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	Kurt Andersen, along with co-founder Graydon Carter, exploded onto the pop-culture scene with Spy magazine, which lampooned the famous and infamous among New York’s elite. Now, a newly released compendium of those heady years, left, gives an insider’s look into life on satire’s cutting edge.

The first time I read it, I literally couldn’t sleep all night,” Kurt Andersen recalls of his first look at a finished copy of Spy: The Funny Years (Miramax Books), a chronicle of the celebrated satirical magazine he co-founded in New York in 1986. “It surprised me that there was all this stuff in my consciousness that had settled comfortably onto the seabed and was stirred up by reading this history.”

Insomnia is a curious reaction, given that Andersen himself is one of the book’s co-authors. But then Spy was more than just a humor mag, and achieving yuks at the expense of Manhattan’s moneyed swells was the least of its goals. Indeed, as fellow co-founding co-editor Graydon Carter boldly proclaimed in an early mission statement, “A hundred years from now, the graduate student sifting through the racks of the New York Historical Society will, with relish, throw himself upon old copies of Spy to get a feeling for what it was to be young and smart and living in New York in the ’80s.”

Heady stuff. Though given the hallowed language with which its many admirers still discuss Spy’s initial run (before Carter decamped in 1991 to helm The New York Observer and subsequently Vanity Fair), crediting the magazine with changing not only the media landscape, but also the very DNA of the media itself, may not be entirely off the mark.

“We’re all Spy now,” Paul O’Donnell wrote on mediabistro.com in 2003. “It’s hard to prowl the newsstand today without seeing the influence of Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter’s stinging tone, or Alex Isley’s layered page designs, or both.” Andersen happily concurs in his book’s introduction: “If you worked at Spy you can’t help seeing its memes everywhere these days, in print, on the Internet, on television,” from The Onion to the current sea of attitude-dispensing blogs to Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and VH1’s endless junk-culture documentaries and reality shows. Founding Spy publisher Tom Phillips even likens the duo of Andersen and Carter to “the Lennon and McCartney of publishing.”

On that note, Funny Years co-writer and then Spy deputy editor George Kalogerakis can pinpoint the exact day the music died. He writes of the somewhat dazed Andersen who greeted fellow staffers during an editorial meeting immediately following Carter’s announced departure:

Kurt had tuned out the discussion and was completely focused on trying to attach a pen and a pencil to either side of a straw. Everyone gradually stopped talking.

“Uh, Kurt?” Graydon said, gently. “Are you going to be alright?”

“I’ve blocked out that scene entirely,” Andersen says with a rueful chuckle, “so I’ll have to trust George’s memory. I do remember Graydon’s leaving as a difficult moment: What’s going to happen next? How does this work now?”


Ivana Trump, May 1989	Tracey Ullman, September 1988	Merv Griffin and Henry Kissinger, November 1989

Still, as solo acts go, Andersen has hardly been a slouch. After soldiering on at Spy for another year and a half, he eventually became the editor in chief of New York magazine, a New Yorker columnist, an acclaimed novelist, a Peabody-winning public-radio-show host and, most dramatically, co-founder of the entertainment-industry-focused website inside.com. From that roost he gave the speculative frenzy of the dot-com era one of its most enduring epigrams—deeming the raising of venture capital in 2000 “as easy as getting laid in 1969”—as well as one of its most defining flameouts, burning through a reported $35 million in less than a year, and with barely 1,200 paid subscribers to show for its mountain of press coverage.

Yet amidst that impressive résumé, it’s Spy magazine that continues to fascinate, as evidenced by the breathless reaction surrounding even the initial 2003 announcement of The Funny Years’ seven-figure advance. Three years later, the source of all that adoration is finally collected in hardcover. Alongside plenty of juicy anecdotes (“The magazine had just gotten new libel insurance, and [Graydon] wanted to try it out”) are reprints of Spy’s “greatest hits”: There’s the secret client list of Hollywood powerhouse agency CAA, as well as notorious correspondence between its imperious CEO, Michael Ovitz, and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, warning him that if he moved to a new agent, Ovitz’s “foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day will blow your brains out.”


Edward Kennedy, November 1987	Donald Trump, April 1988	Donald Trump, April 1988

For those looking to rank Manhattan’s old media elite, there’s an annotated seating chart from the Russian Tea Room, precursor to today’s eatery Michael’s as “the mover-and-shaker lunchtime cafeteria of choice.” In a more mischievous spirit we’re treated to prank phone calls to then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (“He was relentless about calling me back”), and a stern missive from Richard Gere’s attorney warning of the consequences of even thinking about writing a story involving his client, a hamster and a certain persistent rumor.

And of course, there are plenty of tussles with Donald Trump. Christened a “short-fingered vulgarian” by Spy, he replied with a barrage of angry, unintentionally hilarious threats of litigation, providing the editorial gift that kept on giving, “like talking to the TV during Looney Tunes and having Daffy Duck reply.”

