I was reading the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly the other day and came to the week’s marriages, deals, and obits page called Monitor. Nicole Ritchie was dubbed “diminutive socialite”; affixed to the name of Snoop Dog was the prefix “serial airport nuisance.” This was straight, strict Spy magazine, circa 1988.

Spy is arguably the most influential magazine published in the second half of the 20th century. It’s 112 issues from 1986 to 1990, with only the first 81 considered to be part of the funny years were at the cutting edge of national magazine writing style, visual design, and aggressive editorial positions that made all other papers seem pallid by comparison and which made a mockery of unhip journalists at other publications who were prone to using fakely hip phrases such as “cutting edge.” It was a sad day in January of 1998 when the then new owners of Spy announced that the magazine was shutting down.

But those mournful readers weren’t going to miss Spy. It proceeded to pop up, as a tone, as a visual style, everywhere, in the New York Observer, then EW, then Vanity Fair, not to mention the Internet itself, from Gawker to The Smoking Gun, but which at its worst excesses has adopted the crudity of Spy‘s snark without its elegance.
I will admit to being obsessed with Spy during its lifetime. At the “alternative” newsweekly I worked at for a time I attempted to introduce Spy like elements (but so did others, which usually constituted embarrassing public record filings, a speciality of Spy). Though I loved stories such as the underground excursion into Bohemian Grove, and the media columns on Hollywood and the New York Times, my main focus was on The Spy List, its monthly blind item gossip column in the form of a puzzle. Often they were rather easy to figure, usually thanks to a fictional character whose well-known feature or action who provided the clue that defined the group into which all of the names were corralled, but not being in Manhattan some of them were at first baffling. Then when you finally pieced it together, the palpable, physical sense of satori was exquisite, orgasmic. Indeed, I became so obsessed with the Spy list that I first collected them into collated photocopied pages that I carried around with me to ponder over with friends in bars, and then second, even went so far as to try and write some of my own and submit them to the magazine. I reached the apotheosis of this obsession when, after mailing in my submissions, I actually got a call from someone at Spy. I don’t remember his name, and I am guessing that he was an intern, but on behalf of Spy he actually showed an interest in a couple of my Lists. I should have packed up and instantly moved to New York, but it is a good thing I didn’t, for shortly thereafter Spy was sold, and soon the Spy List was no longer a feature under the new regime. Still, I was about to ferret out a crucial bit of information from the caller. There was one lone Spy list that I was never able to figure out. I said, “Say, while I’ve got you on the telephone, let me ask you this. There is one list I’ve never been able to crack.” I read the first few items on the list. Spy‘s owners will be proud to know that the man did not really crack. He wouldn’t say explicitly what the list was about (and indeed the new book also maintains that the Spy list was an utterly random collection of names), but since I had gone to a lot of trouble on the magazine’s behalf, he must have taken pity on me and said, “Huh, well, it sounds like it’s probably a bunch of stuff in somebody’s office.” I put down the ‘phone and hauled out my list anthology. The intern-editor’s statement was all I need; the solution to the puzzle screamed in my face. I shall leave it to the reader to suss out what list I may have been talking about.
Though I could easily pull down and flip through my near complete collection of the magazine, it is still a delight to relive those days thanks to the publication of Spy: The Funny Years (Miramax Books, 304 pages, $39.95, ISBN 1 401 35239 1), a history of the magazine by its early insiders.

As one of my fellow Spy lovers complained, the only thing missing from the book is a disc or two with all 112 issues on it, akin to the complete run of The New Yorker you can buy for a hundred-plus dollars, but otherwise it takes you behind the scenes at what must have been the most exciting place to work in New York in the 1980s. I could have used a more organized approach to the anthology components of the book but I was grateful for the history tour. In fact, I may be the perfect reader for this book, as I could annotated it as I read along by pulling out of my files media mentioned in passing that measured Spy‘s impact. When primary author George Kalogerakis mentions that New York magazine launched an attack article, I was able to re-read it quickly. When he mentions that the Wall Street Journal ran a front page article bemoaning the cruelty of the magazine, I could pull it out of the same folder and enhance my reading pleasure.

Kalogerakis, with the help of co-founders Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter through the agency of occasional footnotes, walks us through the history of the magazine as seen up close and personal. He paints the times that Spy was about to change, he tracks the influences Time-ese, Mencken, Private Eye), and in the most interesting chapter, to me anyway, describes the editorial process. What distinguished Spy was the fact that from its cover to its occasional index it came at you like a collective force. It had a house style, and was probably the most edited paper on the news rack. Though Kalogerakis reports some writers being at first angry at the editorial interference, they also ended up being embarrassed that they hadn’t written the story that good in the first place.

The greatest thing that Kalogerakis did in his youthful exuberance was keep a diary of his time at Spy, and it is a pity that he does not quote from it more extensively, though it is probably not publishable in the way that, say, a Saturday Night Live diary couldn’t be. His snapshots of the behind the scenes interplay, hijinks, and in general congenial atmosphere of creativity and risk-taking. I await eagerly a true successor to that most marvelous magazine.

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