Esquire - Megan Lau

Esquire
Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great
American Magazine (For Men)
Megan Lau

Lau Esquire, Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great American Magazine (For Men)
On Fridays, the staff of Esquire magazine, stationed on the fourth floor of 488 Madison Avenue,
gathered in Harold Hayes’s office. The men and women, dressed in suits and shift dresses,
unbuttoned over drinks at the week’s end. With the smell of cigarettes and rye on their lips, the
magazine’s staffers—and any contributors that happened to be in the building—threw darts at pages
of the New York Times Hayes had pinned up on one end of the office. The game was to impress
Hayes, Esquire’s editor, with a pitch based on where the dart landed, worthy of being published in
the magazine. Friday afternoons were editorial meetings disguised as cocktail parties.
In the end no one was much competition for Hayes in the game of darts. He consistently
came up with the best stories for the magazine since he saw the world through the lens of Esquire.
From December 1963 to April 1973, Harold Hayes’s Esquire left an indelible mark in the history
of American magazines. Esquire tapped into the sense of skepticism, disbelief, and disenchantment
that came to define the Sixties in America. In writing and art, it was a pioneer. Of course, there were
also the iconic covers designed by George Lois that stirred millions of conversations—both
reproachful and laudatory—and thrust issues of Esquire off the newsstands into reader’s hands. The
Hayes years at Esquire illustrate how great magazines emerge from an alchemic mixture of luck,
inventive artists, interesting times, risk-taking, and an exacting editorial vision. A great magazine is
first and foremost the product of the editor behind it and they way that he or she leads the editors,
artists, and writers under the masthead.
Under Hayes, Esquire was almost invariably one of the bestselling magazines on American
newsstands and one of the leading magazines in the world. The Sunday Times of London named
Esquire one of the world’s great magazines (DiGiacomo). Time called the men’s magazine “bold and
occasionally brilliant.” (Polsgrove). It won National Magazine Awards for editorial content and
visual excellence. At its best, the magazine invaded national conversations about culture, celebrity,
gender, politics, and war. Esquire excelled at articulating the voice of youth witnessing titanic
cultural, social, and political change.
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Lau Esquire, Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great American Magazine (For Men)
The first issue of Esquire was published on October 15, 1933 in the middle of the Great
Depression, just as President Roosevelt was launching the New Deal. David Smart and William H.
Weintraub, Chicago-based ad men who also created the Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ), envisioned an
oversized magazine with the philosophy that “when one grew up one didn’t abdicate one’s animal
spirits, one didn’t stop savouring life in all of its gusto and diversity” (Douglas, 176). They hired
the young editor Arnold Gingrich, just twenty-eight years old at the time, to shape the magazine for
the everyday man. Gingrich called the magazine Esquire and filled it with an ingenious mix of girls,
style, cartoons, fishing, fiction, and journalism for intelligent men with “curiosity, imagination, and
good taste” (Ibid.) The premiere issue included bylines for Dashiell Hammett and Ernest
Hemingway, who became a devoted contributor to the magazine in its first five years.
Esquire was a massive success right out of the gates. The magazine’s initial press run sold
out within hours. Eventually 105,000 copies of that issue were sold. The success was all the more
remarkable because the magazine was priced at fifty cents—five times the going rate for magazines in
the 1930s. Esquire was designed to be a quarterly but demand for the magazine was so great that the
next issue was published in January of 1934. In spite of the tough economy, Gingrich’s genius
editorial formula gained many readers. Hemingway’s cachet drew other fine authors—and
advertisers—into the fold. Esquire was a playground for writers to experiment freely. Gingrich also
published material that other magazines rejected for being too offbeat or controversial.
Esquire became the most widely discussed magazine in America (Ibid, 198). By 1937, the
magazine’s total circulation was 675,000 (Ibid). Esquire established a new reading public of men
engaged in intellectual, recreational, and romantic pursuits. The New Deal had “given leisure a new
economic significance” and the Henry Ford five-day week gave men “more time to think of living as
an art, as well as a business” (Gingrich, 102-103). Esquire’s first ten years were halcyon days.
Despite the magazine’s success, exhaustion and personal differences led Arnold Gingrich to
leave the magazine in the mid-1940s, while the magazine was making profits of $1.5 million.
