George Hirsch knew it wasn’t going to end well with Clay Felker. Though New York, the magazine they co-founded in 1968, had been a huge success, working with the gifted but temperamental editor had become intolerable. Hirsch, who’d given up a promising career at Time Inc. to publish New York, began plotting his next venture. First, on a lark, he ran the Boston Marathon, though he’d never run a race, not even the 100-yard dash, as an adult. He regretted only not training first.
In 1972, Hirsch left New York with a concept for a national version of The Village Voice or The Boston Phoenix, rooted in New Journalism and muckraking reporting. Not as stuffy as The Atlantic or The New Republic, not as lefty as Mother Jones or Ramparts, more adult, less fawning than Rolling Stone. The result, New Times, aimed to cover what Time and Newsweek missed and the mainstream ignored.
For Hirsch, that meant unglamorous topics such as the environment, pollution, health, medicine and nutrition, agriculture, and the corporate and political abuse of power. New Times was the first national publication to profile anti-nuclear activists such as Sam Lovejoy and Karen Silkwood.
“Nobody had ever covered alternative energies,” says former New Times editor Jonathan Z. Larsen. “That would continue, the whole environmental strain. Organic farming. Who’d ever heard of that?”
Over the course of 134 issues, a little over five years (late 1973 through early January 1979), and three presidents (Nixon, Ford, Carter), New Times not only captured the Zeitgeist but, because of Larsen’s preoccupations, anticipated the sensibilities and trends that followed.
He approached politics and popular culture by blending dogged investigative work and memorable feature writing by Robert Sam Anson—the magazine’s star—as well as Ron Rosenbaum, Nina Totenberg, Marshall Frady, Robert Ward, Lawrence Wright, Ruth Rosenbaum (Ron’s sister, who specialized in investigative pieces about the medical world), and a deep roster of freelancers, including future TV executive Brandon Tartikoff and novelist Carl Hiaasen. Among the critics, Janet Maslin and Jim Miller covered rock ’n’ roll; Pat Conroy wrote about jazz; Geoffrey Wolff, and occasionally Richard Kluger, reviewed books; Frank Rich and Richard Corliss, joined, briefly, by the incomparable Nik Cohn, captured a golden age of American movies.
Debuting just months before People magazine, New Times approached celebrity culture with irony, mistrust, and caution. Yes, R2-D2 and C-3PO appeared on the cover in 1977, and, sure, an illustration of a bald Barbra Streisand appeared two years earlier with the headline A Star Is Shorn, trumpeting Marie Brenner’s profile of Streisand’s boyfriend, Jon Peters, the Hollywood hairdresser turned movie producer. These were exceptions. Only a few performers made the cover: Hank Williams Jr., Gilda Radner, Martin Mull, the Beach Boys, and, after some editorial grumblings and later regret, Bob Hope. Even fewer athletes: Muhammad Ali, boxer Ken Norton, swimmer Diana Nyad, and, ahem, sailor Ted Turner, who skippered the U.S. to victory in the 1977 America’s Cup.
Each issue ended with a page-long column titled “Final Tribute,” a roaming obit for everything from the disbandment of the Modern Jazz Quartet to the end of Walt Kelly’s long-running “Pogo” comic strip and “Elvis Presley’s deep-fried demise.” Mark Goodman wrote the majority of them: farewells to Chaplin and Groucho, the retirement of football great Johnny Unitas, the end of summer camp, the television series Marcus Welby, M.D., and the greatest hits of Reggie Jackson’s Game Six performance in the 1977 World Series.
“New Times was a total fluke, sui generis,” Maslin says. “It had an anything-goes feeling you didn’t find anyplace else. New York was slick, Rolling Stone had an agenda. New Times was a big playground in the best sense.”
Against Celebrity Culture
Hirsch kept hearing about Frank Rich, a 25-year-old recent Harvard graduate then editing the Richmond Mercury, an alternative paper in Richmond, Virginia. Rich had already written a long profile of Daniel Ellsberg in Esquire. Sterling Lord, the literary agent, and writers David Halberstam and Larry L. King wouldn’t stop raving about him. Hirsch called Rich, a theater junkie who pined to live in New York, and they agreed to meet.
“I was struck by how young he wasn’t,” says Hirsch. “How much he knew about so many things. There was a reason he was impressing people, no doubt about it. I thought, he’s going to be a guy who is so in tune with the culture, he’s going to bring a lot of ideas to the table. And he did.” Before Hirsch had an art director or even offices, he had Rich.
“Our jobs were to get correspondents, cub reporters out of college,” Rich says. “One who was very interesting, and still is, was Tony Schwartz from the University of Michigan, to this day a friend of mine, who later would become famous for writing The Art of the Deal.”
In addition to editing, Rich started writing about movies; the timing couldn’t have been better. “It was the birth of this new American cinema typified by Shampoo, Thieves Like Us, and Chinatown,” he says. “Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese, Woody, Robert Altman. The stuff I got to review—I was very lucky.”
The debut issue, October 19, 1973, landed during the thick of Watergate. Hirsch and editor Steve Gelman, who had come from Life, packed the early issues with journalistic brand names such as Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton, Mike Royko, Studs Terkel, and Joe McGinnis.
