Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2015 i Esquire

SMASH TIME Everyone has their own take on the past. For F. Scott Fitzgerald you couldn’t repeat it. For William Faulkner it wasn’t even past. For Eduardo Galeano the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is. For Toni Morrison the past is there to be continually shaped. For Eugene O’Neill there was no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now. Until about six months ago, the past was my flip phone, the sort of machine guaranteed to get a laugh from just about anyone. I felt oddly smug about it. It was so uncool that it was almost cool. It was the sort of phone used by drug dealers in movies, snapped in two and thrown in an alleyway or flung…

At (approximately) the same moment that this issue, our 1,000th, gets to you, we are launching a complete digital archive of Esquire. Every cover, every story, every photograph, every advertisement—all available (for five dollars) via your phone, your tablet, your desktop, or any other device. ¶ Because we’ve spent a good amount of time planning and executing both this issue and the archive, as well as figuring out how to connect the two, I’ve been thinking a lot about the past. I’ve been thinking about the fact that we live in a time in which the past has never been more present. When I first started exploring what we could do with this issue, I used a phrase—the Eternal Now— that I hoped would explain the potential of linking the…

Esquire promised to be a “fashion guide for men.” But never a primer for “fops” or “gigolos.” “There are two kinds of married men: those afraid of their wives and those who lie about it.” There was this newfangled invention called the “Talon slide fastener” (later renamed the “zipper”). You need to buy it, because buttons cause “bulky ugliness.” Esquire published poetry. But not sissy poetry: “Dead men in barrels, / Dead men in sacks / Trussed up with wire / Knees at their necks.” “The black marlin is a stupid fish.” —Hemingway Best sentence that I didn’t understand but that might well be dirty: “The Kid’s maw was having a hard time on her 640 what with grubbin sage.” Women steal everything, including possibly this magazine. “Although we tried…

Blue Box, Secrets of the Little October 1971 (see JOBS, STEVE). Ron Rosenbaum’s electrifying story about phone phreaks, which turned into the “foundation event” for the creation of Apple Computer. Rosenbaum described the subculture of young telephone hackers whose “blue boxes” permitted them to manipulate the multifrequency tones of the international telephone system and place free calls around the world. Steve Wozniak, then a twenty-one-yearold student at Berkeley, read the story in his mother’s kitchen. Contributing editor A. J. Jacobs recently talked with Wozniak about what happened next. “I was so grabbed by the article,” Wozniak says today. “I called Steve Jobs before I was halfway through and started reading him passages.” Jobs was then a sixteen-year-old high school student and a fellow tech-head. At first, they thought the story…

WHEN ESQUIRE made its debut in late 1933, repeal was imminent and Americans didn’t know a damn thing about polite drinking. Fourteen years of adulterate alcohol and literally criminal bartenders had turned us into a nation of indiscriminate liquor swillers, people who thought the right wine for filet of sole was gin and orange juice. It was an integral part of the magazine’s mission to fix this. To this end, it deployed a crack corps of mixographers, including the bohemian bookseller-anthologist Frank Shay; Jimmie Charters, who had been Hemingway’s bartender in Paris; Murdock Pemberton, one of the founders of the famed Algonquin Round Table; and the copper-throated, granite-livered Lawton Mackall. Throughout the 1930s, they wrangled with underaged whiskey, unfamiliar imports, crappy, Prohibition-expedient cocktails that had outlived their time, and a…

I forget what I wore for my first encounter with Mark Zuckerberg. I know it wasn’t a suit—that would have seemed out of place in the rigorously casual world of Facebook. I probably wore what I usually wear, a pair of jeans and a Gap T-shirt, maybe my black sneakers. Of course, I don’t even have to try to remember what Zuck wore, and my certainty in this regard serves as a case in point—or, as he likes to say, “data.” It works. That whole gray-T-shirt thing of his—it works. Not only does he not have to think about what he’s going to wear when he wakes up in the morning, I don’t have to think about what he wore on the days I spent in his company. I have…

OVER THE PAST few years, the covers that defined Esquire in the 1960s have been the subject of documentaries, museum exhibitions, and magazine features. Much of the credit for these covers has gone to George Lois, a celebrated advertising executive and a creative consultant to the magazine through that decade. Yet Lois never touched a camera or developed a frame. Instead he often turned to Carl Fischer, a former art director who photographed sixty covers for Esquire from 1963 to 1972 and created some of the magazine’s most famous and controversial images. Today, Fischer is a spry, aspirational ninety-one. Recently, with his memory clear and his voice fueled by a kind of insistent nostalgia, he held forth for two hours on creating those still-sharp-to-the-touch images . . . on what…

