editors had, but we got along really well and it really worked out.
And then right when I was leaving to go to Newsweek, MTV came. And the music business was back. It was all new. All interesting—all kinds of great new acts, bands, whatever.
Sean Plottner: Interesting time. I’ve long been a big reader of Rolling Stone, and I remember in 1980 I was a freshman in college and had a big poster of L.A. Woman, The Doors album cover in my room. And I was part of that massive amount of people who were completely reengaged with The Doors, long after Jim Morrison’s death. And they were selling like crazy. And you picked up on that and did a cover story in which Jim Morrison was on the cover with what I think is a Hall of Fame headline: “Jim Morrison, He’s Hot, He’s Sexy, and He’s Dead.” Can you tell us a little bit about how that headline came to be?
Terry McDonell: There’s been a lot of discussion of that headline because, as I recall, it came out of a room, and in the room were Jann Wenner, David Rosenthal, who was my deputy at the time, and who replaced me as the editor when I went to Newsweek, and me. And somehow out of that room came that headline.
David claims that it’s his, that he wrote it. Jann says that’s absurd, he wrote it. It sounds just like him. And then of course, I thought that I had done it. And this has been, like, a rolling fake feud for a long time. And in the end, I don’t think it really matters, because what it does is it underlines the kind of collaboration that makes magazines really fun when they’re clicking.
Sean Plottner: Yeah, that’s great. I’ve had that experience myself. Where, well after the fact, there’s that great cover or great cover line and multiple people are taking responsibility for it. And at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter. And I guess, ultimately, the editor atop the masthead deserves credit for making it happen. It does say something about collaboration, memory, and ego.
Terry McDonell: Yeah, good point.
Sean Plottner: You’ve said that headlines can ruin a good story and they can also be the most fun part of editing. Talk a little more about writing headlines.
Terry McDonell: Well, I think that, in those moments, you had to assume, or at least I assumed, that some people were going to go through your magazine and only read the headlines and the display copy.
So that was the place where you had to throw your attitude, and your identity, and your humor, and everything about yourself as a magazine—or as a brand, as it was soon beginning to be called. “Brand” became like a monstrous word almost all of a sudden. It used to be applied to Corn Flakes, and then it was suddenly used for magazines.
But the thing about it was that that language—if it was powerful, and funny, and not arrogant, and never mean—would serve you well. And the people would understand who you were and what it was about. And if you could convince them to read a story, fine. But sometimes people would just read the headlines and really like the magazine.
I had a really terrible experience. I made a terrible mistake. Spike Lee had just directed X, his great film about Malcolm X. And we had a funny story that was also serious in a way that Spike always was—always is—in spite of the way he would front off. He’s a complicated, good man, right?
And so we shot the picture of him with his hands crossed across his chest, making an X. And it was beautiful, rich, deep, dark. And him looking really good.
Sean Plottner: And this is for Esquire?
Terry McDonell: Yeah. I’ve slowed down because I hate to think about what I did. I had this idea, because I knew him a little bit, that would be funny would be in the headline inside we said, “Spike Lee Hates Your Cracker Ass.” Which was going right at Esquire’s demo, right? But, we thought it was pretty funny.
And he called me up and he said, “What’s wrong with you?”
And I knew as soon as I saw it in print that I had made this huge mistake. But only one word was wrong. If I had said, “Spike Lee Loves Your Cracker Ass,” it would’ve been a completely different story.
Sean Plottner: Does Spike Lee hate your cracker ass? That’s what I want to know.
Terry McDonell: No! That was the whole point. He’s making these movies as an anti-racist. He’s a righteous guy. He’s not kidding. He wasn’t even really angry at me on the phone. He just said, “What’s wrong with you? I thought you were not stupid.”
Sean Plottner: Yeah, I think I’ve heard you say before that a headline is better if it is not mean-spirited. I think you put that in the mean-spirited bank, but thanks for sharing that.
Terry McDonell: That was the whole trick to why Us Weekly worked, too. We wanted to create an American tabloid, but not mean. So, like, the Fashion Police that was supposed to make fun of what people were wearing, wasn’t mean at all. It was either funny, or complimentary, or whatever. And we didn’t do those hard-ass stories. Only once in a while. It was fluffy-ass journalism. But it was not mean-spirited and people really liked that. Not my favorite job, however.
McDonell on the hunt with musician Jimmy Buffet
Sean Plottner: Well, yeah, and I’m going to ask you a question or two about Us in a couple of minutes here. I’m wondering now if you could tell us about the conception and launch of Smart magazine. This was primarily you doing the driving and the fundraising. Tell us what you were trying to do and how it came together.
Terry McDonell: I wanted to start my own magazine because I had been around these launches and I liked doing that. It was fun, creative, energizing—all of those wonderful words.
And I was at Newsweek and it occurred to me that I could maybe raise a little money. And I had just met Steve Jobs and he had given me, to play with, one of the first Macs. Those ones that stood up, like, you put disks in them.
And I realized that you could probably do a whole magazine on that. Adobe was just getting started. We were a beta site for them when we got rolling. Roger Black came—he was the one who said, “type is the sushi of the nineties”—and we were just playing with all this digital stuff. And we were able to create a magazine and shipped it directly to the printer with no paste up. None. All that was gone. It was just so much cheaper.
So we launched Smart for, like, $300–400,000, when most startups would’ve taken $3–4 million. And I wanted to create my own sort of version of Esquire or New York magazine, other stuff that I had envied. I wanted it to be a writer’s magazine. And I gave some of the writers stock for being part of it.
Sean Plottner: And all those writers got filthy rich off that, right?
Terry McDonell: Yeah. Every time they’re basking in their pool, they’re thanking me for that. Hunter Thompson thought that was great, but then thought we should sell it all to Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, who we all knew. And they were big supporters of it. And so we, for a minute it looked like that might actually happen.
And then I was broke. We didn’t have enough money to sustain it. And we got an offer from a Japanese company. And that was right when I got the offer from Hearst to go to Esquire, which wouldn’t have happened if I had not started Smart.
Sean Plottner: Interesting how that happens.
Terry McDonell: I was told that I can either take that job and just not care about Smart or the job is going to go away. You got like 20 seconds to make that decision.
Sean Plottner: Did the buyer of Smart keep it alive?
Terry McDonell: It went for a couple more issues and then it went away because his company in Tokyo started having a lot of problems.
“Jann [Wenner] spent part of that time in the movie business, so I had probably more autonomy than most of his editors had.”
Sean Plottner: And how, from your perspective, how was Smart received by advertisers and readers?
Terry McDonell: Well, everybody told me they liked it. And we had some serious, good advertisers who got the program. But it wasn’t mass enough. And we didn’t have the circulation we might have had, although we were critically well-received.
But it was how I got to know Tina Brown and Graydon Carter. They had both told me, “this is great.” And they were very complimentary about it within the small world of magazines. And there was a lot of satisfaction in that. And that went a long way. Graydon was starting Spy at the same time.
Sean Plottner: Well, I remember it and I remember it had a really sharp look. And again, no digital footprint for that publication, which is quite sad, although you can find some of the covers online. I also noticed, just in case you have a bunch of bound volumes down in the basement, that somebody is selling a complete set of Smart magazines for $450 online if you are so inclined to sell or buy.
Terry McDonell: Well, all those covers are on my website.
Sean Plottner: How did you connect with the great art director, Roger Black, to work on that publication?
Terry McDonell: When I left the AP to go to New York to work on this little counterculture startup in Los Angeles for Karl Fleming, they hired me. I was 25. And they hired Roger to be the art director, and he was 24. And we were immediately drawn to each other, and we have been friends ever since then. Many years.
Sean Plottner: And I get the sense you were pretty active in partnering with art directors. Can you describe what your relationship was with art directors over the years?
Terry McDonell: Well, the joke among them was that I wanted to be an art director, which was fair enough. But I used to sit right next to them, especially Roger, and we would create. We would blow through the whole magazine. I would write headlines and he would slap them in there and we’d look at it. We’d play with the pictures. And so instead of having to send things back and forth and taking what sometimes seemed like forever on deadlines, we would just sit at that computer with the big screen and knock it out.
When he was starting Out magazine, I even sat next to him when he was doing that and wrote these headlines. Although some of the people that were also helping us didn’t think it was right for a guy who wasn’t gay to be writing the first big gay magazine’s coverlines. But that was maybe a window into the future.
Sean Plottner: Back to Hans Teensma, whom you hired at Outside, he says, “You never forget your first editor.” And he has very nice things to say about you. And one of them is that you mentored him and taught him how to go out drinking and stay up all night.
Terry McDonell: Well, he’s not bad at that himself.
Sean Plottner: Well, those Europeans, I think they do have a hand up on that. Have you ever had to fire an art director?
Terry McDonell: Not exactly. But some people had moved around a little bit. That was the hardest thing about any of those jobs—when the cost-cutting started. I never worked with an art director that I didn’t like. Ever.
Sean Plottner: I believe you wrote in your 2016 book, The Accidental Life, I think you’ve said there that despite all the jobs you had, you only got fired from one. Where was that? Esquire?
Terry McDonell: That was Esquire.
Sean Plottner: And can you share with us how you got the news? How did you learn you were out?
Terry McDonell: My agent called me and said, “You’ve been fired.”
And I said, “How do you know?”
And she said, “Because they just announced over at New York magazine that Ed Kosner”—who was the editor there at the time—“was the new editor of Esquire.”
I said, “No. That cannot be.”
And then I got a call to go talk to Claeys Bahrenberg, who ran the Hearst magazine division then, and he said, “Well, there’s two things you can do here. You can either go away—sue me, get your contract, get a bunch of money, and leave. Or you can go over and edit Sports Afield, make it a different kind of magazine.” So I did the latter.
The reason I was fired was discussed at some length in the media. The cover that everyone seems to think got me there was—I did a cover that was white on white and it said, “White People…” And very small at the bottom, in black, it said, “The Trouble with America.” And then inside we set out to prove that in sort of a literary, ironic, sometimes bad-ass way. That proved both popular, and something that I’m quite proud of in most ways, but also problematic for me.
Sean Plottner: So you got a call from your agent. That's interesting. That’s almost the precursor of firing by Tweet in a way.
Terry McDonell: No, but they didn’t tell her. She was just better connected than I was.
Sean Plottner: Yeah, I understand.
Terry McDonell: And someone in another magazine office told her. I always thought I was her pet, but she has many pets. She’s still my agent, Binky Urban.
Sean Plottner: Well, let me let me do something here—I’ve got a list of 10 things here. They’re names, titles, phrases. I’m just going to say them one at a time and ask you to just quickly tell me the first thing that comes to mind and we’ll try to be brief, but there could be some storytelling here. And god knows, I might even bait you a little bit.
Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
Terry McDonell: Complicated. Stupid. Pain in the ass. Moneymaker.
Sean Plottner: Jann Wenner.
Terry McDonell: Brilliant editor. Misunderstood.
Sean Plottner: Liz Tilberis.
Terry McDonell: My best friend while she was here. Brilliant editor.
Sean Plottner: She, of course, was from British Vogue, came to America and edited Harper’s Bazaar at Hearst. How did you meet her?
Terry McDonell: Claeys Bahrenberg, who had hired her, called me into the office and said, “I’ve hired Tilberis. Would you please introduce her around?” So I met her right away. And she came out to stay with us in Sagaponack the next weekend. And it was Easter and there was a party. And we went and she met a whole bunch of people.
And from then on she was staying with me. And she always credited me, incorrectly of course, with showing her the way in New York. Because if there was ever anyone whose instincts were perfect for negotiating media minefields, and using creative firepower, talent, whatever, to create really unique things, that would’ve been her. And she’s also an extremely funny woman.
“What I will always like is something that I can feel is really touched by an editor.”
Sean Plottner: Okay. The fourth one here is: “A dog on every page.”
Terry McDonell: Ah! That was wonderful. I was vaguely bitter. No, not vaguely. I was not in the perfect mental health when I went from Esquire to the—well, no. I mean, think about it. At Esquire I would go to Fashion Week in Milan.
And then I’m suddenly at Sports Afield, and I go to the Shot Show in Las Vegas. If you don’t know what the Shot Show is, it speaks for itself. It’s the biggest gun show in the world.
So just to prove that I could do some things—and of course everyone who liked Sports Afield liked dogs. So I thought, “This is a challenge. How do we do this?” But we did it.
Sean Plottner: So you had a picture or an illustration or some form of a dog on every page?
Terry McDonell: Every editorial page.
Sean Plottner: And it was basically to say that you did it?
Terry McDonell: It was very popular. It was like the kind of a thing you do as an instinct. Or as a joke. And then somebody says, “Hey, I really like that with a dog on every page.”
So they like you. Even if they’re not saying, “Boy, that Terry McDonell, what genius! He put a dog on every page.” There’s something about it. They don’t know who I am, but there’s something about it that makes them say, “This Sports Afield is pretty cool. A dog on every page.”
Sean Plottner: And that was just a one-time deal?
Terry McDonell: Yes. You can’t necessarily do that again, I thought then. But now I’m thinking, maybe it’s time?
Sean Plottner: Well, I’m glad to hear you didn’t follow up with a cat on every page. That might’ve affected the readers somewhat differently.
Terry McDonell: Well, think about that. I mean, there are more cat magazines than dog magazines.
Sean Plottner: Okay. Your favorite poem or poet, having written some poetry yourself.
Terry McDonell: The Waste Land just lit my hair on fire when I first read it. But it would be Jim Harrison. When I was writing this recent book—after he died, there was a huge collection of all of his poetry that came out. It’s a beautiful book and they’re all there. And when I was writing that book, I would read one of his poems every day before I started work, and note the weather or something.
And that gave me some sort of inspiration sometimes. And sometimes when I was stuck, I would go and read the next poem. And maybe that’s not the way you decide who your favorite poet is, but I love that poetry.
Sean Plottner: You’ve worked with so many incredible writers. And I highly recommend your book for those who want to know more about your dealings with these writers. I’m going to pick one out here and just see what you have to say. And the reason I’ve chosen this one is because I feel like he’s being slowly forgotten. Edward Abbey.
Terry McDonell: Oh, God. Ed was just this wonderful, gracious outlaw who you just did not want to fuck with. But if you understood him and got what he was saying, which was, “What’s wrong with you people? This is the earth. This is all we have. The beauty of it changes everything in your life. And accept that.” And he was just a magnificent guy.
The way we started was—he didn’t have a phone, but he was living in Moab, Utah. And I tracked him down. He was at a certain bar in Moab, usually at this time of day for a drink. So I called the bar and I asked for him and he came on. And I introduced myself and I said, “This is Outside magazine, and would [you] like to write something maybe for me?”
And he said, “Well, the last thing I need is another editor, but I guess I could use the money.”
And so he started writing for Outside. And he would send stuff by mail and then I would do something with it. And he would be on the payphone at that bar in Moab and we would work it out. And he wrote a lot of stuff. And every place I went after that he wrote for me.
Sean Plottner: Golf. Specifically with George Plimpton and Hunter Thompson.
Terry McDonell: Well, the first thing that came to mind was Trump cheats at golf.
Sean Plottner: Oh, yes.
Terry McDonell: Well, when I was at Sports Illustrated, underneath the Sports Illustrated umbrella were all these golf magazines. And Donald always wanted to have his golf courses at the top of the list of best golf courses, best new golf course.
“We’ve got a golf course, the best, most classiest golf course.” And they weren’t. Clearly. But he would call up and rail at me about that. “It’s fake news,” he said. “Nah. No. It’s all fake. Mine are the best. Mine are the best. Mine are the best.”
And then Rick Reilly, who was the great columnist there, did a book called Who’s Your Caddy? And he played with everyone. He played with almost every major sports, politics, celebrity you could think about: Michael Jordan, the best golfers. And only two people out of 45 that he played with cheated: Trump and Clinton.
“I wanted it to be a writer’s magazine. And I gave some of the writers stock for being part of it.”
Sean Plottner: Of course, Rick Reilly was your highly paid, highly compensated back page columnist there at Sports Illustrated for a while. Let’s do Golf 2.0. Golf with George Plimpton and Hunter.
Terry McDonell: George Plimpton wanted to do the first Paris Review interviews—“A Journalist at Work” is what they were calling it. So he and I went out to Woody Creek to interview Hunter, and when we arrived, Hunter said, “Well, yeah. Good. But first we’ve got to play golf.” But it was late in the afternoon. It never gets completely dark out there in the summer, but it was dusky.
So we go to the Aspen Golf course. And the guy who runs it waves to Hunter as we go in and he’s driving out, and it’s our course. And in his golf bag, Hunter has a shotgun and all kinds of crazy clubs. And then he’s got a big cooler with all kinds of liquor, and ice, and just got everything. And so we’re going to play this game where you, it’s basically three holes, best-ball kind of thing.
And George is a great athlete and he, of course, can play golf. But before we start, Hunter says, “Again!” And he takes out these three tabs that have this little strange logo on them and says, “Eat this.” And it’s acid. So I do. George sniffs it and says, “I don’t know.” So Hunter grabbed it and ate that one too.
So then we are at the second hole, there’s a lake and geese. And Hunter drives and misses the green and is infuriated, because of the noise that the geese started making. He took the shotgun out of the bag and fired over the head of the geese. They all lifted off—it was this white “thing.”
And Hunter and I are on acid. It was, like, the end of the world, or heaven, or something. And George just looked at us. And then I could hear the tinkle of him making another Dewars and water. Crazy stuff.
Sean Plottner: Well, in, in your book you talk about, you were of an era, the drug culture was part of it. I think you mentioned snorting coke with Jann Wenner, which doesn’t necessarily put you in limited company.
Terry McDonell: Yeah. New York in the eighties.
Sean Plottner: Did drugs affect your work? Any influence on your creativity or your work, directly?
Terry McDonell: No. I mean, I don’t like the way it turned out, because all of that “fun stuff” ultimately killed a bunch of my best friends. Addiction was the worst thing. Alcoholism was everywhere.
We had a joke that there was an organization that Pete Axthelm made up called S.O.F.A., which stood for the Society of Functioning Alcoholics. And this was like a big joke. But when Hunter killed himself, it was because he had such terrible addiction. It didn’t end well. Ever.
Sean Plottner: Although it is tragic that he never got to write for your golf publication.
Terry McDonell: What is really tragic is he never got to cover Trump!
McDonell and George Plimpton enjoyed a memorable round of golf with Hunter Thompson.
Sean Plottner: Yeah. Wow. Okay. Just two more. Miami Vice.
Terry McDonell: Just fun and a huge change for me. Michael Mann.
Sean Plottner: You wrote an episode? Or two? Or three?
Terry McDonell: Yeah. It was really how I learned to write TV movies. I was at Newsweek and it was the anniversary of the fall of Saigon and I found this story about some people who were smuggling heroin out of Vietnam in body bags.
And I thought, “God. This is just … wow.”
And I knew a guy at Fox named David Fields, and he always was saying, “If you come across any stories that might be a movie or whatever, just let me know.”
So I told him about that. The next day, Michael Mann called me and said, “I’ve got this new show I want to talk to you about. Let’s have breakfast.”
And I said, “Yeah.” And I told him what I knew. I gave him the research.
He said, “Why don’t you write it?”
And I said, “I’ve never done anything like this. I don’t know how to do that.”
He said, “I’ll teach you.”
And it was wonderful. And there’s no better writer than him. It was fun.
Sean Plottner: Crockett and Tubbs. I had to look that up to remember, but I just want to be able to say it.
Terry McDonell: My first episode—Don [Johnson] had just emerged, “Crockett” had emerged as a huge star. Like sudden stardom. Although he had been a working actor for a long time already. And for his directorial debut, he was going to do this Miami Vice episode called “Back in the World.”
And Miami Vice then was rolling at about six days, $500,000–$600,000 per episode, a day off, do another one, whatever. This one went $1,500,000 and ran 13 days to get it done. And it was because Don was directing it and could do whatever he wanted. He got all The Doors music. Just that alone was a huge piece of cash. And it’s good. It’s a good episode.
Sean Plottner: It’s probably available somewhere on YouTube.
Terry McDonell: It’s all over YouTube. You can’t get away from it.
Sean Plottner: Okay, finally, Us Weekly. Particularly the Weekly part. I believe you took it weekly?
Terry McDonell: Yeah. That came out of business strategizing and looking at the numbers. The idea was People was, without question, the most successful magazine in the world. And it seemed to be alone in its genre. And US Weekly seemed to be more like Entertainment Weekly or something.
So the idea was if you do, like I said before, a tabloid, that is not mean-spirited. That is not about cats who walk from Seattle to Nome and go home again headlines and stuff like that. It was a friendly, happy weekly about celebrities aimed at young people in their twenties. People’s demo was much older than that. And it was, if you do this right, you can make a lot of money.
Sean Plottner: I believe Carol Wallace was then at People magazine.
Terry McDonell: Yeah. And they were just raking it in.
Sean Plottner: Yeah. And I had worked for her 10 years before at Us Magazine, when it was a biweekly. And I thought the pace was enough there. That was enough for me.
Terry McDonell: Well, you didn’t have any money, right? You didn’t have enough people. Well when we did Us, we staffed up.
Sean Plottner: Everyone always says, “Oh my god, Terry McDonell. He seems like a fish out of water at Us Magazine.” But it’s particularly, in changing the frequency, it just reminds me of something you’ve said that I just relate to so much, and that’s, “Magazines—I love putting them together.” And that’s so subject agnostic. It doesn’t matter what the content is. Talk about that—magazine making is, to be really gushy about it, it’s really cool. It’s really fun.
Terry McDonell: There’s so much to it. There’s the mix, the pacing, the visuals, the design, typography, display copy, does the package work, the cover, great writing, or great news, or great service, or whatever you happen to be doing. It’s a puzzle and it’s collaborative, and it comes together very fast at the end. And that was very attractive to me. And I think a lot of people. Like Graydon Carter says, “You have to be able to see around corners.”
Sean Plottner: You’ve also written about the importance of five key members of any magazine staff, beside the editor in chief, and of course, the art director. The four other ones, when they do their jobs really well, they’re very often unsung heroes. If they don’t do their jobs well, everybody’s fucked. They are: managing editor, copy chief, research editor, and photo editor. Could you just comment on those positions?
Terry McDonell: Yeah. When I wrote about that, it was in the context of women in the magazine business. Because many of the places where I was the editor-in-chief, all of those positions were filled by women.
And the uncomfortable—not secret at all—but the uncomfortable reality of all that was, it was very difficult for women to rise to the top of the masthead, even though they did all of those other jobs, often underneath someone not as good as they were. And a whole bunch of people knew that. And so that was going to change, but it for sure it took too long.
Sean Plottner: But it is hard to imagine getting a magazine out without those people, male or female.
Terry McDonell: I don’t mean to jump into the politics of that. But yeah, you needed all those people. Now you do not. Now you can do it yourself. I mean, look at you guys.
Sean Plottner: Yeah, there’s a lot of do-it yourself out there. And I would say that even with this podcast, in the short time it’s been around, the do-it-yourself tech behind it has evolved greatly, and I don’t even know what I’m talking about. Patrick’s the one who does it all.
Okay. Let’s go down memory lane just a little bit here. How do you look back on the “Go-Go Nineties” and how much freaking money everybody had to spend?
Terry McDonell: That was not really my nineties. Because it was the high point of—magazine editors made more than at any other time. But I was getting more and more excited about technology, up to the time that I got to Sports Illustrated in 2002. It was like—it’s like there was too much money. But there’s still so much money and so much inequity. It’s tragic that we are not able to smooth that out a little bit.
Sean Plottner: Well, in 2010 at Sports Illustrated you—and I remember it so well. It was so exciting, you developing their iPad version.
Terry McDonell: Yeah, that was actually earlier. It was 2006 or eight. The thing about Time Inc. is that it’s a great company with these great brands. And here’s—now it’s 2000—and something’s happening and it’s sort of making everybody a little uncomfortable.
But there were three very distinct cultures at Time Inc. that I saw when I got there. There was an executive culture, which was risk averse and desperate at the same time. Their P&Ls were falling and they were running—it was like trying to catch knives. Some things were falling so fast. This technology is just breaking open.
The edit culture was arrogant, defensive, clueless about what was coming, and generally thought that the people in IT could fix the air conditioning after they fixed your email.
And the people in the IT culture were ironic and more than vaguely bitter about being completely underestimated.
So it was a hard place to really get anything done. But, because of the desperation I spoke about earlier, and because I had this experience and we were doing well digitally with what we did with Swimsuit and the website, I started recruiting people from these different cultures.
And what I would do is I would invite them to join the Machiavelli Club. And then I would send them an email that would say:
“There is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to be a leader in the introduction of change. For he who innovates will have for enemies all those who are well off under the old order of things. And only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new.”
So we’re the Machiavelli Club. And it was maybe the best six months I’d ever had, when we were developing all that stuff.
“The trick to why US Weekly worked [was that] we wanted to create an American tabloid, but not mean. It was either funny or complimentary. It was fluffy-ass journalism, but it was not mean-spirited and people really liked that.”
Has McDonell edited every magazine? We just don’t know, but here are several more of his projects
Sean Plottner: What a great name.
Terry McDonell: That quote is from The Prince.
Sean Plottner: And listeners can go to your website and see the actual little demos that were put together when the iPad version of SI was being born. And they are wonderfully archaic. They really are.
Terry McDonell: Yeah. Zombie hands.
Sean Plottner: The zombie hands. And the expression that I love is, “combines the best of the magazine with the best of the web.”
Terry McDonell: But there again was that horrible dilemma—that shouldn’t have been a dilemma: Do you charge for it? Maybe it should be free? Maybe it’s an advertisement? Which just muddled the whole thing about the magazine, which was by then reduced to you get, like, a football phone, and a bad windbreaker, and the magazine 50 times a year for like 11 cents. Because it was just all out of whack—we should have been charging for Sports Illustrated what it cost. But it would become this advertising and newsstand juggernaut, which was about to tank.
Sean Plottner: I was always immensely disappointed that renewing my subscription did not get me a football phone. I never got a football phone. And damn it, I wanted a football phone.
A few years ago I discovered a website. I fell in love with it. I go to it at least a couple times a week. And in preparing for this episode, I had no idea you were one of the people behind it. Lit Hub. Literary Hub. LitHub.com. What a great site for anyone who loves books or, if we want to be fancy, who loves literature. Can you talk about what your role is with that?
Terry McDonell: Morgan Entrekin and I—he’s Grove Atlantic—are co-founders. For some years when I was at Sports Illustrated, I would take his books that were about sports and excerpt them online.
And the idea was, Well, why don’t all the publishers do that? Well, they had no connection. And so the books weren’t getting any traction or any attention and they would’ve been great across all these new websites, but it wasn’t happening. So then when I left Time Inc., we started thinking about, was that a business and would it be interesting editorially? And then all of a sudden it was.
So he pulled together all of the big five publishing houses and we got them to all become members and buy subscriptions. And for that we would put their stuff on the website, they would get advertising, and it would grow. And then we would assign some of our own.
And I drew the original wire frames, and I did that thing with Joan Didion, Read to Live, that all that took off. And then we got these really smart people—Andy Hunter and Johnny Diamond and Emily Firetog—and they just took it to the next level. Morgan is still very involved. I’m like the crazy uncle now.
Sean Plottner: Is it doing well?
Terry McDonell: Oh yeah. We’re over 5 million—the traffic is huge. And we’re assigning more and more stories. Crime Reads was spun off of it for people who are into mysteries, crime, whodunnits, thrillers, all that stuff.
That’s a whole, very vital part of the literary community now. And completely and deeply connected to television and movies and, so you get all that’s there for, to help you. And there’s also a place where the book reviews are that summarizes all the different reviews for any particular title that you can see.
As editor of Sports Illustrated, McDonell created one of the first digital magazines for the iPad.
Sean Plottner: Oh that, to me, is brilliant. The site is dense, there’s so much stuff there. Often I’m finding new things. But, the idea of aggregating book reviews—it’s like, “God, why didn’t I think of that?” I mean, of course. And your aggregator is great. It is sophisticated, but accessible: “Here’s 10 cool new book jackets.” It just comes at the business from so many different angles. I really like that site and it’s great to hear how involved you were with starting it.
Terry McDonell: We’re trying to do a “Not The New York Times Bestseller” list.
Sean Plottner: That’s great, too.
Terry McDonell: We’re working on it.
Sean Plottner: What else are you doing these days?
Terry McDonell: Well, I have the book [Irma: The Education of a Mother’s Son], which is what got us together here, about my mother and how everything ever happened to me revolves around lessons from her. But a bunch of it’s about the media. Some of it’s about why I left Time Inc.—I once asked the senior HR executive what it was about the truth that made it impossible for her to speak it. Which was something I’m very proud of. But I did it in a meeting, and it was not good that I did that. But some of that stuff’s in the book.
Sean Plottner: Yeah, the book’s great. What about the future of media? Are we still in “let it rip” mode? How’s artificial intelligence influencing your thinking as to where things might be going?
Terry McDonell: Well, in a way it goes back to the people making the content that was valuable giving it away for free. Barry Diller was just talking about how you’ve got to find a way to work together out of business, in business, whatever. Because all those AI things are really based on other content, other places. What I think the future is about is, like, niche things that can get bigger and bigger.
