George Lois' 1960s Esquire covers put today's butt-kissing magazines to shame.
By CHARLES TAYLOR
Chutzpah is a wonderful thing in the Irish. I doubt that the delicious cover of the current issue of George -- Drew Barrymore mimicking Marilyn Monroe's famous "Happy Birthday" to JFK -- was publisher John Kennedy, Jr.'s idea. But surely it was his to kill. That he went ahead with it and even defended it ("If I'm not offended, why should anyone else be?") speaks well not just for his sense of humor, but for some small spark that has vanished from almost all current American magazines: the impulse to startle, provoke, even offend.
I'm not talking about what's inside these magazines, but what's on their covers. At a time when magazine covers are dominated by the glossy movie star shots of Vanity Fair (the Photoplay of our era), and when what constitutes daring is The New Yorker's Art Spiegelman translating his piddling talent into a piddling Santa Claus, the covers reproduced in the new book, "Covering the '60s: George Lois, the Esquire Era" (Monacelli Press), come as a shock.
Returning to them years after they first stared defiantly out from the newsstand -- surrounded then by innocuous Harper's and Atlantics and Saturday Reviews -- brings into focus not just the fractiousness of that decade but the journalistic blandness of our own. Daringly, sometimes even cruelly, conceived and photographed (most often by Carl Fischer) in a satiric, hyper-real style, Lois' covers are the visual equivalent of Norman Mailer's famous description of Terry Southern's prose: "Clean, mean, coolly deliberate and murderous."
There's a not-entirely-attractive self-satisfaction to Lois' work that manages to escape smugness by sheer acerbic virtuosity. Try to imagine the braggadocio of Muhammad Ali (the subject or model of some of Lois' most memorable covers) minus Ali's generosity of spirit or poetic grace. But just as Ali delivered on every grandiose prediction, Lois, most of the time, justified his own outrageous concepts as the logical expression of the articles they illustrated.
Lois could be cheeky (showing Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup for a story on the collapse of the avant-garde) or eloquent (giving us Ali -- denied the right to fight in the ring for refusing to fight in Vietnam -- as St. Sebastian), or disrespectful (portraying Hubert Humphrey as a ventriloquist's dummy controlled by -- hidden under the gatefold sleeve -- surprise! LBJ). Lois could also be cloddishly insulting, as when he showed a long-haired campus radical in GI garb to ridicule what he saw as the cowardice of kids who dodged the war, or just plain oblivious, as in almost every cover about women.
More than anything, though, Lois could be unsettling. To accompany an Esquire exclusive, "The Confessions of Lt. Calley" (for which Esquire paid Calley $20,000), Lois posed a smiling, uniformed William Calley (leader of the My Lai massacre) surrounded by Asian children, the smallest, a toddler, sitting on his lap. On first sight, the cover is shocking, even revolting. Do these children know who this man is? What gradually dawns on you is that the cover expresses -- and decimates -- Calley's view of himself as a nice, regular guy; he's oblivious to any connection between the kids he murdered and the ones he's posed with.
The overwhelming message of Lois' work -- the thing that makes it so anomalous today -- is that the editorial content of magazines belongs to writers and graphic artists and editors, and not to advertisers or sales departments or the magazine's subjects, or even to the readers. When, for Esquire's Christmas 1962 issue, Lois offered a scowling portrait of big bad boxer Sonny Liston as Santa Claus, it cost the magazine an estimated $750,000 in lost advertising and subscriptions, enough to get a contemporary writer or artist fired.
The days when mainstream magazines would stand up for controversial content are almost dead. The people who put out magazines want to stroke the public, not upset them, and covers reflect that. A few years ago, in a profile of the Hollywood agent Pat Kingsley, The New Yorker reported that she asked a magazine editor, "Why do you always get to decide who's on your cover?" Instead of having her arrogant ass booted out of the office, Kingsley was, the magazine reported, "given no satisfactory reason" why she herself shouldn't decide. The result? "She now has almost as much control over magazine covers featuring her clients as the magazine's editor." Since celebs adorn the covers of most mainstream mags, the agents' influence is wide, and cover shots are designed to flatter stars' images of themselves. There should be a kick to seeing Courtney Love posed as an angel on the cover of Vanity Fair. But the creamy Maxfield Parrish look of the photo instead plays to a star's vanity, unlike Sonny Liston's Santa, a risky parody of image.
In his recent book, "Adcult USA," an examination of the influence of advertising on culture, James Twitchell says we're naive to be shocked at how advertising has come to control editorial content. He who pays the piper calls the tune, Twitchell reminds us. He's right. And this state of affairs is likely to continue until the people in charge realize that he who pays the piper often doesn't know the first thing about music.
Charles Taylor writes about popular culture for the Boston Phoenix and is a frequent contributor to Salon.