NOVEMBER 1968 The magazine was running a story about the fact that journalism had become so intrusive, so for the cover I shot a crucifixion scene—Jesus on the cross, and all around him and on top of a truck were reporters with video cameras and microphones. I thought it was going to be a terrific cover [re-created from the original image, above], but this all happened at the same time as the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. All hell started breaking loose and the police were beating up protesters, so Harold said, “I’m going to send four writers to Chicago. We’ll do a quick story, and I want you to do a picture of the writers [from left: Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Terry Southern, and John Sack] with some…

Of all the dead white male writers, Ernest Hemingway is the deadest and the whitest and the malest, vanquished as an icon and relegated to the losing side of so many histories. He is an embarrassing cliché. Even here in his home, La Finca Vigía, he is a monstrous joke. The house is low and flat and white, and despite the hustlers and the unloading tour buses and the small bar cranking sugarcane for overpriced pineapple drinks surrounding it, the place retains most of its dignity. The desks, at which he never wrote, look like he could work on them today if he suddenly gave up the habit of a lifetime and decided to write sitting down. The original sofa Clark Gable slept on because the beds were too short…

WHAT IS GENERALLY CONSIDERED the best, and last, intimate profile of Jobs published in a magazine was written by Joe Nocera for Esquire’s December 1986 issue—“The Second Coming of Steven Jobs”: (Jobs had been fired by Apple a little more than a year earlier and was starting his new computer company, NeXT.) One moment he’s kneeling in his chair, the next minute he’s slouching in it; the next he has leaped out of his chair entirely and is scribbling on the blackboard directly behind him. He is full of mannerisms. He bites his nails. He stares with unnerving earnestness at whoever is speaking. His hands, which are slightly and inexplicably yellow, are in constant motion: pushing back his hair, propping up his chin, buried snugly under his armpits. When he hears…

THANK YOU. For showing us how you make a sandwich and teaching us how to make a pie. For letting us follow you down makeshift red carpets and meeting us in hotel lobbies when you had other places to be. For sitting down to tell us about how you grew up on a military base in Japan—or about the hooked rug on your wall memorializing two pigs named Jack and Pete. For letting us photograph you with a drone. Because it was fun and so are you, Chrissy Teigen. To Sharon Stone. To Angelina Jolie. To Helen fking Mirren! And especially to Mary-Louise Parker, for making us pose naked in front of a camera so that we too would know what it feels like to bare ourselves. To all of…

MOD·ERN TRAIL (NOUN) /’ MÄ-D RN/’ TRĀL/ 1. the course of direction in which a well-connected life moves It should go without saying—but this isn’t your average trail. It’s every which way your day takes you. Whether you’re at an outdoor festival or an insider event, there’s a strong chance you’ll end up at the other by day’s end. Needless to say, the Modern Trail is pretty unpredictable and so are the conditions— which means there’s no time to go home and change. If you’re made for the Modern Trail, you know what we mean. It’s not the first time you found yourself thankful to have left the afternoon wide open for whatever came your way. So you don’t need to be told twice to keep your passport handy or…

A leading light of a Silicon Valley seed fund told me recently that kids who come to him with dreams of changing the world with squiggles of code don’t want to be Steve Jobs anymore, or even Mark Zuckerberg. They want to be Elon Musk. Never mind that Zuckerberg’s ambition of “connecting everyone in the world” is more attainable than Musk’s ambition of dying on Mars. Never mind that Musk’s rocket ships blow up and his Tesla proves he’s absorbed the lessons of Jobs but not of Henry Ford. Never mind that he can be singularly unpleasant. We now look to our tech titans for what we used to find in our artists, and Musk is one of the few among them who is actually making something and whose dreams…

Almost two decades ago, when Muhammad Ali, shivering with palsy, made his surprise appearance in Atlanta to light the Olympic torch, we suddenly heard what a “symbol” the man had become, and even ludicrous speculation that he had “made peace” with the Olympics, having once thrown his gold medal into a river because he was angry about how things were for black folks back in 1960. It is something just short of a crime against history that this man has been used the way he has been used because he can no longer speak for himself. There simply has never been an athlete who has so deeply affected all levels of society the way he has. There simply has never been an American athlete whose life has so vividly represented…