You don’t start a general interest mag. You’ve got to find something—LitHub is a good example of what will work on the web. You could probably do that for bicycles. You could probably do it for toys. Maybe they’re all stores, maybe they’re whatever. But what I will always like is something that I can feel is really touched by an editor.
Like, Air Mail feels like that to me now. It may not be everybody’s taste, but for a certain [audience], there it is.
Sean Plottner: Graydon Carter’s website.
Terry McDonell: Yeah. And Jim Kelly. There’s a bunch of really good editors there.
Sean Plottner: Yeah. I get you what you’re saying. Go vertical, go deep.
Terry McDonell: And that’s a model for local, too.
Sean Plottner: I’ve noticed that Air Mail has gotten back into, comically, the magazine business somewhat with this MAGA-zine. Have you seen what they’re doing?
Terry McDonell: Yeah. It’s classic. Yes. It’s Spy.
Sean Plottner: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. It’s Spy Illustrated. And why not?
Terry McDonell: That’s where “short-fingered vulgarian” came from. That’s what they used to call Trump in Spy. Made him crazy. If you go to Graydon’s Restaurant, The Waverly Inn, on the menu across the top it says, “Worst food in New York. –Donald Trump.” They’re just blasting about that stuff.
Sean Plottner: What would your advice be to a 25-year-old who is interested in, I don’t know, journalism? Is that even a thing anymore? A 25-year-old who’s interested in journalism or media. You got any advice?
Terry McDonell: Yeah. Start stuff! Startups are where you learn the most. Try doing your own stuff. I think it’s really hard to get the kind of jobs that ultimately play to our nostalgia about what it’s like to be a reporter, a foreign correspondent, that kind of stuff. But to get there, you’ve got to go out and do stuff. At least my friends, the people that I know, that’s how they got into it. It’s never too early to try to write a novel.
Sean Plottner: Okay. We usually wrap things up with our big-money question. And this time I’m going to ask you if you were given a big boatload of money—let’s say it’s Laurene Powell Jobs. Let’s say, perhaps, she just feels guilty over the fact that her husband and his inventions helped in the demise of the magazine industry. You’ve got an unlimited amount of money. You are the editor. It’s got to be a print magazine. (It can be other things too.) You’re not worried about making money or distribution. What would you do?
Terry McDonell: I think I’m the kind of editor who doesn’t want to do something that doesn’t have a business plan that makes sense. I want what I make to be valued by the people I make it for. So that influences everything that I think about.
And I have one, actually. It’s called Passing Lane. And it’s about “move fast, catch up, learn things, speed up.” That focuses on all of the things that I’m interested in—which is maybe close to what you’re interested in, if it’s journalism, and literature, and design, and whatever. So you get stuff from all over the web—the best of the web—plus, sort of focused on these interests that I have, maybe some other people have, too.
And then I’d do a big-ass quarterly or a big-ass yearly—some big, thumping thing that pulls all that together somehow, that resonates with the old values of graphic design, and big pictures, and ironic headlines.
I have a complicated history with Steve, by the way.
Sean Plottner: Yeah! Let’s go there.
Terry McDonell: You want that story?
Sean Plottner: Of course we do!
Terry McDonell: Well, I knew him from way back. Right when he was launching the first Mac. We had dinner with a journalist from The Washington Post named Tom Zito at the time. And this is in the time when [Jobs] was doing, “it’s like a bicycle for your mind”—he had all this wonderful language. And he’s so charming and so smart. He’s great.
And over the years, I wrote a Miami Vice script on one of those early Macs, and Steve paid attention when I put him on the cover of Newsweek, and we once did a swimsuit shoot and all the model was wearing was an iPod.
But then I did that demo for the Sports Illustrated iPad [app]. So Steve comes to Time Inc. to show us the iPad for the first time. He’s making the rounds—The New York Times, everybody. And at that meeting, in one of the big boardrooms, is the editor of Time, and Fortune, and People, and EW—we’re all there.
And he comes in and he’s got these iPads and he passes them around. And the first thing that Ann Moore, who’s running the company then, does is she goes and she hits it and she happens to hit my voice saying, “Hi, I’m Terry McDonell, and here’s your new issue.” And Andy Serwer said, “So Steve, what do you think of that?”
He said, “I think that’s really stupid.”
And I didn’t say anything. And he looked over and he recognized that we knew each other, and he said, “You make that?”
I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “Huh. That’s too bad.”
And the meeting went on. And then the meeting is over and we’re all going away, and I walked by and I said, “It’s really a great thing that you’ve built.”
And he says, “No hard feelings. I was just negotiating.”
For more information on McDonell, visit his website. We highly recommend grabbing both of his recent books, Irma: The Education of a Mother’s Son and The Accidental Life: An Editor’s Notes on Writing and Writers, available everywhere.
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An Englishman in New York
A conversation with designer Robert Priest (8x8, Esquire [twice!], GQ, House & Garden, more).
A conversation with designer Robert Priest (8x8, Esquire [twice!], GQ, House & Garden, more).
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If you can count yourself among the lucky ones who’ve met Robert Priest in person, any chance you remember what you were wearing?
Well, fear not: He does. According to his business partner, the designer Grace Lee, Priest possesses a near-photographic memory of how people present themselves. And those first impressions last a lifetime.
To hear him talk, though, it’s not at all about being judgy. Priest is just naturally consumed with all things visual. He has been since childhood. (He gets it from his mother). To him, design is everything.
Priest has dedicated his 50-plus-year career to the relentless pursuit of taste, style, and fashion. And it shows. He has led design teams at all of the big magazines: GQ, House & Garden, InStyle, Newsweek, and Esquire (Twice!)
But there’s another side to Robert Priest. He’s a huge sports fan. And designing magazines is his sport. Indeed, like a head coach, he’s hired to win. And the trophies in this case are readership, advertising, circulation, and buzz—and when that’s all taken care of, the design awards start to pile up—they certainly have for him.
We talked to Priest about his early days in London, when he—and The Beatles and the Rolling Stones—were just getting started, about why soccer is the real football, and the rise and fall of one of the biggest magazine launches in history, Condé Nast Portfolio.
Condé Nast Portfolio was one of the biggest launches in magazine history.
Patrick Mitchell: We’re going to start at the beginning, Robert. If you could just tell us a little bit about growing up in the UK in Middlesex. What was it like there, growing up in the fifties and sixties?
Robert Priest: Well, yes. Yes, west London. I was quite near Heathrow. It was a very quiet, sleepy town to be quite frank. My father worked for the public sector of the British government in the Ministry of Defense, and he came from a working class family in Shepherd’s Bush in London. And he was in World War II in Italy and Libya.
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ENGLAND (1968-1977)
Spectator Publications (1968–69)
Wine and Food (1969–1970)
BOAC Welcome Aboard (1970–71)
Flair (1972)
Robert Priest Design (1972–75)
British Clinical Journal (1973–4)
Radio Times Specials / BBC (1975)
Radio Times / BBC (1975–77)
D&AD Annual (1977)—
CANADA (1977-1979)Weekend Magazine (1977-79)
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USA (1979– )Esquire, v1 (1979–1983)
American Illustration Annual (1982)
Newsweek (1983–85)
Us Magazine (1985–88)
GQ (1988–1995)
House & Garden (1995–97)
Esquire, v2 (1997–99)
Report on Business / Globe & Mail (1999)
Priest Media Inc. (1999–2006)
In Style Specials (1999–2002)
Avon Dreams (2003)
Liz Claiborne Life (2003)
Gala Magazine (2003)
Bloomberg Personal Finance / Redesign (2003)
O at Home (2004–05)
Hollywood Life / Redesign (2004)
More (2004–05)
SPD Annual 39 (2004)
SPD Annual 40 (2005)
Sky Magazine / Delta Airlines (2005–06)
Condé Nast Portfolio (2005)
Priest + Grace LLC (2009–Present)O, The Oprah Magazine / 10TH Anniversary Special (2010)
O, The Oprah Magazine (2010–13)
Weight Watchers Magazine / Redesign (2011)
Forbes Life / Redesign (2012)
Media Jet (2012)
Web MD / Redesign (2012)
New York Observer /Redesign (2012)
Bloomberg Markets / Redesign (2013)
Howler (2012–2013)
Eight by Eight (2013–Present)
Trending New York (2014)
Newsweek, v2 (2014–17)
Opera News / Redesign (2015)
AARP Bulletin / Redesign (2016)
New Beauty / Redesign (2016–18)
Skin Cancer Foundation Journal (2017-Present)
NYCFC for the City (2018)
Smithsonian / Redesign (2018-2020)
Dubin Breast Center, Mount Sinai / Book (2018)
Elle Decor / Redesign (2018)
Air and Space Magazine, Smithsonian (2019)
Forbes / Redesign (2019)
Forbes (2019-present)
Relentless, Mount Sinai / Book (2021)
NYCFC Commemorative Book (2022)
Pride of a Nation, USWNT / Book (2022)
Apple News Euros (2020–21)
Oprah Daily / Website (2022)
Apple News World Cup (2022)
Apple News Wome’s World Cup (2023)
According to my sister, who’s 10 years older than me, he had a pretty bad time. It was just a rough experience leaving a three-year-old behind. And I think that really affected the rest of his life. Mother was the artistic one. She was essentially a homemaker. She made things. Clothes, mostly. Literally all my clothes except for my grammar school uniform.
That lasted until I discovered Carnaby Street. It was a street off Regent Street in Central London that kind of celebrated the new kinds of clothes that the sixties were about to explode. So, then I went rogue on my mom and just went for that kind of clothing. I was about to go to art school at that point and it was really great for me.
Patrick Mitchell: You were making a statement.
Robert Priest: Yeah, I was making a statement.
Debra Bishop: Was there a eureka moment where you were like, “Oh, I have a special talent”? Or was that something that evolved?
Robert Priest: I felt two things. I felt that I was a leader, even though I was shy. And I felt that I had taste. My mother had taste and I felt that I had taste. And I have been looking for good taste all my life. Good taste in almost everything, but mostly the way people look. I’m absolutely fascinated by people’s faces.
I should have been a portrait painter in the 13th century because I just love faces. And the human figure, actually. So that clothes idea was more “decorating” that human figure. And in those days that’s exactly what it was.
And then I went to grammar school and I was a pretty decent student, but I did suffer from a little bit of anxiety, sometimes doing less well than I expected to. But I was extremely lucky to have a charismatic art teacher called Elvert Thomas. And he left the school a year before me and moved to a purely art school called Twickenham College of Art.
And he asked me to follow him. I’d done some paintings and drawings that he was impressed by. And he thought I had promise as an artist, or a commercial artist as they were known then. But I was staggered at the quality of painting and drawing at the school and quickly decided to study design.
And there was a television graphics designer and illustrator called Bernard Blatch, who joined the school and kind of revolutionized the design department while I was there. He had ideas sort of on the level of someone like Christoph Neiman now. Not quite as genial as Christoph is, but still really good.
And as a result of that, I’ve sort of always gravitated toward idea-based illustration rather than decoration. And there was a sort of exceptional student there called Colin Fulcher who went on to become Barney Bubbles. Do you know about Barney Bubbles?
He was an amazing designer in the sixties and created this underground newspaper called Oz, which was sort of a psychedelic-looking, really interestingly printed—and you’d never seen anything like that before. And it was very influential. It sort of changed everybody’s point of view about print, quite honestly.
And Barney also went on to design Elvis Costello’s albums: My Aim is True and This Year’s Model and Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp. Do you remember that with the pointed shoes on? That one was actually shot in my house by Brian Griffin. I’d moved to Toronto sometime later, but he’d rented my house and shot the album cover there.
Patrick Mitchell: Going back to childhood, what was the first magazine that you actually remember—where it actually got you thinking about what a magazine was and if it interested you at all?
Robert Priest: Well, as a young child I used to be influenced by football magazines. And that was a bit of the influence that made me start Eight by Eight. But after that I would say the great Esquire period. I mean, I wasn’t a real kid, I was a teen. But those George Lois covers were working in England as much as they worked here—and so staggeringly different from everything else you saw. I don’t think the inside was designed that well, as a piece of design. Some of the art was good. But yeah, that was a massive influence on me.
Patrick Mitchell: I mean, God, you were essentially in the room where it happened. You were a contemporary of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and everything that was going on in London in the sixties.
Robert Priest: I was.
Patrick Mitchell: How did that affect your life?
Robert Priest: Well, there was a certain part of my life—Twickenham was very near Richmond. And in 1963 I used to go to see the Rolling Stones—before they’d made a record.
Every week on Sunday night, from June to September of that year. So 20 or 30 times. They hadn’t written any songs yet. They were just playing Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters music. And you’re standing right next to them because the stage is about a foot high and there’s 300 people in a very low-ceilinged room.
I was a Stones person and not a Beatles person. Although I love The Beatles. The Stones just had this … energy.
Patrick Mitchell: You’re either one or the other.
Robert Priest: You are, really. Yeah.
Debra Bishop: You’ve always been an immaculate dresser, Robert and obviously interested in style. So did you look like the Rolling Stones? I would love to see a picture.
Robert Priest: I did. I do. I did.
Patrick Mitchell: How much velvet did you wear?
Robert Priest: No! What it was—everybody, literally everybody, wore a gray sweater (Mick Jagger, too), a pink gingham shirt and pinstripe flared pants. And those shoes that the Beatles used to wear from Anello & Davide, with kind of a high heel on them. Yeah, I was exactly that person, embarrassingly enough.
Debra Bishop: And did you have a Beatle cut for your hair?
Robert Priest: No. My mom made me a Beatles jacket once. Those ones that button up to the top. But my hair never did that. It all sort of went—it’s gone now—but it all used to swing to one side. It didn’t look like Paul McCartney at all. Very disappointing.
Debra Bishop: But that’s always good when it has a little movement.
Patrick Mitchell: But, Carnaby Street, is that what established your fascination with fashion and style?
Robert Priest: Yes, very much so. And there was the King’s Road in Chelsea that started a number of shops selling things—handmade or just very different from anything anybody was wearing. I had friends, Pat Booth (a model) and James Wedge (a photographer and fashion designer), who were a couple, and he did some work for me. But we became very good friends. They actually made the frock that Mick Jagger wore at the Hyde Park concert a couple of days after Brian Jones died. He was singing in this white, three-quarter-length frock with some pants underneath it. And it was a very memorable concert because it was, I think, the first time they had their new guitarist (Mick Jones), et cetera. Swinging away from print here, Patrick!
Patrick Mitchell: Well, it’s all fashion, right?
Robert Priest: Yeah, it is.
Patrick Mitchell: I had a nice chat with your partner, Grace Lee, who you’ve been working with several years, and she let me in on this uncanny skill you have. She says, “Robert can remember, literally, what everybody was wearing every time he ever met them.”
Robert Priest: That’s not quite true, but I do have a sort of photographic memory for people’s clothing, yeah. She told me that she said that and I was trying to remember what you wore when you visited my studio, but had forgotten.
Debra Bishop: I don’t want to remember what I was wearing the first time. I think I’d just had a baby.
Patrick Mitchell: Unfortunately now, for everyone who’s listening who’s met you, they’re going, “Oh my God! What was I wearing that day?”
“I flew over and saw all those gold skyscrapers in Toronto and I was sold.”
Debra Bishop: In 1977, you jumped to Canada—across the pond. Why did you decide to leave London? And how did you end up working at Weekend Magazine in Toronto?
Robert Priest: Well I was working at Radio Times, the BBC magazine, and David Driver—this was actually, the first time I was ever a number two—but I wanted to work with David because he was a genius. And I was working at Radio Times and he was offered the job of Weekend Magazine in Toronto and he went over to interview with John Macfarlane, the editor.
And he gave every indication that he wanted to take the job, but when he came back, I think he changed his mind. For what reason I never understood. And somebody who was passing through Canada who knew us both recommended me to John Macfarlane. And so he came over to London to interview me at the Park Lane. And we got on famously.
He remains a good friend and one of the best editors, and smartest people, I’ve ever met. So after that I flew over and saw all those gold skyscrapers in Toronto and I was sold. He even paid for me to go to New York to sort of check it out for potential contributors.
Patrick Mitchell: Was that the first time you left the country?
Robert Priest: Not the country, but certainly the first time I’d come to North America, which just absolutely blew me away. With the glossiness of Toronto—and New York was like Taxi Driver, it was pretty grim.
But Toronto was amazing. We had a huge, 50x20-foot art department for, like, four of us, with a gigantic wall for displaying the layouts and everything. It was just, everything was first class: great views, great people, great editorial thinkers. Gary Ross was John’s number two, and continues to be my good friend and sometimes-editor of Eight by Eight.
I had such a great time there. And I was able to bring Derek Ungless over. He had worked with me at Radio Times, just after I joined, and he went on to be the art director of Vogue, and Details, and Rolling Stone. He had a pretty good career.
I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had maybe five unbelievable number-two designers, the second designers, as it were. But yeah, it was a special time.
We did this cover for Weekend Magazine, the first one I think, and it was Ralph Steadman illustrating a story about seal hunting. And he had done this very terrifying illustration of a woman on ice, in a white fur coat made of seal, covered in blood. And Canadians weren’t exactly ready for that. You probably wouldn’t remember it, but it was in your lifetime, Deb, if you hadn’t left by then.
Debra Bishop: Well, I remember Weekend Magazine. I don’t know if I remember specifically that cover, but I can imagine.
Robert Priest: Well it seemed to upset most of Canada, but, that’s okay.
Debra Bishop: Well I remember Weekend, and I think that the covers and the design really stood out in those days. I don’t think there was anything quite as good in Canadian publishing. The covers were simple and beautiful—and ahead of their time. Was there a brief that you got from the editors at the time or were there influences?
Robert Priest: There were definitely influences. I think John Macfarlane wanted the magazine to be a little bit more conservative than I made it. And that’s one of the reasons I hired Derek, because he’s a kind of a beautiful, a “quieter” designer. But I wanted to push it on.
Roger Black was doing some pretty fantastic stuff at Rolling Stone then, and really displaying type beautifully. And I wanted to—not copy him at all—but just sort of try and do my version of that. Try to make typography front and center as well as the art. So it’s a sort of double-whammy. And assigning unbelievable illustrators from all over the world, which also pissed off the Canadians.
But John Macfarlane’s point was—and he was delighted—that if a young Canadian illustrator is a few pages away from Milton Glaser, or Jim McMullen, or Seymour Chwast, that’s very exciting and inspirational for the young Canadians. And we never worked with Anita [Kunz], although I wish we had. She was a bit young then. But we worked with somebody called Blair Drawson who was amazing, totally fantastic. And, all the contributors were pretty great, I have to say.
Debra Bishop: I remember Blair Dawson. A really amazing artist and hugely influential. In the United States as well. I particularly love that italic logo. I think it still feels quite modern. Did you work on that?
Robert Priest: I did. I didn’t design it. Tom Carnase designed it. He was Herb Lubalin’s number two, basically. They had a company together. And I went to see him when I first came out to New York. And the rough he did with it, in pencil—you could publish it. It was perfect. And we didn’t even change it. We just said, “Yes!” It was so good.
Debra Bishop: I think it’s right back in style. It’s beautiful.
Robert Priest: Yeah.
Patrick Mitchell: From my research [Weekend Magazine] looks like it was a newspaper supplement.
Robert Priest: Yes. A supplement that went to 50 newspapers across Canada. In Toronto it was The Globe & Mail. In Montréal, The Montréal Standard.
Patrick Mitchell: Every week?
Robert Priest: Every week. Yeah. So I did about a hundred of them.
Patrick Mitchell: That’s an accelerated course in magazine design.
Robert Priest: It really was.
Debra Bishop: What was the magazine design community like in Toronto? Were you guys kind of an island there on your own?
Patrick Mitchell: And who were your contemporaries there?
Robert Priest: Well, you probably know Louis Fishauf, who was doing some nice work. He was sort of a competitor. And there were a couple of other supplements that I think were a bit taken aback by what we were doing. So I’m not sure how they felt about it. And we used to win quite a lot of awards at the Art Directors [Club] and National Magazine Awards, so I’m not sure that I was the world’s most popular person there. It did, I think, move things on a little bit. And that’s important.
Patrick Mitchell: Multiple people have told me you’re competitive and I can see it’s coming out right now.
Robert Priest: Yeah. I’m, yeah. I’m especially competitive at sports, I have to say. But you know, you want to win. And if you don’t, I’m not sure that you should be doing it.
Patrick Mitchell: I think there are three of us all feeling kind of the same way. You know?
Robert Priest: Yeah. Yeah.
Patrick Mitchell: Peer recognition is a powerful thing.
Robert Priest: It is. Stroking the ego!
Debra Bishop: Was it always in the back of your mind, though, that you might want to go to New York?
Robert Priest: No. But I was like everybody else in my circle, we were fascinated by it. It was Kojak on TV, and it was in all the movies, and it was just magical. Even at its dirtiest and grimiest, when I got there it was magical. Still is.
But you know, I’ve moved to Brooklyn now just because Manhattan is a bit too intense. In a different—much different—way from when I first went there. You know The Odeon restaurant? That had just opened and you would go in and there would be Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, very frequently, just having dinner together. And they were terrifying. Really muscular guys who look like they want to kill you.
Patrick Mitchell: Boy has it changed. It now seems to be a place strictly for millionaires. Or billionaires.
Robert Priest: Oh, most certainly. Yeah. Yeah.
Patrick Mitchell: So moving on to Esquire, v1. This has come up many times, and it’s almost exclusively with men. It seems to me, and it’s true for me too, that every man in this business shares a passion or a desire to work at Esquire. It’s kind of the nirvana of magazines. And it seems like, obviously—you’ve worked there not once, but twice—that’s true for you, too?
Robert Priest: Yeah. Obviously it depends on who’s there editing it. But it was very glamorous. First time around it was different, though, because it had just been bought by those guys from 13-30. I think you had some association with them, didn’t you, Patrick? Phillip Moffitt and Christopher Whittle. And they were my age. So they’d just bought Esquire. And I was, what, 33 or something.
And Walter Bernard sort of orchestrated the move down for me and asked me to come and meet Phillip. And I liked him. He was really honest and straightforward. He could give a shit about the whole history of Esquire. He wanted to do a magazine for the new man that was sort of beginning to emerge, called a “yuppie.” And he did so. And he was working with some of the most amazing editors you could possibly imagine.
Our art department bullpen was right next to the editor’s area, and it was my first job and out there I’m looking at Byron Dobell and Lee Eisenberg! Fucking legends. Lee was mentoring Adam Moss at the time. He was about 10 years old. Byron Dobell was mentoring Dominique Browning, who hasn’t done too badly, either.
And they were assigning Tom Wolfe, and Gay Talese, and Gore Vidal. And Philip didn’t mind that at all. As long as he could understand it fitting into his vision. And I’ve noticed that the best editors—I’m not saying he was really the best editor, but he was very focused on what he wanted the magazine to be. And it became that.
Patrick Mitchell: You’re talking about Lee Eisenberg?
Robert Priest: Lee Eisenberg, yeah. Absolutely. Genius guy.
Patrick Mitchell: David Granger told us that he felt like Esquire under Phillip Moffitt, which was also when you were there, was maybe the best era of Esquire ever.
Robert Priest: Wow. That’s bizarre. I mean, I would say Harold Hayes or Arnold Gingrich, but okay.
“Those George Lois covers were working in England as much as they worked here—and so staggeringly different from everything else you saw.”
Patrick Mitchell: His own as well. But, in the same way that you credit George Lois at Esquire for getting you into this, you did the same for me. I first learned of Esquire and you when I started buying it when I was in college. I think you were there [at the time]. And I would say you were the reason I pursued my career in magazine design. But the ones I remember—and tell me if this was you or I know your number two, April Silver, ended up taking over at some point—but the things I remember most were the series of 50th anniversary issues that you guys did. Was that while you were there?
Robert Priest: Yeah, the first one was my last issue.
Patrick Mitchell: The big gold one?
Robert Priest: And the gold one was the one April did. April was just—again, I was talking about number twos—she was fantastic and I inherited her. I didn’t hire her. And she was just a brilliant designer, but also designed herself. She would just wear the most beautiful clothes every day. I also had Steven Doyle working for me. I inherited him too. And he is a really funny guy. Kind of insubordinate in a good way, if that’s possible. He had great ideas, shared my enthusiasm for David Byrne and Talking Heads.
So we partied a lot in each other’s apartments. But it was a very nice mood there. It just couldn’t be better to have that as my first job in New York because I was a bit isolated. I didn’t really know what to do. So the work really consumed me.
Patrick Mitchell: Well, it was also at a time—I’ve been doing a lot of research of sixties and seventies magazines—and these magazines that we remember from that era so fondly and lovingly, as you were saying earlier, the covers were one thing, but the insides were not super thought out. I’m sure for a million reasons, and limitations, and realities, but your Esquire back in the eighties really seemed, cover to cover, to be so carefully designed and thought out. And it appeared to me that April just continued the work you had been doing. So it lasted a long time. It was just really something.
Robert Priest: It did. As I said, April was really a very special person. And we had a look. And we also had a certain kind of illustration we assigned and a certain kind of photography we assigned. With the photography it was more like trying to do an album cover. Making it a bit more mysterious, less straightforward. And the illustrations were just a little, not exactly darker, but just really thoughtful. And people were illustrating fiction, which is always fun. But there were several other things.
I was also influenced by Jean-Paul Goude’s Esquire, actually. The guy who did all those Grace Jones photographs. He worked with us actually, and he made a difference. His work was just very spectacular and I think probably continues to be over in Paris. But yeah, it was a great time.
And I was so disappointed when April left the business. She was in the running for New York Woman with Betsy Carter, who was a very good friend of hers. But for some reason they took Fabien Baron, which I mean, you can understand, but it was kind of odd. I thought she was going to just walk into that and make that magazine her own and then she would have her own reputation, as it were.
Debra Bishop: It’s not often that a designer from Canada gets a huge opportunity to move to New York. Someone must have really seen the great job that you were working on at Weekend. Do you remember getting that call? What was that like?
Robert Priest: I remember talking to Walter Bernard about it and then to Phillip Moffitt about it. I had no phone call other than Walter’s, and he just said, “come down.” And what am I going to do? That was obviously, amazingly exciting and I think disappointing to have to leave such good friends. But if you’re offered at Esquire, what can you do?
Debra Bishop: What did art directors get paid in those days?
Robert Priest: Oh, that’s a really good question. I think I got $30,000 when I went to Canada, and I think when I came down it moved to about $50,000, which was pretty good then.
Debra Bishop: Interesting. So, we pretty much know what the brief was at Esquire.
Patrick Mitchell: What was the brief?
Robert Priest: They wouldn’t have hired me if they weren’t expecting some different kinds of typography. So, something unusual, something with its own identity that’s really strong but can relate to these 30-something yuppies that were emerging.
And part of it was to do with New York getting cleaned up a little bit. And I think there was sort of more ambition. We did a piece on Joe Biden actually, when I was there.
Patrick Mitchell: Well, we’re talking about the Reagan years, so that all makes sense.
Robert Priest: Yeah, that was interesting. But no, it was a very straightforward brief, actually, and we bent it as much as we could. And we were allowed to do that.
Patrick Mitchell: Were you explicitly asked to do a redesign?
Robert Priest: Oh yeah. Because it had been Clay Felker’s magazine and it was a biweekly at that point. So we took it back to being a monthly and you kind of had to do a different look because it was a more permanent, not exactly a coffee table magazine, but it was just a more permanent feel to it. Rather than the sort of, and this is not an insult, but the sort of more dispensable two-week cadence.
Patrick Mitchell: I had a nice conversation with Bob Newman the other day and he took me back to those days. And we both agreed that you were hugely influential to both of us, and I’m sure a bunch of others. But he pointed out something that seems insignificant now, but knowing how editors and designers related back then—it was very contentious, pretty much universally. He wanted to give you credit for inventing the opening spread that did not have text on it.
Well, in two ways. One, that the story began on the following spread, but also that, and other people have said this too, that prior to when you came along, people were much less respectful of illustration and photography and would slap type all over them. But you kind of created that balance of letting the art do its thing and doing something typographically on the opposite spread, which again, seems so common now, but was just kind of revolutionary at the time.
Robert Priest: I didn’t realize that that was me. But, yeah, it was something that I still have battles about. I’ve managed to persuade a lot of editors over the years that it's a good way of creating a real look rather than having to start a story on the opening spread.
I mean, I think Fred and you, Deb, did amazing work with that as a sort of model. So yeah, it’s absolutely what I wanted to do and wherever I go or whatever magazine I design I’m always encouraging that. Doesn’t always work, but I would say I’ve got an 80% record on that one.
Patrick Mitchell: Made it much easier for the rest of us.
Robert Priest: Well, good of you to say.
Debra Bishop: As I recall, you have a great skill for recognizing talent, in designers obviously, but also in illustrators and photographers. Do you have a formula for making good commissions? How do you get inspired?
Robert Priest: That’s a really good question, Deb. Mostly I like to give as much freedom as I can. There’s been a movement over the last 15 years of basically illustrators being told via the editor, but not by the editor that, “this is what we want the illustration to look like.” And that’s really disappointing for me.