“New Times was a total fluke, sui generis,” Janet Maslin says. “It had an anything-goes feeling you didn’t find anyplace else.”
This all-star team helped get the New Times subscription base off the ground. The downside came when the all-stars underwhelmed. (Only Marshall Frady, a features writer for Willie Morris at Harper’s, continued to deliver first-rate stuff.) Hirsch wanted a magazine that got people talking. Apart from Joan Barthel’s true-crime feature “Did Peter Reilly Murder His Mother?,” about an 18-year-old in New Canaan, Connecticut, charged with killing his mother after being pressured by police to give a statement—and denied legal representation—the magazine didn’t give anyone reason to chatter. Nobody, including Hirsch, knew exactly what New Times was.
Enter 34-year-old Jonathan Z. Larsen, a 10-year Time Inc. vet with an even longer Time Inc. bloodline. The son of Roy Larsen, right-hand man to Henry Luce on the business side of Time Inc., Jon attended Harvard and then spent two years writing short obituaries at Time before eventually landing the plum entertainment-industry beat in Los Angeles.
“My father was a celebrity of his day—as a businessman, anyway,” Larsen says. “I didn’t appreciate that. I know my mother didn’t. She always thought he was flying too close to the sun. He’s out promoting, hundreds of speeches a year. Some people thought he wanted to be an ambassador to England. I grew up against celebrity culture.”
After being assigned to write about Raquel Welch, whom he found paralyzingly boring, twice in the course of a few months, Larsen told his bosses at Time he wanted out of Hollywood. They complied by reassigning him to Saigon to cover the war for the next two years.
Not long after he left Time, in 1973, a newly freelance Larsen pitched Gelman about alternative energy sources: solar, wind, methane gas, thermal gradients. Soon after, Hirsch invited Larsen to sit in on a story meeting. “Steve Gelman was a good guy, well liked, and respected,” says Hirsch. “But Jon had a rather strong point of view about a lot of things, and I think for a magazine like this to click, it really needs a strong point of view.” A week later, Hirsch asked Larsen to be the magazine’s editor.
Larsen came from wealth yet understood that money doesn’t protect anyone from cancer or the environment falling apart. “I grew up in a Republican household,” he says. “My God, you couldn’t work for Time Inc. and not be Republican. I slowly had to wean myself from that, but I remained independent, and I always looked askance at all institutions. A muckraking magazine should play it down the middle. You don’t want to cut your available stories in half.”
Larsen took over New Times 10 issues in, and he dropped the famous bylines in favor of younger, cheaper, and, arguably, better talent. He recruited Anson, a Time Vietnam correspondent who had spent weeks as a prisoner of war. At New Times, he wrote about Jimmy Carter, the neutron bomb, J.F.K.’s assassination, the Warren Commission, conspiracy theories, and Rolling Stone’s editor Jann Wenner and writer Hunter S. Thompson (a two-parter). In his first year, Larsen published cover stories on aerosol-can pollution, medical corruption, bisexuality, Muhammad Ali, Patty Hearst, and the fall of Richard Nixon.
Hirsch remembers dreaming about “a story that will put us on the map.” The first candidate arrived in the 16th issue, dated May 17, 1974. Written by Washington correspondent Nina Totenberg, the cover story identified the 10 dumbest congressmen. No. 1? William Scott, a Republican senator from Virginia.
After the article came out, Scott called a press conference at which he said, “Obviously not true.” Then Scott’s son leaped to his father’s defense: “My father is not stupid.” Humorist Art Buchwald wrote a column on how Scott’s denial gave New Times the kind of attention that any struggling magazine would die for, and made the story part of his spiel on the lecture circuit for years.
“It was the birth of this new American cinema typified by Shampoo, Thieves Like Us, and Chinatown,” Frank Rich says. “The stuff I got to review—I was very lucky.”
In a private note to Hirsch, Bill Moyers wrote, “That’s some magazine you’re putting out, with some of the most provocative writing and ideas anywhere, and I simply wanted to congratulate you for making it work.”
New Times made it clear that it would take on all comers, including Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party; Providence mayor Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, who tried to suppress a story that he raped a woman years earlier; and heiress Patty Hearst (a 1976 New Times cover story played a key role in the judgment that sent her to jail).
The New Times legal counsel stayed busy as the magazine faced a stream of lawsuits. “We had a really good libel lawyer,” Larsen says. “We had a good libel-insurance policy. We were a well-edited, well-reported magazine. When we were sued, we prevailed in court.”
“I gave more depositions than I’d like,” Hirsch says. “I remember sitting in a number of law firms, thinking, This isn’t a lot of fun, and we don’t have the budget for it.”
For Hirsch, fun was running, which by the mid-70s had bloomed into more than a fad. In 1976, Hirsch helped organize the first New York City Marathon. New Times was one of the original corporate sponsors. Hirsch ran the marathon three years in a row—and, yes, he now trained. In 1977, he published a magazine-booklet for the race, distributed to the runners and the press, that served as a prototype for a new magazine, The Runner, which premiered the following year.