In the end, it seems, he knew us far better than we would ever know him. That is going to be the enduring mystery of Barack Obama, the forty-fourth president of the United States. In 2008, the country elected him in a wave of emotion and relief. It preened itself in his golden rhetoric. He never stopped reminding America that its greatness and its goodness were both still within reach, with the right amount of effort and a profound turn of heart. Then, because his very presence in the White House created a new and baffling mystery in the great American paradox of race and freedom, he confounded expectations. In his first term, he carried himself like a lame duck, and was accused of being both too conciliatory toward his…

On July 2, 1964, when Lyndon Johnson turned to his aide Bill Moyers after signing the Civil Rights Act and said, “I’ve just handed the South to the Republicans for a generation,” Bill Clinton was seventeen and had already decided to run for public office, as a civil-rights Democrat. It was as a southerner whose moral imagination had been awakened by the racism all around him that Clinton would shape his political career—in a canny, treacherous, and open rebellion against the values that prevailed in the place that created him. And so it would be that Clinton—the greatest political talent of his generation, the one his opponents feared most and most ardently sought to destroy—not only would learn to survive but would become the embodiment of American potential in the…

“The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” by Tom Wolfe, March 1965: Instead of going into the curves and just sliding and holding on for dear life like the other drivers, Junior developed the technique of throwing himself into a slide about seventy-five feet before the curve by cocking the wheel to the left slightly and gunning it, using the slide, not the brake, to slow down, so that he could pick up speed again halfway through the curve and come out of it like a shot. This was known as his “power slide,” and—yes! of course!— every good old boy in North Carolina started saying Junior Johnson had learned that stunt doing those goddamned about-faces running away from the Alcohol Tax agents. “What Do You Think of Ted…

IN THAT, THE magazine has reflected its nation. In the nearly seventy-four years since Pearl Harbor, the United States has been engaged in major wars—not counting the little ones, like Somalia and Bosnia and Grenada and Panama—for nearly half of them. We are a warring nation. Over scores of stories, the nature of the magazine’s own fixation with war evolved in the way journalism itself evolved over those decades, moving from soft commentary and reminiscence and occasional propaganda to vivid reporting and visceral narratives, the kind the magazine practically invented. I could see three men lying prone with terrible burns. The man on the top bunk was recognizable only because of his physique and a small shock of blond hair which hadn’t been burned. He was smoking a cigarette held…

WRITER, JOURNALIST, ESQUIRE LEGEND | 81 EVANSTON, ILLINOIS INTERVIEWED BY CAL FUSSMAN The interesting thing about “Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case!” is I didn’t even ask [editor] Harold Hayes if he wanted me to write it. I was soaking in the bathtub, reading, when my wife came in. She said, “They’ve killed Dr. King.” And I said, “Get me a plane ticket while I get ready.” I got out of the bath, dried off, and Natalie got me the last ticket on the plane to Memphis. I hung around for a couple days at the church and the garbage strikers’ union hall, talking to leaders of the strike. There were only a few buses headed to Dr. King’s funeral. Space was tight. They were going to use…

NOT IN HEAVEN BUT someplace close by, Norman Mailer sits with Nora Ephron at a lily-white table piled high with airy grilled-cheese sandwiches. They are both as beautiful as they wanted to be. Nora says to Norman, Our names were alike, but that’s the end of it. That’s not true at all, Norman replies. You and me, we had a slew in common. War. Wegotism. Women. Wangs. I’m not obsessed with war, says Nora, never was. Fine, says Norman, Waistlines and Women, then. He lights her cigarette and pulls down a heavy book from a floating Ikea shelf. We were so obsessed with women because we couldn’t get them straight, he says. Speak for yourself. Women have these stitches—they’re made up of billions of them. Thousands, anyway. What men like…

FIVE STORES THAT SPECIALIZE IN ONE-OF-AKIND OBJECTS FOR MEN Read about five stores that have done the hard work for you— traveling the world, remaking the classics—and stand apart from the usual brands, boutiques, and chain stores. TOTAL IMMERSION: YOUR PERSONAL SOUND ENVIRONMENT There’s a reason that car stereos became an essential feature a long time ago—and why smart artists make sure to check how their records sound inside a vehicle before they sign off on the final mix. Ironically, car stereo technology hasn’t changed that much since the early days of rock and roll. But with help from renowned sound system designers at HARMAN International, Revel* audio expertise has come to the auto experience. With available QuantumLogic® surround sound, Clari-Fi™ technology, and up to nineteen speakers, the 2016 Lincoln…