I think the art directors have to sort of stick up for themselves and say, “Well, no, we can come up with a better idea than that.” Or, “This illustrator can come up with a better idea than that.” And, the compromise, early compromise was, “Okay. Let’s do the editor’s idea, and then let’s do another sketch that is our idea.” And inevitably we were able to persuade the editors to go with our idea once they saw it.
So yeah, I mean, that’s not across the board. But there’s a lot of illustration that is dire because of that sort of dictatorship that can be prevalent in American magazines sometimes.
Debra Bishop: I agree.
Patrick Mitchell: You designed Esquire under three different logos. I was looking at the Esquire cover archive. The one you inherited in 1979 was a real dog.
Robert Priest: It was.
Patrick Mitchell: Who do we have to blame for that?
Robert Priest: I’m not even sure I know. And I wouldn’t tell you if I did. But it was awful.
Patrick Mitchell: Well, that was Clay Felker’s Esquire. But the new/retro logo, which appeared in 1993 was kind of groundbreaking in that not a lot of magazines were looking back, as Esquire did. But I will say the logo that you created, that first sort of script logo after the Felker—boy do I like that. I really want it to come back. Can you talk about how that was created and who you worked with?
Robert Priest: Well, we worked with Tom Carnase again because, as Deb said, the Weekend Magazine logo was so beautiful. And so he did it. And it was just a little twist on the classic, but enough of a twist to have its own personality.
And again, drawn in pencil. You just couldn't believe that’s possible with Tom Carnase’s work. And it was such an honor to work with him—one of the great typographers along with Herb Lubalin, his partner. Who gets to do that?!
Patrick Mitchell: And what was the response when it appeared?
Robert Priest: Everybody loved it because, although it was memorable from previous times, it was new. It’s still fairly fresh. And everybody’s tweaked it a little bit, during the last 30 years, or whatever it is. And that’s how it is. Everybody wants to have their own tweak. Fair enough. But I do like that one too.
Patrick Mitchell: What was Esky’s status in your first period of Esquire?
Robert Priest: He was banned, essentially. He was too old school for our yuppies.
Patrick Mitchell: Well, a byproduct of your arrival in New York was the creation—along with Edward Booth-Clibborn, and Julian Allen, and Marshall Arisman, and Steve Heller—of American Illustration. Can you tell us how that came to be and how it became the steamroller that it ended up being?
Robert Priest: Well, I was very good friends with Julian Allen. He had been brought over by Milton Glaser to do those illustrations for New York magazine—of situations, often on Watergate, where [things were happening] behind closed doors and never photographed. And he recreated those moments very effectively for Milton and New York magazine.
And we just became good friends. We used to go see The Clash all the time, at CBGB and the Mudd Club and things like that. And my friendship with Julian led to us talking to Edward Booth-Clibborn, who we knew from London, who ran D&AD, the Designers and Art Directors Association and European illustration from London, and asked him to come over.
And we suggested, “Let’s do an American illustration version of that European illustration.” And we got together with Marshall, and Steve Heller, and Sue Coe, actually. And we put it together. And the really sad thing is that I’ve been to nearly every party that they’ve thrown since 1982.
There’s a passionate leader, Mark Heflin, [who] I think we all know. And he’s a wonderful guy. Has kept it going and developed it. And, I just really think he’s moved it on beautifully. It’s such a joy when I look at illustrator’s sites and see them highlighting their work that got into American illustration. It was just, it just feels really good.
Debra Bishop: Your work at Esquire led to several other high profile positions at Newsweek, US Magazine, GQ, House & Garden, and even a second tour at Esquire. We worked together on the relaunch of House & Garden. Can you talk about that? It was kind of a big deal at the time. House & Garden was coming back from the dead.
Robert Priest: It was. And I think it was a time that James Truman had taken over from Alexander Liberman. The best thing about it for me, apart from just having the pleasure of working with you every day, was the incubation period at the beginning where we just talked about it—we did this at Portfolio, too later—but the idea of having a year to just think about what a magazine should be.
And there was an all star cast. Dominique Browning was the editor, who I’d worked with at Esquire. Suzy Slesin was the number two, from The New York Times, and Lora Zarubin was the food editor, who was brilliant. David Carey was the publisher. It was a pretty talented bunch.
And, as I said, the idea of having that amount of time to think it through and think out how the photography should look and how the magazine should look—I’m not sure whether you were part of that, Deb, that incubation period. I had trouble getting you away from Fred.
Debra Bishop: Yeah. I remember it being a very long time, but I probably wasn’t part of the very early part. I remember going to Dominique Browning’s place in Rhode Island.
Robert Priest: Oh yeah, that was part of it.
Debra Bishop: That was it? That was the incubation? Oh, okay.
Robert Priest: Yeah, that was part of it. And I slept in a hotel or a house with a ghost in it. I’ve never seen a ghost before. So that was, that’s something from the past. I’ve forgotten about that.
But Dominique, she just had great, wonderful taste. And that’s what drew me toward her. Even though, at the end of the day, she did let me go. And I was stunned because I really thought Dominique liked working with me, as I did with her. And that hurt a lot.
And it was either Si [Newhouse] or James Truman who might’ve suggested it. I’ve never been able to believe that she did that, because we got on so well. But I’ll never know. And I think, as you said, Deb, on one of the podcasts that you guys have done, a lot of us get fired. And I was fired twice. “Invited to leave” is even better.
Debra Bishop: Very common in magazine publishing.
Robert Priest: It is. If you play the game at that level, at a major magazine, and you’re the art director, it’s like being a manager of a sports team. You’re not going to last. You’re going to be fired. So you have to enjoy every moment knowing that could, or would, happen. And I’ve tried to do that. But it’s always very damaging when it actually does happen.
Debra Bishop: I’m pretty shocked and amazed at how much time they actually gave us to redesign House & Garden. I’m not actually sure it was a great thing. How do you feel about that?
Robert Priest: Well, it was a great thing for me because I was able to work under no pressure with people who are extremely talented. So what’s the downside? They’re paying you the same amount and you’re expected to come up with something special. And in a way we did. Certainly that first cover, that gold first cover that Ilan Rubin shot, with Jeffrey Miller styling. It was really wonderful.
And it’s all sales with Condé Nast, of course. So they started off with a bang and if there’s any drop at all everything starts getting questioned. It’s hard to continue at that level, for sure. And you’re doing interiors. And if you don’t get that right, it’s tricky. But I felt like the sales dominated everything, obviously.
Patrick Mitchell: The amount of time you’re saying you had to create this really showed in the work. For years I carried your issues of House & Garden with me, in the slew of magazines that followed me from place to place. And at some point I decided, “I just can’t do this anymore.” So I started scanning some things. But even that was difficult because your design was so detailed that you even designed the gutters.
Robert Priest: We did design the gutter.
Debra Bishop: Yeah. I remember that.
Patrick Mitchell: It’s not easy to tear those pages out and preserve the gutters.
Debra Bishop: We realized that designing the gutters was a bad idea. Remember that Robert?
Robert Priest: Yeah, we did.
Patrick Mitchell: That’s probably what got you fired.
Robert Priest: Maybe actually. Well, one last thing on that. Check out Deb’s layout of a house in California that Dewey Nicks shot. It was the best layout that was ever done in House & Garden. It’s spectacular.
Patrick Mitchell: Speaking of bad endings, in our Episode 24, Steve Heller and Bob Ciano were joking about the way art directors and editors got fired. They said it was a “sport” back in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. Bob told a story of getting fired, a new editor getting hired, him getting rehired, and then him getting fired, and then the new editor getting fired. It was a whole sequence of things, but what was your worst—we’ve all been fired—what was your worst getting fired experience?
Robert Priest: I would say not Dominique and just because, I don’t know, I just couldn’t—I’ve never been able to accept it. But the only other time I was fired was when, at the end of Esquire, v2, as it were, Granger basically wanted a magazine that had never been seen before. And this happened in about June and we’d just won five gold awards at SPD and it was me and Rockwell Harwood and some other good designers.
But it was pretty unusual looking. And he wanted to take it in a different direction—which everybody says—but I think he wanted a magazine that’s never been seen before. And as far as I’m concerned it wasn’t so much different when John Korpics was doing it and when David Curcurito was doing it.
They did instigate that type-heavy, hand-drawn, tons-of-type on the cover that probably hasn’t been seen before. So if that’s what he meant, fine. But I was thinking it would be more to do with the whole thing, the holistic, Esquire rather than just the covers.
Patrick Mitchell: Everyone knows about the excesses at Condé Nast. I was talking to Karen Frank, and she talked about working at Condé, both before and after the crash, and I think you’ve done that too, and she was just so shocked that very little seemed to have changed since the crash. She said there was still a crush of town cars lined up at the entrance.
Robert Priest: Oh, really? Wow.
Patrick Mitchell: You’ve worked at all the big publishers. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like for you—the differences between Time, Hearst, Meredith, and Condé? And how that affected the way you worked at each place?
Robert Priest: Well, it was the most fun at Condé, I have to tell you. Because they spent the most money on the most ridiculous things. Like the fashion assistants taking limos—there was a car company that everybody used at all magazines, and they had the excuse of returning clothes, so that’s fine. But, yeah, money was just flowing when I first got there in 1988.
For a couple of years there were some big goings on. Everybody was spending a ton of money on expenses and all of that stuff. There was one art director, who I will not name, who had dinner at The Odeon every night—and claimed it. Which is pretty good.
To me it was never the same at Hearst. It wasn’t that they didn’t throw money around, but it just was that it could never be that time again. It was really a moment.
Steve Florio, the publisher, was there. Mad Dog, another publisher, I’m forgetting his name [Ed: Richard Beckman]. The publishers were almost as big of stars as the editor. And they were flashy. And they were good, actually. And the magazines were thick there.
And then the crash happened. It happened when I was at Portfolio and, ridiculously, we didn’t really predict it. It just happened while we were doing an issue.
Patrick Mitchell: While you were out to dinner.
Robert Priest: Yeah. While I was out to dinner. But that was shocking. It was shocking because it really signaled the end of magazines. Or the beginning of the end of very highly-paid photographers getting $10,000 for a cover. Gone. One day you’re earning $10,000, next day you’re earning nothing.
Patrick Mitchell: You were at GQ when we launched Fast Company—I was talking to Karen about this—and I remember we were trying to figure out, “What do you spend on a monthly newsstand magazine?” And I did some research on what GQ was paying, and I asked Karen, “Is this true that what I believe we found out was that the monthly art budget for GQ was somewhere between $300k and unlimited?”
And she said, “Yeah. That sounds about right.”
Robert Priest: Well, yeah. I mean, it could be right. I didn’t know that.
Patrick Mitchell: She said, “We literally assigned every piece of art from cover to cover.”
Robert Priest: Yeah. There wasn’t really a budget. And what a privilege to be in that position. It was fabulous.
Debra Bishop: Speaking of extravagance, what was the best perk that you ever got, Robert?
Robert Priest: The most dramatic perk—that actually I came to think was embarrassing—was to have a driver pick you up in the morning and take you home. I think that was at GQ. And whilst it was just wonderful on one hand, I sort of lost touch. I was never on the subway. I lost touch with humanity. And it just ended up being embarrassing coming out, and you’re getting into a car and your pals are going down the subway. It was just ridiculous. So I think that was both the best and the worst.
Debra Bishop: Patrick asked me what my perk was and I said the same thing. I didn’t say that I lost touch with humanity. If I lost touch with humanity, it was because I was getting car service home at like midnight, between midnight and three o’clock in the morning because I was working.
Robert Priest: Where were you living then?
Debra Bishop: I lived in Hoboken, so I was just across the river. But I was working at Rolling Stone. We used to have very late hours there.
Robert Priest: Yeah, it showed. Really nice work.
Debra Bishop: Of all the magazines, other than Eight by Eight, which was most fun to work on?
Robert Priest: Well, Weekend Magazine in Toronto, actually. The staff was incredibly supportive of what Derek and I were doing. The conditions were fabulous. They did give me a perk: They leased me a TransAm—a white TransAm, without the eagle on the front—because I didn’t want to be flashy. But I did want to go really fast. And that was most spectacular.
Debra Bishop: And where did you drive it?
Robert Priest: Well, I was caught speeding in the airport. I mean, you just had to touch the pedal and you’re going 60, 70, 80 miles an hour. So, I was a bit careful. Not always that careful, but I’d learned a big lesson about cars at that point.
Patrick Mitchell: Everybody has their Art Cooper stories. We’ve gotten them in previous episodes, and I heard that was a difficult relationship for you. Do you have an Art Cooper story?
Robert Priest: I have an Art Cooper memory of the three-martini-and-a-bottle-of-wine lunches at the Four Seasons. When I say frequently, I mean very frequently. And it really upset the afternoon work because, he, and if there were any GQ companions with him, are kind of different people.
Patrick Mitchell: And you had to partake?
Robert Priest: Yeah. Yeah. I went with him to the Four Seasons a couple of times, but it was nothing like a regular gig for him. I didn’t want to drink at lunchtime. And he did. I mean, he did have his assistant bring him a tumbler of vodka at five o’clock every night, and he was pretty happy at the time and he was much easier to deal with. But we all thought it was just a bit too much.
Patrick Mitchell: And it didn’t feel like a partnership to you?
Robert Priest: No. He wanted GQ to look like Vanity Fair. Like Graydon’s Vanity Fair. And they already did that. David Harris did it beautifully. I don’t know that Art was jealous of Graydon, but he certainly was influenced by Graydon’s life and his charisma. And it was clear that he wanted me to do, kind of, a more reserved look. But honestly, I don’t think I did my greatest work at GQ. It was just too complicated.
“We were always under fire from media critics. Gawker used to really trash us, almost on a daily basis. And Keith Kelly too. It was battering.”
Patrick Mitchell: We can’t finish this section without talking about Portfolio, but sort of as a precursor to that, John Korpics was telling me about the Fortune “bakeoff” that you both participated in.
Robert Priest: Oh, jesus. Yeah.
Patrick Mitchell: And he ended up getting the job, but he told me that he saw your presentation and his reaction was, “I’m toast.” Because it was so good, obviously. And I wonder, was your Fortune—I never saw it—but was your Fortune pitch sort of a preview of the Portfolio design?
Robert Priest: No, I don’t think so. If you’re talking about the Fortune pitch I did, we sort of had a dance. We thought we did a nice job on that. I’m kind of pissed off that John got it, but he’s a really good designer, so why not?
Patrick Mitchell: He also told me, and he’s told me this before, that he thinks Portfolio was one of the most perfect magazines ever.
Robert Priest: Wow. That’s really good to hear because I never—it’s very hard to know if John likes you or your work. And that’s because I basically only ran into him at SPD [events]. And SPD award shows are sort of so tinged with tension. The desire to get up there on the stage or at least pick up a medal. And I think emotions can take over, as they did with me just as much as anybody else.
Patrick Mitchell: So, as you were saying at House & Garden, Portfolio was kind of an all-star team. It seemed to be the launch that had everything behind it.
Robert Priest: It had a lot of money behind it. Yeah. We did an incubation period there, and there were just maybe six of us. It was Joanne Lipman, the editor, and Jim Impoco, who was the assigning editor. Blaise Zerega was the managing editor. And then a photo department of Lisa Berman and Sarah Czeladnicki, and Grace and I. So that was about eight people.
Patrick Mitchell: And it was the biggest launch, at that point, that we’d seen in quite a while—and maybe have seen since.
Robert Priest: Probably ever.
Patrick Mitchell: Can you talk a little bit about the lifetime of Portfolio?
Robert Priest: Well, the first part of it, the incubation period, was where this small group that I mentioned had been hired to talk about what it should be, and what it should stand for, and what it should look like, and what it should be called. We actually designed 300 logos for different names that people had suggested. That’s a lot.
And then once we decided on Portfolio, we designed a number of other typographic interpretations of the logo. So, apart from designing sections for the front and some features and everything, that was the sort of first era within. And then there was the era of dealing with Si and Tom Wallace.
So it was me, Joanne Lipman, and Si, and Tom Wallace in a room, again talking about what it should be. But based on reality. Based on what we’ve been producing. Not only in design, but the words. And I have to say, Si, who can be brutally frank, he really gave Joanne respect and space. But we were always seemingly under fire from media critics. Gawker used to really trash us, almost on a daily basis. And Keith Kelly too. It was battering.
And it was mostly reserved for Joanne, because people had decided Joanne wasn’t quite right for the job. And if she wasn’t, it was just because she was a newspaper person, not a magazine editor. And there’s quite a different skill set required to be a magazine editor from a newspaper editor. And I think that’s what tripped everybody over.
Patrick Mitchell: It lasted what, not quite two years?
Robert Priest: Yeah, about two years. But it was three for me because of the year’s incubation. Which, again, I can’t emphasize enough—if anybody ever gets the chance to do that, do it.
Patrick Mitchell: All right. We’re not going super chronologically here, but I do want to briefly touch on Esquire, v2. So there was a 15 year gap. Fifteen years after leaving Esquire, you go back, which is just incredibly rare. It’s like marrying the same woman twice. What were the circumstances that brought you back?
Robert Priest: Well, I guess the circumstance was that I was fired by Dominique Browning. And the person who took my job, Diana LaGuardia, was the art director of Esquire at the time. So we swapped jobs, which was as simple as that.
And again, this was Ed Kosner, who hired me, who was a long time New York magazine and Newsweek editor. And I got there and basically you could feel it wasn’t right. You could feel that he was going to be let go and then they hired David Granger. And things went pretty well for a while.
I was pretty excited about what we were doing. When I first started, Rockwell—it was incredibly funny—he used to come in every morning and say, “I can’t do this. I’m just not good enough. I’m going to resign, I’m resigning. Goodbye.” And honestly, every day, for the first month I was there, he’d do that. And of course he was brilliant.
And thanks to him we did very well. Really thanks to him because he has such an unusual point of view. And I was never quite comfortable with Granger. Although we worked together at GQ very well. And it’s just one of those things, it just didn’t work out.
But there was no decision made about, “Oh, should I, I or should I not go back.” It was Esquire. And there’s always an opportunity there to do something special. And not everybody makes it special, but it certainly the opportunity is there for the taking.
Debra Bishop: Tell us about starting Priest Media, which you started in 1999, and then again as Priest & Grace 10 years later.
Robert Priest: Well, Priest Media was a reaction to not having a job, and I decided I would start my own business. It was risky, I thought. But we had a very nice—I rented a very nice space in Tribeca and had custom furniture made for it. The whole thing.
And I took Peter Curry from InStyle Specials where I think I was before that. And Peter Curry is a good designer, for sure. And such a supportive man. He’s now the design director of The Hollywood Reporter. And then Chris Martinez, who is a wonderful designer who soon left to go to Barney’s, but he made an incredible difference. He designed my website.
But pretty soon afterwards, 9/11 happened. I was going to work, reached my office at 285 West Broadway, and saw the first plane fly by into the building. I’m not sure that I ever recovered from that.
Interestingly one of our clients—I’m not going to say who, and I’m not going to say who the person was—but he actually asked me to present that afternoon. We’d done a redesign for a magazine and they wanted to see it that afternoon, which just blew my mind. It was a struggle to get work in the beginning for sure, but we certainly tried very hard.
It was really just me finding the work. Or the phone would ring, basically. But we managed to kind of get going a little bit—after a little struggle to begin with—doing sort of more fun magazines. There was a magazine called Hollywood Life that a friend of ours knew the editor of, and we managed to get that looking quite nice and a few other things.
It was just a tricky period, honestly. I mean, I feel like everything at Priest Media revolved around 9/11. But I did a lot of sort of business magazines for smaller companies, which is a way to make money. That still seems to be part of our workload at Priest & Grace.
Priest & Grace was a completely different proposition, because for the first time I had a partner. And I couldn’t believe what a relief that was. So you can share the responsibility. On your own it’s pretty tricky. No matter how well-known you might be, you’ve still got to rely on people wanting you to design. And, mostly, it was designing magazines at that point. So you just had to work the room a little bit.
But with Grace, I hired her as a designer when I was designing O at Home. And that was a Priest Media thing. And the first time I’d ever worked with Oprah. And she came in as the third designer behind Ed Levine, who’s as we know, is great. And Angela Riechers, who is a really good designer, also.
But it was just too much work. So we hired Grace. And I could see from the very beginning that she had incredible talent. And the other thing about her is that she’s so nice to be around. She’s one of those rare people have a smile on her face all the time, and it helps. It’s just, like, you go into the office and you’re feeling good about things.
And actually we’ve got every reason to because we did get, and have got, a lot of work. And so the difference being, on your own versus sharing the responsibility, essentially. And it’s a godsend. And you do it on your own, don’t you, Patrick?
Patrick Mitchell: I do.
Robert Priest: Yeah. So you know what it’s like and you’ve done extremely well under those conditions. And I didn’t feel good about it, honestly.
“If you play the game at that level, at a major magazine, and you’re the art director, it’s like being a manager of a sports team. You’re not going to last. You’re going to be fired.”
Patrick Mitchell: By the time you got to Priest & Grace, do you think you had sort of consciously or subconsciously sworn off being on staff ever again? I mean, a lot comes with that.
Robert Priest: It does. I mean, we did design Oprah’s 10th anniversary issue because I think you were there and didn’t have time to do so.
Patrick Mitchell: I was, uh, unavailable due to being fired.
Robert Priest: Oh, well, I was never sure of those circumstances. But yeah, that was horrible. Well, at the end of that, we redesigned the magazine after the 10th anniversary issue and presented it to Oprah.
It was just a classic moment at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in LA. And going up to the 14th floor, which I’m pretty sure was occupied wholly by Oprah, and a personal assistant took us through about 10 rooms and there was Oprah at the end of it. We had really loved what we’d done, including what we thought was a brilliant new logo, a bejewelled logo.
Patrick Mitchell: And you were working with Susan Casey?
Robert Priest: Yeah. And she was great. The absolute greatest thing about her is that she was previously an art director at Outside and Sports Illustrated for Kids. So she understood how art people should be treated, or could be treated, if you wanted to get the best out of them. And she was a pleasure. She was a delight.
And Oprah just looked like, “this better be good.” Because she doesn’t want to waste a single second of her time. And she loved it. She loved the new logo. And later, Cathie Black, president of Hearst did, and Ellen Levine, and Mike Clinton. But we could never persuade the top hierarchy to change the logo. So I was really disappointed by that.
We did her first iPad app, with all those bells and whistles that used to be on that kind of platform. But it was a pleasure working with Susan, that’s for sure.
Patrick Mitchell: Well of all of the wonderful things to come out of Priest & Grace, which we’ll be happy to show on our website, maybe the coolest thing is when you put on a different hat and launched, created, founded a magazine that you edit, design, and produce all on your own, along with, I’m sure, help. But I wanted to ask you, before we get to Eight by Eight, on your timeline I noticed you had done Howler right before.
Robert Priest: Yeah.
Patrick Mitchell: And so what was your involvement with Howler, another soccer magazine?
Robert Priest: Well, we had started the company and we needed something to occupy us. And also a promotional piece for ourselves. But I really love soccer/football, and Grace and I just got together and decided that we wanted to do it. We went to England and interviewed writers for it and came back just to think it through.
But we found a person who was an intern at Condé Nast Portfolio, actually. And he had a friend and they were thinking of starting a magazine. So we combined forces, with them controlling the edit and us the visual side. And we produced two issues of Howler, which were pretty nice, but we were unhappy with the vision. I just felt I knew a lot more about football than the editors did.
Patrick Mitchell: And so the competitive Robert decided to crush them.
Robert Priest: Yeah. But the whole thing ended pretty badly. But not to be deterred, we founded Eight by Eight. And our vision for that was to create a visual energy like the one you experienced at a Premier League football match, where you have the excitement of supreme skills, the noise of the crowd, the drama, the language of the fans, which is fabulous, and the sheer spectacle of it.
And editorially we wanted to be just a little bit more political. And humorous. And other social commentary about the aspects of the game, the inequities, the corruption, the way the game has developed worldwide. But it was just really, at its core, it was a celebration of the game, the players, coaches, fans, and the history.
So, I feel like we were on the right course. It’s just very hard to do. It took us six weeks to design it, and that’s six weeks out of making profit, really. And we were doing, at most, I think four a year, but mostly three, and sometimes two. It was tricky. Very tricky.
The responsibilities were interesting, in a way, because becoming an editor, I was assigning all the writing but I was also assigning all the illustrations and photography and finding all the pickup. And Grace pretty much designed every page of the magazine. I doubt that I designed more than six features in its whole existence.
And she’s super fast. Wonderful designer, obviously. And she handled the business side. So it was a real sort of equal—still is—an equal footing. And we’re basically equal in the company and I find that’s the only acceptable way of doing it.
Debra Bishop: Eight by Eight is no longer in print. Are you still excited about doing a digital version of it?
Robert Priest: The pandemic basically killed the print version because of the cost of paper, and printing, and distribution was so high. It almost doubled. And the fact that at that point, we weren’t allowed to ship to Canada and Europe just made up our minds for us.
But, in answer to your question, I still want to break that thing that really nobody has broken: making a magazine that—the great thing about opening magazines is those spreads. And you both did those as well as anybody.
Those moments haven’t really happened digitally for me. But I still feel there’s a way of doing it. And one of the things we’ve run into is templating, you know, to do things and get them out quickly everything’s got to be on a template.
But I still think there’s a way of doing it that is yet to crystallize in terms of how to do it, but just something that doesn’t exactly replicate the old magazine style, but has the excitement, the visual excitement. Do you feel that there’s any magazines that are able to do a successful digital version?
Patrick Mitchell: The whole reason I launched this thing, was sort of to commiserate on and answer the question of, as I told Grace, that for all these decades, really the most creative people in the world were in the magazine business.
And the creation of a magazine—the skills that go into it, the types of work that go into it, may never exist again. To this point, online design is not capable of showing that kind of work. Although, shout out to our OG sponsor, ReadyMag, which I have not really played with that much, but I know you guys do.
Robert Priest: Yeah, we use it a lot.
Patrick Mitchell: They’ve made a tool that I think comes the closest to allowing people to create. I think maybe mostly typography is the thing that’s missing online.
Robert Priest: It is.
Patrick Mitchell: But they allow you to do that.
Robert Priest: But also, the format for a phone is vertical, and most people receive their information on a phone. So that’s the tricky part.
Patrick Mitchell: I want to thank you for sharing your career chronology. It was jaw dropping. I actually had to print it out because it was too long to scroll. But just looking at the volume of jobs and clients and different kinds of work, and doing the math in my head, I’m guessing you’re about 106?
Robert Priest: I am. I just turned. I had the birthday on Monday. Hundred and six years old.
Patrick Mitchell: But seriously, what is your plan moving forward? Are you the type that’s going to die while exporting a PDF for a client?
Robert Priest: Sadly I am. And that’s a horrible way of putting it. But yeah, I don’t really want to retire. I still feel quite young, actually.
Debra Bishop: Sorry, Robert, that, that was not my question.
Patrick Mitchell: Well, there’s a genuine thought behind that. And I agree. In this podcast we’ve been talking to people from every generation of magazine design. But I think it’s true for all people in our profession, I’m probably speaking for Deb, too, this work is too much fun to stop. I assume you feel the same way.
Robert Priest: Yeah I do.
Patrick Mitchell: I mean, would you rather be golfing?
Robert Priest: No, absolutely not. I would prefer to be working because that’s going to keep your mind more stimulated. But, you know, Paul McCartney is over 80. So is Mick Jagger. So why would anybody stop working?
Patrick Mitchell: Exactly.
Debra Bishop: Keep going, Robert.
Patrick Mitchell: So, our tradition at the end of our episodes is to ask the Print Is Dead Billion-Dollar Question. And that is that a very rich person, Laurene Powell Jobs, Jeff Bezos, has an offer that you can’t refuse. They want to give you a blank check with one caveat: you have to use it to create and launch a print magazine. What would you do?
Robert Priest: First of all, jokingly, but I would do Eight by Eight, 2.0, properly. But failing that—Jeff is going to like this—I would do a magazine on aerospace. A very visual one all about the science, the equipment, the sort of blind ambition, the greed. But also, beautifully designed in a completely new way. I mean, the equipment and just the look of everything in aerospace is so beautiful.
And I would employ, on contract, Spencer Lowell, Dan Winters, and Benedict Redgrove in London, to do the photography. And it would be like a coffee table book. It would be thick with information about the science and everything.
For more information, visit Robert Priest’s website, or follow him @priestandgrace on Instagram.
More Like This…
Back to the Interviews
A Revolution from Within
A conversation with editor and author Gloria Steinem (Ms., New York, Esquire, Show, more).
A conversation with editor and author Gloria Steinem (Ms., New York, Esquire, Show, more).
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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY COMMERCIAL TYPE.
This episode is about a girl from East Toledo, Ohio.
A girl who taught herself to read by devouring comic books, horse stories, and Louisa May Alcott. A girl who didn’t set foot in a school until she was 14.
A young woman who went to India for two years to avoid getting married—to anyone. A young woman who was described by one Esquire editor as the only writer he knew who could make sex boring.
A woman who has never, ever, worked for a paycheck—who made up and launched her own idea for a column in New York magazine. (It kind of still exists.)
A woman who, while on assignment, was kicked out of the lobby of the Plaza Hotel because “she must have been a hooker.” Because all unescorted women who hung out in hotel lobbies in the 1960s must be sex workers, right?
A woman who describes herself as a “hope-aholic.”
