July 10, 2011 |
FROM THE VAULT (WINTER 2010)
There’s a photo of George Lois from 1964, taken not long after he started art directing covers for Esquire magazine. It’s in black and white and he’s around 30 years old, dressed in a sharp suit and dark tie, with his jet-black hair slicked back. One foot’s resting across his knee, and while he’s making a point, gesturing to someone outside the frame, it’s casually done, leaning back in a leather chair. He looks like a young Brando: all confidence, tough-handsome, a bit of a charmer and a bit “fuck you”, too.
A conversation with Lois today and his famous outspoken self-assurance proves as maverick and uncompromising as his accent must have seemed when the Greek kid from the Bronx first hit the Wasp-dominated Manhattan advertising world of the 1950s. “There’ve been some terrific art directors besides me,” he says at one moment. “I’d say there was four or five guys in my class.” Who’d disagree? Lois isn’t afraid to call it how he sees it, and his contribution to magazine and advertising culture is truly legendary, with everyone from Annie Leibovitz to Martin Scorsese lining up to pay him his dues.
From 1962 to the early 1970s the 90-odd images Lois created for the premier front page spot helped define Esquire as the greatest American magazine of the decade – the greatest of all time, according to Vanity Fair. Under the auspices of the hotshot young editor Harold Hayes, writers such as Tom Wolfe, Normal Mailer, Germaine Greer, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Terry Southern, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Dorothy Parker chronicled the age, bringing fresh vigour and vision to magazine writing and giving birth to what would be dubbed the New Journalism. They surely had a lot to write about, including the Civil Rights Movement, free love and feminism, while political turmoil seemed a constant from the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King to the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts, the rise of Nixon and, of course, there was Vietnam. Tellingly, a 1970anthology of Esquire articles was named Smiling Through the Apocalypse.
Lois’s covers announced the magazine’s clout with a single sure-fire visual statement of his own devising. “I realised from the very beginning that it was a canvas for me to do exciting work but also to kick some ass,” he says. This included posing Muhammad Ali, decried as a draft-dodger, in his Everlast boxing shorts, his body scored with arrows like a martyred Saint Sebastian; surrounding Nixon’s profile with hands bearing hairspray, powder puff and lipstick; while Andy Warhol was shown drowning in his own soup, or rather a giant tin of Campbell’s…
As with all living legends, Lois has a lot of good stories and he tells them well, like how Warhol responded to that cover request: “Ooh, aren’t you going to have to build a gigantic can of soup?” Or the time he used clip art to pose the notoriously bolshy writer Norman Mailer on the cover in a King Kong suit, carrying another Esquire contributor, his archenemy Germaine Greer, in his arms: “Mailer just screamed at me. He really wanted to fight me. I said, ‘This could be the best day of my life, I wanted to punch you out.’ We made a date in Central Park. I went there and he never showed up. He thought he could fight, you know? But I know I can fight.”
Born in 1931 to a Greek florist, Lois was raised in the Bronx and says he was lucky to have been steered by an early art teacher towards the Bauhaus-influenced, progressive High School of Music & Art. He met his future wife, Rosemary, on his first day at Brooklyn’s Art Institute, an encounter he speaks of as if it were yesterday, though they’ve now been together for nearly six decades. A year after meeting, they eloped. Lois left college to work for Reba Sochis, one of the very few women art directors of the 1950s, and as he was no longer a student, was promptly drafted to fight in the Korean war. Denouncing it today as “a war of genocide on the Korean people”, it was an experience that would define his political sensibilities.
Returning to New York, Lois went back to work as one of the original Mad Men (though, for the record, he hates the series, slamming what he considers a fantastical presentation of a louche, martini-drenched lifestyle, when it was all hard work and nobody ever bedded secretaries). Working for the iconic ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, he met his great mentor, Bill Bernach, who put his name on the production masthead, a first for an art director.
By the time Lois got the call from Hayes, asking for some advice on how to revamp Esquire’s covers in 1962, he had co-founded his own agency, Papert, Koenig, Lois. He recalls how Hayes described the decision-making process behind the covers, a complex but familiar to-and-fro between the art department, the ad team and the editors. “‘Oh my God,’ I said, ‘group grope… You gotta get yourself a real graphic communicator, someone who understands culture, sports, politics.’” Lois had never worked in magazines before, but in Hayes’s eyes he’d just talked himself into a job.
Over the next 10 years Lois and Hayes would meet once a month at The Four Seasons restaurant. Here Hayes would talk through each issue’s stories and Lois would “recognise a great cover”. He explains, “Many, many times it was far from being the most important article in the magazine that month. I was just gonna do covers that gave the feeling Esquire was an intensely aggressive, hip, sharp, tough, funny, thrilling, serious, thinking person’s magazine. That’s the way we did it.” Lois describes his side of the bargain as if it were simple: “People say to me all the time, ‘It took a lot of balls to do those covers.’ It didn’t for me. It took Harold Hayes balls to run it.”
Take Lois’s first and only “Christmas special”, a knockout so socially seismic it initially sent magazine advertisers fleeing the ring. Asked by Hayes to give him something “Christmassy”, Lois came back with an image of the black world heavyweight champ Sonny Liston in a Santa hat, prompting Sports Illustrated to later remark that he was “the last man on earth America wanted to see coming down its chimney”. Liston was, as Lois says, “the meanest motherfucker”, deemed a danger to the Civil Rights Movement thanks to his connections in organised crime. Overturning hollow statements about equality and “goodwill to all men”, Lois’s image of a black Santa pushed serious racial hot buttons, underscoring just how far America had yet to go.
Lois’s covers ran the gamut from righteous to sardonic to fearless. Highlights include Joe McCarthy’s brutish interrogator, Roy Cohn, who had recently published a book defending his persecution of suspected communists. Lois had him decked out in a self-applied halo, which sticks out from the back of his head while he grimly gives the camera the evil eye. Most shocking, perhaps, is the photo he commissioned of Lieutenant William L Calley Jr. On trial for the massacre of more than 100 villagers in Vietnam, Lois convinced him to pose surrounded by Vietnamese kids. “I called myself a cultural provocateur,” he recalls. “Harold Hayes said what I used to do were pictorial Zolas [the 19th-century French realist novelist]. You could look at all of those covers I did over those years as a visual timeline of what was happening in America. Good and a lot of bad, you know?”
In the intervening decades since Esquire’s heyday, Lois’s achievements have been legion, including masterminding the I Want My MTV campaign in the early 1980s and his award-winning and only music video, which set Bob Dylan’s Jokerman to art images plucked from a couple of past millennia. While he once headed an office of 100 people, today he runs his company, Good Karma Creative, with his son Luke. “Now I just see Luke, give him a kiss and go to work,” he says.
Magazines clearly remain a passion and when Lois says he’s a fan of Ten’s design, we know he means it. He’s not afraid to be vocal when it comes to what he recognises as an industry in creative freefall, too often weakened by advertising muscle over visual and editorial content and unsure of itself in the wake of digital media. “No white space, no excitement, no spreads you turn to that knock you down,” he says outraged. “The graphics are about organising a ton of information on a page. The more trouble magazines get into, the more they’re looking like the internet. It’s ridiculous!”
While Lois is full of righteous ire about the present state of publishing, he does have some pertinent advice for hopeful rebels. “Doing celebrity covers shouldn’t handcuff you. If you are given the job of photographing a certain person, get a goddamn idea bout it. Get a goddamn idea that knocks you down.” Now, that’s fighting talk.
by Skye Sherwin