EVERYTHING THIS MAGAZINE has ever published lives on—the pages full of yakking and provocations and ads and embarrassing cartoons—though mostly in exile between the covers of old issues at yard sales. Open one and it’s 1966 or 1951 or 2013 all over again, full of life and noise and nonsense. But often also full of amazing stories and photos and personal essays and jaw-dropping reporting that seem as moving and enlightening and entertaining as anything just published. Even when the particular subjects at hand are long dead or irrelevant, the stories and pictures themselves stay alive, if only as windows on their time. So we’ve devoted this issue— in part—to that vividly present past, an alphabetical collection of subjects and stories and writers and obsessions that mattered once and often…

“I MAY BE PARANOIC, Lord knows, anybody can be, but I am sick of these literary cocktail parties where people congratulate themselves because I, Jimmy Baldwin, have made it. Well, screw ’em. I made it. They didn’t do it for me. And I didn’t do it for any old Cadillac, I did it just for me. They act as if I’m now about to become the luckiest black man in the world because I’ve managed to become like them! Believe me, they couldn’t be more wrong.” That is Baldwin, as quoted in a profile by Marvin Elkoff in this magazine (“Everybody Knows His Name,” August 1964), at the moment when Baldwin—himself a regular contributor to Esquire—was enjoying his greatest celebrity. He had long been a leading voice of black America…

Caulfield, Holden His fate—after the events of The Catcher in the Rye—was revealed by J.D. Salinger in a short story published in Esquire in October 1945, six years before the release of Catcher. Although Holden made a passing appearance in a story Salinger wrote for The Saturday Evening Post the previous year, he turned up as a significant character for the first time in a published story in “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise,” which focuses on Army sergeant Vincent Caulfield, sitting on a troop truck in the rain in Georgia awaiting travel to an off-base dance as he worries about his younger brother: Where’s my brother? Where’s my brother Holden? What is this missing-in-action stuff? I don’t believe it. I don’t understand it. I don’t believe it. The United States…

FOR A BIG MEETING Silhouettes have tightened and relaxed. Double-breasted has gone in and out of style. Through it all, even in the most casual-leaning times, the two-piece suit has remained the lingua franca of the serious workplace. 1935 1950 FOR A COCKTAIL PARTY What’s changed: the extent to which we dress way the hell up (tie and all) for the sake of a little revelry. What’s the same: a strategic use of color and accessories to draw in the eye and express some personality. 1942 1961 FOR A BLACKTIE EVENT Before World War II, white tie and tails was the formal standard and a black-tie tuxedo was considered semiformal. By 1950 or so, black tie became the gold standard, and endless variations in cut, color, and proportions followed. 1934…

Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish deadeye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. —Thomas Pynchon, “The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity,” December 1965 Strike spotted her: baby fat, baby face, Shanelle or Shanette, fourteen years old maybe, standing there with that queasy smile, trying to work up the nerve. —Richard Price, “A Hustler Hustles, That’s What He Does,” May 1992 She said, “Poor Beauty’s thirsty.” —Graham Greene, “Beauty,” April 1963 It is, in the end, she thinks, the shallowest of confessions: all of the truth, none of the honesty. —Colum McCann, “Treaty,” August 2015 His real name was Frederic Dobson. —Vladimir Nabokov (writing as Vladimir Sirin),…

The Passion of Muhammad Ali APRIL 1968 Ali had just gotten his title taken away because he had refused to go in the Army, so he was a martyr. Our story was Let’s do him as a martyr. Who’s a martyr? Saint Sebastian is a martyr. When he got to the shoot, we explained what it was all about—we never told people what they were going to do before they got to a shoot; they would never show up if we did— and there was a little hassle given the fact that Saint Sebastian is a Christian. Ali said, “I’m a Muslim now.” And so we got Chicago on the line and I spoke to Herbert Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad’s son, from the Nation of Islam. I told him this was…