This episode is about Gloria Steinem, the woman who created Ms. magazine—and started a revolution.
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Our editor-at-large George Gendron caught up with Steinem on the occasion of the magazine’s 50th anniversary.
Ms., “The New Magazine for Women,” premiered as bound-in supplement in a 1972 issue of New York magazine
George Gendron: I want to start by asking you, Gloria, before there was Ms. magazine, there was Gloria Steinem, the journalist. And I think lots more people are familiar with the Ms. legacy than they are with your days as a journalist. Could you go back and tell us a little bit about those early days for you as a journalist and what the environment was like, particularly for young women, trying to break into journalism then?
Gloria Steinem: Speaking personally, I think I always wanted to be a journalist—ever since I was a child. Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women and many books for young people, but also a lot of serious, depressed novels was a journalist. And in addition, my mother had been a journalist. She worked for the Toledo Blade and always regretted having given up her way of making a living for reasons of my father’s because he moved us all to southern Michigan where he had a dance hall.
I mean there were familial reasons, but altogether, from my mother to Louisa May Alcott and back, being a journalist seemed the most attractive, magnetic, full of learning, diverse profession, I could imagine. And on top of that I hated talking in public in any way. And I was only kind of forced to do so much later.
But the idea of being a writer and not having to talk was very seductive.
George Gendron: At a certain point, I, too, hated talking in public. And when I took over Boston magazine, I had to start doing it. And I read a survey, a poll, asking Americans what were their most primal fears. And number two was death by drowning. And number one was speaking before a group.
Gloria Steinem: I’m more surprised by the drowning than the speaking before a group.
“Being a journalist seemed the most attractive, magnetic, full of learning, diverse profession I could imagine.”
George Gendron: I am too, but that kind of establishes a certain context for both of our fears of public speaking.
Gloria Steinem: No, I only began to do it after New York magazine had created invitations to do it first in New York and then in other places, and I absolutely couldn’t do it by myself. So I recruited Flo Kennedy. Do you remember Florynce Kennedy? She was fearless. And so, yeah, we traveled together. And then Dorothy Pitman Hughes. And I never really did it by myself.
George Gendron: So what kind of journalism—were you freelancing initially?
Gloria Steinem: Yes. No, I’ve never been on salary. I’ve always been freelance.
George Gendron: I think many people, probably when they think of you as a journalist, think back to that article that you wrote for Show magazine about being a Playboy Bunny, but I’m more interested in your work for New York magazine. Did you actually create the “City Politic” column?
Gloria Steinem: Yes, I did. Yeah. Because we were starting the magazine, all of us together, working out departments and the balance between articles and columns and so on. And in the process I gave myself a column.
George Gendron: You gave yourself a column. Well, that’s one of the virtues of being there at a startup, right?
Gloria Steinem: Right. It was Clay [Felker], and Tom Wolfe, and Jimmy Breslin and all the people.
The premiere issue of Ms. hit newsstands in June 1972.
George Gendron: Yeah, you had all left by the time I got there, but I was still delivering mail to you somehow. So what was the “City Politic” back then? What were you covering?
Gloria Steinem: It was literally events in the city because, I mean, we were the first of the city magazines. But many of the substantive, bigger articles were about issues that stretched beyond New York City. And I loved New York in the way that only somebody from Toledo, Ohio, can love New York.
So, it felt natural to focus on the city. And also I had gone to cover an early women’s liberation meeting and realized that this was a movement that was not getting covered and I could help to cover it.
George Gendron: So, when you get a bunch of journalists together, very often the conversation turns to what I refer to as The Big Break. You’re going along and sometimes you don’t even realize it’s the big break at the time. Looking back, what was your big break as a journalist?
Gloria Steinem: I suppose from an external point of view, writing about being a Playboy Bunny was the big break. But certainly not from my point of view. Because the kinds of assignments I got because of it were not assignments I wanted to have.
George Gendron: So what was it? Was it your relationship with Clay and New York magazine that ended up in retrospect being The Big Break?
Gloria Steinem: I don’t even know how it happened because it felt kind of organic. I knew Robert Benton, who was the art director of Esquire at the time. And Esquire was, I believe, looking for someone to write an article about the contraceptive pill, which was then new. And so I wrote that article, and that was the beginning, even though I am not sure I knew it was the beginning.
George Gendron: For that article, Clay Felker was your editor, wasn’t he?
Gloria Steinem: Yes.
George Gendron: And rumor had it in the New York magazine newsroom that he made you do a major revision of that article? Or is that just urban legend?
Gloria Steinem: No, no. I think it’s true because I remember him saying to me that I had performed “the miracle of making sex boring.”
Steinem with Ms. publisher Patricia Carbine.
“I’ve never been on salary. I’ve always been freelance.”
George Gendron: Well, that sounds like Clay doesn’t it? He doesn’t mince words. So I want to go back, you mentioned your growing up, and your dad, and you grew up—a lot of people, a surprising number of people, based on my informal survey, don’t know about your background. And when I asked them, “Well, speculate. Where do you think Gloria Steinem came from?” They say, “Well, Manhattan, of course. Upper West Side. Her parents were professors at NYU or Barnard…
Gloria Steinem: That’s interesting.
George Gendron: …Or Hunter [College]. And then you say, “Well, actually, no. East Toledo.” And they look at you like, “No way!”
Gloria Steinem: We're so used to thinking of our real background that we don’t understand what the impression may be. I didn’t realize it.
George Gendron: That's true. So talk briefly about your life in a trailer with your mom and dad, and your sister, and the passion that seemed to kindle in you, lifelong, for travel.
Gloria Steinem: First it kindled a life without going to school. So I was just constantly reading in the car as we were going to and from Florida or California, since my father [Leo Steinem] hated the cold weather. And when the dance pavilion in Michigan at Ocean Beach Pier, as he called it—“Dancing over the water and under the stars,” that was his slogan—when that was no longer a way to make a living, then he would go to country auctions and buy small antiques and sell them to the shops along the road to Florida or California.
So it was just pretty much all that I knew. I might go to school for the first month, but as soon as it got cold, my father wanted to put us all in the house trailer and leave.
George Gendron: So we know what homeschooling is. This was mobile homeschooling?
Gloria Steinem: Yeah. And it wasn’t, I mean, I just read all the time. In fact, my mother was more worried about my eyesight reading in the car than she was about my lack of schooling.
George Gendron: So you were self-taught, basically.
Gloria Steinem: You might say so. Or book-taught.
George Gendron: Okay. So I’m curious in reading your memoir about your life on the road, I’m not sure whether you’re, you say this explicitly or whether it’s implicit, that there’s something about the kind of traveling that you did that maybe informed and enhanced you as a reporter in terms of your ability to listen in a really profound way. Am I reading too much into this?
Gloria Steinem: No. I think listening was my preferred form of communication, because, one, I didn’t want to speak in public. And only much later, and with a speaking partner, did I even attempt that. And also I was following in the track of the adult Louisa May Alcott who had done that during the Civil War.
George Gendron: So in addition to Louisa, who else were your role models?
Gloria Steinem: That’s interesting. There were not full-time women writers out there that I was aware of. It wasn’t necessarily women writers. My father, among his purchases for his antique and other business in the wintertime, used to buy entire libraries in order to get one first edition.
So he would leave the rest of the entire library in the garage, just scattered on the floor. And I would go out there and randomly pick books to read. So I think I read the history of part of the Civil War. I mean, I was an “unguided” reader.
George Gendron: I think a lot of us were, frankly, even when we were supposed to be disciplined by, in my case, a Catholic education. But I can’t tell you the number of journalists who describe themselves as lifelong “promiscuous” readers.
Gloria Steinem: Really? No, I think that’s true. And I didn’t really experience learning a different way until I was in high school. And of course, college.
George Gendron: So let’s go back now, after college you’re in New York. I’m back now in your life as a journalist. Do you remember the first time an idea for a publication, a magazine for women first struck you?
Gloria Steinem: Well, in between my arrival in New York and the first magazine, I lived in India for two years. And that was partly because my mother and both grandmothers, even though one family was Jewish and one was Christian, they were all theosophists.
So I had grown up on books like Lotus Leaves for the Young, and so I’d grown up an interest in India. And because I was engaged in trying not to get married, I fled to India and fell in love with it and ended up living there for two years, and also writing for Indian newspapers. So that was the beginning for me, writing columns.
George Gendron: That was beautifully put: “engaged in trying hard not to be married.” Was it that you were trying hard not to be married to a particular individual or was this just in general?
Gloria Steinem: Also remember it was the 1950s, and even in my college classes, the number of engagement rings that showed up in junior and senior year was massive. And I was in love with a very interesting guy, so all of it seemed headed toward marriage. And in those days, marriage was more the end than the beginning for women.
George Gendron: Right, right. So you took the modest step of going to India for two years to get away from it.
Gloria Steinem: Yeah. First I sat in the—remember Pan Am, the airlines—I sat in the office of Pan Am so long that they finally gave me a free ticket.
George Gendron: Is that true?
Gloria Steinem: I told them I would write brochures for them or something, but they finally, I think just to get me outta the office, they gave me a free ticket.
George Gendron: So you’re now back from India. Where and when did the idea for Ms. as a magazine come from?
Gloria Steinem: Well, Suzanne Braun Levine, who was our managing editor, Patricia Carbine, who was our publisher, she had been the editor of Look magazine. And indeed, I had written as a freelancer for Pat there. So most of us had been involved in the magazine business in some way and were hyper aware that the magazines for women were catalogs. You were just supposed to write complimentary pieces about makeup and all kinds of subjects that were covered editorially. And, it was literally complimentary copy for the ads.
So they had wanted to be working on a women’s magazine that was different, and I also did. And on top of that, I had seen a magazine get started at New York. So I had faith that it was possible.
George Gendron: For the few people who have never heard the story of how that first issue got launched, can you recreate that? When was the first time you sat down with Clay and discussed the idea of Ms. as an insert in an issue of New York, which gave you, at least for one issue, instant circulation and distribution?
Gloria Steinem: It wasn’t as direct as that. It was first that Clay, who had a great news sense, could see that, along with the peace movement, along with the civil rights movement, there was coming to be a women’s movement, since women had not been able to participate fully in the other movements. He could see that it was happening and that it was news.
So he suggested that I write about that, and sent me off on a tour to California and back, and a few other places, to promote the issue that we did. And I had written the column that I mentioned, which was called “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation?” I think with a question mark. I’m not sure I was secure enough to say it without a question mark.
George Gendron: When we’re young, we always carry a few question marks around with us.
Gloria Steinem: So it was all blossoming. And there were women doing public speak outs against the anti-abortion laws because women were literally dying from and being injured from illegal abortions.
George Gendron: So when you were starting to actually develop the idea for that very first issue that would be inserted in New York, who was your team? Who were the people you turned to for advice? Who were your writers? I’m curious. Give us a sense of how that first issue came together.
Gloria Steinem: Well, they were writers that I knew—either personally or from New York magazine—Jane O’Reilly, for instance, who wrote “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth.”
George Gendron: That was a great story.
Gloria Steinem: So it was like spontaneous combustion, because there were women who had been writing for women’s magazines or for New York.
George Gendron: So the issue gets out. This is, again, the premier issue in New York. Share what happened. What was the response?
Gloria Steinem: It was an insert, part of it was an insert in New York magazine, and then other articles were added and it became a kind of one shot on the newsstand. I was sent by Clay to go to various cities, including Los Angeles, to get on radio talk shows—any way of publicizing it because we both had a fear that this issue was going to “lie like a lox.”
And it was when I was in California that I was on some talk radio show and people called in, women called in and said, “We can’t find it on the newsstands.” I called Clay in a panic and said it never got here, somehow. And he called the distributor and discovered it had sold out. That it was sold out in eight days, even though it was cover-dated spring because we thought it was going to lie on the newsstands for so long.
George Gendron: Is that one of those moments, Gloria, where you think to yourself, Damn, maybe this is going to really work?
Gloria Steinem: Well, I didn’t know what the “it” was. I certainly didn’t see myself as—I’d never had a job, I’d always been a freelancer. And it was only because Pat Carbine, who had been the publisher of Look magazine as I said, who really understood the magazine business, and Suzanne Levine, who also had been the editor of another magazine, that it was possible.
“Our secret weapon with advertising agencies was the women who worked there. Because for the first time they would want to come to the meeting, too.
But at the same time, we got resistance and hostility from the men in the agencies.”
George Gendron: So when you were doing that very first issue, you weren’t necessarily thinking about this as the launch of a monthly magazine?
Gloria Steinem: No. No. The one that was internal to New York magazine I was thinking of as a one shot, as they say.
George Gendron: When did it occur to you and your colleagues that maybe this is more than a one shot?
Gloria Steinem: When, in our little office where we had produced this one shot, we got bales, and bales, and bales of letters. Every day, hundreds, even thousands, of letters arrived with women saying, “At last, here’s a magazine that isn’t just about cooking and raising children. That treats me like an adult.” And, “I loved this article and didn’t like that one.” Just mailbags full of letters. It was stunning. And we saved them all. I think they still exist someplace.
George Gendron: Yeah, you’ve given a lot of your papers to Smith College, haven’t you?
Gloria Steinem: Yes. Archives, yes. Right.
George Gendron: For anybody interested, if you’re in the neighborhood, I think Smith has those letters, if I’m not mistaken.
Gloria Steinem: It may have been earlier. So it may be one of the other women’s colleges who have the first letters.
George Gendron: Okay. So, you guys get together and decide, “Well, maybe we’ve got an idea for a sustainable magazine here.” You do a business plan, go out and look for money. What do you do?
Gloria Steinem: Yes. I’m trying to remember the sequence of events right now, but Warner Communications was, at the time, a company that made all or most of its money from parking lots. And ...
George Gendron: …Of course they did—and they may again in the future!
Gloria Steinem: Right. And we’re wanting to be known as a name in print and magazines, not just parking lots. So they gave us enough money for the first issues. Like $8,000. It wasn’t a lot but it made all the difference.
George Gendron: And they had done Wonder Woman, right?
Gloria Steinem: Yes, and we put Wonder Woman on the cover because Wonder Woman, who was a figure of my and many other women’s childhoods had suddenly, lost all her magical powers and become like a car hop. No more magic lasso. Because the company that owned her [DC Comics] had transformed her. [Ed Note: In 1968, DC Comics’ decided to have Wonder Woman voluntarily surrender her Amazon powers and status to remain in “Man’s World” rather than accompany her fellow Amazons to another dimension where they could “restore their magic” ].
So we put the original Wonder Woman on the cover, striding across the city as a colossus, giving out food with one hand and rescuing people with the other. And after it was very successful, the creators of Wonder Woman called up and said, “Okay. All right. She’s got her magic lasso back. She’s got her invisible ring back. Now will you leave us alone?”
George Gendron: So you were partially responsible for revitalizing Wonder Woman.
Gloria Steinem: Yeah, well I mean, it was Wonder Woman herself in her original form, and then because we put her on the cover, yes.
George Gendron: So there must have been an enormous number of people, mostly men, who when they heard the idea that you were going to take this first issue and now create a monthly magazine around it, thought you were absolutely crazy. And I’m curious, what was the most colorful, negative feedback you got? Because I know, man, you got everybody in every aspect of the culture telling you you’re out of your mind.
Gloria Steinem: Yeah, well, we had a collection of women editors who believed in this, so that made a huge difference. But, aside from Clay, who was at least inadvertently encouraging by inserting a first issue in the magazine, I don’t remember anybody else who was encouraging.
Bea Feitler (right) was the first art director of Ms.
George Gendron: I remember one rainy afternoon at New York magazine, a bunch of people didn’t want to go out in the rain to have lunch, and so we had somebody bring it in. And I was talking to Jane Maxwell, Clay’s assistant, and Jane said that Clay’s response after the first issue when he heard that you were going to do a monthly magazine, was, “Well, now what are they going to write about?” As if you had covered everything that needed to be covered.
Gloria Steinem: That’s true. Clay felt that one issue was it. True.
George Gendron: Did he ever formally acknowledge that he was wrong? I know a lot of well-known people did, including Harry Reasoner on the air, right?
Gloria Steinem: Oh, yes. Oh, that’s very smart of you to remember that. I’d forgotten that. Yes.
George Gendron: It wasn’t frequent that those guys ever acknowledged changing their mind.
Gloria Steinem: I don’t think Clay formally apologized, but he acknowledged that.
George Gendron: So I’m curious, whenever you read anything about the early days of Ms.—I actually have the first 12 issues of the magazine sitting right here—your masthead is really interesting because there’s no hierarchy.
Gloria Steinem: Yeah. It was by function and then alphabetical.
George Gendron: Yeah, but I’m curious, what was your role? Because people will often say, “Oh, so and so was really kind of acting as the functional editor.” And people always refer to you as a co-founder.
Gloria Steinem: That’s as I was saying. Pat Carbine was the only person who really understood the magazine business because of Look magazine.
George Gendron: So was she kind of the publisher?
Gloria Steinem: Yeah, she was the publisher. Suzanne Levine was really the editor. She was the one who had all the assigned articles on her wall and when they were supposed to come in. And she was the one who was truly a managing editor. But other than that we had meetings of, not only everybody in the magazine, but women who happened to be passing through New York from New Delhi or Paris or something, who would come to our editorial meetings and make suggestions.
George Gendron: At some point you were quoted as saying something about how sitting around in an editorial meeting with a group of people where you can say anything you want, you don’t have to worry, but that’s not about right or wrong, it’s more brainstorming, you’ve got diverse points of view, was just absolutely thrilling for you.
Gloria Steinem: Yes, it was. It was. And it was different because unlike New York magazine, much as I loved it, when we were sitting in a meeting there, we were all trying to interest and intrigue Clay. But in this meeting, there was not that kind of all-powerful individual. It was just all of us sitting in a circle or around a conference table together trying to figure out what was exciting, what we wanted to do, what writer would be good for what subject.
George Gendron: But at some point, somebody has to make decisions, right? And we’re going to do that article, and at least for now, we’re not going to do the other one.
Gloria Steinem: Yeah. And that was really Suzanne Levine, who was the managing editor.
George Gendron: And you were willing, egotistically, you were willing to accept that despite the fact that you were Ms. magazine in the public imagination.
Gloria Steinem: No. I was somebody who was “the traveler.” I was out there bringing back little bits of paper, and information, and article ideas, and here’s a writer. So I was the wanderer and coming back to editorial meetings. But Suzanne was really the editor.
George Gendron: When I was talking to Corey, one of your assistants, when we were setting this up, I said to her, “If I had to guess at what title Gloria might have bestowed on herself, was editor at large.” Because you always talk about coming back from the road with tons of story ideas, and scraps of paper, and notes, and it sounded like, once again, you were “the traveler.”
Gloria Steinem: That’s true. But we listed ourselves alphabetically. So, except, the art director—I mean, some people had distinctive functions, but the rest of us were listed alphabetically.
George Gendron: What kind of resistance did you get from the ad community? I mean, they’re notoriously risk averse when it comes to anything new and suddenly you have people knocking on their door, even someone as well known and highly regarded as Pat Carbine saying, “Well, we’ve got this great new idea for a magazine.” What was the response on Madison Avenue?
Gloria Steinem: It was very negative, especially in the universe of women’s magazines where the editorial is dictated by ads. That is, you know, you have home decorating and all kinds of cooking articles, and articles about family, and so on. And it’s really mostly about the ads.
So our secret weapon in going around to advertising agencies was the women who worked in those agencies. Because for the first time, in many cases, they would want to come to the meeting too. And they had not—whatever their job was, didn't call for that, didn’t demand that—but they wanted to come too.
But we also, at the same time, got resistance and hostility from a few of the men in the agencies.
George Gendron: How could you not, right? That was still kind of the tail end of the Mad Men era.
Gloria Steinem: Yeah. People would even throw the magazine down on their desks or on the floor or demonstrate that this was just a fad, or “We’re not interested,” or “It’s hostile to what normal women want.” There was a fair amount of hostility.
But what made the difference was that we would be at J. Walter Thompson, or some agency, where the men in power did not see that this was a good option, but the women in the office wanted to come to the meeting, for the first time. So that helped.
George Gendron: Yeah. I think, from time to time I teach undergraduates, and I’m struck sometimes by how, to them, the sixties and the seventies are ancient history in some ways. And there’d be times when I would say something really simple, I don’t know, in response to a question about something in a newsroom. And I’d say, “Well, we didn’t have computers. We didn’t have word processors. We had typewriters.” Or at one point somebody was asking, “Well, how did you get the magazine to your printer?” I said, “By messenger.” And they’re like, “By what?”
Gloria Steinem: No. I agree with you. We could use a kind of chronological set of translators, right?
George Gendron: Yeah. But I sometimes think, when reading your memoirs in particular, even for me, I mean, here’s an example: So my mom, a Brooklyn girl, loved the Oak Room at The Plaza. And it used to infuriate her that she could never meet her friends there for lunch. And when I tell my daughters that story, they look at me like, “Well, that’s just fiction.” That there was a time—that must’ve been like in the Victorian era. And I’m like, “That wasn’t that long ago.”
Gloria Steinem: No. Not only could you not go into The Oak Room, but you also couldn’t wait by yourself for some—if I was interviewing somebody who was staying at The Plaza, I couldn’t wait by myself in the lobby. I had to get them to meet me outside the door. Because they were so sure that women waiting by themselves would look like prostitutes or hookers.
George Gendron: I know you probably have told us a million times, but I’m going to ask you to tell it one more time. Tell us your famous Plaza Hotel lobby story.
Gloria Steinem: Well, because I was interviewing someone? Or because—there are various stories. I mean one, one is—it wasn’t me—I’m trying to think who it was. Somebody famous, like Greta Garbo? No, couldn’t have been Greta Garbo. Anyway, some famous actress was told that she could not enter the dining room because she was wearing a pantsuit, and so she stood in the door, took off her pants and her jacket.
George Gendron: That one I haven’t heard. Thank you very much. But there’s one in which you are the protagonist and you were escorted out of the lobby while you were on assignment.
Gloria Steinem: Yes. Because literally, they thought we would look like, or could look like, call girls. Single women were not allowed—or single women of a certain age, anyway—you’re not allowed to sit in the lobby.
George Gendron: But you went back and confronted that person.
Gloria Steinem: Yeah. And not just we in the magazine, but other women’s groups too, confronted that and demonstrated against it.
George Gendron: In fact, I think somewhere there’s a video of you doing some kind of a reenactment on PBS. Do you remember that?
Gloria Steinem: It’s possible. I don’t know.
George Gendron: You actually reenact being escorted out of the lobby, but then coming back later. And in your memoir, it’s interesting because you talk about the process of building self-confidence and self-esteem in situations like that, which is crucial for reporters, but they’re essential for everybody in life.
Gloria Steinem: Yes, of course. It’s essential for everybody. And the problem of the era was that even the word “self-esteem” was thought to be some squishy, unworthy, unserious, “California” concern.
“If I was interviewing somebody who was staying at The Plaza, I couldn’t wait by myself in the lobby, because they were so sure that women waiting by themselves would look like prostitutes or hookers.”
George Gendron: You discovered that with your book, right?
Gloria Steinem: Yeah. there was some resistance to even discussing it in those terms.
George Gendron: I want to talk a bit about young journalists today. And this is not just true for young journalists, it’s true for young men and women in general, of course. Activists, I’m sure, are dealing with this. But what advice do you give to a young woman who comes to you and wants to do something in the media at a time when, you could argue, that the whole industry, across the spectrum, is in a state of complete disarray. But somebody who wants to do what you did with Ms. Something comparable. What advice do you give them? How do you help them make sense of this incredible fragmentation that’s taken place in the media?
Gloria Steinem: Well, I think I’d first ask them what do they love to do? What do they love to do so much they forget what time it is when they’re doing it? Where and how do they feel understood? Are there websites, or countries, or professions, or ways of contacting other like-minded people. If so, start there, expand that. Because the path is not the same, of course, for everybody. But there’s usually, in the story that you hear, a beginning of the path that’s right for that person.
George Gendron: How do you feel personally about social media?
Gloria Steinem: Well, I’m probably not the best judge because I’m not in it in the same way that younger generations are in it. But, most of all, it worries me that there’s no fact checking. That you can say anything and it assumes a life online, even if it’s completely false, or negative, or libelous or—can anybody sue for libel on social media? I haven’t heard of anybody doing that.
George Gendron: Is your ego also an issue here? And here’s what I mean by that: I rarely like memoirs and yet, I love your book about being on the road. I’ve recommended it to everybody. And one of the things that I find really striking about it, and I’m not saying this to flatter you now—my wife can attest to the fact that I felt this way and said this long before I knew I was going to be doing a podcast with you—is that you don’t have the kind of ego that today we associate with people who have accomplished and achieved what you’ve achieved.
We live in an era of monumental egos. And it seems like so much of social media is clamoring for attention. It’s “pay attention to me! Pay attention to me!” And I wonder, do you have just a personal aversion to that?
Gloria Steinem: I don’t know if it’s an aversion. But I’m just communicating in a way that’s natural for me. And that isn’t it. And then sometimes the online pattern of communication sounds to me like what—when I was in the sixth grade or whatever—we used to call personality books, did you have those? They were, you know, like secretarial handbooks and people would put the name of an individual student on the top of the page and then people would anonymously write what they thought about that person on the page.
So it would say things like, “Cute, but knows it.”
George Gendron: Well, that was a precursor to social media, wasn’t it?
Gloria Steinem: Yeah. No, it was. It was. So at a big, basic level, what troubles me is no fact checking. At another basic level, what troubles me is that huge swaths of the world have no electricity. So the internet is dividing us in very crucial ways because it’s very limited in the people who have access to it.
George Gendron: I’m going to switch gears, slightly here for a second, and go back to a comment you made earlier, which is an obvious characterization of the sixties and seventies when we were experiencing the feminist revolution, anti-war revolution, civil rights revolution, to an extraordinary extent. And there is and was something absolutely exhilarating about that. And yet you could argue maybe that it was a precursor to the complete lack of trust we have these days in institutions. Complete lack of trust. In government, education, business, and capitalism. On, and on, and on. And so it seems to me that, those institutions up until the sixties, they were the ways in which we, for better or worse, made meaning in our lives. That provided meaning for us. Now we're pretty much on our own and alone trying to figure out how you do that. Do you agree with that or disagree with that? And if you agree with that, what advice do you have for people?
Gloria Steinem: I’m trying to think of real examples. I mean, there are obviously individual people who we trust as sources. There are media that we trust, more or less, as sources. I think we are striving or looking toward our own system of reliability, fact checking, trustworthiness—whether from an individual human being or a particular newspaper. Yes, I trust The New York Times and the Boston Globe, but I’m not so sure about—I mean, I think we figure it out on a daily basis and through friends we trust.
George Gendron: So when you see a poll that talks about the low esteem that media in general is held in, or Congress. Your response would be, but within that, there are individuals and individual organizations that we do trust.
Gloria Steinem: Yes. I think it’s too amorphous and general to say Congress, because that includes completely disparate people from Trump to … right? Specificity is very helpful.
George Gendron: Okay. Here’s another kind of non-sequitur, but I think these are related. There’s been a lot written lately—in fact, lately I’d describe it as almost an avalanche of articles—about men, but also about boys, being in peril. And I’m not sure why that surfaced so much recently, but as the father of three daughters and a son—this is something my wife and I have been watching for decades now—I can still remember the first time we had a conversation about this when my oldest daughter in eighth grade was, being inducted into honor society, or something like that, and there were 24 students from her school. And there were 22 girls and two boys. And afterwards, we went up and talked to the teacher about what was going on. She said, “We don’t really know. It’s probably just an aberration.” But we saw this start to repeat itself over, and over, and over again, and a lot of iterations of it.
Gloria Steinem: That’s interesting because you’re in a better position than I am to experience that. What’s your instinct about the ‘why’?
George Gendron: I think that there’s been a process that has supported girls in a way that produces girls—not young women, but girls—first and foremost, who are more centered. They have a greater level of self-esteem. They still experience a lot of the craziness that accompanies young girls as they’re growing up that I discovered—I grew up in a family of four brothers, and so this was a shock to me that you guys are a handful. But I think as girls and then young women started to flourish—as a result of a lot of the changes that we’ve been talking about and more—I think it was threatening to boys. And I think it began to raise really serious questions for them—of which they weren’t aware, of course, at that age of development—about where they belonged. How do they fit into this? I’m not being very articulate about it because, of course, it’s a monumental issue.
Gloria Steinem: I see what you mean. And there is no masculine or feminine, there’s human. But we are still in a time when we have, a lot of us anyway, have been trained to think in terms of masculine or feminine.
And there’s probably a racial parallel to this because the idea of white supremacy was, and I’m afraid still is sometimes, part of our national culture. So there’s an anxiety about the fact that we are now a majority people-of-color country. I mean, the first generation of babies who are majority babies-of-color has already been born.
And on the outside you get racist rebellions against that fact. And insecurity. So it's a discomfort with the unfamiliar. But I still think it’s progress. Because every one of us is a unique individual regardless of gender, or race, or other collective judgements. And hopefully we will get there.
“The problem of the era was that even the word ‘self-esteem’ was thought to be some squishy, unworthy, unserious, ‘California’ concern.”
