It was Thursday, March 14. 2013. On the subway ride downtown to view the documentary Smiling Through the Apocalypse and hear thoughts about the movie from Tom Hayes, Gay Talese and George Lois, I had a Gail Collins column for company. Ms. Collins seems to be showing a nostalgic desire for some new Armageddon theories. With end of the world crackpots in short supply she feels that anything to forget the reality of the present day situation would be useful.
Of course, the apocalypse discussed in this documentary was the one from fifty years ago, that decade that just dosen't sound right unless preceded by the word turbulent. It was a time in American history when school teachers were instructing us to get under our desk when the temperature suddenly rises by 2000° and our future choices were either Vietnam or Ivy League. The man doing the smiling through the assassinations of our leaders, student riots, far away wars and that nuclear balance of terror was Harold Hayes.
The movie was a 99 minute act of love, the story of a publishing icon through the eyes of his son. No criticism to be found there but searching around around it seems Harold Hayes really was all that. A Semper Fi southern liberal who just showed up on Madison Avenue one day in the 1950's and wound up becoming the editor of Esquire magazine from 1961 to 1973. It wasn't much of a magazine when he got there and apparently the sexism has never left but something special happened. Some say that he was "the man who broke the barrier that once separated journalism and art." Most say that he gave the best writers of the era the space and support they needed to shine and this whole experiment was called "The New Journalism."
There were many explanations about how Harold Hayes went on to become one of our cultural curators through the turbulent sixties but a story in the beginning of the movie was so refreshing that it bears repeating. As a young man returning from the war he went back to education and resurrected the school magazine of a small Southern baptist school named Wake Forest. During the movie there was a preview of Esquire illustrations to come in the line drawings he got illustrators to make from his own photos but it was an encounter with Dizzy Gillespie that really set the stage.