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Lau Esquire, Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great American Magazine (For Men)
In 1952, Smart wooed Gingrich back to Esquire. The offices had moved to New York 1 and
Gingrich was made publisher. In Gingrich’s absence, the magazine had floundered due to lack of
editorial vision and poor management. Gingrich’s had writers left and the magazine was stuck with a
reputation for being a “girlie magazine” filled with titillating half-nudes and pin-ups. Esquire lost its
place among the smart magazines Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Life, and Smart Set. Gingrich’s
challenge was to restore magazine so that it could stand beside its serious, smart peers, offer
captivating visuals like pictorial weeklies such as Look, and compete with Sports Illustrated, Playboy,
and “macho-man” 2 magazines such as Stag and Saga for the elusive male readership.
He worked to acquire a new stable of writers to raise the literary profiles of the magazine and
create a tone for the publication that was more serious, substantial, and political. The magazine he
formed, Gingrich knew, would be a place for “upcoming generations of readers to rally to it and
make it feel it was their own” (Ibid). By then another war had passed and American values and
perspectives were changing. Though chaos and revolutions were still to come, the Sixties and Esquire
would belong to another generation. Gingrich knew he needed younger editors to eventually take his
place since “people like a magazine that sees things the way they see them, and says things the way
they feel them, and once they find it they’ll keep coming back to it” (Gingrich, 210).
In 1957, Gingrich hired a stable of six young and thirsty associate editors—he called them
“young Turks” and presented a recently vacated corner office as bait. Among the young Turks were
Hayes and Clay Felker. Felker was a journalist, editor and man-about-town. He knew writers and
brought unusual ideas to the table. Felker was behind one of the first examples of New
Journalism—a genre of journalism using literary techniques pioneered in the 1960s: Norman
1 Meanwhile, Hugh Hefner, a promotional writer and failed cartoonist for Esquire stayed in Chicago and started his own
magazine: Stag Party—which was renamed Playboy (Esquire, 2005).
2 In the sixties, the second wave of Feminism destabilized men’s position in society. In response to changing concepts of
gender, the “cult of masculinity” emerged. Publications such as Male, Climax, and True responded to this phenomenon
(Waller-Zuckerman, 292-293).
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Lau Esquire, Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great American Magazine (For Men)
Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” (DiGiacomo). Hayes, on the other hand, was a less
cosmopolitan editor who had been introduced to Gingrich through a mutual acquaintance. Gingrich
initially sent him to work at Picture Week, where Hayes held the job for two years but was eventually
fired for producing a feature that foreshadowed the audacious attitude that Esquire would be known
for. As soon as he got to work at Esquire, Hayes championed the brash and irreverent personality
that would set the magazine apart from others. Hayes brought in William F. Buckley Jr. to write for
the magazine and he was the first magazine editor to hire Diane Arbus, one of the great American
photographers, after her partnership with her husband, Allan Arbus, had dissolved.
Esquire’s evolution came out of the Hayes and Felker’s competing editorial visions. Gingrich
held editorial meetings with the young Turks on Friday afternoons, which became “a schedule of
cockfights… under the cover of an editorial staff meeting” (Gingrich, 205). 3 By example, Gingrich
taught his protégé Hayes how to turn competition into a stronger content. Gingrich’s methods were
questionable but the shouting matches resulted in smart writing, strong reporting, and provocative
visuals. Also because of the young Turks, Esquire led the way in running ads throughout a
magazine, instead of sandwiching editorial content between front and back advertising sections. The
changes in format and editorial content brought down the median age of Esquire’s readership steadily
just as advertisers were realizing the importance of the youth market.
The four-and-a-half year battle between Felker and Hayes ended in 1961 when Gingrich
named Hayes managing editor. In his time at Esquire, Felker had shown unquestionable promise
and cultivated an impressive roster of writers. Embittered, he left the magazine to consult for the
New York Herald Tribune Sunday magazine, which Felker transformed into New York, a magazine
that set an example for every city magazine to follow.