George Gendron: You have often spoken about the fact that one of the effects that travel has on you is it gives you hope. You’re traveling less these days, I take it. Are you still hopeful?
Gloria Steinem: Yes. No, I am. I’m, I’m a hope-aholic probably, but...
George Gendron: …but just hardwired that way?
Gloria Steinem: Well, hope is a form of planning. If you don’t have hope, you’ve already closed off possibilities by being pessimistic. So I don't mean that we should be insane about it beyond all probability, but I do think that hope is crucial. Absolutely crucial.
George Gendron: That’s nice to hear. It’s encouraging for those of us who are Gloria Steinem fans to hear. This is a question that really interests me because—having spent a big part of my professional life at the intersection of kind of media, and entrepreneurship, and innovation—I’m really stunned, frankly, by the extent to which we are now at a point in our cultural life where we have this mindless love affair with scale.
And you can see it of course, in a lot of the venture-backed companies that we’ve thrown literally billions of dollars at without, necessarily, the hope of ever getting any money back. But one of the things I was really struck by thinking about your life and the extraordinary impact you’ve had is that, as you said earlier, you’ve never had a job.
So, here we are, we live in a world where, frankly, I think there’s a common assumption that underlies our obsession with scale, which is: If you want to get anything done, you have to be big. You have to have access to unlimited resources. And here you are, never having had a job, and it seems as if you’ve been able to do what you’ve done through building relationships, trusting relationships, and groups of relationships that have formed personal networks around shared values.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
Gloria Steinem: Well, I, I think that what you’ve described is any movement, social justice movement—whether it was against Vietnam, or for civil rights, or for gay and lesbian and transgender rights—it’s the contagion of common sense ideas that are in the end really about mutual respect. And we need to communicate with each other and meet in each other’s living rooms, as well as online, in order to perpetuate that.
But it’s the basis of a lot of our actions. I mean, if you get an email or a factoid, you look at the source and consider the person or group that this came from and that dictates, or influences at least, its credibility and what your action will be. It’s always going on.
George Gendron: So, we have a tradition here at Print Is Dead of asking what we call the billion dollar question. So I’m going to put this to you coming on the heels of a question about scale.
Gloria Steinem: Yeah. No, no, no, no stress here. Just a billion-dollar-question.
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, Ms. published a new anthology.
George Gendron: It’s just a billion-dollar-question. Exactly. So, Laurene Powell Jobs wants to give Gloria Steinem a blank check with one caveat. Well, two. One is you’ve got to spend a lot of money because otherwise it’s not a substantial enough tax deduction to even make it worthwhile to have a conversation. But the other is she requires that you spend the money on creating a 21st century equivalent of Ms.—could be a magazine, could be a site, could be an association. What would you do with it? What would you do with this billion-dollar blank check?
Gloria Steinem: Ah, very tempting. Well, I’m not enough of a technology person to say this properly, but I think I would create a satellite in the sky that allows people in Central Africa and parts of Asia, and parts of this country, to communicate, at least the way we are now, who now can’t afford to.
Because, I remember going to Google in California, and they had a giant map on the wall with lines going from Google to individual places on the globe. And there were parts of the globe that were completely dark.
And that’s dangerous, I think. That’s divisive and dangerous. So I would do my best, via satellite in the sky or whatever other available technology, to democratize the communication that we already have.
George Gendron: Now I realize Print is Dead has a very, very passionate following, but not a huge one. And yet, I’ll warn you that I expect you’re going to get a call from Laurene wanting to talk to you about your satellite idea.
Gloria Steinem: I would love to talk to her. She’s such a good person.
Steinem in Brooklyn.
For more information on Gloria Steinem, visit her website. Get a copy of 50 Years of Ms.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution wherever books are sold.
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Back to the Interviews
It’s a Wonderful LIFE
A conversation with designer Bob Ciano (LIFE, Esquire, Wired, more).
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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY MAGCULTURE
Today’s guest, Bob Ciano, is probably best known as the designer who guided the venerable LIFE magazine into its second chapter, shifting, after five decades as a weekly, to a monthly. But in an era where editors and art directors did not enjoy the downright chummy partnerships we have now, he’s known for a lot more.
In his career, which continues to this day, Ciano has punched his time card at all of these places: The Metropolitan Opera, Redbook, Opera News, Esquire, The New York Times, LIFE, Travel & Leisure, Wells, Rich & Greene Advertising, The New York Times (again), Encyclopedia Britannica, The Industry Standard, Forbes ASAP, Wired, St Mary’s College, Cal Arts, as well as his current Bay-area studio, Ciano Designs.
And in the middle of all that, he had an entire side career as a renowned album cover designer.
Talented and successful—and, by all accounts, extraordinarily kind—Ciano did not leave all of these jobs voluntarily. As he says in our interview, “firing art directors was a sport in those days.” Ciano himself has lost more jobs than most people have had.
In preparation for this episode, Ciano shared an fascinating artifact from his archive. It’s a note from LIFE editor-in-chief Richard Stolley’s monthly column, where Stolley is taking the opportunity to sing the praises of his unsung art department. This is what he wrote:
Next to my office on the 31st floor of the Time & Life Building is the layout room. It is dominated by a 19-foot counter set three and a half feet off the floor so you don't get a crick in your back bending over color transparencies. All the ingredients of the stories in every issue come together in the layout room. First, departmental editors, reporters and picture editors gather there, and we begin to put slides and pictures in a logical sequence. About that time, I turn to somebody and ask, “Will you please get Ciano?”
Moments later, Bob Ciano, LIFE’s art director, strolls in. Bob wears a beard and jeans, a kind of uniform of the day among art directors; in every other way, he is unique and one of the best in the magazine business. It is his job to take all the elements and ideas that other staff members have brought to a story and transform them into vibrant, intelligent layouts. The task is not unlike turning a kitchenful of ingredients into a feast. (It is no accident that Ciano is a great cook.)
Ciano has been in charge of our art department since LIFE became a monthly in 1978, having previously worked at Esquire and The New York Times. He decides which of his associates will design an article or does it himself. The arson story in this issue is his. “Fires are hot and colorful,” Ciano explains, “but because of the conditions, this story had to be shot in black and white.” Ciano decided that a symbolic point could be made by literally setting the opening photograph on fire. He put a match to it, and the blazing print was re-photographed in our lab. “If we can make a reader feel heat coming off that page, then we’ve done something he’ll remember.”
Though LIFE designers have won [hundreds of] awards, they toil in anonymity, getting no bylines on the articles they play a major role in shaping. Their reward, as Ciano puts it, “is to move readers, to touch their emotions. We’ll use whatever graphic tools we can.”
Ciano left LIFE—by his own decision—after an 8-year stint. Why? Because there’s something worse than getting fired, and that’s getting bored. It happens.
Our editor-at-large Steven Heller caught up with Ciano recently. Their lively conversation covers the magazine business the way it was, the way it is, and the way it will be.
Steven Heller: I just want to start by paying homage to my good friend and one-time mentor, Bob Ciano. His name was one of those few that I kept track of as a young wannabe designer or art director, not knowing what either of those really entailed. But I go back as far as Redbook.
And I forget when we actually met, but I do remember when you came to The New York Times to work with Lou Silverstein on the “C Sections,” which sounds slightly obscene, but that’s what we used to call them: the “C Sections.” And you did The Living Section. I don’t remember whether it was called Living or not, but there was a big fish on the front page.
Bob Ciano: A fish. And the face of Pavarotti.
Steven Heller: Yes. It was very unique. And the fact that you were coming over to our neck of the woods to newspaperland was a big thrill. Do you remember why you were recruited?
Bob Ciano: I wasn’t recruited. Well, I had talked to Lou before I was at Esquire, and I got fired. Art directors got fired a lot in those days.
Steven Heller: It was a sport.
Bob Ciano: It was a sport. And I called him the day after I got fired and said, “I need a job.” And he said, “Come on over.” So I got fired on a Wednesday and I was at The New York Times the following Monday. It was pretty amazing.
Steven Heller: Well, before we get into what you were doing at Esquire prior to that, I just want to say that it was because of you that my career existed. I was doing the Op-Ed page at the time, and they put me on the Book Review for a short period of time. And you were slated to take over the Book Review. You may or may not remember.
Ciano moved to The New York Times to work with Lou Silverstein on the “C” Sections. “I got fired [by Esquire] on a Wednesday and I was at The New York Times the following Monday. It was pretty amazing.”
Bob Ciano: I don’t remember that. Wow.
Steven Heller: You were slated to take over the Book Review and I was to go back to the evil devils in Op-Ed land, and I kind of came into your office and cried, probably alligator tears, but basically you said, “You want to do the Book Review? I’ll pull out.”
Bob Ciano: Oh my, I don’t remember that.
Steven Heller: That was one of the most generous things ever done for me, and probably in our whole crazy little industry of print design magazines and newspapers.
Bob Ciano: Well, I’m glad I did that.
Steven Heller: And then, I guess, a year later you took over Life.
Bob Ciano: Yeah. It was very hard to leave the times. I enjoyed working with Lou and those new sections were very exciting for me. I don’t know if you remember, but in The Living Section we actually had a comic strip.
Steven Heller: Yeah. It was Rick Meyerowitz and Tony Hendra.
Bob Ciano: Yeah. And all the characters were food. And every week they would deliver the comic strip and Abe would get it and he would call me within minutes and say, “This isn’t funny.” And then he would hang up.
And he pulled the plug when the food kidnapped Craig Claiborne and started sending ransom notes to The New York Times editor, saying, “If you don’t stop the recipes, we’re going to kill Craig.” That was the end.
Steven Heller: Did it run?
Bob Ciano: It ran for several months. And then when they did that, he pulled it.
Steven Heller: But did that particular comic strip run or was that pulled?
Bob Ciano: I don’t remember. I doubt it. The other thing we did, which I always felt good about, was there was a weekly article by John Leonard. And I connected him to Guy Billout. And Guy did the illustration every week. And it was just a nice little thing to have every week to anchor on. But I had a lot of fun. And I had a lot of fun with the Sports Monday. And the front page.
Steven Heller: It was very special having you there, particularly having seen the work you did in Redbook, believe it or not, because Brad Holland was in Redbook and I think …
Bob Ciano: … and I know if he mentioned it to you, but I bought him a bed.
Steven Heller: You bought him a bed?
Bob Ciano: I asked him to do something for Redbook and he did. And he was telling me when he delivered it that he didn’t have a bed to sleep on. He was in some small hotel or something. He had just come to New York, and he didn’t have enough money, so I doubled a fee so he could go buy a bed.
Steven Heller: I never knew that.
Bob Ciano: Yeah. That always I always felt that was one of my contributions to our business “Get Brad a Bed.”
Ciano’s 6-week-old daughter Melissa once graced the cover of Redbook.
Steven Heller: Well, I don’t want to go on gushing for the whole hour that we’re doing this, but I will, because your reputation in those days was as one of the nicest art directors, as well as one of the most creative art directors in New York.
Bob Ciano: Well, thank you.
Steven Heller: And part of that was your love of illustration, your keen eye for photography, and your aptitude with typography, which was a very important element in those days. And you could make it all work.
Bob Ciano: It still is.
Steven Heller: It still is, but some people forget that.
Bob Ciano: Especially students.
Steven Heller: So how did you get into the business of art direction?
Bob Ciano: By default, by total default. I went to Pratt Institute and I got thrown out. I was studying architecture. I had Mrs. [Sybil] Moholy-Nagy as a teacher. And in those days we would get eight-week problems, build a model, and have drawings. And the teachers would walk through the room. You had to have your drawing table horizontal, and they would look at your work. And if she didn’t like your work—she had a cane—she would smash it. She would’ve just gone WHACK! No comment.
But I wanted to be a baseball player. I really thought I was going to make it as a pitcher. I was on a sandlot team and the catcher was Joe Torre. But the bigger thing was that, when I was 13 and we moved into a new apartment, the family moving out were the Koufaxes. And I was going to have the same bedroom as Sandy. And I thought that was fate, that I was going to be a pitcher.
And, as we all know, it didn’t happen, but I missed so many classes that I got thrown out of school. And I had to get a job at BBDO doing pasteups. And I went from there to Columbia Records as a designer. And the art director I reported to was Reid Miles.
Steven Heller: Really?
Bob Ciano: Yeah. Reid Miles and Bob Cato were the art directors. John Berg was the assistant. And I worked there a few years, and saw an ad for Opera News. And I went for an interview. I didn’t know how to do a magazine. I faked my way into the job and they hired me, the editor hired me.
And it was the days when there was still an engraver, a typesetter, and a printer. And I invited each of those guys together to lunch and said, “I don’t know how to do a magazine. You’re going to have to help me out, or if something goes wrong, I’m going to blame you.”
And they were terrific. They taught me how to mix ink, how to set type. I was always on press checks. And we did a weekly. I had an assistant and we did between 72 and 96 pages a week for 26 weeks.
Steven Heller: And you did a hell of a lot of beautiful covers, including covers by Milton Glaser.
Bob Ciano: Milton, Stan Zagorski, Erté, the French artist. Well, what happened was I succeeded a guy named Paolo Lionni. He was Leo Lionni’s son.
Steven Heller: “Pippa.”
Bob Ciano: Pippa. And I never met him, but I found a form that he sent out to artists and it said,
“Dear—and a line—We are returning your artwork for the following reasons.” And it would say, “poor idea lack of color, wrong size blah, blah, blah.”
And there was only one made out, and all of the negative things were checked off, and it was addressed to Alexander Calder.
Who, I guess, he knew through his father. And I thought, “You know, this form is terrible, but this is a good idea.” I can ask anyone. And it was one of the most important things I learned. Don’t hesitate to ask people even if they’re well known to do something. And I paid everyone a hundred dollars for a cover. And, if they wanted, two tickets to the opera.
And nobody said “no.” I mean, [Richard] Avedon did portraits. Everyone said “yes.” Milton did several covers a year. Erté got a hundred dollars to do an original painting.
“I saw an ad for Opera News. And went for an interview. I didn’t know how to do a magazine. I faked my way into the job and the editor hired me.”
Steven Heller: How long did you stay at Opera News?
Bob Ciano: I worked one year at the old Opera House on 40th Street, and then I worked three years at Lincoln Center. And all the while what I did was, I put Opera News, I sent gift subscriptions to every magazine art director I knew of, and Bill Cadge called me and said, “Would you like to come to Redbook as my assistant?” And I did. And that was fabulous.
And we did a lot of illustration in the magazine then: John Alcorn, Milton, Bernie Fuchs, Joe Bowler. I mean, maybe seven or eight. Danny Maffia. And photographers. Like, when I was at Opera News, I started working a lot with Duane Michals and Alen MacWeeney and Tony Ray-Jones. And I commissioned Bill Brandt in London to do eight pages on the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company for a hundred dollars. And he did it.
As I said, nobody said, “No.”
Steven Heller: So just listening to you, I’m getting all sweaty and shaky. It just sounds like heaven on earth and the kind of thing that I wanted to be involved in.
Bob Ciano: Yeah, you were doing Screw. That was exciting.
Steven Heller: But that was a stepping stone. But how did you feel doing all of this? You were kicked out of school and here you were top of your profession almost.
Bob Ciano: I was kicked out of school. My family was incredibly upset. My parents never knew what I did. Ever. I would explain it over and over. When I was at Life magazine, Dick Stolley, the editor, wrote an editor’s note about the art department. And it said, “We have hundreds of photographs. We don’t know what to do with them. We call Bob and his art department, and they come in, wearing their designer clothes, black shirts, and black jeans, and they take all the pictures. And a day or two later, they come back with a wonderful story. And in the process, they won X amount of awards.”
So I sent this editor’s note to my mother, thinking maybe this would impress her. Of course, she was never impressed. And after a few days, I called her and I said, “Did you get the article that they wrote about me and the art department?” She said, “Yeah, you wear jeans to work? What kind of job is that?” And I never tried to explain it again.
I just loved it. I still do. I can’t get enough of it.
Steven Heller: So one of the things that I remember of your work back then was it was so cinematic, particularly in Life magazine, which was known for its photography, but not really known for its graphic designery until you got there.
Bob Ciano: That was the way the structure of the magazine had been. And the one good thing when I got that job was I was handed a stack of resumes of designers who had worked at the old Life magazine and I decided, “I’m not hiring any of them. All I’m going to hear about is the old magazine.” And I hired people who were kind of new to magazines. Mary Kay Baumann, several other people. Carla Barr. And we just attacked it differently.
And the editor and the picture editor were very open to doing that. And I, you know, I had OD’d on Ingmar Bergman and François Truffaut. And I was very into movies.
Steven Heller: Right. And they were designers themselves.
Bob Ciano: Yeah. I remember I used to go to a place on Macdougal Street—the Folklore Center—and I went one Sunday and there was a sign on the door and it said, “Had to close. Shirley wants to see Wild Strawberries.” And I didn’t know what that was. And I found out and I went up and went to see the movie at Second Avenue and, like, 63rd or 64th Street. And I was blown away. I mean, I was not used to seeing things like this.
Steven Heller: Did you ever go to the Charles Theater on Avenue B? That’s where many of the avant-garde films and foreign films were shown.
Bob Ciano: Yeah. And there was a place on 57th Street. And there was usually, there were director there talking about the film, and before the film started they would serve espresso for free.
Steven Heller: Right. I used to go there with Ruth Ansel. So let’s jump back a second to Esquire. How did that come about?
Bob Ciano: I was at CTI Records doing covers, with Pete Turner, Alen MacWeeney, Stan Zagorski, and that had just kind of petered out. We had so many creditors after us that when we got our paychecks, we had to go to one teller at the bank and halfway waiting online, the teller would waive his or her hand and say, “No more money today.” And we’d have to wait for another check to come in to pay it. It was Creed Taylor, but he let us do anything we wanted with covers.
Steven Heller: I don’t think I’ve seen any of those covers.
Bob Ciano: Oh! I’ll send you some. I still get contacts from people who want prints of the covers. We used to print extra covers and sell them for a dollar. And so I heard about the Esquire job. The editor was Don Erickson. And he hired me. I was a little surprised, but …
Steven Heller: … And who had preceded you at Esquire?
Bob Ciano: Richard Weigand. And the art department hated me. I ended up having to replace everyone.
Steven Heller: Really? Why did they hate you?
Bob Ciano: They really liked Richard, and they thought somehow I was involved in getting him fired. I only met Richard once. He was a lovely man. Who knows? But you know, as in those days, then 12 months later, I got fired. So...
Steven Heller: … And was it with Don Erickson still as editor?
Bob Ciano: No. I’m trying to think of the guy who fired me. I probably blocked it out.
Steven Heller: But was it one of those firings where a new editor comes in and “mows the lawn”?
Bob Ciano: Yes, pretty much. But it was like musical chairs. The new editor would come in, fire the art director. They’d get a new art director. The new art director was Michael Gross, who was also then at the Lampoon. And the magazine wouldn’t do any better. Then the editor would get fired. The new editor would come in, fire the art director. They never asked the art director who was there to redesign the magazine.
But I must admit I kind of enjoyed the year I was at Esquire. I mean, Nora Ephron was one of the editors. Gordon Lish. It was very heady for me to have these incredible writers and to be involved with them.
“Abe Rosenthal came up to the art department and said, ‘You’re leaving? Don’t you ever come back to The New York Times again.’ He was so pissed at me.”
Steven Heller: That was the generation that preceded us and was kind of such an honor to be with those people.
Bob Ciano: Yeah. It was exciting.
Steven Heller: I’ll tell you a quick story. I wanted to get out of Screw, and I interviewed at Esquire with Richard Weigand. Don Erickson was the editor, so I interviewed with him too. And the two of them spent an hour convincing me not to come over to Esquire. It would’ve been a low-level job in any case, but they said, “You have much more promise elsewhere.” But they didn’t promise where that would be. So from Esquire, you came to The New York Times, almost immediately.
Bob Ciano: Yeah. And in those days it was relatively easy to move around. So I remember I got fired on a Wednesday and I called Lou Silverstein on Thursday, and I started the following Monday, working with Lou.
Steven Heller: And how did you know Lou?
Bob Ciano: I had talked to him about working at the Times before that, but then the Esquire job came up, and that was to be the art director. So I took that job. But I loved working with Lou. I mean, he was crazy, but I was...
Steven Heller: … He was a great man. But he brought you in a very special capacity. I mean, you were there when he was revolutionizing the paper. So he wanted a co-revolutionist.
Bob Ciano: But I would walk into his office with a sketch and before I even showed it to him, he would reach for his tracing pad, like whatever I did, and slip it under the first page and start to change it.
And when we had pages to show Abe Rosenthal, we would get on the elevator to go down to the third floor where the editors were. And Lou would still be leaning on the elevator wall, making changes. And I am sure you remember these big graphite pencils and his fingers were always black and all that.
But I found him wonderful to work with. Frustrating at times, but wonderful. And he kind of let me do what I wanted to do and, you know, would make comments and changes that were always right.
Steven Heller: So you always felt that there was respect for the print art director?
Bob Ciano: Oh, yeah. Yeah. We also put together, I don’t know if you remember, there was an afternoon paper.
Steven Heller: Yeah. “PM Paper.” Or whatever it was called.
Bob Ciano: Yeah. And it had The New York Times and a really tiny logo, but in big words, it said “Monday,” “Tuesday,“ and it was just like the day of the week.
Steven Heller: And you had a special office upstairs? Secret office, as I recall.
Bob Ciano: Yeah. We used to hide. And we would, when we finished the section—I forgot about that—we would leave everything. We wouldn’t take anything with us. We would leave T-squares, drawing tables, like we had gone out for coffee and just not come back. And then the next section we worked on, we would commandeer another attic space somewhere in the building.
Steven Heller: Lou was good at hijacking real estate.
Bob Ciano: He was terrific. And when he would explain the designs to the editors, Abe and Artie Gelb and that crew, he would be like a Talmudic scholar. I mean, he would talk in these beautiful—you, you would have to agree with him. But, yeah, I loved working with him.
Steven Heller: So you worked at the Times for about a year?
Bob Ciano: About a year and a half, almost two. We did all the sections, the only one that was done when I got there was the Friday Weekend section.
Steven Heller: Well, that was a radical section at the time.
Bob Ciano: Yeah. Oh yeah. And that kind of set the stage for things.
Steven Heller: That’s when Artie Gelb wanted people like Red Grooms to do the front pages.
Bob Ciano: Yeah. Yeah. I’m trying to think of who was there. Eric Seidman was the art director.
Steven Heller: Right. He did Week in Review review. And Travel.
Bob Ciano: And “some guy” did the book review. I don’t remember him.
Steven Heller: Bob Nelson?
Bob Ciano: No. You!
Steven Heller: Oh, that me.
Bob Ciano: That me. Yeah. But it was a backbreaking thing because with the new sections we would be there late, especially when they debuted. And I remember that we weren’t allowed to pick photographs. The picture editors would pick a picture or two. And during one of the closings for one of the new sections, there were just terrible photographs on the page.
And I said to Lou, “Look at that. We’ve got to change that picture.” And I started to go over to the picture editor and he grabbed my arm and he said, “Are you going to be here tomorrow night to do this? And the next night? And the next night?”
I said, “No.”
He said, “Then don’t do it. Only if you want to take it over should you do it.”
And he was right. He was right.
“We used to have a minimum of 28 editorial spreads in a row in the middle of the magazine. And if we got one spread less, we would start complaining.”
Steven Heller: Well, remember those were the days we couldn’t touch type.
Bob Ciano: Right. You had to look and peer over somebody’s shoulder.
Steven Heller: You had to look at it upside down even. But I remember the day that you announced that you were leaving and it was a heartbreaking day. We didn’t share an office, but your cubby office was next to mine. You could probably hear me singing Beatles songs. But I thought, “This guy is too important to have one of these cubby offices.”
Bob Ciano: Yeah. It never occurred to me. No. It was so much fun. But Abe Rosenthal came up at one point to the art department and said to me, “You’re leaving? Don’t you ever try to come back to The New York Times again.” He was so pissed at me.
Steven Heller: Yeah. He took things personally.
Bob Ciano: Very personally. But I had taken a job to be art director of Forbes, and I don’t remember who the art director was, but somebody who had some medical problem, some eye issue, and Malcolm Forbes hired me, but said, “You can’t start right away because we have to transition out because of the art director’s medical problem.”
But I took the job and I was going to start in a month or two, and then the editor of Life magazine, Phil Kunhardt called me and said, “Would you be interested in interviewing?” And I went over after work one night. And I brought my tray of slides, my carousel. He never looked at the work at all. And he was one of these people who interviewed you by not saying anything and causing you to talk your head off.
So we sat there and stared at each other because I had a friend who was working—this was at the startup of the new monthly Life an editor named Byron Dobell.
Steven Heller: Byron used to be at New York.
Bob Ciano: Right. And he said to me, “Now, when you get interviewed, Phil is not going to say anything and you’re going to blab. So don’t blab. And make him talk.” So I tried to make him talk. And neither one of us talked.
And after about 20 minutes I said, “Do you want to ask me anything?” And he said “No. I think not.” I said, “Do you want to look at my work?” He said, “No, that’s not necessary.” And I thought, “This is a waste of time.” And as I’m leaving, he says, “Oh, one thing. Is there anyone else you could suggest for this job?” And I was so taken aback, I said, “What about Will Hopkins? Or...” I named a whole bunch of people. And he said, “Oh, I’ve seen them. I’ve seen them all.” And I went home and I thought, “What a waste.”
And 10 o’clock the next morning he called me and said, “Would you like to come and work at Life magazine?” And I, to this day, can’t tell you why he picked me. But when I got there, he gave me a folder with almost 150 resumes from people who wanted to be the art director. And most of them had worked at one point for the old weekly Life.
And I decided on the spot I would not hire someone who had worked for the old magazine because I was afraid all I would hear about was, “We used to do it this way, we used to do it that way.” And I hired people that had never worked at a magazine.
Steven Heller: How long was it before the weekly turned into a monthly?
Bob Ciano: It was several years. They did one or two special issues a year, usually on a single subject. And they did that to also keep the name, to keep the copyright. So it was about six or seven years. So then it came back as a monthly.
Steven Heller: And then how long was it a monthly?
Bob Ciano: Well, I was there until ’87 or ’88. And then it continued on for a while longer. I started in ’78. So I was there about eight or nine years.
Steven Heller: I remember when you did take over, there was a lot of anticipation to see how it would change, if it would change, what would change. I mean, by the time it folded, it was a full-color magazine. It wasn’t the old Life at all. But it still used type that looked like it came from the same Linotype machine.
Bob Ciano: Yeah. We tried to keep a connection.
Steven Heller: But you made it clean. It was clearly a new magazine with an old title.
Bob Ciano: When I think about the magazine, we used to have a minimum of 28 editorial spreads in a row in the middle of the magazine. And if we got one spread less, we would start complaining. So it was really a wonderful thing to work on.
And I could call anyone anywhere and say, “We want to do a story.” And they knew the magazine. I didn’t have to explain it. And I remember the editor, Phil Kunhardt, said to the staff, “Come up with a picture story idea that you’ve never seen.”
And I wanted to do the Emperor of Japan at home. How naïve! We never did it. You have to go through the Imperial Household Agency. And every time we would approach them, they would ask us to do something else: send magazines, have an editor talk to them, blah, blah, blah. And I was saying to a friend who’s Japanese, I was saying to her, “I don’t know how to get through to them.”
And I remember we were having lunch and she slammed her chopsticks down and she said, “Are you stupid? They’re saying, ’no!’ They’re not going to let you go into the Imperial household and take pictures of the emperor.” And I said, “Well, why don’t they just say no?” And she said, “Oh, you’re even more stupid than I thought! They want you to go away.”
Steven Heller: This was Hirohito?
Bob Ciano: Yeah.
Steven Heller: So what were some of the joys of your editorial ideas? What are the ones that you remember most fondly?
Bob Ciano: At Life? Or in general?
Steven Heller: At Life.
Bob Ciano: Oh. We did a story on cocaine that I loved—and stories were like five or six spreads minimum. And a lot of famous people. I remember we did five actresses. Reid Miles did the shoot out in Hollywood. We’d done one with Joan Collins portraying famous women in history and she and Reid just didn’t get along and she was always screaming at him and threatening to leave and so on.
And then we did a lot of kind of gritty street stuff, which I really enjoyed, on news stories or aftermath of the news. There are just too many to specifically remember.
Steven Heller: A segue question is, among the magazines you worked for, you hired lots of designers, you worked with a lot of people, and many of them became designers in their own right. Can you talk about a few of those people that came through your “School of Ciano”?
Bob Ciano: Well, I always thought that people should stay, like, three or four years and then they should leave. I didn’t fire them, but I thought, “If I’m doing my job right, they should want my job.” And since I wasn’t going to give them my job, they should find other places. So, Mary Kay Baumann was one of the best hires. She went on to do Geo. And then she and Will Hopkins married and they did American Photographer, and then they did American Craft magazine, which I thought was fabulous.
Carla Barr went on to do Connoisseur. Charles Pates went to a catalog company [Garnet Hill] and redid all their stuff. He started a music site. It’s called PatesTapes, that’s still around and is fabulous if you don’t know it. He used to give out mix tapes to everybody, and this transitioned to an online equivalent of mix tapes. So there are maybe a hundred or 200 subjects, and it’s free. It’s fabulous. And those are the people that come to mind.
