Magazines: Look How Outrageous!

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Hayes, a soft-spoken North Carolinian who started his career as an assistant editor for Pageant magazine, remained. He rose to managing editor in 1962, editor in 1963. He pacified the staff, tackled a perennial dull-cover problem by persuading Gingrich to try out George Lois, one of the adman inventors of the Volkswagen campaign. Lois, in real life a partner in the advertising firm of Papert, Koenig, Lois, Inc., gives away the $600 he gets for each cover to a Greek charity. Hayes also put across the idea that the magazine's editors should think up the table of contents instead of simply choosing among stories suggested by contributors. Each Friday, Managing Editor Byron Dobell and six editors drift into Hayes's New York office for a story conference described as "organized anarchy." Occasionally they are joined by one of the magazine's two contract writers, Gay Talese, author of a long Esquire indiscretion about his old employer, the New York Times. When article ideas are nailed down, Hayes meets with Lois at New York's swish Four Sea sons restaurant; Lois takes it from there. "Reduced to its simplest terms," says Hayes, "our success relates to the fact that Gingrich got some smart, young guys together and gave them the freedom to thresh things out. As a result, Esquire has its own thumbprint now."