FELKER:'BULLY... BOOR... GENIUS'

The quintessential, slightly hoarse upper-class Manhattan honk, Tom Wolfe once theorized in New York magazine, can only be produced by the proper Eastern boarding schools, too many cigarettes over too many years and a great deal of whisky and gin. New York's founding editor Clay Schuette Felker, 51, attended a public high school in Webster Groves, Mo., has never smoked and rarely drinks anything stronger than cambric tea. His accent remains stubbornly and glottally Midwestern nasal. He flunks the honk test.

Nonetheless, Felker's weekly Almanac de Gotham lays down standards of aspiration, acceptance and rejection as rigid as any set by Louis Quatorze. Along with genuinely useful "urban survival" features, it gives the insecure a superior feeling of being inside, offering them a blend of fact and fantasy. It portrays an unreal stream-of-consumption world whose Gucci'd, Pucci'd denizens glide between Parke-Bernet (the t is not silent) and La Grenouille (the maitre d's name is Jean), send their children to the Dalton School, winter in St. Maarten or Gstaad, summer in the Hamptons, patronize the priciest boutiques but also thriftshop, and know exactly where to find the best buys in catered canapes, scuba lessons, English butlers, conversational Italian, take-out lasagna, abortions, exterminators, '76 Beaujolais, yachts, docks, clocks, stocks, rocks, lox and woks. Also rijsttafel, macrame and dog psychologists who make house calls. With all this, plus extramarital affairs to save their marriages and therapeutic sex with their shrinks, New York's New Yorkers lead busy, busy lives.

Clay Felker, the creator and curator of this ineffably rewarding world, screams a lot. He insults people. He falls asleep at dinner parties. His wispy, graying locks go uncombed, his custom-made Savile Row suits look as if they had been bought at a manufacturer's fire sale--they do not disguise his paunch. He is variously described by associates and acquaintances as autocratic, devious, dishonest, rapacious, egotistical, power mad, paranoid, a bully and a boor. Almost in the same breath, the same people call Felker a genius. "He's always been tough, restless and driven," says George A. Hirsch, now publisher of New Times, who quit as publisher of New York after four years of corporate karate with Clay. When New York was still struggling for survival, he adds, "Clay would pace the room, hyperventilating as he does when he's excited, and say, 'I think there's a great chance for us. Maybe we can take over ABC or Time Inc. I don't know how it's done, but I know they do these things.'"

Felker is, above all, according to one longtime staffer, "a collector and a climber. If you're not important or have nothing interesting to say, Clay won't remember you, even if he's met you 20 times." Milton Glaser, the gifted designer who is responsible for New York's hip, hyped visual package, concedes that his longtime friend Felker is "very abrasive, very argumentative," but insists that "the chemistry works. It's all a great mystery." Bestselling Author Gail Sheehy (Passages), Felker's steady companion, considers him a fascinating talker but adds, "He's the most impatient man I've ever known. He's incapable of spending ten minutes at the typewriter." Sheeny adds that Felker is "almost worshipful" of good writers.

Felker is an idea editor, not a pencil editor. He has had remarkably accurate antennae for coming fashions --and a knack for catchy headlines that are often better than the articles and make each fad seem momentous. The list of writers for whom he has provided a springboard is also impressive. As features editor of Esquire from 1957 to 1962, he helped steer Norman Mailer into reportage and published some of the first so-called New Jourrialists, most notably Tom Wolfe. On the old New York Herald Tribune, where he edited the Sunday magazine that was to be reincarnated as New York, he gave free rein to such emerging stars as Jimmy Breslin, Dick Schaap, George ("Adam Smith") Goodman. Many of the best and the brightest have left in rage and frustration--or on the wave of New York-borne success. Felker, says Ms. editor and Felker protegee Gloria Steinem, is "the lightning rod of animosity--and of creativity."

Felker does not add to his credibility by listing his birth date in Who's Who as Oct. 2, 1928, when he was actually born on Oct. 2, 1925. As adamantly as Harry S. Truman, he has refused to disclose his middle name--possibly because Schuette rhymes with "snooty" in Missouri honk. His father, Carl Felker, now 82, was a veteran newsman who became the editor of the immensely successful Sporting News (circ. 330,000). Carl Felker never won a single share of stock in Sporting News, a failure that still weighs on Clay's mind. When Clay was eight, he started his own hectograph-printed newspaper (ads: 25-c- a shot). Soon after he graduated from Duke, he got a job at LIFE.

Some New York staffers--who are not generally overpaid--have loudly objected to Felker's costly personal and professional style. When the magazine moved in 1974 to expensive new quarters on Manhattan's Second Avenue, the boss installed a gym. He also carved out a staff dining room (he had it redecorated several times) and installed a $25,000-a-year chef, who signed each day's menus "Felipe--Executive Chef."

Then there was Felker's private office. After years of inhabiting cubicles filled to overflowing with books, manuscripts, scratch pads, plastic cups, unpaid bills, echoes of old screams and the yellowing envelopes on which he jots his inspirations, Felker decided to create for himself a baronial HQ. The walls were walnut-paneled, the floors Orientally carpeted. All went executive suitely until, says Managing Editor Byron Dobell, "Clay heard people discussing things outside his office door, and he couldn't bear not hearing all of it." So Clay moved his battered old desk--a Trib memento--into the editorial bullpen, where he could overhear everything.

A bachelor for eight years since his divorce from Actress Pamela Tiffin (he claimed at times that she was a streptococcus "carrier," and he was constantly infected by her tonsils), Felker maintains an East 57th Street superduplex with a live-in housekeeper-cook named Berta, whom he sent to cooking school. Says one ex-protege: "Clay told me that you should always live beyond your means so that people will think you're doing well." Adds Richard Reeves: "I think Clay Felker made a great mistake in not being born rich."

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