3 Gingrich said his choice of Fridays “gave us until Monday to wash down the blood on the walls” (Gingrich, 205).
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Lau Esquire, Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great American Magazine (For Men)
To speak of Esquire’s golden years are to refer to Gingrich’s first stint as editor and Hayes’s
legendary decade at the helm. When Hayes was promoted, the magazine was on the verge of
bankruptcy. Magazines were losing advertising dollars, costs were soaring, and competition from
television and other magazines was escalating. 4 Nonetheless, during Hayes’s tenure as editor, the
magazine’s circulation reached an all-time high of two million (Lois). He engineered a magazine that
was being talked about, acclaimed, criticized, and imitated. Esquire became more than its tagline—
“The Magazine For Men”—it became required reading material for the culturally active, politically
aware, and intellectually inquisitive; a quarter of its readership was women (Polsgrove, 159).
The Esquire of the Sixties is almost unrecognizable as a magazine by today’s standards. It
was an oversized tome (12 5/8 x 9 7/8 inches) that was sold for just sixty cents to a dollar. Special
issues were plump with ads, but also with content. It looked like a book printed on thin coated
paper and in other ways it was like a book: the art and writing inside gave the publication a kind of
permanence. Magazines are often considered ephemera, but so much of Esquire from that decade
holds up and is remembered with veneration. Hayes was behind each of the lasting legacies from
that decade in Esquire’s history: the covers, the Dubious Achievement Awards, the Vietnam War
exposés, the first-person tell-alls from people in the news.
The writers that contributed to Hayes’s magazine are some of the literary greats of the latter
half of the century: Carver, Pynchon, Sontag, Wolfe, Ginsberg, Dinesen, and Capote, just to name a
handful (Baron). Hayes was an exacting editor who would wrestle with writers. Esquire killed half
the articles it assigned (Polsgrove, 137-138). However, like Gingrich, Hayes gave his writers
tremendous freedom. Said Tom Wolfe, “There was so much excitement about experimenting in
nonfiction, it made people want to extend themselves for Harold” (Waller-Zuckerman, 288). Gay
Talese, who came from a journalistic background at the New York Times, called the autonomy he had
4 In 1961, twenty-four magazines were launched or announced (Waller-Zuckerman, 247)
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Lau Esquire, Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great American Magazine (For Men)
at Esquire a “narcotic” (DiGiacomo). Some of the pieces Hayes published would drag on—he was
not one to heavily edit pieces; he trusted his writers. Hayes followed Gingrich’s footsteps and
stepped back where he lacked knowledge; in those spaces, he would let his editors and writers to take
the lead. Accordingly, Hayes won the loyalty of his writers easily. He made writers into public
figures, cultural heroes, and gave them a large platform to speak from. Numerous contributors have
remarked that Hayes’s relationships with his writers were fraught but meaningful, fruitful, and very
intense (Ibid). Consequently, Esquire produced several landmark pieces of long-form journalism;
four of “The 7 Greatest Stories in the History of Esquire Magazine,” according to Esquire, were
published when Hayes was editor (Esquire, 2008). One of these was Talese’s profile of Frank
Sinatra. At the time, Sinatra had fallen from public’s favour and was struggling to make a comeback.
Talese’s unexpected take on the entertainer embodied so many of the themes of the Sixties: old ways
struggling to find a place in the new world, the death of the American dream, and the emptiness of
fame (Talese in Hayes, 280-310).
Between 1963 and 1973, Esquire witnessed “America’s collective confusion” (Hayes, xxiiii)
and responded with a magazine that grew increasingly darker as the years went by. As Hayes saw it,
the cold-war politics and suburban life of the previous decade gave rise to explosive tensions. In the
very first issue of the decade, Norman Mailer presciently noted in the magazine that country would
erupt in chaos (Polsgrove, 47). Mailer was right. The Sixties witnessed the Vietnam War, the civil
rights movement, the student movement for democracy, feminism’s Second Wave, and most
tragically, the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. Yet the world changed in smaller ways, too. In those years, Esquire writers responded to the
transgressions of boundaries in fashion, literature, politics, and gender. Hayes saw that his duty as
editor was to address and document the times. Said Hayes:
[An editor] sets out to do this within fairly well defined commercial limitations, all
conditions for the play of his imagination; but this is why he does what he does and, most
often, the reason he behaves the way he does. … He is not placed on earth to serve selflessly
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Lau Esquire, Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great American Magazine (For Men)
the artistic pretensions of his writers: he is here to get in touch with the reader (Polsgrove,
42).