Fitness See Men’s Health. It was when he washed up that he made his big splash at Esquire. “The Crack-Up” was a confession—of having fallen down, fallen apart, fallen from grace. Yet it wasn’t needy or hysterical—the opposite, in fact, its tone strikingly free of self-pity. And though self-revelation was, ostensibly, its aim, its sole and entire point, there was as much concealing of self going on as revealing. That Fitzgerald had suffered some sort of breakdown was clear; that he also suffered from alcoholism, however, was not. The three essays that make up the collection appeared in successive issues— February, March, and April 1936—and were an immediate sensation. An immediate scandal, too. Fitzgerald’s peers were almost beside themselves with disgust, could hardly wait to trash it. Hemingway, particularly incensed,…

IN NOVEMBER 1996, Esquire introduced the world to Allegra Coleman, the world-weary twenty-twoyear-old beauty who hung out with Deepak Chopra and Nic Cage and swiped roles from A-listers. And who, it turns out, didn’t exist: I was only twenty. It was the very beginning of my career, when I was still just modeling. I had worked with the photographer, Troy House, before, and he told me that Esquire was creating a fictional actress to comment on the whole phenomenon of the Hollywood ingenue. So we went down to the Santa Monica Pier for the shoot, and I just kind of acted out what I thought would be inappropriate behavior in that kind of situation. It was so much fun to sink my teeth into the drama of it. And then…

Ken, aka Wisdom or Knowledge A short-lived offshoot of Esquire that was published in the late 1930s with the purpose of producing explosive and controversial magazine features, such as Ernest Hemingway’s dispatches from the Spanish Civil War and a first-person report from a Los Angeles prostitute. DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 2005 CONFIRMING WHAT WE’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT ABOUT BARNARD On her Web site, Martha Stewart described the West Virginia minimum-security prison where she is serving her five-month sentence as “like an old-fashioned college campus—without the freedom, of course.” THERE EXISTS NO PHOTOGRAPH in which he is not immaculate. Take the Esquire cover from November 1973, ten years after his death. The shirt he is wearing while eating an ice cream cone on summer holiday is somehow the ideal shirt for eating an…

Mailer, Norman Wrote more than a dozen stories for Esquire, beginning with his short story “The Language of Men” (April 1953) and including his classic examination of JFK, “Superman Comes to the Supermart” (November 1960), plus a regular column in 1963. He wrote his novel An American Dream as a serial, under deadline, for the magazine in 1964. But it was—especially with editor in chief Harold Hayes—a long love/fk-you relationship: June 12, 1970 Dear Harold, About a year ago some kid who started to work for Esquire came over to me and suggested I do a piece for Esquire on Fidel Castro and I said “Do you know what would happen? I would spend two months getting ready to do the piece and then a lot of time in Cuba…

TRY IT TODAY AT DEAL.ESQUIRE.COM ON YOUR TABLET AND GET EVEN MORE GREAT STUFF ESQUIRE ’S BIG BLACK BOOK—FREE FUNNY VIDEOS! BONUS PHOTOS OF WOMEN WE LOVE! INTERACTIVE FEATURES DELIVERED BEFORE ISSUES HIT NEWSSTAND! THIS IS ESQUIRE DIGITAL Completely reimagined for your tablet: Experience our moving covers; watch a beautiful woman tell you a funny joke; take an interactive quiz; see exclusive outtakes from photo shoots; enhance your skills with instructional videos; get even more out of Esquire.…

No great man is merely great. He is also flawed in innumerable ways. We’ve written about men—their greatness and their weaknesses— for as long as there has been an Esquire. Often it’s because there is something about them we strive to emulate. Other times it’s because they changed the world or some part of it. On occasion we’ve become a little obsessed (see KENNEDY, JOHN F.). Sometimes the duration of a person’s influence has compelled us to revisit him time and again. (Woody Allen, for instance, was first on Esquire’s cover in 1964. He’s been on five additional covers and has also been a regular subject of stories, most recently in 2013. Fifty years in Esquire.) After a thousand issues, we asked ourselves which of the (living) men we’ve covered…

Since God’s very existence must be taken, if at all, entirely on faith, we are given Bill Murray to love and love us back. I don’t claim that he’s Jesus— more than one poor soul has spoken of encountering a churlish Murray, not that Christ didn’t suffer blue days, too. Murray’s more akin to Santa Claus, whom he played on our cover in 1998, if Santa had grown up in blue-collar Chicago as one of nine kids. Truth is, Santa doesn’t need us. Murray does, and he needs us more than once a year. He doesn’t merely walk among us—he insists. He may or may not sneak up on folks, reveal himself, and whisper, “No one will ever believe you,” but he does pop up at bachelor parties and karaoke…