Steven Heller: I want to take this time just to make two little anecdotes about you. One you may not remember at all, but over the last 15 years I’ve been doing a lot of work on Ladislav Sutnar. And there’s a story I always tell, and hope it’s not apocryphal, that you were in the Art Director’s Club when it was on Madison Avenue in the Look building. And you were sitting around, out in the vestibule or something, and there was some dejected old man sitting near you—I may have over dramatized the old man bit—but you were talking to him very politely and interestedly and he was saying how he used to be rather big in the organization and it turned out to be Sutnar.
Bob Ciano: That’s a true story. I thought he was a really nice guy and when I looked at his work I thought it was fabulous. I thought he did really groundbreaking stuff. You know, I’ve learned now that people avoid old men,and I’ve gotten into that category of being avoided. So, I think I first felt sorry for him and then realized this is a very talented, wonderful designer. And I loved hearing what he had done and his stories.
Steven Heller: The other tale I want to tell is, I forget whether I was ill or just plain depressed, but you brought me, speaking of Japan, a bonsai tree. And I think it was an oak. The first one died, as you might remember, and you had to come over with your medical bag and act as a tree surgeon to this little miniature guy. And that stayed alive for a few months. And then I didn’t have the heart to tell you it passed on.
Bob Ciano: Oh, I still grow them.
Steven Heller: And also when my son was born, you sent us a care package of Bob Ciano’s jams and spaghetti or meatballs, which, for those who never received them, are beautifully-packaged and hand-calligraphed labels.
Bob Ciano: Well, I still do that. So, you’re on the jam list.
Steven Heller: So, back to magazines, I didn’t realize that you had become creative director of Wired in 2005. How did that come about?
Bob Ciano: When I came to California, it was for Encyclopedia Britannica. I had moved to Chicago. And in Chicago we were opening something called Britannica School. We were going to do online learning and they decided that the office should not be in Chicago, where the book division was, and it ended up being San Francisco.
So I came here and about a year into it, we all got fired. There were 50 of us. The whole office got fired. And I got a job at The Industry Standard, a weekly magazine. And the first year I was there, we had 8,000 pages of advertising. So many pages that we had to start a second magazine because we couldn’t bind all the ads into the weekly.
Steven Heller: What year was that?
Bob Ciano: 2003 or 2004. Most of the ads ended up not being paid for because they were startups that went out of business. So, from there, I was doing Forbes ASAP, designing that, and somebody I worked with at The Industry Standard was working at Wired and the art director announced he was leaving, like, within two weeks.
And Jeremy LaCroix, a designer at Wired, recommended me to be the art director. And they hired me. I was supposed to stay a month or two while they did a search. I was not going to be considered for being the art director because I was too old, I was told.
Steven Heller: Was this before it went to Condé Nast?
Bob Ciano: No, it was Condé Nast, but they were here in San Francisco. The two months ended up being a year there. And I had a great time. I loved being there. I loved the magazine. And a year later they hired somebody and I moved on.
Steven Heller: Did you see any irony in “Mr. Print” working on a print magazine called Wired?
Bob Ciano: Yeah. I did. But I didn’t let it get in the way.
Steven Heller: So what happens after Wired? You’re in San Francisco, the next I hear of you is that you’re teaching.
Bob Ciano: Well, you know, I started teaching at SVA when I was still in New York in the sixties, late seventies. I was teaching a class with Ed Lee. He was a designer at Columbia Records with me. And we co-taught a class. And then I taught at NYU and I taught, oh, a lot of places—I’ve always been teaching. Always.
Steven Heller: Always magazine design?
Bob Ciano: No. I did classes on typography. I did classes on just thinking. It didn’t have to be magazines. It could be how do you come up with good ideas.
So after being at Wired, I went to work at St. Mary’s College as their creative director, and that was doing their magazine—they really wanted to upgrade their magazine. I did all the campus signage. I did the letters going out to donors to raise money. I did uniforms for the basketball team. And that was fun. I enjoyed that. But, after a while, I get antsy and I want to try something else.
Steven Heller: You’ve been antsy a lot in your life.
Bob Ciano: Yeah. I once made a list and it’s, like, about 22 or 23 places that I’ve worked as an art director. I must admit it was easier to move years ago, when I lived in New York. You know, people were switching off all the time. Things seem much more static now, and as I’ve gotten older, you know, I don’t get calls from people looking for art directors. So I’ve morphed to just being, not just, but being a teacher and doing freelance. But, strangely enough, freelance has been very busy.
Steven Heller: Very busy. Since Covid or before Covid?
Bob Ciano: Before Covid. So currently I’ve got two books going. I’ve been doing music videos, and magazine redesigns.
Steven Heller: All out of your Ciano Designs studio?
Bob Ciano: Yeah, this room. All out of this room. Before Covid I had two people in the dining room working, but now we do it long distance.
Steven Heller: Going back to teaching, I face this getting into my dotage, that the students tend to know a lot more than I do, in terms of popular culture, in terms of technology, and the quality, at least on the surface, of what comes out of their machines is so far superior to what I used to do when I’d mark up tracing paper pads like Lou Silverstein did. How do you cope or adjust to this kind of newness? In the face of growing older?
Bob Ciano: I push back against it. I make them sketch on paper. They think I’m, you know, ancient. But I’m more interested in their process than I am in their finished work. So I spend a lot more time making them do thumbnail sketches, pushing their ideas to past where they want to go.
And I’m always preaching that it’s better to start way out, in an uncomfortable place. You can always bring your design back. But it’s very hard to start conservatively and then push it out. So I make them sketch a lot and we talk about the idea more than the finished art. And they’re all working on their tablets. And I think it’s restrictive.
I had a student last semester who was doing a book and she had the type set and I asked her what size the type was and she said the text is all 24 point. And I said, “What is 24 point? How big is that?” And she said, “It’s 24 point.”
And I realized she didn’t know what a point was. And she didn’t really know the size because she was looking at it on the screen. So it kind of led me to do several classes on what’s a ‘point’? What’s a ‘pica’? Why are we still using this nomenclature? That you can use type as a visual element, a design element. It can be the only design element. Don’t just, like, throw in some type.
And the students tend to resort to, “I’ll do hand lettering.” Because they don’t want to deal with points, and picas, and Bodoni, or whatever. So I kind of force them to do that. And I also teach them calligraphy. You know, how to take a pen and—I just, sadly, saw in the paper a few weeks ago that David Lance Goines died.
Steven Heller: Yeah. He was 77.
Bob Ciano: … And we were scheduled to go to his print shop. Every semester I took a group to his shop. But I think it’s important for the students to explore and it’s too easy in Procreate to get the same old answers over and over. And it’s just not good enough.
Steven Heller: Do you see that as the rule? Because I see as, certainly as an exception to the rule, that students are interested in hot type, hot metal, letterpress, silk screen—things that we were—that they are interested in.
Bob Ciano: I’m not seeing that here. I’m not. I mean, I introduce it in the class, because I teach a class on typography and design for illustrators. And, at the beginning they’re not interested. But by the end I hope they are. And one of the nice things, and I don’t know if you’ve come across this, I’ll get an email from a student who I had, maybe, five years ago, who’ll say, “It’s now sinking in. The stuff you told me is now making sense. It didn’t make sense when I was a student.” And that’s always gratifying.
Steven Heller: You always get one out of every 20 that will do that.
Bob Ciano: That’s a pretty good ratio.
Steven Heller: That’s a pretty good ratio.
Bob Ciano: I still try to push illustration. You know, I have no problem with photography, but I don’t think illustrators are being used enough. And I think they bring something to the table that photography doesn’t particularly do.
Steven Heller: How do you feel that the students have changed in the last 10 or 15 years?
Bob Ciano: I don’t know if they’ve changed as much as I’ve changed. Or maybe they’ve changed and I’ve stayed still. They seem too quick to settle on an answer. And the exploration part doesn’t seem as emphasized as much as I think it should be. They’re very interested in the surface of what things look like, but there’s no surprise or depth. They’re very adept at polishing things, but I don’t think they spend enough time thinking about things.
So I play opera for them. I introduce things that they’re not familiar with. I show them work of illustrators that they’ve never heard of because they’re from 30 years ago. So I’ll show them the work of Guy Billout and they don’t know who he is. How could that be? So I make each student do five minutes on somebody whose work they like.
And last semester one student did five minutes on Mœbius, which was a surprise. So we talked about Mœbius and then we talked about Tin-Tin. And then I showed them Guy Billout’s work and they loved it. And I said, “Would you like to meet him?” And we did a Zoom with him for two hours. The one good thing about, the only good thing about—for two years we were doing Zoom classes only—was that I was able to get people from all over the world to talk to my class. Every week I had somebody dialing in from somewhere—people they wouldn’t see. So from Italy, from Japan, from South America, it was great.
Steven Heller: So I want to end with two questions. I’m working on a piece based on the old Fisk advertisement, “Time to Re-Tire.” Do you remember that little boy holding a tire around his nightgown? And of course it’s related to me and others like me who are wondering if designers ever retire or just fade away like old soldiers. What do you think about that?
Bob Ciano: I think we’re old soldiers. What would I do? I don’t play golf. You know, this is too much fun. As long as I feel like I can do things. I don’t apply for jobs anymore because once they see my resume, they know I’m too old. But as I said there’s turned out to be a lot of freelance out there. And as long as I feel like I can still do the work, I’m going to die in my chair.
I have this video interview with Saul Bass that somebody did. You may have seen it. But at the end of the interview the interviewer says, “Are you going to retire Saul?”
And he said, “Are you crazy? I’m having too much fun. Why would I stop working?”
And I feel the same. As long as I feel like I can do it, I’m going to do it.
Steven Heller: That’s great. So the last question I have: Is print dead?
Bob Ciano: No. It’s just different. I think things are morphing all the time. And I don’t know if print has to be print in a traditional way anymore. I think one could do a magazine in all different forms. And that’s the exciting part. I try to avoid telling my students, “This is the way we used to do it.” Nobody cares. How best to do it now with the tools we have now.
Steven Heller: And we could call it anything we want.
Bob Ciano: Exactly. Magazines, or books, have come in many forms over centuries. They’re not going away. They’re always changing. Is there going to be a Life magazine again? No. Do we need one? Probably not. But there are ways to tell stories and there are ways to present information that can be special and can be memorable. And we just have to find those ways. And be willing to try things.
In between his magazine gigs, Ciano did stints designing album covers for Columbia and CTI Records.
For more information on Bob Ciano, or to beg for a jar of his homemade spaghetti sauce, start here. In addition to running his studio, Ciano teaches in the Illustration Department at California College of the Arts.
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Back to the Interviews
A Freaking National Treasure
A conversation with illustrator Anita Kunz (The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time, more).
A conversation with illustrator Anita Kunz (The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time, more).
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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY COMMERCIAL TYPE
By any measure, Anita Kunz has built a dream career.
She’s won every award, been inducted into every hall of fame, won every medal and national distinction. When her native Canada ran out of honors to bestow, the country minted a postage stamp in her honor.
Over the last 40 years, the Toronto-based illustrator has created covers for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time, and many (many!) others. On top of that, she’s now authored two volumes of her own work.
“She is,” as Gail Anderson, her former Rolling Stone collaborator puts it, “a freaking national treasure.”
And yet, despite all that success, Kunz confesses to still battling with self-doubt. No matter how great the genius or how many accolades hang on the wall, the familiar feeling of insecurity and inadequacy spares no one it seems. Is this good enough? Am I good enough? Every thinking creative person faces these questions at some point in their career.
While the universality of self-doubt may serve as consolation for those wrestling with some type of creative crisis, today’s guest has a different attitude about it. Instead of trying to quash self-doubt, “embrace it,” she says.
“Self doubt is fuel—a generative force. Allowing a measure of uncertainty fosters experimentation, playfulness, and an open-mindedness that helps keep the ego in check.” And in a profession like editorial illustration, where rejection is ever present, self-doubt can transform into a survival skill.
In this episode, we delve into all of this, and we’ll talk about Kunz’ recent turn as an author, her favorite art directors, and that time she collaborated with an artistic monkey named “Pockets Warhol.” We also go into a dark moment when she was embroiled in a nightmarish copyright lawsuit. And, because it’s 2023, we’ll talk about what artificial intelligence means for her profession.
Anne Quito: Anita, I’m so pleased to finally be here. Since we first spoke I’ve watched, listened, talked to some of your colleagues. So I was thinking we’d start from the beginning. When we first corresponded, we chuckled at the notion that we share kind of the same name.
Anita Kunz: That’s right.
Anne Quito: And then you said that your ancestors trace back to Transylvania. Can you talk a little bit about your background and your family?
Anita Kunz: Well, sure. Yeah, so we are from a long line of people from Transylvania. In the 12th century there was a group of German people who went and settled in Transylvania, which, you know, is Romania.
And so I think what happened was that they, at that time, I mean this is so long ago, but I think at that time they needed to settle Romania, and I think a lot of Germans went and made their homes there. They were farmers and peasants and I think they were given a pretty good deal. I think they were given land and they didn’t have to pay taxes for five years.
And I just recently have been doing a bit more research into it and I find it really fascinating. We went there a few years ago and it’s beautiful and rugged and the, you know, the mountains are just, it’s just beautiful.
People think it’s very weird, and I remember my mother didn’t really talk about it that much because she didn’t like the way people talked about her people. She didn’t like the whole vampire thing, right? But anyway, if anybody is interested in Transylvania, King Charles has an Airbnb there and you can go, and one of these things that I discovered is that he is a very distant cousin to Vlad the Impaler. So there is a Transylvania connection. But that’s the extent of what I know.
Anne Quito: That’s incredible. So good. And your last name—I always have this hunch—I mean, I’m a reporter and I meet a lot of people and sometimes someone’s last name, or I would say often, gives a clue about their ilk. And your last name is Kunz, German for “art.” As if you are destined for this profession.
Anita Kunz: I guess so. I guess so. It’s very, very close. It’s “kunst,” but, yeah it’s, it’s very close.
Kunz’ uncle Robert Kunz (above)—a major influence for her—was an illustrator in Toronto.
Anne Quito: Yeah. Was art a big part of your upbringing? I know you were influenced by your uncle. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that.
Anita Kunz: Yeah. My first, and one of my biggest, influences ever was my uncle Robert Kunz. And he was an illustrator. And this was way back, way back when, and his motto was “Art for Education.”
And so, kind of from that, I learned that it would be great if art could serve some kind of a purpose or be useful in some way. And it didn’t just need to be decorative, it could perform a function. And he was a huge inspiration. Not only was he an illustrator, he illustrated all the textbooks when we were in high school and he did the “Children’s Corner” in our local paper in Toronto. He was just amazing.
But also, he was just a quintessential artist. He did weavings, and he made architectural freezes, and landscapes, and all that kind of stuff. But what I loved about him is that he also influenced me on my worldview, which is that he had a studio on the lake. He was an environmentalist, and he knew the names of all the animals. So I loved that whole, that aspect, of him too. So, yeah, the first big influence for sure.
Anne Quito: I’m going to make a sharp turn to magazines. Because when you spoke, you said you’ve always loved magazines and this is what you wanted to do. Can you talk a little bit about why? I know you did some early work in advertising as well, but what made you fall in love with magazines?
Anita Kunz: Well, you know, I didn’t know what I was going to do. When I went to art school, I went to the Ontario College of Art, and the only thing that I knew was that I wanted to draw pictures and I needed to make a living. It was as simple as that.
So I went to college and I thought, well, I guess I’ll be a children’s book illustrator. And then I developed this kind of very cute style. And then I did some advertising. But actually, I did quite a bit of advertising and I was able to, you know, I was lucky to make some money, but I got tired of drawing little animals in skirts and making cute stuff.
And I wanted to grow and I wanted to do things that were really interesting to me and things that were more political. And anyway…
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble for Rolling Stone.
Anne Quito: I heard you describe your very first paintings as “very, very dark.” Is that true?
Anita Kunz: Okay, so I went through a phase where I did really cute stuff. But then what happened was, I became very influenced by some of the British artists. And what happened at that time, and this really catapulted me into magazine work, was that two great art directors came to Toronto through Toronto to New York via the UK. And it was Robert Priest and Derek Ungless.
A Ralph Steadman portrait of Kunz.
And they went on to do great things in the magazine field. But what they did in Toronto was Weekend Magazine. And Weekend Magazine came out once a week and it was kind of a general interest magazine, but they were using people like Sue Coe for skiing, for a skiing article. They did a great cover of the Anti-Fur Industry by Ralph Steadman. And I just began to really love the work of the British illustrators.
And the work was darker. And I really tried to stretch instead of doing, you know, work that was cute and “palatable,” I just really wanted to get into doing some more substantial work and to really be more of an artist and make work that was much more personal. So that’s kind of where that’s where that started.
But also, when I started, there seemed to have been so many possibilities. I mean, these art directors were doing really amazing creative work. It was really out of the box thinking. I’ve been thinking, I knew I was going to talk to you about this. I’ve been trying to think of examples. I’m pretty sure it was Robert Priest, who was doing something for a magazine. It was a fiction piece, and it was about three very different characters. So he got three different illustrators to illustrate one piece. This is really amazing thinking.
So very, very early on I was drawn a little bit to dark work. But also I just loved, to me there seemed like endless possibilities in the magazine field.
Anne Quito: I hear some nostalgia for what was. Why do you think things changed so abruptly? Do you think it’s the speed of production? What happened?
Anita Kunz: We’re talking about a span of 40 years here. I don’t know how they got away with it, except that they were allowed to do really creative work by the publishers. By the editors. So I think it all goes up to who’s running the show.
But I do remember back then, doing all of this social- and politically-oriented work and having carte blanche, like having complete autonomy. That’s the kind of thing that I think is really different now. I would get a manuscript and I would be asked to give maybe one or two sketches. But I think back then there were a lot more art directors who were thinking in terms of, not style necessarily, just style, but that the illustrators, maybe, we had a brain and that we had thoughts about these things, and we had emotional reactions, and we had intellectual reactions to the piece, and then it didn’t just have to be the way it looked.
“Very early on I was drawn to dark work. But there seemed like endless possibilities in the magazine field.”
Kunz’ 2017 cover for Variety was a nod to a 1968 Esquire cover featuring Richard Nixon.
Anne Quito: Do you remember your first magazine cover?
Anita Kunz: The first cover…I’ll tell you the first illustration I ever did. The first public illustration I ever did, I got out of school and, you do everything that you’re going to do and, you spend hours putting together a portfolio and it has to be perfect. And you’ve asked all your teachers what you need to do. And, so I went out there and I got a—it was for Toronto Calendar magazine or something. It was about the “Great Canadian Bathtub Race.” And it was something so inconsequential. And I think it was maybe a three-inch wide spot.
And it was just really silly. It was just probably some little, I don’t even remember, some little race to do with charity. And I got the job on Friday, and I immediately went into an anxiety attack/panic mode. I cried all weekend. I delivered the job. I’m like, it’s so cute when I think about it now. I was just so desperate that this was going to be this incredible piece for the Great Canadian Bathtub Race.
It was just, it’s kinda sweet when I think about it now, but I guess they liked it. I must have chilled out a little bit after that, but I thought, “I can’t do this. This is so stressful. I can’t do this.”
Anne Quito: I want to go back to that emotional rollercoaster, but first I’ve got to ask, what is the Great Canadian Bathtub Race?
Anita Kunz: I can’t really remember. Well, I don’t remember what it was, but I think it was just a silly thing. I assume it was done for charity. But I mean, that was my big splash into the field of illustration.
Anne Quito: I want to go back to what you said about art directors and freedom. And your work has been, as we all know, has been published in every major magazine over the four decades: Time, Newsweek, GQ, The New York Times, The New Yorker. Can you tell me what makes a good art director?
Anita Kunz: I actually have an awful lot to say about that because without great art directors illustration really can’t thrive. The ones who are the most open-minded and interested are the ones that, you know and, in my view, offer the most creative freedom, I think are the best. And I am so endlessly lucky that I’ve gotten to work with these incredible people. I’ll name some of them if you don’t mind.
In Toronto one of the first great art directors I worked for was Louis Fishauf. And he was at Saturday Night magazine. And this was after my cute phase. This is when I was doing serious illustration. But the subjects that he gave me to illustrate, I mean, I remember there was one about Helmut Rauka, who was a Nazi war criminal found living in Toronto, and the assignment was to basically read it and come up with a couple ideas and that was it. It’s a far cry from what happens now where it seems like almost every detail we’re being told exactly what to draw. But, I had such a visceral reaction to the story. I think that always helps come up with a better image.
I’m just going to interject here and say, I moved to England for a while and I went to see the art directors there. And I went to see Gary Day-Ellison at Picador Books, I knew he was a great art director, and the first thing he asked me was, “What do you read?” I mean, that sounds like such a nothing question, but it was so that he could know what kind of jobs that I could do my best at.
I worked for Steve Heller. I worked—I was in the right place at the right time. Tremendous luck. Arthur Hochstein. I got to do Time covers. And I did some Canadian Time covers for Edel [Rodriguez]. But, I didn’t want to make a list for you because I knew that if I left some people out, I would feel terrible for a week after. But just all this wonderful work that we illustrators used to get, you know?
I used to get two or three jobs a week and I just wrote down some of the topics all over the place, but really interesting. Socially- and politically-oriented subject matter about things like marijuana legislation, chronic fatigue syndrome, Viagra—I did a Time cover about Viagra—American politics, motherhood. I did the sex column for GQ. Censorship, the drug wars, gun control, child abuse, politics. This was pretty heavy stuff.
And a lot of us illustrators because we were given this great, tremendous freedom, I really think it was a little golden age in the eighties and nineties. I didn’t realize how great it was and how lucky I was to have that kind of freedom to make pictures and have everybody see them. It was amazing.
Anne Quito: I love hearing those stories, but as we know with great freedom, the burden goes to the illustrator to come up with a novel, original solution. Now, I spoke to one of your former art directors at Rolling Stone, Gail Anderson. I said to her, “What would you ask Anita if you could ask her anything?” Actually, her real answer is, “Can I buy one of her paintings?”
Anita Kunz: Oh, but I’ll send her one. Oh my goodness.
A 1987 Rolling Stone cover portrait of Michael Jackson
Anne Quito: But her real question is—I’ll read it—she says, “How has she kept it going at such a high level for so many years?” She says, “I mean, I go back to 1994 with Anita, and that was a long time ago. Anita’s managed to get better and better and has never rested on her multiple laurels.” How do you keep it going? How do you keep it fresh?
Anita Kunz: Well, that’s, that’s incredibly sweet. I think Gail is one of the great art directors. I loved working for her. First of all, I could talk for an hour about Fred Woodward. Maybe we can talk about him. But just working for Gail. You know, she was—she is—one of the greats, and I don’t think a lot of people realized at the time that Fred was doing all these amazing spreads and designing all this great stuff, but so was Gail.
I think a lot of people may have assumed that it was all Fred, but she has always done this, like, amazingly terrific stuff. And I certainly was hoping that she would get the art direction job after Fred left, but you know, she’s absolutely amazing.
But I could ask her the same thing. How does she keep it going? But I think I just have a restlessness. There’s all kinds of stuff I still need to do, feel like I want to do. As I get older, I feel more of a sense of urgency, like, “Oh, I want to do this,” and, you know, “I need to do a book about this.” So there’s all this stuff I still want to do.
Also, I’m absolutely terrible at boredom. Some dark things happen when I’m bored. I really need to keep—I need to keep busy. The pandemic was, you know… I don’t know. I had to do something, so I painted 400 pictures of women to know.
Anne Quito: That’s incredible!
Anita Kunz: But I got stuff done. I just am very restless as a person and I just need to keep doing stuff. So that’s the real answer. But thank you Gail.
Anne Quito: I’m going to go back to the book and the 400 portraits in a second. But I want to ask you—so you are restless, you are thinking of ideas. What happens if you ever get stuck? I always ask this because, as a writer, there are some things like “walk around the block,” “drink a lot of water.” I don’t know, some weird tactics. But it’s never worked for me. My only thing is to start. I wonder if you’ve ever experienced the so-called block on a deadline?
Anita Kunz: Yeah. Oh, sure. Yeah. I don’t think there are any artists or writers who don’t. But I think sometimes I remember in the past I just got really tired of doing the same thing and using the same formula. And I just thought, “That’s it.” And I got some clay and I started playing with clay and I just needed to pound out some of the frustration.
But I think I try something different. I think that’s the answer. Just I try something different. But it happens a lot and I think whatever you can do I think everything that you said is right, go for a walk.
But I’ve put together all these quotes for students and I can’t remember who it was. It may have been Chuck Close, maybe it was Milton, it was probably Milton Glaser, who said, “You just have to sit down and keep going and it’ll come back.” You know, it’s not always about inspiration. It’s about just sitting down and actually getting the work done and it will come back. And I’ve found that there are always ups and downs, but it will come back. Or maybe it won’t. I don’t know. It hasn’t—I’m still doing it. I don’t know.
For a 1989 Rolling Stone feature titled “In Search of Historic Elvis,” Kunz portrayed the King throughout history.
Anne Quito: You’re still doing it. You’re living proof that it works. You’ve also talked a lot about handling rejection. Now in those 10 tips you give to creatives you’ve written, I think, a list that you constantly update maybe. But one of them I was really struck by. You said, “Embrace self-doubt. It will propel you forward.” Now I have a follow-up question there. Self-doubt can sometimes be interpreted as a lack of confidence. It can be a negative. But how do you spin that? How do you propel that forward? And also where does the artist’s ego or voice come into this interplay?
Anita Kunz: First of all, rejection is so commonplace in the arts. You really have to develop a thick skin. So I don’t really quite know how I did it, but the whole thing about moving through the gut churn or whatever. Milton Glaser said that. So what I’ve written for students is really stuff that I never knew. I was wondering why, when I was young, like, “What’s wrong with me? Why am I always dissatisfied?” And, you know, “What can I do?” And, “What can I do to be better?” And, “What’s wrong with me?”
I always used to think that kind of stuff, but I never learned anything in school about that. What we learned in school was that, “Here’s how you do the job and here’s what you do. But none of the surrounding things. So yeah, it’s just moving through it, and I think the bottom line is just, it’s something that you feel that you need to do. And so whatever it takes, it just needs to be done.
And I don’t know where I developed that kind of tenacity. I think I was just always really stubborn. And I still have a lot of rejection. It’s really common. And I think it’s important for students to know that. It’s not them.
Anne Quito: I wanted to probe more on the self-doubt thing. I wonder how you feel whenever you submit an illustration. What are the feelings swirling around you? You talked about how you felt for the first illustration, you were wrecked with doubt and worry. Has that simmered down? How do you feel?
Anita Kunz: Thankfully it simmered down, otherwise I would’ve had to do something else. But when I do commercial illustration, every one is really different. Every job has its own set of parameters. Sometimes they’re completely self-generated. But for the most part, when I hand them in, there’s no great eureka! There’s no great joy. I always think I could have done better. And when I see it in print, I think, “Ah, I should’ve done this, or I shouldn’t have done that.”
I listened to Barry Blitt’s episode—which was great, by the way—and I was actually interested to hear that he does things two and three times. So for somebody like him, I mean, part of what he does that’s so brilliant is that the work looks so effortless.
But anyway, I don’t really know too many artists who aren’t insecure or don’t have tremendous self-doubt. I think that’s kind of the nature of the beast.
“It was a golden age in the eighties and nineties. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to have that kind of freedom to make pictures. It was amazing. ”
“The New Yorker was 100% behind me,” says Kunz after another artist claimed Mohawk Manhattan (above) was a stolen idea.
Anne Quito: Can I ask you about what you described as maybe the darkest point in your career? Is that okay? I read about a lawsuit you were embroiled in—sorry to bring that up—with The New Yorker. I think it was a 1995 cover, and someone claimed that he had the same idea. But what really interested me was you saying that after that, you became a little paranoid?
Anita Kunz: Well, I was paranoid to begin with, but that didn’t help. Well, there was an artist who—after my first New Yorker cover, it was 1995, and I was so thrilled. And, first of all, Françoise [Mouly] is another person we could talk about for an hour. She’s amazing.
But yeah, so I did my first cover and it was called “Mohawk Manhattan,” and it was around the July 4th weekend, and it was all about, “America! Rah, rah, rah!” But I wanted to sort of do something about, you know, Native Americans, and that they were really the ones who were ripped off.
So I wanted to make a nod to Native Americans. You know, let’s think about that on July 4th. So I did “Mohawk Manhattan,” and it was an indigenous person with a Manhattan skyline. And so after, I was thrilled. My first job. I was so happy.
And Françoise called me and said, “There’s somebody here who said you stole his idea.” And I said, “Oh, okay. Who is it?” And she gave me information and I called him. And probably I shouldn’t—like now, that would never happen. Now, it would just be like, “Let’s get the lawyer.”
So anyway, he seemed to think that I stole this idea. I didn’t know who he was. Nobody I knew knew who he was. And he presented me with a lawsuit. It took four years in Manhattan civil court. It was kind of a nightmare. And the whole point was that it was a plagiarism lawsuit. He said I stole his idea.
But of course the further we went along, the more ridiculous it sounded. Really ridiculous. And then ultimately, of course, we won. But what ended up happening was now, if you become a copyright lawyer—it’s a precedent setting case.