However, some of the closest-read stories in Spy were the ones that, today, seem the most conventional in light of the dizzying array of weekly, daily and on-line, instantaneous media criticism. But in 1986, “we had the field to ourselves,” Andersen marvels, particularly when it came to coverage of the then mysterious internal workings of the nation’s paper of record, The New York Times.


Spy scored laughs and devoted readers with witty features such as “Separated at Birth,”

“It was like the Kremlin during the Soviet time,” he notes of the Old Gray Lady and the void of published commentary surrounding its editorial decisions. “Some of it was fear. People wanted to get work there and not be blacklisted, and that had an enormous effect. For some people it was just too scary to say the emperor has no clothes.” Twenty years later, “now you or I or our retarded cousins could be blogging about The New York Times.

“We’d been journalists in New York for almost a decade,” Andersen says, pointing to his and Carter’s positions at Time. “What was said over drinks at the bar that could never go in the piece, the things we found out that never saw print—all of that was what we wanted to get into Spy. That was the galvanizing motivator.”

Not that either man was willing to entirely cut his ties with Time’s parent company. In a pre-Internet age, archival fact checking—now accomplished with quick on-line LexisNexis and Google searches—meant spending hours poring over old newspaper clips in the kind of sprawling “morgue” that only large institutions possessed. Fortunately, Andersen and Carter neglected to hand in their ID badges when they left their staff gigs to launch their new journal.

Spy intern David Kamp recalls in The Funny Years that “I was given Kurt’s Time Life ID and Marissa [Rothkopf] was given Graydon’s—she had a sort of flapper, wedge cut, which from a distance wasn’t a world of difference from Graydon’s hair style. We were trained to flash them very quickly. We never got caught. That was our research library.”

Workplace shenanigans aside, one of the most jarring aftereffects of reading The Funny Years is the realization that so many of its ’80s bête noires have not only made it through the intervening years with their public reputations intact—they’ve actually thrived. Trump, of course, is bigger than ever, and now savvy enough to realize the marketing value of a few carefully scripted self-deprecating jokes on Saturday Night Live or his own Apprentice series. But even a second-tier target, such as blowhard and enfant-terrible painter Julian Schnabel, is now deemed downright respectable—and hired by hotelier Ian Schrager (another rehabilitated ’80s character) to inject a dose of classy refinement into his projects.


	“Separated at Birth,”

“These days there’s so much snarkiness, so much making fun of everyone all the time,” Andersen laments. “That ambient Spy-ishness allows people like Julian Schnabel to be taken utterly seriously. Instead of having one guy with a howitzer aiming at a few things a month as we were, today you have a million people with BB guns firing at will. The Donald Trumps of today—his younger, more interesting equivalents—don’t have to worry about being taken down a peg by a magazine or a blog.” So in popularizing the all-irony-all-the-time approach, did Spy create a snarky Frankenstein monster?

“A father has many children,” Andersen replies dryly, “and he doesn’t necessarily want to take credit for all of them. There’s stuff in the snark-o-maniacal present that maybe we had some small measure of responsibility for. But you’d rather look away as you see it rampaging through the culture.”

Call it, then, an Oedipal case of the revolution’s children turning on one of their own, as Andersen appears to be directly in the path of that oncoming rampage. As he has moved to a prominent role within the very media milieu he once assailed, a growing number of younger writers and bloggers seems dedicated to tearing him down.

“I’ve gotten used to the kind of spitballs that the Gawkers of the world can spit,” he laughs, adding that he’s much more impressed by a recent shot across the bow from the nascent Radar, a magazine he’d previously eviscerated in a New York column as a pale retread of Spy. Returning the compliment, Radar fashioned an on-line parody with fake e-mails between Andersen and Carter discussing The Funny Years.


At Spy’s October 1986 launch party, staffers Graydon Carter, Eric Kaplan and Susan Morrison pose with cutouts of then New York editor Ed Kosner, Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown and The New Yorker editor William Shawn.

The latter was viciously lampooned as a jet-setting wastrel, who, between having Vanity Fair’s copy editors remodel his Connecticut summer home and its interns ghostwrite his facile What We’ve Lost (“my searing indictment of the Bush Gestapo”), paused to commission yet another fluffy feature (“You know the drill: quiet dignity, triumph over the odds, etc.”) and prep-school exposé (“Tween Whores of Dalton”). Andersen got off somewhat lighter, portrayed as a faddish, slightly insecure wonk babbling on about his novel’s “droll exploration of the techno-fragmentation of urban thoughtscapes, set against the faute de mieux of brand signifiers and hyper-identity politics—as seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old hip-hop prodigy.”

“Whoever did it, my hat’s off,” Andersen says of the parody, dropping his voice into a deadpan to quip, “Though it captured Graydon better than it caught me.” He admits to an initial powwow with Carter wherein the two tried to “triangulate” which former colleague was the piece’s mystery writer. But eventually they just decided to be grateful it wasn’t more damning: “If when people make fun of you, it’s that carefully done and well-wrought, all you can do is appreciate it.