We might as well say it: He is the most dominant player in the history of basketball. LeBron James will never be the most popular, like Mike, Shaq, or Bird. He will never have the elegance of Magic, the grace of Kareem, the backto-the-basket command of Wilt or Russell. But at six-foot-eight and 250 pounds, with the skills of a combo guard and the shoulders of a fullback, he is unstoppable on his way to the basket, deadly from midrange, a wizard of a passer whose gifts exceed those of any other player who has ever stepped onto the hardwood. Put him one-on-one against any legend and he’d win—provided fouls were being called. James would take the smaller guys to the hole. He’d step out on the bigs. Magic would…

The exuberant and ageless John Sack was the only American journalist to witness combat in every American war from Korea in the early fifties to Afghanistan in 2002. The “embed” arrangement—which attached a journalist to a particular military unit—was virtually invented for Sack. While he was covering the Korean War for Stars & Stripes, his status as a correspondent ended after he stowed away overnight aboard an American landing ship to interview Chinese prisoners of war and was arrested by the American military police when the ship docked in Pusan, South Korea. Facing court-martial charges, Sack was reassigned to a mail room in Tokyo. A month later, he was ordered back to Korea as an infantryman, the Army being unable to charge him with a specific violation. He helped create…

AN AERIAL VIEW OF NEW HARLEM will disclose a radical landscape: vast, cleared ranges of space with fifteen peaks rising into the sky. These fifteen widely separated conical structures will house a half million people. . . .Where we are physically is enmeshed with our deepest consciousness of self. There is no evading architecture, no meaningful denial of our position. You can build to defend the endurance of man, to protect his existence, to illuminate it. But you cannot build for these purposes merely in spasmodic response to past and present crises, for then crises, like the poor, will be with us always. If man is to have not only a future but a destiny, it must be consciously and deliberately designed. From “Instant Slum Clearance,” by June Meyer, an…

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ONE OF THE GREAT PLEASURES of reading Tom Wolfe—of still reading Tom Wolfe—is the sense of awe he consistently inspires. No, not through his grasp of character, as Talese; or the lengths to which he allowed his sentences to go in pursuit of his thoughts, as Mailer; or the extent of his humanity, as Sack. What inspires awe in Wolfe is simply that he fucking got away with it. I’m not referring to any one thing; I’m referring to everything— to every sentence, every paragraph, every story, every jot and tittle. His reputation has suffered because he was never a particularly literary writer; Updike, over at The New Yorker, turned up his nose at Wolfe’s novels and rendered what was meant as a decisive judgment: “entertainment, not literature, even literature…

September 1935 “THE SCIENTIFIC production of laughter as it is practiced by all celebrated joke-makers” was the subhead to the first of Esquire’s many analyses of what’s funny: Another standard formula product is the humorous simile. . . . Arthur “Bugs” Baer shines in the field of simile and wordplay. . . . [H]e methodically hammers out his snappy phrases, “a town so tough the canaries sing bass,” “a Greenwich Village café where the girls are boisterous and the boys are girlsterous.” From “41 Howlers, Screamers, and Groaners to Get You Through the Holidays,” December 1989: 9. Duck walks into a drugstore, asks for some Chap Stick. Guy behind the counter says, “That’ll be fifty-nine cents.” Duck says, “Put it on my bill.” 10. Duck walks into a drugstore, asks…

Norman Mailer once said—after Diane Arbus photographed him—that “giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.” She detonated more than thirty of them in Esquire in the 1960s. This was the first magazine to publish her work—in July 1960, including the photograph above of the actor Andrew Ratoucheff—and also one of the last, her final photographs in our pages appearing only a month before she committed suicide with a razor blade in July 1971, at age forty-eight. Achievements, Dubious Helped give birth to the plague of modern irony. Their endlessly copied fake-headline-on-a-news-item format was invented by Robert Benton, Esquire’s art director, and David Newman, an editor, and first appeared in the January 1962 issue. (Benton and Newman went on to…

NATIONAL-SECURITY ENEMY NO. 1 for nearly twenty years and three presidents, and the subject of two major first-person accounts in Esquire—bookends, as it turned out—maybe the two most significant and vivid portraits of him ever published. The first was his last interview ever with an American journalist, in his mountain hideout in Afghanistan in 1998. “Greetings, America. My Name Is Osama bin Laden,” by John Miller, February 1999: Osama bin Laden has a firm handshake. We exchanged pleasantries in the polite but stilted manner one uses when speaking through a translator. . . . “So we tell the Americans as people,” bin Laden said softly, “and we tell the mothers of soldiers and American mothers in general that if they value their lives and the lives of their children, to…