The banality of the Fifties inspired Hayes to show “alternative possibilities to the monolithic view”
(Hayes, xviii). It declared itself an enemy of sobriety and, sometimes, taste. Esquire was not
characterized by a certain political position or even tone. Esquire was defined by a cacophony of
voices—all bold, contradictory, provocative, creative, and always changing. All perspectives were
invited as long as the take could not be found in other magazines. When presented with an
unsatisfactory but promising idea for a story, Hayes would hold his hand in front of his face and
rotate it to show that he wanted to editor to take a different angle. Hayes’s idea of a good Esquire
article often involved unorthodox pairings of writer and subject.
Esquire spoke directly to the reader like a talkative, informed, opinionated, and witty
companion. It was self-reflexive and it spoke frankly. In the “Publisher’s Page” of August 1964,
Gingrich wrote:
Looking through the dummy of this issue… we find our own reaction to its various features
ranging all the way from near ecstasy to near nausea, with intermediate stages of both acute
boredom and active dislike. If it were our sixty cents, we’d feel we’d have our money’s
worth and more. (Esquire, 1964)
Satire was the magazine’s default vernacular but “satire as a mode, locked in a symbiotic
relationship with culture, required constant adjustments as the culture underwent change”
(Polsgrove, 197). Always, even in the most tragic of times in America, Hayes delivered a magazine
that was funny and hip. He wanted “every column inch” of Esquire to reflect that tone. And it did.
In the Thirty-Fifth Anniversary issue of the magazine, published in October 1968, Esquire reflected
on the decade so far, which had seen three monumentally tragic assassinations. The cover, designed
by George Lois, was a “dreamlike epitaph on the murder of American goodness” (Lois, 62). The
reverential cover showed President Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, and Dr. King watching over
Arlington National Cemetery. Hayes chose feature articles that presented his readers a vision of
America that was without any cause for celebration or pride. The Sixties were marred by death and
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Lau Esquire, Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great American Magazine (For Men)
extraordinary violence, and the continuing unrest promised more. And yet, there was room for a
joke. Tom Wolfe said that Hayes regarded the social and political turbulence with amusement and
he was having a ball with the material (DiGiacomo). They were, in Hayes’s words, “Smiling
Through the Apocalypse.” 5 On page 188 of the anniversary issue, just past halfway through the
magazine, Hayes placed a message from the staff of Esquire:
At this very point (page 188) it strikes us as editors of probably the most significant issue
of any American magazine in this century that you, as readers, are going to be depressed as
hell. In this issue we have already laid bare the bleakness of four generations, revised the
Constitution, changed the Bill of Rights, decided that Burton, Taylor and psychoanalysis
must go, that dirty books can stay; and we have learned that money will disappear, that the
young will destroy us all, and so forth.
It would have been nice if we could have made this page the turning point in the issue—
everything after it cheerful and gay. But we find that impossible. These are desperate times,
and there is more misery to cover. Before we can move on, though, we would like to do
everything we can to make at least one of your happy. And we propose to do it here and now
on this page. What we have done is this: we have looked around in our offices and gathered
together a hamper of unusual gifts, and we will bestow it on one of you. We believe this is
one of the last great personal gestures in a world becoming less personal every day. There is
no contest; the least deserving of you can win. (Esquire, 1968, p. 188)
Among the thirteen prizes included in the “happiness sweepstake” hamper were “Two plastic
daffodils,” “Thermofax copies of original letters, complaining of editorial malfeasance, from Norman
Mailer, Philip Roth, Stanley Elkin, John Updike, Bruce Jay Friedman and Bernard Malamud,” and
“One letter in French, from somebody in General de Gaulle’s office that nobody here could
understand” (Ibid). Although the issue was somber in tone, Hayes maintained the Esquire voice
throughout with small touches like such as this. It’s an editorial philosophy that is honoured by the
editorial staff of the magazine today: no page or section is a throwaway. Whereas other magazines
might treat the letters to the editor section with indifference, Esquire fills theirs with witty responses,
infographics, and clever quips (Rothstein).
Esquire’s covers exemplified its irreverent tone. Hayes recognized that the cover, the reader’s
first encounter with the magazine, would be the most salient device to electrify the magazine’s image.
