” could take you while still maintaining an abode in Greenwich Village. In a buccaneer move that none of us underlings saw coming (and caught nearly all the overlings off guard), the paper was sold by its principal owner, the patrician pretty boy and former New York City councilman Carter Burden, to Clay Felker, who had made New York magazine the flagship station of the New Journalism, the only weekly worthy of the racing silks and the dusty roar of career jockeys working the far turn. The sale was a culture clash fused with a shotgun wedding. Where the Voice was a downtown scrappy collage, a bulletin board that shot back, New York was a midtown, Madison Avenue, starfucky, glossy display window where the contributors shone with the reflected glow of their glamorous subjects, achieving their own celebrity shellac—Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin, John Simon, Albert Goldman, Gail Sheehy, Nick Pileggi, Nik Cohn, Judith Crist. If the Voice still fancied itself as something of a rogue enterprise, punching above its weight with wicked uppercuts, New York aspired to the cocktail party in the penthouse suite where every name was boldfaced and the tinkling of ice was musical delight. In this, my first experience with an editorial coup, I had the psychic cushion of being a bit player not worth waging a custody battle over. I had little stake pro or con in an editorial changeover because I was still down in the circulation department, hiding incriminating mistakes in my desk and fielding phone calls from the highly frustrated. It was far more emotionally whipsawing for most of those around me, whose histories with the paper went back a decade or more and had become integrated into their cellular structure. For those of such braided loyalty, the Voice was the only journalistic home they had ever known, the only hut on the island willing to accept the idiosyncratic and unclassifiable and provide refuge. Dan and Ed, Ed and Dan (their names went up and down together like a teeter-totter), were soft-spoken patriarchs whose presences were taken for granted as enduring. The sense of dismay and betrayal at the paper being sold cut deep and cross-angled, serrated with the knowledge of how much Dan and Ed had profited from the original sale to Carter Burden while writers were subsisting on financial scraps. As would later happen at The New Yorker when William Shawn was deposed, some would never recover from Wolf’s departure, banking their bitterness for long-term capital losses and never quite finding themselves again.
What Felker perceived with pirate zeal was that the Voice was a brand and the brand was being left to fend for itself, unexploited, unemblazoned. He compared the current operation of the Voice to a college paper, a country store. Following the model of Rolling Stone, he intended to platform the paper into a national weekly less immersed in the parochial joustings below Fourteenth Street and packing more throw weight as a political and cultural resonator. To accomplish this, the national edition had to pipe up and pump out trend pieces that translated into every urban zip code. Such trend spotting and trumpeting were antithetical to the Voice ethos, where eyewitness testimony was prized over billboard statements plastered over every passing craze. And the wider spectrum Felker sought involved a different, alien set of metrics; he commissioned a profile piece of the impressionist Rich Little—whose personality was considered bland even by Canadian standards and whose takeoffs had none of the fanged bite of David Frye’s (his tongue-darting, eye-popping William F. Buckley suggested an iguana on mescaline)—based mostly on Little’s high Q ratings, which were considered a gauge of likability. Likability! This from a paper dedicated to chafing and championing the difficult underdog. He brought in designers and illustrators and introduced a blue band to the Voice’s front-page logo, a minor twirl-up that was considered a trashy violation of the paper’s monochromatic aesthetic. It didn’t take long for the verdict to be rendered on