Carver, Raymond Janitor. Textbook editor. Salesman. Sawmiller. Published numerous, now-classic short stories in Esquire, beginning with this one, “Neighbors,” from June 1971: “Don’t worry,” he said into her ear. “For God’s sake, don’t worry.” They stayed there. They held each other. They leaned into the door as if against the wind, and braced themselves. DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 2000 BUT ROD STEIGER’S SNORING SCARES THE MONKEY About his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson said, “She’s a warm, cuddly blanket that I love to snuggle up to and cover myself with.” Wild rumors began to circulate about the outside world. It was said that Chicago had slid into Lake Michigan; that Manhattan Island had been submerged; that all the Pacific Coast cities were in ruins. In this blazing inferno, such stories…

AMONG THE 272 MEN AND WOMEN under forty celebrated in the first “Esquire Register: The Best of a New Generation,” published in December 1984, the editors said, “We do not claim to have a future President here.” They were right in every case but one (Bill Clinton, then thirty-eight) and possibly two: Hillary Rodham Clinton, then thirty-seven. She did not warrant one of the forty-five in-depth profiles that accompanied the list (nor did he). That would change. “You’ll Never Look at Hillary Clinton the Same Way Again,” by Tom Junod, October 1999: She has a sexy mouth, I think. That slight palatal overbite—it gets to me. She seems expert at marshaling her mouth’s resources, at inspiring its ingenuity. She can fold her lips into an origami of fleeting smiles. Her…

“Esquire” In November 1932, publisher David Smart and editor Arnold Gingrich conceived of a men’s-interest magazine aiming to become “the common denominator of masculine interests” and a “magazine for men only.” They rejected the names “Stag,” “Beau,” and “Trim” in favor of “Esquire” after Gingrich received a letter addressed to “Arnold Gingrich, Esq.” Whew. Below, design director David Curcurito explains the evolution of Esquire’s distinctive logo. 1933 “The first logo feels very personal, almost like Esky carved his name into a tree.” 1945 “The thicker version was designed to stand out on the newsstand. Which was probably also the thinking behind the cover drawings of seminude women.” 1956 “This logo is short without being dumpy, just like Elizabeth Taylor. And even though it’s harder to read, it’s still in keeping…

HOW TO HANDLE A “CATFIGHT” “When I see one of these coming on I first remove all the loose objects from the bar, such as ashtrays, glasses, bottles and plates.” —May 1934 2015 update: Invest in break-resistant glassware and when a fight occurs, quietly back out of the room. HOW TO COMPLIMENT A WOMAN “Don’t compare her with other women. Blatantly tactless is the ‘I always thought my wife had the best [eyes, breasts, legs, et cetera], but yours are terrific.’ ” —May 1982 2015 update: We got nothin’. Solid advice. HOW TO LIE SUCCESSFULLY TO A WOMAN “Keep it short, simple and emphatic. Overelaborate prevarication will arouse instant suspicion, and her self-respect will impel her to trap you.” —July 1962 2015 update: Not lying also works. HOW TO GET…

GOD BLESS you, ’70s Man. You’ve got a crow on your shoulder and an eye patch on your face. (How did you lose your eye, ’70s Man? Was it a whiskey-related sledding accident? Did that crow peck it out?) You feel comfortable in turtlenecks and plaid and nature, but you’re just as happy sitting atop a Plexiglas cube wearing only sunglasses and knee-high socks. You like blonds and a shitload of ice in your drink. (You’ll have another, thanks, sweetheart.) ’70s Man, God bless you. For your musky masculinity. Your misguided confidence. Your sincerity. For begetting Ron Burgundy and the Most Interesting Man in the World and Ron Swanson and the Old Spice Guy. For laughing with us once you got the joke.…