5 Smiling Through the Apocalypse is the name of Esquire’s anthology of writing from the Sixties, edited by Hayes
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Lau Esquire, Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great American Magazine (For Men)
As soon as Hayes was made managing editor, he persuaded George Lois to create covers for Esquire
on a monthly basis. Lois had been the art director of the famous Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising
agency and was now, a much sought-after ad man at his own firm, Papert, Koenig, Lois. Hayes
promised Lois total creative license without any interference from the advertising department. His
first cover was a view of an empty boxing arena with a model dressed as the reigning champion
Floyd Patterson in the ring, flat on the ground. Lois was calling the fight between Patterson and his
challenger Sonny Liston months before it happened. The magazine hit newsstands two weeks before
the fight. Luckily, Lois was right and the cover was a sensation. Lois went on to create ninety-two
covers for Esquire.
Lois was impenitent about the statements he made on Esquire’s covers. Using the language
of advertising, Lois let typography or a provocative image dominate the page. There were no sell
lines to clutter the covers, just one headline. The September 1966 cover paired a close-up shot of a
Columbia University football player applying lipstick with the headline “How our red blooded
campus heroes are beating the draft.” For Lois’s most controversial cover, he commissioned a
photograph of a beaming Lt. William Calley surrounded by four Asian children. Calley was
accused of ordering the MyLai massacres.
Some Esquire covers chased away subscribers and advertising sales 6 but they also won the
magazine attention, as well as awards. Today the covers are celebrated icons of American graphic
design, and part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Moreover, most of Lois’s
covers made the issues into commercial successes. Lois and Hayes’s partnership pulled the magazine
out the red and Esquire was making $10.5 million in ad revenues by 1966. The covers were
revolutionary images that forced America to collectively confront the issues of the day. Viewed
together, they “serve as a visual timeline and a window onto the turbulent events of the 1960s” (The
6 The December 1963 cover featuring Sonny Liston in a Santa hat lost Esquire $750,000 in future advertising dollars
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Lau Esquire, Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great American Magazine (For Men)
Museum of Modern Art). Often, the cover would contradict the editorial material inside; as a
package, the magazine’s cover and contents offered a pluralistic, nuanced view of the month’s events.
Although Lois showed Hayes how the techniques of advertising could elevate the magazine,
Hayes rejected the idea of the magazine as a medium for advertising. Once he pleaded to the
president of Esquire Abe Blinder, “Abe, please don’t turn this magazine into a catalogue. I’ll do
whatever’s necessary to make money” (Polsgrove, 71). Thus, he found creative ways to comply with
the ad department and still make the magazine he wanted to read. Throughout his career at the
magazine, Hayes included the compulsory eight fashion pages, and produced car specials and
service-oriented pieces for Christmas issues. Sometimes the magazine treated these duties with
parody and self-mockery. Perhaps answering a request to include more pinups in the magazine to
broaden the appeal of the magazine, Hayes produced a photo feature called “The Girls of Summer: A
Seasonal Portfolio and Editorial Challenge” (Esquire, 1964, n.p.) 7 : a six-page feature of women in
bathing suits. Never overly earnest, the Esquire writers applied an introduction:
It is widely understood in publishing circles that A) people like pictures of girls, and B)
that although fortunes have been made with no more complex editorial policy, it is bad
form simply to run pictures of girls without accompanying text. … we present here The
Self-Reflexive Editorial Comment as a guide to readers and publishers everywhere. (Ibid)
Esquire’s assertive attitude made it a memorable magazine but also led to Hayes’s eventual
exit. At the end of 1968, sales dropped by 200,000. Hayes had tried each issue to top the last, to
do something more shocking. As the mood of the country darkened, however, the magazine’s voice
came across as callous. It was sarcastic and brutal, matching the reality of the Vietnam War. The
magazine’s signature lists, diagrams, illustrated guides, and sardonic quips looked flippant in the
light of the tragedies of the past years. Readers began to distrust the Esquire. This led Hayes to
reassess the editorial mix and the magazine’s management to demand more “more service, more
girls, and ‘fewer kooky covers’” (Polsgrove, 97). The magazine had always appealed to liberal readers
7 My research notes and photographs are missing this page number.
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Lau Esquire, Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great American Magazine (For Men)
but alienated more right-leaning audiences. Though Hayes managed to rebound briefly—the
magazine even won National Magazine Awards in 1972—his staff and contributors were moving
on, the recession was taking its toll, and tastes were changing. Furthermore, the publishers
downsized the magazine to the conventional letter size and the art did not translate to the smaller
format. The commercial strength of the magazine suffered and Hayes was eventually ousted in 1973.