Nobody has ever challenged the notion of copyright. So after all said and done, it’s something that young copyright lawyers learn about. So it’s a very famous case. But what you said is correct. I mean, when you’re accused of something like that you’re thinking, you know, “Maybe I was walking in New York and someone walked by with a t-shirt on and I subconsciously registered it.”
And so every time I did a job and the idea came too quickly, I remember thinking, “Oh, I must have seen it.” It really jeopardized my ability to come up with ideas. And of course, we know that ideas are not copyrightable. So it basically made that case. But yeah, that was a really low point for me.
But I have to say, The New Yorker was 100% behind me. Because if you’ve worked in this business long enough, you know that the ideas are something that we all use freely. I used to work for Newsweek and Time magazine, and sometimes they would come up with the same idea. That’s why we use ideas to, you know, to talk about concepts.
Kunz in her Toronto studio
Anne Quito: And also with social media, on Instagram. We’re saturated with images.
Anita Kunz: Yeah, absolutely.
Anne Quito: Have you gotten over this sort of paranoia or like double checking if someone has ever done the same construct?
Anita Kunz: Well, I think I understand that it happens. I remember my beloved—my great art teacher, Alan Cober, one time we came up with the same idea. It was for something about pollution. It was an Earth Day and we both did like a pig with, you know, and it was just, we laughed about it because that’s what happens.
But one of the things I do now deliberately is, before I submit something, maybe to The New Yorker, I’ll do a Google search and if it’s been done, I won’t do it. So I sort of preempt it just in case, but that’s fair enough. I don’t want to do something if someone else has done it anyway. It’s just courtesy.
Anne Quito: I want to shift to your techniques and tools. I know you told me that you still paint in this sort of era of digital illustration.
Anita Kunz: Yeah.
Anne Quito: You use acrylic paint and there’s a particular thing we had talked about. I said that I love how you render eyes and you said, “Oh, actually people have commented on how I render hands.”
Anita Kunz: Oh, that’s right.
Anne Quito: Can you talk about your hands, how you take care of them and why this fascination with hands?
Anita Kunz: I mean, it’s just the way I draw, honestly. When I started, I just tried to get it together to do a drawing quickly because there were always deadlines, and how to make something as expressive as possible. And I thought the use of hands always made something a little bit more, more expressive. I guess that’s the only word I can think of.
So that was something I think I probably overused early on, but when I started, the, the medium I’ve always worked in traditional media. Right now it’s acrylic. When I first started it was watercolor. But when I was working for magazines, everything had to be done so quickly.
So I couldn’t make a giant painting and use oil paints, although some people do. I don’t know how they do it. But, for me it was, if I had a day to do something, I had to do it quickly, and I had a certain amount of real estate to fill. And so for me that meant working in water-based materials, which I’m glad I did because it’s green. It’s safe. That stuff is safe to use. There’s no turpentine or benzene or anything like that. It’s all green.
And I still used traditional—I mean, I’ve sort of grudgingly learned Photoshop just because it’s something I have to do. Of course there’s no sending via FedEx the final art anymore. I need to be professional and properly scan and color correct and all that stuff.
But still, I like painting and these days I’m working less to specifics and I’m doing a lot of my own stuff. And so I’m just experimenting with working really big and trying different materials, trying acrylic. Painting big forces you to change the nature of the way that you work. So I don’t work with little tiny watercolor brushes as much anymore like I used to.
Anne Quito: That’s wonderful. You mentioned Milton Glaser a couple times. I was with him till, you know, his last years working in his studio and working on a book, and his hands, to the last day, were perfect.
Anita Kunz: Really?
Anne Quito: No shaking. I think one time he experienced a little tremble and he said something about—is it Matisse?— leaning into how your hand shifts? And he did a portrait just sort of like deliberately with a shaky hand. But, he also said that “the brain is directly connected to the hand.” And it’s a weird statement. I have never stopped thinking about it. But whenever I see him, I look at his hands and they’re perfect.
Anita Kunz: That’s amazing. I was so in awe of him. I think the few times that I met him, I probably didn’t notice that much. But certainly I think he was absolutely one of the greats.
Anne Quito: I want to talk about your fascination with portraiture. You’ve done many, many portraits, but I particularly love your self portraits. I found one—you as Frida Kahlo. You as Albrecht Dürer. You as Mona Lisa. Can you talk a little bit about your approach to portraiture and why you chose some of these characters to embody you?
Anita Kunz: Yeah. When I think back, I really did start doing mostly socially- and politically-oriented work and using metaphor and, to illustrate these things. But I think when I started working with Fred Woodward—he’s the one that gave me my first portrait assignments.
And it was one of those things—I didn’t deliberately say, “Okay, I’m going to do portraits now.” But I think the first thing I ever did for him was Ray Charles, and it was for the Dallas Times Herald or something. [Ed: Woodward was briefly the art director at Westward, the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. He left to become the art director at Texas Monthly]. And from that point on, he just kept giving conceptual portrait assignments.
And I thought they were great. I mean, I loved doing them. I think I spent the majority of the years after doing almost predominantly portraits. But there was a lot of portrait work to be had—conceptual portraits. There was a lot of great stuff going on in the magazine world.
I was working for Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Ms., Entertainment Weekly, Premiere. And they all wanted portraits because that’s what they were reporting on and what people, politicians, celebrities, were doing. So I shot off into the direction of doing almost entirely portraits, which I actually loved doing.
I wasn’t necessarily interested in, for Rolling Stone, doing some of the celebrities. I wasn’t as interested in painting the celebrities as I was why are they celebrities? That sort of was the backstory to that. But to your question I can’t remember why I did those three. I did three portraits of myself as my heroes, basically.
I think artists typically do self-portraits. Some artists do it more than others. And I always need portraits for things—you know, author’s photos—but I want to give them some art instead. It was just an homage to three of my favorite artists.
And I put myself as them, and I called them, “Three Portraits with Facial Hair.” It was just a silly thing. But it was kind of my faves.
Anne Quito: You mentioned heroes. If you could pick three of your, let’s say, heroes in illustration...
Anita Kunz: Oh, boy. Boy.
Anne Quito: ...who would it be?
Anita Kunz: Yeah, see now I’m going to feel bad because the second I stop talking to you I’m going to think of 10 others. But I would say that my favorites are always Ralph Steadman, Sue Coe, for just the incredible work that she does as an illustrator and also now is a fine artist. And I’m going to also at this point say Marshall Arisman. Because there’s no one who helped me more when I started. I was in Toronto for a while, moved to England for a while, and then came back to Canada wanting to work for the US market because the US market was huge.
So I gathered up my courage and I went to see Marshall Arisman. And he was so kind to me. And he gave me names of people to go see, and he really kind of jump started my career. He was extraordinary. And of course his work, you know, he was such a kind man just by himself, but the work was extraordinary.
Here was somebody who was thought of as an illustrator, but absolutely straddled that fence into fine art beautifully. And his work was beautiful, and moving, and touching. So those are three, but there are tons more. Lots more.
SNL alum John Belushi on a 2015 Rolling Stone cover
“I’m sounding like a real grouch, but I really don’t like collaborating.”
Anne Quito: What you said about Marshall Arisman is so true. I met him, and that is perfectly accurate. Kindness and genius bundled in one.
Anita Kunz: Absolutely.
Anne Quito: If you could commission any artist or illustrator, I don’t know, in history to paint your portrait, who might it be?
Anita Kunz: Yeah. I really, I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, I’ve had my portrait done by a few people, but I think I’ve already had one done that I’m going to stick with. And it’s a picture that Ralph Steadman did of me riding a camel. And that’s hanging in my house. And if nobody else ever paints my portrait, I’ll be happy about that. I’ll be happy with that one.
But my favorite illustrators are ones who are incredible thinkers, who are concerned for humanity, who just go ahead and do what they feel like they’re meant to do. And they’re just incredible. But definitely at the top is Ralph.
Anne Quito: What a trip! Ralph over Leonardo da Vinci. Vermeer. Incredible.
Anita Kunz: Yeah, no, Vermeer would’ve been cool. I didn’t realize I could go back that far.
Anne Quito: I spoke to Mark Heflin, at American Illustration, and he has only loving words to say about you. I asked him a few questions, but he basically just sent me sort of this really loving, almost essay about how you’ve contributed to the illustration industry, not just about your work, but like how you’ve really been a voice for this industry. He gives three ingredients to describe your work: beauty, humor, and insight. Are those three things you try to balance?
Anita Kunz: That’s, that’s incredibly kind. I’m not quite sure what to say. That’s, that’s incredibly kind. I love Mark. I love what he’s doing. The American Illustration Annual, you know, right from the beginning—if you look at even the early annuals, you’ll see such an extraordinary array of illustration work. You know, everybody had a different style. Everybody was completely autonomous. It was really about their personal vision. It was much more like an art book than an illustration annual.
And the fact that he keeps doing it. And at that time, that was really a testament to the kind of autonomy that we all had. But anyway, I’m so grateful that he keeps this incredible book going. So he’s, yeah, he’s a dear friend.
“I love drawing monkeys,” says Kunz, who volunteered at a Canadian primate sanctuary during the pandemic.
Anne Quito: I love listening to your tirade against collaboration. I think I heard it in another—I love how you said, like, “You have to be given permission to realize your vision,” to be able to, like, I love this sort of assertiveness about “individual vision.” However … you’ve collaborated with a monkey.
Anita Kunz: Oh! I was wondering where this was going. Okay. I’m sounding like a real grouch, but I really don’t like collaborating. Because when I collaborate with somebody, I keep thinking what do they want and how do I please them instead of keeping it to what I think is best. But yes, I have collaborated with the monkey.
I’m glad it’s leading to this. So for about five years—I haven’t done anything recently, because Covid changed all of that—I was volunteering at a monkey sanctuary, the only primate sanctuary in Canada that rescues pet monkeys and monkeys who have spent their lives in labs, and they give them a good retirement.
So it was, for me, it was just really interesting because I love drawing monkeys anyway, and I just think they’re so human-like and I think we’re so monkey-like, and so just from that standpoint it was really amazing to sort of just be around monkeys. But one thing that they do that I think is really kind of interesting is that there’s a white-capped capuchin monkey that they named “Pockets Warhol” because he looked like Andy Warhol with his hair, and he really likes painting.
So there’s one person there who works with him and she puts out paint and he sits there and he makes these paintings. And it’s really good for one of the things that with captive animals you try to keep them busy and keep them happy and not just have them sit in cages. You try to keep them occupied. So that’s one thing that he likes to do. He just loves painting and the sanctuary sells them, and he really helps to keep it going.
But what I did once is I thought, “Well what, what would happen if I collaborated with him?” Just for fun, just to see what would happen. And so I gave a painting and he started working on it. Actually, we did this a few times now that I think about it. But the first one ever was a picture I did of a woman and a monkey, and he looked at it and he painted over it and I think he improved it. But then the very last thing he did was he put a slash over the woman’s head. And I thought, “Whoa, that’s a political comment right there, isn’t it?”
But that was just one of those fun things that you know it was just, it was really fun and hopefully helpful for the sanctuary.
Anne Quito: I love that. And you’ve done a portrait of Ellen DeGeneres together?
Anita Kunz: Yes, we did. Because Ellen is such an animal lover. Yeah. Oh, wait! We did a portrait of Ricky Gervais too!
Anne Quito: Oh my goodness!
Anita Kunz: Because Ricky Gervais is actually a supporter of the sanctuary, too.
Anne Quito: You mentioned volunteering at sanctuaries. I was wondering, it sounds like you might be working all the time and very busy with illustration work, steeped in this industry, in this profession. But do you have hobbies outside of illustration, or art, or your profession? What do you like to watch? What do you like to read? Any guilty pleasures we should know about?
Anita Kunz: Oh, of course Lots of guilty pleasures. I just finished watching Black Mirror—oh my goodness! Anyway, if you haven’t watched it yet, the first one is about AI. But as far as anything else, I am not a polymath. I’m terrible at everything else. The only thing I can do is illustrate, seemingly. So thank goodness I was able to be so lucky as to have found so many great art directors to work with.
But yeah, I’m not very good at other things. I’m a terrible cook. I really don’t, you know, I’m not much good at anything else. But I have to say, going back to my uncle, I love being in nature. I love spending time in nature. I love kayaking and being out in the winter. So I’m a big nature lover and a big you know, animal advocate. You know, I do as much as I can, but I’m not working all the time, especially now.
I spend tons of time working on a project and now I feel like I’m a little bit between projects, but there’s always stuff to do. Like, you know, I need to organize my last project and it’s going to be a traveling show. So there’s all kinds of stuff that needs to be done for that. So there’s always, there’s always stuff to do.
Anne Quito: I also heard that you might be an incredible snowboarder.
Anita Kunz: Oh, well, I was certainly one of the first, but I haven’t done it recently. My bones are getting a bit creaky for that, but I used to love it. Yeah, I used to love it. We were the young punks on the hill, but that was many, many years ago.
Anne Quito: I want to switch to your books. The 400 portraits and the books that you’ve mentioned. So from doing a lot of commissions and working for magazines, you’ve, I guess during the pandemic, began, these two and three—actually there’s a third one coming—you began these projects for yourself. Can you talk a little about, first about Another History of Art, which I love?
Anita Kunz: Well, thank you. Years ago, I think maybe 20 years ago, I started doing my own work. I wasn’t getting the kind of freedom that I liked anymore in the publishing world, and I just started trying other things. I started trying to paint really big. I actually tried an excursion into the art world, which failed miserably. I mean, illustration does not translate well into the art world, I have found. There’s some kind of a stigma. If you’ve been an illustrator, watch out.
But I had these paintings and I thought, even as I moved away from print, I always come back to print, and I think it’s interesting that this whole podcast is about, is print dead, because I always seem to come back to it.
So I made a whole bunch of paintings and the art world, somehow, I didn’t have the right pedigree or I don’t know what that was about, but, I thought, “Well, I think this might be a book.” So Another History of Art became a book. And it’s satirical—I think my work is satirical, but it always has kind of a dark undertone.
So really, it’s meant to be funny and it takes a look at the history of art and how there are hardly any women in it. And the history of art, as we’ve learned here, certainly is very European-based and everything. And so, I sort of re-did a lot of iconic paintings as if I had done them. It’s pretty cheeky. It’s a pretty cheeky thing. So that became a book.
Then what I started during the pandemic was this book of women you should know, Original Sisters. And at this point I’ve painted 400 and they’re very simple. For me it’s more about the content. You know, it’s, “Why don’t we know about these women?” The woman who discovered the nature of the universe and all these women who are extraordinary and that they should be household names.
And so during the pandemic I started to paint one a day. And it was really, really inspiring. It was also inspiring painting one portrait a day of an extraordinary woman in a pandemic where we were asked to mask up and stay home, you know, big deal. What I was painting was women who endured the Holocaust, and endured wars, and did these extraordinary things.
So it was a very interesting project to work on at a trying time for us. So I went back to print, I thought when I reached a hundred, I thought, “I think this might be a book.” So I reached out to Chip Kidd, who I adore, and said, “Do you think this might be a book?”
And so it became a book and, you know, a foreword by Roxanne Gay, which was like, couldn’t get better than that. So that became my second book. But in the meantime, I kept going and I’ve done 400 portraits. It’s going to be at the Rockwell Museum next summer.
And hopefully it’ll travel, because it’s just really, it’s super interesting and I made it really fun. You know, it’s colorful, and there are pirates, and there’s all kinds of stuff. It’s for kids, it’s for boys, it’s for girls. It’s been really fun and it’s been really interesting. I used bright colors.
Anyway, for me it’s just something, this is different from my other work because it’s just purely information. You know, these are women you should know about. And then I have another book coming out in the fall, and I’m actually working on another one. I really wanted to do something that’s a thinly-veiled book about parables, and having to do with the time that we live in and gender politics and the environment. And so that’s what I’m working on now. So I seem to be, I’m straight back to print no matter what, where I don’t never go too far, but I’m, but I, right back here.
Six of the more than 400 portraits Kunz created for her book, Original Sisters.
“I constructed a career that allowed me to work for the people I wanted to and not for the magazines I didn’t want to. I had autonomy. That was part of it.”
Anne Quito: It’s the right direction. You’ve told me that you’ve started writing, and I guess this parable book could involve a lot of writing. How is that going? Are you okay calling yourself a writer?
Anita Kunz: Well, I’m not a writer. The women’s book was really just factual, you know, it’s historical nonfiction. So it was a matter of just trying to write just enough about the woman to get people interested in their accomplishments. So, I didn’t have to write anything more than to explain the person’s accomplishments and do it in a way that was concise.
But yeah, I’m not a writer. And I also do everything backwards. The parable book will start from the paintings. The paintings are the jumping off point. And then I don’t have to write that much because I’m not actually comfortable writing.
Anne Quito: I’ve heard you give advice to your students that it’s important to have some kind of fluency to explain your ideas, is to have words to sort of explain your concept.
Anita Kunz: Absolutely. Especially now. When I think back to when I was doing all the magazine work, I felt as though, especially with somebody—we’ve hardly talked about Fred Woodward, but he was so important in my career—but it seemed as though I worked with Fred and that was it. I’m not sure he ever went back to any editors. I think he just had the final say. I’m not sure how prevalent that is now, but it just seemed that I was working with Fred and that was it. And it’s quite a bit different now anyway.
Anne Quito: I read that Publishers Weekly described your books as “trickster feminism.” Are you okay with the label “feminist”?
Anita Kunz: Of course. I mean, the textbook definition of feminism is giving women and men the same rights and opportunities. Who doesn’t want a fairer world? You know? It goes to everything, doesn’t it? Differently gendered people or races or anything. Who wouldn’t want a more fair world?
Anne Quito: So you mentioned you started 40 years ago. I imagine you might have experienced some sexism during the early years? Is that something that lingers and something you want to, I don’t know, address now?
Anita Kunz: When I came up, I went to a school called The Illustrator’s Workshop, and it was always men, it was always just white men. And I think they, they brought in Barbara Nessim for an afternoon, the great Barbara Nessim. She’s wonderful. She’s amazing. And that was really the only contact I had with a female illustrator.
And even when I was teaching, I was always the only female. And I used to get asked all the time, “Why aren’t there more women?” I think I have more sophisticated answers now but at the time, I kind of just, you know, stubbornly kept working and I didn’t really consider that there were fewer female illustrators. For me there were always more female art directors.
But now, the older I get the more I see. Yeah, there were some pretty, pretty nasty things. You know what? I’ve made a giant painting and I’ve put all the terrible things that people have said to me into the painting. And it’s a picture of a woman and they’re, they’re kind of like little gashes and little tattoos and everything. Probably I will never show them to anyone but it, it’s kind of helped me think, “Wow. That wasn’t cool. That wasn’t cool. That wasn’t cool. That wasn’t cool.”
I think there’s still an awful lot of work to do. I think it’s certainly better. I mean, there’s so many amazing young women artists and designers, and I mean, just extraordinary, extraordinary.
And again, it’s just having the opportunity. Just give us the opportunity and we’ll do our best. But you know, part of the reason for the book was to showcase—“Okay, you haven’t heard of a woman scientist. How about this one?” It’s a sort of a love letter to the women who have gone before me who have not been recognized or have fallen through the cracks, or who were marginalized. So it all comes out in the work.
A 2004 cover for The New York Times Magazine.
Anne Quito: I imagine the books are opening you up to new audiences, maybe younger audiences. It struck me how generous you are to keep, I guess, reintroducing yourself. You have all the accolades. You are in halls of fame. But every interview I listen with you, you are generously, sort of, recapping your career.
Anita Kunz: I’m happy to talk about this stuff because we have a small field here, and I think it’s important to help people who are coming up in the field. I remember very well the artists who we went to see, or who were my teachers. I remember very well the ones who were generous and the ones who didn’t tell us what kind of pencil they used. Come on.
You remember this stuff. It’s not such a big world and. And I think kindness, especially kindness, is really important. The thing about different audiences, you know, I mentioned briefly that I tried to get into the art world for a while and you know, that was me really trying to find a different audience. But it didn’t work. It didn’t work until recently.
And this kind of maybe goes to, sometimes you want to do something and you just have to wait for the right opportunity. There is now a gallery, Philippe Labaune Gallery, in Chelsea, among all the really important, fine art galleries, and he shows narrative art, and he shows print art, and he shows comics, and he shows cartoons.
And, so I actually finally did get into a Chelsea gallery. And Philippe Labaune is French. He’s from Paris. And if you’ve ever been to Paris, you’ll see that every block has bookstores and they love comics and they love narrative art.
So maybe print is not dead. It’s in Paris.
Anne Quito: What a quote! It’s not dead. It’s in Paris.
Anita Kunz: It’s just in Paris. Yeah, it’s in France.
A collection of Kunz’ covers for The New Yorker.
Anne Quito: I love that quote, “Print is not dead. It’s in Paris!” I want to ask you about the future of magazines and editorial illustration. Right now we’re saturated with talk about generative AI. And there was this, I think it was Cosmopolitan magazine who made a splash saying, “Oh, we collaborated with OpenAI and generated the first cover.” How do you feel about this? Is this a threat? Is it an opportunity?
Anita Kunz: You know, somebody asked me to write an article about it, and I don’t feel I have the facts yet, 100%. But I don’t like it. I don’t like it because, you know, a lot of the internet has been scraped. And a lot of the material is copyrighted material. I don’t like it. I don’t know where it’s going to end. Somebody told me that my work is being used by one of the big companies, Stable Diffusion.
And somebody told me, “No, it’s not just the work, it’s your name.” Apparently, any artist who goes to some of these platforms, you can type in your name and, “Do such-and-such, a dog, in the style of Anita Kuntz.” Well, I don’t like it because now I’m competing with myself for something that I would charge such and such for, now it’s being done with no input from me. To me, that’s identity theft.
In season six of Black Mirror, the first [episode], I loved it so much, it was actually about this, it was about identity theft. Because illustrating, it’s not just about style, it’s not just about the picture, it’s not just about a cool visual pun. Illustrators are, hopefully, we know about the world. We’re intelligent. There is intent. It’s not just a cute picture that we’re going to slap here. There are any other number of things that compel an artist forward, you know, choice.
When I was an illustrator I constructed a career that allowed me to work for the people I wanted to and not necessarily for the magazines I didn’t want to. So that was part of the deal for me was that I was able to make visual opinions and again, I had autonomy. I mean, that was part of it. It wasn’t just someone taking an arm from here, and a leg from here.
The thing that bothers me more than just how I think it’s going to affect artists and writers is how it’s going to affect culture. An already divided culture. I don’t know how we’re going to get together and continue to have any kind of a stable democracy when there’s the potential for making any politician say something and nobody will know if it’s real or not.
Being an illustrator everybody knew it was a painting. They knew it was a visual opinion. But with AI, that’s the part that really scares me. Like when there is no such thing as truth that we can all agree on, then what happens to democracy? So I think it’s actually a much bigger problem than how it’s affecting my field.
I keep actually reading everything I can about it. It’s really fascinating to me. Because when I started in the field, I remember when faxes came out. Wow, that was amazing. You know, I was mailing things or FedEx-ing things. And when computers came out, or the internet, it changed everything. And I think this is going to change everything too, but I’m not quite sure how yet. So that’s the question of the decade or the millennium or whatever.
Anne Quito: My last question. How would you like to be remembered?
Anita Kunz: You know, I would like, I would hope that I’ve contributed more than I’ve taken away. And that’s it. I hope that I’ve done more good than harm. And I think that’s all I can expect. Everything else is gravy.
“Three Self Portraits with Facial Hair,” from left: Kunz as Albrecht Dürer, Frida Kahlo, and Marcel Duchamp (after da Vinci).
For more on Anita Kunz, visit her website or @anitakunz on Instagram. Her books, Another History of Art (Fantagraphics) and Original Sisters (Penguin Random House) are available wherever books are sold.
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Back to the Interviews
All the News that Fit
A conversation with editor and founder Jann Wenner (Rolling Stone, Outside, Men’s Journal, Us Weekly, more).
A conversation with editor and founder Jann Wenner (Rolling Stone, Outside, Men’s Journal, Us Weekly, more).
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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT COMMERCIAL TYPE
Imagine there’s no sixties.
In 1967, today’s guest was a college dropout whose Plan B was to start a rock ’n’ roll magazine. Plan A? “Kicking back, having a good time, delivering letters, and smoking dope all day” as a San Francisco postal worker. But thanks to a nudge from his mentor, Ralph Gleason, and a cash infusion from his soon-to-be-wife, Jane Schindelheim, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner dove head first into Plan B. And the rest is magazine history.
Imagine there’s no Gonzo.
Rolling Stone was an instant hit. But it wasn’t until Wenner met the now legendary journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, and later published his “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” that Wenner found the editorial promised land. Thompson’s explosive, unhinged prose created space at Rolling Stone for a legion of iconic writers—Tom Wolfe, Lester Bangs, Joe Eszterhas, PJ O’Rourke, Matt Taibbi, and others—and allowed the magazine to expand its reach from music to something much bigger. “If it feels good, man, just do it.”
Imagine there’s no Annie.
In 1970, a 21-year-old newcomer was given her first paid assignment for Rolling Stone: a cover shoot with recent ex-Beatle John Lennon. In short time, Annie Leibovitz was named the magazine’s chief photographer. But it was a nude portrait of teen idol David Cassidy for a 1972 cover that signaled another watershed moment for Wenner. The allure of celebrity fueled the young editor’s personal obsession to join the cultural elite, and the cover of Rolling Stone became his ticket in. The combination of Thompson’s wild-eyed, uninhibited ramblings and Leibovitz’s intimate, provocative imagery was the magic that set Wenner free.
Imagine all the memories. It’s easy if you try.
Five decades on, Rolling Stone is a boomer autobiography—its pages filled with Random Notes and “All the News that Fits,” epic stories documenting massive successes, abject failures, and the lives and deaths of the culturally relevant, all accompanied by unforgettable photographs and game-changing design. The magazine has survived near-bankruptcies, editorial scandals, cross-country moves, and yes, even that Reagan-era “Perception vs Reality” ad campaign.
In the end, though, Wenner’s story is a somber one. Any time a parent outlives a child, there’s immeasurable sadness. Of course Rolling Stone lives on—“digital-first” as they say—with new owners. And with Wenner’s son Gus taking the reins in 2017. But it’s not the same Rolling Stone. How could it be?
As for the man himself, that legacy is “complicated.” But in this episode, you’ll get glimpses, as Rich Cohen describes in The Atlantic, of Wenner’s “infectious charm, his gleeful, let’s-hope-we-don’t-get-shot zeal for adventure, how contagious his enthusiasm was, and how important his loyalty could be.
“Wenner’s pen and language weren’t what defined him as an editor. It was his vision and energy that attracted the best talent and inspired such memorable work.”
Rolling Stone debuted on November 9, 1967 as an 11x17-inch newsprint magazine, folded in half.
George Gendron: Given the name of this podcast, we really do have to start by asking you, if you don’t mind, to recount for our listeners the emotional story of your last day in the Rolling Stone offices, right from the prologue of your book.
I mean it was really, really emotional and so relatable to so many people in our business. It’s almost like a eulogy to a child you’ve lost.
Jann Wenner: Well, it is. I do compare it to a death and, as you say, it goes through the various stages of trying to accept it. And it’s not until, really, the body is in the ground you actually believe it. Even as sick as the patient is, you’ve still got the patient, the loved one around. And you hang on. You hang on and you cling and try and keep it alive. But even when dead, the body’s still there.
It’s that moment of burial. That moment when I left the office, though it was empty by that time. And the chairs and the computers had been thrown in trash bins and, you know, just nothing was left.
I was sitting there writing and I got a call from a friend of mine, Patty Scialfa, who’s Bruce Springsteen’s wife, and I was telling her what I was doing, and she says, “Well, why don’t you just drop what you’re writing and write this scene?” And I did write it, sitting there as it was happening. And it turned out to be the opening scene of the book.
George Gendron: Man, it’s really powerful.
Jann Wenner: Well, thank you.
George Gendron: It does make me wonder, though, why did you subject yourself to that? Why did you actually go into the office when the physical symbols, if you will, of what you had created were being torn down and carted out?
Jann Wenner: Well, I was using it as a place to write my book and I was set up there in my office with my writing desk and computer and research and all that stuff. So it was a convenient place to go to work. That was the primary reason. I suppose there’s an underlying psychological reason of wanting to just cling on to something I was familiar with for so long. I mean, I was still in my office. My office for some 30 years. Where, as I say in the book, I had risen to fame and fortune and ruled an empire.
George Gendron: Founders often talk about a moment in a startup where suddenly something happens. They’re sitting there one day and they go. This is going to work. They know it. It’s not about the confidence that you bring when you launch. It’s about, kind of, the response. The response in terms of revenue. It’s like, “Okay, this thing is sustainable.” But also people tend to feel that way when they know something is over. Was there a moment when you just knew that for you personally, this was over?
Jann Wenner: I guess it was kind of a creeping dawning of reality. I mean, going back some years to 2008-2009 when the ad recession started and the internet was starting to come on substantially, we were in a position where we kind of bucked it for the first year or two because our demographics were so good and were so desirable. That’s because we were a quality magazine, which goes last.