We Were on a Mission
“The key thing about New Times that made us different,” says Larsen, “is I had a completely open-door policy. Anybody could walk in and sit in my office and pitch a story. And very often they would end up with an assignment without any preamble—young writers who couldn’t have gotten in the door at other magazines. We wasted very little material. If we made an assignment, we got it into the magazine. We were always publishing right on the edge.”
“They let me write what I wanted,” says Robert Ward, who profiled cops, used-car salesmen, musicians such as Tom Waits and Mose Allison, and Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. Although Flynt was “furious with the piece,” Ward says Flynt asked “if I wanted to be the editor of Hustler. ‘I’ll pay you $60,000 a year, and we’ll have a hell of a good time.’ I was making $9,000 a year and freezing my ass off teaching college in upstate New York.” Although tempted, Ward politely declined.
Frank Rich became a film and television critic at Time in 1975, and in 1980 began his long run at The New York Times. Future publishing-world stars such as Peter Kaplan (later the editor of The New York Observer), Susan Lyne (who helmed the film magazine Premiere), and Jane Amsterdam (who launched the business magazine Manhattan, inc.) had stints at New Times.
“It was not a boys’ club at all,” says Amsterdam, who later married Larsen. “I saw a couple of boys who didn’t love me as executive editor, but I was used to that.”
“Of the places I worked in journalism, it was the jolliest, even though it wasn’t a roaring success,” Rich says. “It was very small. We were on a mission—maybe a little bit sloppily designed, but we were proud of the work we were doing.”
When the entertainment company MCA bought New Times, in 1978, the magazine had a circulation of 350,000. Initially, Hirsch and Larsen had reason for optimism, only to be told that MCA planned to fold New Times instead. “There was a sense of heartbreak,” Hirsch says. “I came to love New Times. I thought we were doing great work. I’m an optimist, so I kept thinking we’re going to get there. And yet all those stories that put us on the map weren’t moving the financial needle that much.”
Why didn’t New Times last longer? When your mission is exposing corporate ineptitude, advertisers are going to be wary. Even when the business side of New Times landed a big advertiser, it backfired, like when they were about to close a big ad deal with Polaroid only to find Larsen ready with a New Times cover story exposing the Polaroid SX-70 as a mediocre product. Poof went the deal.
“I was shocked,” says Larsen. “Thank God we got to do that final issue, which was a gift itself.” Kaplan returned and came up with the issue’s theme: decadence—fitting, considering what lay ahead in the 80s. Larsen wrote the last “Final Tribute,” his favorite recurring feature: “New Times, as a subject, belongs here, side by side with diners, barber shops and country stores. Like those, we hope we have served our purpose; like those, we hope we will be missed.”
In a private note to Hirsch, Bill Moyers wrote, “That’s some magazine you’re putting out, with some of the most provocative writing and ideas anywhere.”
There were casualties, like Paul Slansky’s profile of comedian Albert Brooks, for which Slansky interviewed Brooks over sushi in L.A. and rode on a roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain. A few months later, Slansky called Brooks and said, “You have a good chance of being on the cover. We haven’t had a celebrity in a while, and don’t have one lined up.”
Slansky called Brooks back the next day and said, “You’re not going to be on the cover after all because the magazine just folded.” Without skipping a beat, Brooks said, “Does this mean I have to pay for the fish?”
The Runner, George Hirsch’s other magazine, did better than well, as running, and fitness in general, went mainstream. In 1987, Rodale, which had recently acquired Runner’s World, approached Hirsch about merging the two publications. Hirsch agreed, and he continued on as publisher (they kept the title Runner’s World), holding several prominent titles over a long, happy career with Rodale. In his ninth decade now, Hirsch is amazed and delighted that more people are running than ever.
Like Rocky, Fernwood 2 Night, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, New Times belongs to the strange period after Watergate and before Ronald Reagan—the Dazed and Confused, Jimmy Carter pocket. Its reverberations were felt into the following decade and beyond as Larsen and his staff became all-stars themselves: tethered, however loosely, to their days at New Times, careers ahead of them, serious fun to be had and serious work to be done, no matter the repercussions, with the time and space to do it.
Notable among them: Lawrence Wright, now a New Yorker staff writer and author of The Looming Tower, among other best-selling books.
“You know, I have often wished I could have been part of a great scene, like Paris between the wars or the roundtable at the Algonquin, something that was just full of brilliance and everyone on the outside looking in would say that’s the place to be, at least at this place and time,” Wright wrote in a letter to Larsen, sent shortly after New Times went under.
“It occurs to me now that in a way that’s what we had, out of nowhere and for a too short period we had the money and the talent to do any story,” he went on. “It was almost too much, too rich a diet. Think what a journalism student looking at the files of New Times ten years from now will wonder. How did this die? Would be the first thought. But I know his next would be, God dammit, I wish I could have been there. I’ll be able to tell him I was, I was in the right place for my time.”
Alex Belth is the editor of Esquire Classic and the curator of the Stacks Reader. He has worked in film editing for Ken Burns, Woody Allen, and the Coen brothers