Lois went with him and the sales of the magazine dropped drastically and immediately. Under new
editors, the content floundered. How could they recreate the combination of talent, current events,
and luck the magazine profited from in the decade past? How could anyone step into Hayes’s shoes
after such a long and successful run?
It is a testament to the grandness of Hayes’s vision that his version of Esquire became the
blueprint for the modern magazine. Esquire’s cheeky mix of high and low culture was a major
influence on magazines such as Vanity Fair, Talk, the Atlantic, Spy, Saturday Night, and the New
Yorker (from the Tina Brown era and onward). Rolling Stone, which published its first issue in
1967, became known for its use of New Journalism techniques pioneered at Esquire. In the end,
Esquire was more than a commentary about the events of the Sixties. Its journalists and artists went
behind the curtain and saw the true character of America’s people—its heroes, idols, misfits, and
rebels. Regular contributors Gay Talese and Diane Arbus were known for going backstage and
showing the true and ugly character of their subjects. Their work represents Hayes’s true ambition
for Esquire: to offer a document of the times, uninhibited and uncompromised by the limitations of
a mass-market periodical. And Hayes succeeded with playful and unequaled irreverence. Said Vanity
Fair, Esquire was “the great American magazine of the 20 th century” (DiGiacomo).
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Lau Esquire, Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great American Magazine (For Men)
P O S T S C R I P T
It is impossible to compare the Esquire of today to the way it was. Magazines evolve and media
culture changes. Nonetheless, the outset of the twenty-first century might be remembered as another
notable period in the Esquire’s history. The magazine’s offices are now housed on the twenty-first
floor of the Hearst building in New York City. On Eighth Avenue, the office of thirty-odd art and
editorial staff members are perched above Manhattan, guided by the creative vision of David
Granger. Granger, a veteran of GQ, was named Editor in Chief in 1997. Under his leadership, the
magazine has won numerous National Magazine Awards (“Esquire,” 2010). Always one to offer
unique creative, Granger has gained the favour of advertisers with his experimental covers, including
the first E-ink magazine cover to commemorate the magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary, and the
Augmented Reality (AR) issue featuring Robert Downey Jr. sitting on an AR barcode. The covers
have placed the magazine in the public consciousness at a time when press about magazines is always
about diminishing ad sales and dropping circulation figures. While the magazine is thinning,
Esquire strives to remain relevant, smart, and funny (Rothstein). Nobody at the magazine wants to
see the Esquire “die under their watch” (Ibid). In Esquire’s spirit of innovation, the magazine is
forging ahead by publishing their magazine in print and as an iPhone app. The magazine’s forays
into new technology show that Granger, like Gingrich and Hayes, is intent on serving the
magazine’s present readers and cultivating new ones. Esquire also continues to make the news with its
writing. Chris Jones’s profile of film critic Roger Ebert in the March 2010 issue has been making
the rounds on blogs (Ryzik), even earning the attention of Oprah Winfrey, who endorsed the article
on her show. For the first time in recent memory, a magazine article has inspired international
discussion.
Since Esquire’s triumphs are so closely identified with their editors, I imagine Granger
trying to grasp Hayes’s spirit as he remakes the magazine for the twenty-first century. When Hayes
was feeling out his role as Editor, he tried to understand Harold Ross, the founding editor of the
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Lau Esquire, Harold Hayes, the Sixties, and the Great American Magazine (For Men)
New Yorker. After reading a biography of Ross, Hayes wrote, “[I] would like to know what he did in
the heat of things …when he was at his peak, and he had just closed a good issue and had nothing
very good for the next issue, but had to start planning anyway. What did he do?” (Polsgrove, 43).
Granger may have pored over Hayes’s incomplete manuscript for his book Making a Modern
Magazine in the same way. In these transitional and uncertain times that parallel the unrest and
uncertainty of the Sixties, Granger must be asking, “What did Hayes do?”
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