And then it just started to shrink year after year, after year, after year. The first couple of years of decline, you could say, “Oh well. We’ll turn around the advertising, sell something.” But then it just became inexorable. And I suppose the moment when my son [Gus Wenner] and Tim Walsh, my CFO, came and said, “We have to sell Rolling Stone.” And I always knew that if I sold Rolling Stone, you know, I was not going with it. It’s too late.
Wenner with his wife and co-founder, Jane, in San Francisco.
George Gendron: When would that have been roughly?
Jann Wenner: Gosh. The years! I don’t even know what this year is. Like the end of 2017, 2018? I’m not sure. Maybe 2016, 2017. [Ed: It was 2017].
George Gendron: I think a lot of people experienced those same feelings around that same time. I want to go back now. The story about the launch of Rolling Stone, of course, is legendary. But I do want to touch on just a few quick things. The first is just a personal response I have every time I’m reminded that just before you launched Rolling Stone, you had taken the civil service exam, wanting to be a postal worker. Could you explain to young kids listening to this, what was so attractive about being a postal worker in San Francisco back then?
Jann Wenner: Let me take you back to San Francisco then. It was a small town, still. It was beautiful weather outside, generally. Always pretty pleasant weather. And it was just, if you came out of the hippie scene, I mean, the thing was you didn’t really want to work.
A career was, you know, no good. There was no big sense of ambition. “I’ve got to go into marketing” or “It’s time to go to business school or Wall Street” for me. There was none of that.The ideal thing was to sort of kick back and have a good time.
So if you worked for the postal service, you could go out and deliver letters or whatever and smoke dope all day. And you know what? What’s wrong with that? That’s cool.
“I always knew that if I sold Rolling Stone, you know, I was not going with it. It’s too late.”
Nobody did death like Rolling Stone.
George Gendron: So in a way it was perfect training for the launch of Rolling Stone.
Jann Wenner: Well, no. No. It was like a laissez faire time. It was a kick back era. People didn’t need money that badly. There was plenty of money around.
George Gendron: That was also starting to surface, believe it or not, even here on the east coast, although not with that same intensity.
Jann Wenner: The East Coast was never as laid back.
George Gendron: No. But I can remember with my college buddies talking about the fact that nobody wanted to go into a profession. Everybody was trying to figure out, well, what are the alternatives?
Jann Wenner: That was the cool thing. I mean, really, the fifties was a very prosperous era. Everybody was raised with some level of money. Let me just say it was comfortable, really, for everybody. You were lower middle class, you went to a good public school. You know, there were jobs aplenty. The country was so small then. Less than half the size it is now. Less than half the size it is now.
George Gendron: It’s amazing, isn’t it?
Jann Wenner: Think about that. Think about New York City with half the number of people in it, for example. Anyway, and so there was no real struggle or need to survive. Your education was free. Benefits were everywhere. Your parents had money. People had a second car in the garages. It was not like today. So the need to support yourself, let alone the need to do something highly ambitious, was not there.
An Issue of firsts: Lennon’s first post-Beatles interview and Annie Leibovitz’s first cover assignment.
George Gendron: Now I want to touch on something else that I think you touch on in the prologue. And that is the mission. But you write about it in a very interesting way. I can’t recreate the actual sentence, but you’re talking about the mission of the magazine Rolling Stone. But you also talk about your personal mission. And I wonder, can you describe the two of those as you were thinking about them back then?
Jann Wenner: Well, I think they’re kind of one and the same really. I mean, the general idea is, I had developed this deep belief and love of rock and roll. I really wanted to be part of it. It was the magic that could set you free. And I wanted to be part of it, know more about it, and just have it infuse my life.
And through that a lot of feelings were expanded, explained, developed about personal freedom, about public duty, about what society should be like, what we should stand for in our lives, having fun. What I boiled it down to, finally, is a passion for, and a belief in, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Which defined, I think, The American Dream. Or if you define it as something other than getting very rich or something.
And let’s call it the foundational principles of the country. And I believed in those. And they were expressed for me through rock and roll. I found them in part through rock and roll. And they were what we were taught when we were growing up. And to grow up, and go to college, and discover that these things were not true created this giant rebellion and this desire to make them become true, despite what we had all embarked on. That my generation embarked on. And that rock and roll was devoted to.
George Gendron: Yeah. It’s funny, almost everybody I knew who was my age, I’m 73 now, growing up then they either wanted to be a rock musician or they wanted to play third base for the Yankees.
Jann Wenner: Well, yeah. It was the land of choices. What can I tell you?
“We didn’t pay salaries. We didn’t pay rent. Our only expense was food for me and my girlfriend and printing the paper itself”
Like father/like son: Wenner passed the torch to his son, Gus, in 2017.
George Gendron: So you rustle up about $7,500 in startup capital. That’s about, I don’t know, $65,000 in 2023 dollars.
Jann Wenner: But that’s not even, it’s not even—is it even comparable? If you were to start a magazine today, you’d need several million dollars.
George Gendron: Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask you.
Jann Wenner: I mean, then maybe, I don’t know. You could do it for a million. You’d need a lot. Who knows? Anyway, yes.
George Gendron: How long did that initial 7,000 bucks last?
Jann Wenner: To today! We just spent money as we could afford it, as we had it. And spent it and it just, you know, just kept it alive. We didn’t pay salaries, so we just paid increasing expenses out of the money that would be coming in. And we didn’t pay salaries. We didn’t pay rent. Our only expense was food for me and my girlfriend and printing the paper itself.
George Gendron: Right. You know, for 20 years I ran the creative team at Inc. Magazine, and chronicled the rise of the entrepreneurial economy. And Rolling Stone is kind of the classic startup story in terms of scrappy, fiercely mission-driven, unbelievably resourceful—because you’ve got to be. And it strikes me that when you and Mick Jagger launched the UK version, it had none of those qualities. Maybe it had too much money. Didn’t seem to have much passion.
Jann Wenner: Yeah. Right. I mean, Mick, represented unlimited financing to an extent.
George Gendron: Not a good thing for a startup.
Jann Wenner: Yeah. And the people starting out, we were kind of more laissez faire and their attitudes for things, they weren’t really professional journalists or professional magazine people. They didn’t tend to have that hunger or the drive for it. And the kind of passion that makes you, you know, go further on less resources.
George Gendron: I also think there’s a quality that Rolling Stone had that felt like you were discovering and exploring with your audience rather than kind of you already had all the answers and you were simply imparting it to them, if you know what I mean. Kind of mutual self-discovery.
Jann Wenner: Meaning me and my readers?
George Gendron: Yeah.
Jann Wenner: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Probably. Yeah.
Determined to change Rolling Stone’s image—and rake in more upscale advertising—Wenner hired Minneapolis-based ad agency Fallon McElligott to appeal to yuppies and their dollars.
George Gendron: I think there’s nothing like that in terms of a bond.
Jann Wenner: That’s the thing. The bond that developed between our readers and ourselves was so incredibly strong. People believed in Rolling Stone, loved Rolling Stone. It just meant the world to so many people at so many levels. Whether it was just an average reader there in Paducah, Kentucky, or whether you were Mick, or Bruce, who’s spoken about it at length. He said, “We were out there in New Jersey in nowhere land hoping there was somebody out there like us. And Rolling Stone would come and it was like a vision of another country.”
They were waiting for it every two weeks, you know. It told them of all the possibilities. What they could be. And the fans who just listened to this music loved it and went, “God, there’s another person who feels the same as I do about this. Wow!”
George Gendron: I live in this little compound on the South shore of Boston, and my neighbor here, Jay, has what he calls the “1968 Museum,” which is basically about five or six rooms devoted to two things: Rolling Stone and Andy Warhol.
Jann Wenner: Awesome.
George Gendron: And he was a young kid. He was growing up in Mississippi. Or Texas, I think it was. And that was his lifeline to, kind of, a different world.
Jann Wenner: That’s great.
George Gendron: So you grow up in San Francisco—the magazine really couldn’t have been launched anywhere but San Francisco—have you thought about the relationship between a magazine’s identity and place? Where that magazine has its roots? And I’m curious if you felt that Rolling Stone’s identity and culture changed when you left San Francisco and moved to New York?
Jann Wenner: Well, all of the above. The more, in a way, kind of spiritual home of it, even more than San Francisco, was Berkeley, when I went to college there. And that’s where all this stuff first started happening. This education in rock and roll, and the local politics, and drugs, and all those things really coalesced there. It started to crystallize.
And it was in San Francisco the year later when I was working for Ramparts that we started Rolling Stone. But once it was so much reflective of that time and place: the drug scene, the rock and roll scene, this hippie thing that was going on, the kind of values and ethos that was trying to be developed there, and what the Grateful Dead and the Airplane were doing. And we were totally of that time and place.
We, obviously, were trying to think internationally because the same kind of thing was happening in London with the Beatles, you know, the same kind of rock and roll scene, all that. So we’re trying to think nationally and internationally but we were such a product of that time and place.
And only over the years did we start to shed some of that local stuff, and started to see it in a broader sense. And we started to put people and writers in LA, in San Francisco, and London and New York, which gave us a broader look at things.
Before we moved to New York we had already kind of outgrown San Francisco, and our fame and reputation and reach had become very national, very international. Hunter [Thompson] had covered the elections, the presidential elections of ’72. We had, by that time, done the Silkwood case, the Patty Hearst case, we had interviewed John Lennon and all that. So we had a national focus already. But when we moved to New York, by that time we’d already kind of, really, left behind the hippie ethos of San Francisco. That had already dissolved several years earlier.
And the San Francisco rock scene had become much less intense. And of course drugs are everywhere now, so you didn’t have to be in San Francisco. But when we moved to York, two things happened. One is my staff for the first 10 years—because it was primarily ex-newspaper guys, hard-hitting reporters, young people looking for stories, you know, really crusaders—stayed behind or dispersed, really.
And when we went to New York, we picked up a lot of people who were more professional magazine writers, and profile writers, and softer in a way. Good writers, good people. Also, we started covering more entertainment, more popular entertainment. But are those also reflective of the change in music itself.
This 1972 cover, featuring Annie Leibovitz’s photograph of teen heartthrob David Cassidy, signaled Rolling Stone’s slow shift away from musicians and towards celebrities.
And then of course you get to New York and your concerns become much more cosmopolitan, maybe a bit more sophisticated, more worldly. And you’ve gone there, really, for purposes of ambition, for purposes of career success. And so we were very busy pursuing that as well. And we wanted to be influential in an entirely different world. Kind of the literary/media capital of the world.
George Gendron: Was there a downside to that from your point of view looking back?
Jann Wenner: Well, I think. Yeah. It’s a little glittery. You get distracted. There’s a lot of dinner parties and there’s a lot of entertainment and, you know, your values are much more about career and success.
It’s always distracting for a while. You have to quickly get your head on or you can lose yourself in all that. And people have. Some people struggle with it, a little back and forth. I struggled with it a little. And end up doing what I always do.
George Gendron: Let me switch gears, Jann, for just one second and talk about the incredible, outsized role that design played in the success of Rolling Stone. It was extraordinary. As I was reading your book and rereading parts of it, I was making a list of your designers and I can’t name them all, but Roger Black, Fred Woodward, Gail Anderson, Nancy Butkus, Deb Bishop. It goes on and on and on. And then of course you have Annie Leibovitz, Richard Avedon, David LaChapelle, Herb Ritts, I mean, God, Albert Watson….
And so I guess my question is did you back then have any idea the outsized role that design would play in Rolling Stone’s success?
Jann Wenner: Well, not really. But coming from Ramparts—Sunday Ramparts—they had a really strong sense of design there because they had a very influential art director there named Dugald Stermer, who copied the London Times for a lot of its tricks, techniques, and Oxford rules. The typeface was, of course, Times Roman.
And so I was raised on that, and the idea of elegance. I was an early reader of The New Yorker and Playboy, both of which were really excellently-designed products. And I wanted to distinguish ourselves so much, from the beginning, from the underground press. So I wanted the type set properly, justified columns, and so forth.
And so I don’t know where I developed that design sense, but I realized early on that the look of the magazine, as much as what you’re saying, defines to the readers who you are—who you think you are and the message you’re trying to give. So my message right away was: this is a straightforward, serious, sober publication with formal rules of design, formal rules of journalism, and reporting.
And then, our first real designer was my brother-in-law, Bob Kingsbury, who gave it a very fine, folksy-looking design where it felt very—it was very personal. It was a very idiosyncratic design. And it evolved over the years saying different things to different people. Ultimately, we started winning a lot of awards.
I always viewed the art director as my essential partner. As well as the managing editor. And I think that if you want people to read your magazine, you have to make it look good, and look attractive, and look inviting to have, to want to buy, to want to own. It should be something you’d be happy to set on your coffee table. You want it in your house you like to look at. And it had to have that look.
I was early on a fan of Twen magazine, a great art director, Willy Fleckhaus, who ran that. And, you know, all those things influenced me. My wife [Jane Wenner] was an art student and had a great sense of taste and style. So I was very lucky.
I liked art directors. To me it was critical. It was really secondary at most other places. To me it was of major importance. The photography as well. To me, what we are covering, rock and roll, is an extremely visual thing as well as a musical thing. The thing that you write about. The looks counted. Their costumes counted. All that counted a lot, and that we had to show. And so that meant you had a visual magazine.
Lennon was murdered just hours after Leibovitz’s legendary shoot.
George Gendron: What was your favorite story and Rolling Stone cover of all time?
Jann Wenner: The all time favorite cover’s gotta be Annie Liebovitz’s portrait of John and Yoko, the naked John curled up and holding onto Yoko, which was taken three or four days before he was killed.
And it’s won every award there is for covers. The best cover of all time. Cover of the Year. And it’s partially because the picture itself shows such vulnerability and love. And a friend of mine, a writer actually Scott Spencer, called it the Pietà of our times, which indeed that’s great it is.
And then given that it has, comes out of that moment in time, that moment in history of the death of John Lennon has taken on us even more rich and extraordinary meaning. So it’s certainly gotta be the most powerful. It’s one of the most beautifully designed and executed as well. So, it’s fantastic.
My favorite story is much harder. I mean you’re talking about—the body of work with Hunter was amazing and so fun for me. And working with Tom Wolfe and doing The Bonfire of the Vanities was just a riot, and laughing all the time. And I’ve just been reading over some of the interviews I did with Bob Dylan and John Lennon and Mick and they were remarkable documents of people in their creative heights and their thinking.
And you were asking me before about my friendships with these people, but friendships had enabled these really direct, open conversations where they’re startlingly frank about what they do and looking to explain themselves.
George Gendron: Just a footnote to what you were just saying is, were you influenced by the rise of the album cover, which was kind of a design frontier and an art form in and of itself?
Jann Wenner: Yes and no. We were always aware of it, but we weren’t trying to design like album covers. Obviously that’s a piece of design we saw all the time. I guess we were influenced by certain lettering things or…. It was in the air. It was in the air.
We were more influenced by the poster artists of San Francisco, in a way. Like Rick Griffin, and Stanley Mouse, and Wes Wilson, than by album covers.
George Gendron: That’s interesting, yeah. But now I want to fast forward and I want to talk to you about something you touched on in the book, but I would’ve loved to have heard more, and that’s about making money. So you, at one point, you start to think about, “Well, how much is enough? How much is too much?” And in fact, I think you go and have a conversation with Jerry Garcia.
Jann Wenner: Right.
George Gendron: And Garcia says something that a lot of very, very smart and wise entrepreneurs have said, which is, “Maybe you’re too big when you don’t know the names of everybody you work with.”
Jann Wenner: Right.
The Beatles, collectively or individually, have been on the cover of Rolling Stone more than thirty times.
George Gendron: But you know, you get to a point at your peak where you’ve got Look Magazine, Family Life, Record Magazine, US Weekly, Men’s Journal, Glixel—kind of the early Wenner Media. I think at one point you guys were thinking about doing restaurants.
Jann Wenner: Uh, yeah. There’s… Yeah.
George Gendron: I know. Okay. That was an outlier, but I just thought ...
Jann Wenner: ...those are people that approached us and wanted to license our name. We never really thought of getting into it.
George Gendron: So, in your mind, what was your ambition? People sometimes referred to you wanting to be kind of a 21st-century Henry Luce. Maybe wanting to build the next generation Condé Nast.
Jann Wenner: I never was that ambitious. Ten years after coming to New York—or even before coming to New York, when we started Outside, a magazine which still thrives—simultaneously, two things came to mind: One is I wanted to turn over being a day-to-day editor to somebody else. I wanted to be less involved. And I felt I’d learned a lot about magazines and I wanted to put that knowledge, and the kind of staff and structure we had developed, and expertise, to leverage that into other magazines.
And I thought I knew how to do that. And I had a couple ideas for magazines I wanted to try out. And so I really wanted to use Rolling Stone to go into the magazine business, as well as the Rolling Stone business. And I pursued that for a number of years and I more or less knew what I was talking about. I still had some big, expensive lessons to learn.
And I enjoyed being a magazine publisher. And I titled that section of the book, “Building the Empire.” And we were lucky in having a couple of good magazines and one wildly successful magazine. So at the end of the day, I could look back on their career and say, “Well, you know, I started five or six magazines, four of them still exist, and two of them were huge hits.”
Hunter Thompson’s presence in any given issue was cause to celebrate. Below, from left, William Greider, PJ O’Rourke, Wenner, and Thompson interviewing presidential hopeful Bill Clinton for in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1992.
George Gendron: Was that enough for you?
Jann Wenner: Yeah! Then, by the time I had the second huge hit, by that time, the internet was coming to destroy the magazine business.
George Gendron: You mentioned in this context that at one point you had an offer to sell at the top of the market.
Jann Wenner: Right.
George Gendron: But you don’t provide any details at all. Can you share more about that?
Jann Wenner: Well, I provide the details of my thinking about whether you take the offer or not, in which I really go through the analysis that I made at the time, which is, “What would I do with this money, and what happiness might that bring me?” versus the happiness that I was getting—the satisfaction from doing this job, which is so incredibly unique.
And you know, was the happiness of buying a small yacht or owning five Picassos going to be as great as the life I’d made for myself and the people I’d met through the magazine? And my sense of self and ability to contribute to the dialogue about national policy? And my joy? And just being deep in the rock and roll thing—was that close to what I have?
So, instead of selling it then and making a fortune, I said, “Just stay around.” And I was there for another 10 years. And what would I have done? I’d have been bored. I couldn’t start another Rolling Stone. You know, I might start other magazines. I might do this, I might do that, but nothing was going to bring the satisfaction that I had with Rolling Stone.
George Gendron: I’m curious, there was, obviously, a period and a pretty extensive one at Rolling Stone, where you really were immersed in the issue-by-issue creation. And then, of course, as time goes on, your energies start to focus on a much broader array of projects and other stuff. Do you ever look back and think, “Man, my best moments were X”?
Jann Wenner: Not in that context. I do remember feeling a special thrill and the adrenaline of working on an issue, of approving layouts, and copyediting. And then, of course, all the fun of the deadline, which everybody hates at the time but realizes it was just too much fun. It was like being with the gang and playing, you know? Whether it was all-nighters or not. But the actual creative moments were great.
The magazine—if I was involved in an issue, it was generally much better. I could sharpen the layouts. I could do other stuff. Every time I could bring my touch to it, you know, there’d always be improvements. The headlines would be funnier or whatever it was. And when I stepped away, it was extremely good, but probably not as good as it could have gotten. That was always the dilemma. But I had other things I wanted to do.
George Gendron: What was it like when you were—your offices were I forget they were in the early days in the typesetters?
Jann Wenner: We were in the printer’s loft. We had a, there was a ...
George Gendron: Printer’s loft. That’s right.
Jann Wenner: ...small building, and upstairs above the Goss Community Press that they had downstairs. They had a type shop with about a dozen Linotype machines, big lofts where they stored all these rolls of paper—I mean, huge, heavy things. And an ink melting smelter or something where they would melt all the lead type down and burn all of the ink that was left on the lead, which was the smell we lived with for a long time.
George Gendron: Brings back memories. There was nothing like actually closing a story when you were down at the typesetter side by side with the typesetter himself, man. But the question I wanted to ask was what was it like for you when you grabbed that first issue of Volume One, Number One of Rolling Stone as it came off the press?
Jann Wenner: Well, it was, I don’t know, sometime in the evening and our first staff photographer, Baron Wolman, was there, another great photographer who should have been mentioned. And they came off, you know, it was on cheap paper. It was folded in half and if you picked it up, you smudged the ink on your fingers. You’re just coming out the press. But it smudged anyway.
And I just looked at it. I was paging through it and I thought, “Geez, this is, you know, we’re never going to do as good again. We’ve already peaked, you know, this is as good as it can ever get.” I really thought the dilemma was: How could it get better?
George Gendron: And lo and behold...
Jann Wenner: Blind self-confidence.
George Gendron: Yeah. But I think what you’re getting at is, again, something that Adam Moss and I were talking about. A lot of people bring it up in our podcast and that is kind of this sense of actually making something real, something tangible that you hold in your hands. Man, there’s this kind of psychic thrill that you get that maybe you don’t get from almost any other process.
Jann Wenner: I don’t know. I mean, when the book came about a year ago, whenever I first got the first copies of it, all bound. You look at it, you hold it, you smell it, really. I went to sleep with it. I put it in my bed. And the physical, you know, manifestation of something that came from your, it’s wholly from your mind, wholly a work of imagination is very, very powerful. I mean it. It’s like, in a sense really, dreams that have transmogrified into being true. It trans-substantiated your brain into an actual object. That is a miracle.
George Gendron: That is a miracle.
Jann Wenner: The turning of something into flesh.
“I’m proud of my generation.”
George Gendron: People ask me, how could you possibly stay at Inc. for 20 years? And of course part of the answer is that the world and the market was changing so radically that the magazine was changing year over year, so it wasn’t the same job. But the other was—I agree with you, it’s a great word—it was like chronicling a miracle. The magazine really was about documenting the process that people go through when they transform an idea into something tangible. It’s thrilling.
Another question that comes to mind that I think a lot of journalists cope with to this day. And that is managing the tension between a relationship that forms between you and the subject—let’s call it a friendship—and journalism itself. And you were really close friends with many of the people that you ended up writing about. How did you manage that? What kinds of conflicts did it create for you? Springsteen is the godfather of one of your kids, for God’s sake.
Jann Wenner: Well, I mean, let’s divide this into two things: What are these people like as subjects and what are they like as friends? Let's talk about the very famous stars I was very friendly with or even the record company executives who were not so famous, who I had relationships with professionally and personally.
First off, the business that we were covering, the record business, unlike traditional American businesses, is about making art. About making people feel good. About the creative process. About good people and their imaginations.
And particularly in this one, there’s a lot of soul and spirit and beliefs underlying, more so, say, than other creative businesses like the movies or television, which are really substantially commercial and somewhat cynical enterprises—particularly television. But this was about doing good.
And the people in the record business were nice people. Nobody was making faulty cars or bad washing machines or selling cigarettes—anything. So the idea of having to do investigative reporting on them and harsh stuff was not unknown, but it was not really the business. It was not what was meant to be, what our mission was, what was called for.
Occasionally there’d be things like the prices of CDs, the attempt to shut down home taping—there’d be a few business issues where you had to stand up. That wasn’t difficult. But, so you couldn’t go to an artist and say, “Well, I need to investigate Bruce Springsteen. Or Mick Jagger.” It just didn’t call for it.
What we were there for—and what I was interested in—was we wanted to explore them artistically and thoughtfully, what their intellectual thinking is, what the creative process is, what they stood for, and their belief systems.
The one time, the only real time, it got in the way of a friendship was when we had to cover Altamont in 1969 and lay the blame in part to the Rolling Stones for why that happened. This is after Mick and I had been publishing Rolling Stone together, so, you know, we were close associates at the time and friends and all that stuff and I knew it would put this at risk, but I just really had no choice but to go ahead with this and report the story. It’s a major piece of journalism.
There was a murder, a killing, a bunch of issues that were not necessarily part of the creative, but in any case, then let’s look at the people themselves: Bruce, Mick, these are wonderful people. They are people so smart, so good in their own things, that they understand my process, and my needs, and my creative needs, and principles I live with and have to honor, and what journalists are.
There is a natural guardedness that one starts out with, but over a period of years, you know each other really well and you don’t doubt the friendships going either way. I mean, I understand and love creative people and I know how that works, what the creative process is like, and it’s different for everybody. And how it affects the ego, and how you think and how you perceive things, what you’re looking for, and how talent works. And so I’m very sympathetic and I like it. And so we get to talk.
There’s so much, mutually, that we have together, as well as family. You just develop friendships. I mean, I like the people. I never felt compromised. Nobody ever said, “Give me a good review or a bad review.” The respect goes both ways and nobody would expect me who knew me well to do anything like that.
So I never felt, in any way, compromised to do something or not do something. There was never that. There was always an implicit understanding that I looked after their interests as a friend, you know, but it is a two-way street of respect.
Anita Kunz’ portrait of Michael Jackson was commissioned by Rolling Stone’s great(est?) art director, Fred Woodward.
George Gendron: I want to wrap this up by quoting something that you wrote in the book and it’s, “The battles about the legacy of the sixties continue, known today as ‘culture wars.’ From my first day at college, it seemed we were on trial for intergenerational crimes.” Then later, but very closely related, you go on to say, “this book is a report on today’s world and how we got here.” So Jann, as someone who has chronicled the journey from the sixties to where we are today, where are we now?
Jann Wenner: The period that is called the sixties, or the Baby Boom, or the postwar generation has really significantly reshaped the country. Its values, its morals, and what the country stands for. I mean, the progress on human rights issues, whether it’s racism, sex, women’s equality, all these things. They’re so far advanced at this point—so far more advanced you could have ever imagined they would get from 20 years ago. Or 30 years ago. Or even 10 years ago. Remember, Barack Obama was afraid to come out for gay rights. For gay marriage. And it wasn’t until Joe Biden forced him. And now, of course, it’s a right!
And the generation took on—now the biggest crisis—the climate crisis, the environmental situation. And these are not resolved issues by any means. And there’s still things we’re fighting about and for, but I think most of this is just embedded in American society now.
There’s no going back on abortion no matter what the fights are now. There’s a right to, it still exists. Maybe it’s limited in some places. Maybe you have to go to other places for it. Maybe it’s being overturned. I don’t know. They’re not going to go back on gay marriage, you know? That’s set. If they do, big things are going wrong.
The big issue today is climate. And there, we, as a generation, as a society in whole, our generation has fought hard on this issue. But we are up against the most powerful forces in the world. This is not just being up against the legislature or people you can vote out of office in your state, or being influenced by public opinion and where we can go out in the streets and protest.
We’re fighting the biggest, best financed, greediest, most powerful forces on earth. Not just the United States, but in collaboration with the people in Moscow, and people in Saudi Arabia, and other places where they control the vast carbon resources, where people are regularly killed. Slaughtered. Killed for these things.
So whether it’s control of the rainforest or control of those Middle Eastern governments. So we’re in the biggest fight ever. Now that’s what we’re in. Everything else is on its way to being finally won, I think. But if we can’t win the climate fight, not only do we face short-term peril of disease, we share mid-term peril of vast population changes and migrations and refugees, which will destroy democracy and self-government and all kinds of freedoms that we now enjoy. And long-term extinction. Or, at least, maybe there’ll be a hundred million of us left living on the North Pole.
So, where are we? In an extremely hopeful place because we’re moving fast in a lot of directions, but also in an extremely desperate situation, because we’ve met a huge enemy and we don’t quite have the tools.
George Gendron: It’s interesting listening to you talk. My wife and I were watching Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis last night, and we paused it halfway through, and whatever else you think about the movie, I think Austin Butler’s performance was breathtaking. But my wife turned to me and said, “It is astonishing when you think about how far the culture has come...
Jann Wenner: Really!
George Gendron: ...in such a short time.” And we forget that. We forget that. And I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been hanging out with my buddies, and my colleagues, and friends and they start to talk about, “Oh my God, as a generation, we have really screwed everything up.” And I think ”No!”
Jann Wenner: That is not true at all!
George Gendron: It’s not true. No!
Wenner published his memoir in 2022
Jann Wenner: In part, my purpose in writing the book was to tell people, “No, we haven’t [screwed everything up].” We’ve got a lot to be proud of. We made a huge, huge difference. Enormous difference.
Think about the fifties. They threw people in jail who were gay. They castrated them. They could do that. Blacks? Jim Crow was still going on! I mean, they couldn’t vote, couldn’t use the same drinking fountain! On, and on, and on. I mean, women, you know, could cook—and that was all!
It’s come so far in such a short period of time. In my lifetime. And I think younger people today are passionate about the environment and they see this as critical. It’s their future. The same way we were against the war because we were going to get drafted and killed.
If they don’t solve the climate problem, these are the people—our children—are the people who are going to get killed, die of asphyxiation. So I’m proud of my generation.
George Gendron: I’m glad to hear that.
Jann Wenner: I’m proud of what I did. And I’m proud of the magazine I put out. I think all these things were historical, important, groundbreaking, and meant a lot to everybody and to the people in their lives, and to the country.
Wenner in his San Francisco office.
Jann Wenner’s autobiography, Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir, which The New York Times called “entertaining in spades,” is available wherever books are sold.