The guys from Spy-sometimes called the Marx Brothers of the magazine world-do their work nine floors up in the Puck Building, just across the street from graffiti artist Keith Haring`s Pop Shop.
Spy editor E. Graydon Carter (the Groucho of the group) is convinced against all evidence that the much-ballyhooed Haring broke into his car last summer and stole his tape deck. That`s Carter`s idea of a joke: not that his tape deck is missing, but that someone as celebrated as Haring may have done it.
Pointing accusing (and amusing) fingers at art world luminaries is only the beginning for Carter. Each month, he and co-editor Kurt Andersen, publisher Thomas L. Phillips Jr., publishing director Steven Schragis and a team of poison pen-pushers trash celebrities other magazines glorify and expose the absurdities of modern city life in a publication that is home to the hippest satiric journalism around.
Slightly more than a year after its launch, Spy magazine has emerged from the stable of trendy, downtown New York publications to become an often-quoted antidote to the name-dropping excesses of glossy monthlies.
If Details tells readers what`s hip, Spy tells readers what`s overblown. If Interview treats New York`s underground like major celebrities, Spy treats major celebrities like dirt.
With its brash, kick-`em-while-they`re-up attitude, Spy is selling more copies with each issue. Current circulation is about 40,000 copies a month. As Spy sets satiric sights less on Manhattan and more on the continent, it can only garner more fans. Already more than a third of the magazine`s circulation is outside the New York area.
One needn`t live in the Big Apple to watch Spy take a big bite out of it or even have visited New York to notice how cleverly Spy puts the fun back into Fun City. But a knowledge of Manhattan and its cast of characters helps. ”You get a higher appreciation of it,” Carter said.
For November, Spy`s theme is ”Kennedy Bashing!” Its cover shows Sen. Edward Kennedy (a crafty bit of photo grafting, actually) being doused with a bucket of water. The cover lines tease to ”Chappaquiddick: The Unsold Story,” and ”Chappaquiddick Girls: Spy Goes on an Update.”
Mean-spirited? No more than a Spy profile some months back of fitness guru Jake Steinfeld called ”Big, Rich and Pushy.” No more than the magazine`s annual list of the 100 ”most annoying, alarming and appalling people, places and things in New York and the nation.” And, no more, in the Spy guys` view, than is necessary in a world of kissy-huggy media hype.
”We`re not mean-spirited cranks,” Carter said. ”We`re not going to make fun of obvious tragedies. We`re all decent family men. It`s just that there are so few people to admire in New York City in 1987.”
Besides, he said, ”We don`t make fun of nuns.”
Said Andersen, ”There are bounds of taste and propriety. Spy is a very tasteful magazine. But there is no subject, per se, we won`t touch. Spy is like New Yorker was in the `20s and `30s. It`s a young people`s New Yorker.” ”It`s also funny,” Schragis added. ”People run out and read the magazine on the subway and laugh. If you really read it, you see the general notes and chords. The serious and the playful stuff.”
Andersen maintains that Spy is ”inventing a new genre-things that are on the edge of fiction and non-fiction. That`s why Spy is what it is. It dances around the edge.”
”Kurt is a heretic, by the way,” Carter blurts.
Actually, he is just a former Time Inc. employee. Andersen, an Omaha native, and Carter, from Ottawa, Canada, met at Time six years ago and talked about doing a contemporary satire magazine.
They met Bostoner Phillips through Andersen`s wife, his former classmate. Schragis, the only native New Yorker, became the fourth partner as Spy`s major investor.
Today, both Andersen and Carter admit Spy is very much influenced by their days at Time magazine, especially, as Carter says, in ”the mix and packaging of stories.” A Spy staff of about 25, most between ages 25 and 40, produce news briefs, lots of sidebars accompanying major stories, and humorous standing features, including ”The Liz Smith Tote Board,” a list of celebrities and how many times they were mentioned in Smith`s gossip column in any given month.
Said Smith, whose column appears in about 70 newspapers: ”I`ve been a big supporter of Spy magazine. A lot of it is very amusing, but a lot of people don`t agree with me, particularly if they`ve been attacked.”
Television celebrity Oprah Winfrey, the Spy guys say, was furious when a profile of her titled ”It Came From Chicago” was published, but later forgave them. (She did not return calls concerning an interview for this article, however.) A story on colleges of the dumb rich prompted calls from
”lots of dumb rich alumni,” the spy guys say.
”Some proved they were dumb rich alumni,” Schragis added.
Steinfeld, of ”Body by Jake” fame, said his Spy profile, which included an unflattering junior high yearbook photo, ”was the first time someone took a shot. (But) I got more response to that than I got from the New Yorker, Time, Newsweek and Life.”
Steinfeld said the response was positive.