“Graydon was talking to me the other day about his notion of survivors, which was a word we made fun of instinctively at Spy. But when you’re in your 50s and you have a life and a career, it’s not so funny anymore....We are the people Spy circa-1986 would be making merciless fun of.” Andersen pauses, sounding as bemused as any of his critics. “We’re part of the academy now.”

Kurt Andersen and co-author George Kalogerakis will read from and discuss Spy: The Funny Years during the 23rd annual Miami Book Fair International on Saturday, November 18th, at 11 a.m.

E-mail: brett@oceandrive.com

1. The 23rd Annual Miami Book Fair International


Christopher Hitchens

For one weekend every November, all the easy jokes about oxymorons and “Miami’s intellectual community” cease. Instead, Miami Dade College’s downtown Wolfson campus plays host to the country’s largest book fair. Throughout the fenced-off surrounding streets, a literal marketplace of ideas erupts: Rare-book dealers, self-published diet-guide authors, steely-eyed Socialist Workers Party cadres and proselytizing Muslim sects all hawk their wares. Inside the college’s adjoining classrooms and auditoriums, as the literary world’s who’s who holds court, the proceedings are a bit more genteel—sometimes painfully so.

Sadly, the 2004 pairing of David Brooks, conservative pundit and New York Times columnist, with Donna Brazile, Democratic Party operative and Al Gore’s Presidential campaign manager, was a one-shot deal, regardless of how illuminating—and laugh-out-loud funny—the resultant debate was. The book fair’s organizers have since reverted to a safer, often snooze-inducing political segregation, stacking discussion panels with uniformly like-minded souls, making sure to nudge Red and Blue Americans into separate rooms.

Which makes the appearance this year of ideological renegade Christopher Hitchens all the more welcome. To many wary figures on the right, neither Hitchens’ stalwart defense of the Iraq war, nor his stirring call to arms against Islamic fascism, erase his Henry Kissinger-goading, Trotskyite past. And no number of bylines in The Weekly Standard will paper over his former gig at The Nation. Suspicions are equally high on the left, where Hitchens was considered an apostate long before 9/11, vilified for joining in the impeachment effort against Bill Clinton—the title of his 1999 Bubba-bashing book, No One Left to Lie To, says it all. His latest tome is a bio of Thomas Jefferson, in which he pointedly notes that the Founding Father had his own foreign-state-sponsored terrorists to contend with on the Barbary Coast. Accordingly, don’t expect the conversation, or the subsequent Q&A session, to dwell in the 19th century for too long.

Other 2006 Book Fair highlights? Another President receives the biographical treatment, this time from his own daughter Doro Bush Koch in her My Father, My President: A Personal Account of the Life of George H.W. Bush. There aren’t any startling revelations within (“That’s when Dad told Jebbie and me to meet him in Tijuana with $10,000 in unmarked bills”), but given how weepy Doro got on a recent Larry King Live, a well-placed question might elicit an interesting response.

Fall also means the release of Nature Girl, the latest screwball thriller set in our own backyard from journalistic giant killer Carl Hiaasen, as well as Miami Noir, a new collection of, well, Miami noir, edited by FIU prof Les Standiford, whose own work oscillates between tightly paced crime novels and stranger-than-fiction historical inquiries. On that true-life tip, Mirta Ojito and Virgil Suarez plumb the emotional layers of el exilio, while lexicologist and media expert Richard Weiner serves up The Skinny About Best Boys, Dollies, Green Rooms, Leads, and Other Media Lingo. For times and locations of author presentations on November 18th and 19th, visit miamibookfair.com.

2. The Detroit Cobras


The Detroit Cobras

Singer Rachel Nagy cites seminal R&B crooner Irma Thomas as a key inspiration, and she certainly has the hair-raising pipes to do that comparison justice. With guitarist Mary Ramirez riffing away alongside her, and their rhythm section locking into place behind them, the Detroit Cobras stand as proof that something as simple as three chords and a heart full of soul can still make for some thrilling rock ’n’ roll. They play Miami’s Studio A on November 7th.

3. Miami Art Central’s Celluloid Manifestoes: Jim McBride


Jim McBride

Miami Art Central turns its lens homeward: Programmed by Konstantia Kontaxis (not a James Bond villain, but a University of Miami film prof), its ongoing film retrospective shifts from the cream of Europe’s ’60s art scene to an unsung American cinéaste, Jim McBride, and his first two cult pictures, 1967’s David Holzman’s Diary and 1969’s My Girlfriend’s Wedding. Screening on November 10th at 8 p.m., McBride’s work is deeply confessional, alternately hilarious and poignant, and an inviting precursor to latter-day self-obsessive directors Alan Berliner and Ross McElwee. Heck, we’ll even forgive him for his later move to Hollywood, 1983 train-wreck remake of Breathless and all. For more info see miamiartcentral.org.

—Brett Sokol