John F. Kennedy, handsome, arrogant, ambitious, egotistical, highly capable, and capricious, takes the presidential oath of office. Roger Maris breaks Babe Ruth’s single-season home-run record. Former fighter pilot John Glenn goes further and farther than any American before him, circling the earth in a capsule the size of a commercial washing machine. Johnny Carson, a vaguely young, safely middleaged man, takes over The Tonight Show. James Bond bests Dr. No. JFK stares down the Soviets in Cuba. (Thirteen months later, he is murdered. Men everywhere weep. Little boys watch.) LBJ moves into the White House, pissing in the bushes to assert his territorial imperative. Cassius Clay, imperial and imperious, beats Sonny Liston, becomes heavyweight champion, renames himself Muhammad Ali, and refuses to fight in a war he doesn’t believe in.…

It’s so easy to imagine this world without Robert Downey Jr. He was all but dead for the six long years he spent in cuffs, rehab, or prison. He was addicted to black-tar heroin, which back then he preferred to working. “It’s like I’ve got a shotgun in my mouth,” he told a judge in 1999, “with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gunmetal.” He did a yearlong bit in a California state pen—and then he eventually got clean. Mel Gibson paid to get him bonded for The Singing Detective in 2003, which was followed by a long string of small jobs. He got married again. Work was steady. He was still a fluid, fearless actor, with more range, more depth, more honesty as…

The role closest to Jack Nicholson’s true persona may well be Melvin Udall from As Good as It Gets, the 1997 romantic comedy for which he won his second Oscar for best actor. (His twelve Oscar nominations make him the most nominated actor in history.) He portrayed a misanthropic writer whose obsessive-compulsive disorder alienates nearly everyone. Udall wears the same sort of sunglasses Nicholson is well known for wearing. “Once you’ve experienced negative territory in public life,” Nicholson told me in 2004 as he chain-smoked and sipped milky coffee at his house in Los Angeles, “you begin to accept the notion of shields.” With his rose-colored shades and sarcastic sneer, his devilishly rubber brow, Nicholson—now seventy-eight—paved the way for two generations of cool guys. “I can’t look into the eyes…

To hear Woody Allen tell it, the moment he truly grasped the irreducible fact that he and everyone he loved was doomed, life itself turned down a one-way deadend street. His father worked side jobs, including as a bookie for the Mob, and his mother smacked him often. He tuned out. He learned magic and card tricks and found himself at the movies, every day and often all day, for years. Out of this he created a persona, the nebbish, as lasting and influential as Chaplin’s tramp. But he wasn’t a nebbish, ever; he was a schoolyard jock and a Brooklyn street hustler. Also a genius: As a teenage joke writer, he outearned his old man. He wrote for Sid Caesar. He became a brilliant stand-up, so popular he’d guest-host…

We loved her as a wild child, with her tattoos and vials of blood and feral, doomed beauty. She had the chops; nobody could deny that. She had force. She made James Dean look like a whiny little pussy. She was Young America racing her black car through the night, and we watched with a mixture of lurid fascination and parental concern. Then the strangest thing happened—she reinvented herself as a badass action hero, and somehow it made perfect sense that the most vulnerable woman in the movies could become the most invulnerable. She was America, after all, and the nation was at war. She was always a hardworking actress who tried everything from detective films to sci-fi to Kung Fu Panda. She talked about quitting a lot, but she…

The forbidden delicacy of France, chosen by former French president François Mitterrand for his final meal as he lay dying of cancer in 1995. This is what it tastes like. “The Last Meal,” by Michael Paterniti, May 1998 The bird is surprisingly soft, gives completely, and then explodes with juices—liver, kidneys, lungs. Chestnut, corn, salt—all mix in an extraordinary current, the same warm, comforting flood as finely evolved consommé. Yes, quidbits of meat and organs, the succulent, tiny strands of flesh between the ribs and tail. I put inside myself the last flowered bit of air and Armagnac in its lungs, the body of rainwater and berries. In there, too, is the ocean and Africa and the dip and plunge in a high wind. And the heart that bursts between…

WRITER, JOURNALIST, ESQUIRE LEGEND | 83 NEW YORK CITY INTERVIEWED BY CAL FUSSMAN, JULY 15, 2015 Still alive, and writing as slow as ever. My attention to detail came from watching my father put together a suit. Stitching, then measuring, two fittings, three fittings. . . . The idea of doing things well . . . taking time . . . getting it right. It’s all part of my journalism. It’s writing like a prideful tailor. Every person you interview becomes a kind of mentor of the moment. My daughter was born because of the Peter O’Toole assignment. Esquire sent me to London in 1963 to interview Peter. He asked me, “Do you have any children?” I said, “No, I can’t afford children.” He said, “Why not?” I told him…