Alexander Kaplen died December 16, 2015, at the age of 56. He was 31 when I last saw him on March 5, 1991, about 5:30 p.m. I know the time because I had rushed to the bank in a taxi with $8,000 in cash. The money was the Wigwag Magazine Company’s share of the auction proceeds of the magazine’s hard assets: the phone system, Macs, desks, chairs, fax machine. An ironist would have enjoyed some of our furnishings: filing cabinets from Esquire‘s former headquarters, their drawers still labeled “Man At His Best” and “Women We Love.” The conference table too big for our conference room, but irresistible when the man at the used furniture shop in the basement of Calvary-St. George’s Episcopal Church told me it had belonged to Ivan Boesky. In the hectic days leading up to the auction, after every media company that pursued us in 1990 had turned us down in 1991, I got one last call. It was Michael Milken’s public relations man. Would we be interested in letting Mrs. Milken run the magazine while Mr. Milken was in prison?
Lex’s career up to this point had been enviable, magnificent—if only he could have enjoyed it more. Born to a wealthy, artsy, philanthropic family in Englewood, New Jersey, he had made a mark at Harvard by founding an undergraduate magazine, which brought him to the notice of William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, who hired him. But Lex left his junior editorial job after two years to attend Yale Law School. There he had the idea of starting a new, national “literary” magazine (which is how the New Yorker was classified by an adoring advertising industry), but one less arch, more rooted, written for the young woman who lives in Dubuque, or yearns to. Lex’s dream took fire when Si Newhouse, whose Condé Nast acquired the New Yorker in 1985, fired Shawn in 1987. The magazine’s editorial staff regarded this as a betrayal, and some who were young and had little to lose joined Lex’s project. After a test issue of Wigwag in early 1988, Lex found an investor and hired me as publisher, to start January 1989.
I handed Lex that final deposit slip two years later. We shook hands, and I left. Lex would never speak to me again. Not a rare experience in my life; much rarer was never to have encountered him again in the next 20 years in the media business in New York. It wasn’t personal. Lex kept to a minimum contact with Wigwag people he liked, even loved. When I met those to whom he was closest, I would ask them about Lex; the reply was often, “I was going to ask you that.” The brilliant entrepreneurial young editors of the ’80s and ’90s kept bobbing up again, and still do. Adam Moss, Graydon Carter, Terry McDonell, Dan Okrent, Jane Pratt, the late Peter Kaplan—I had the privilege of seeing them all in the midst of various humbling experiences, all of them crystallized in an ineradicable memory: Tina Brown, post her editorship of the New Yorker, struggling to open the lobby door of an anonymous 56th Street office building with an armful of presentations for her next project, Talk magazine—all by herself. Barely reaching the door in time to help her, I murmured, “Miss Brown, you shouldn’t have to do this.”
Not Lex. He would not sacrifice to the media gods. He seemed to me to have determined that Wigwag magazine would not only remain his greatest achievement, but would entomb his ambition and the greater part of his immense talent.
A characteristically illustrated Wigwag spread
In mid-September 1989, Lex and I were alone in his office in Wigwag‘s second-floor space on Spring Street in SoHo, waiting for the first box of printed issues of the magazine: the October 1989 issue. Lex grimaced and jammed a pencil into the powerful electric pencil sharpener on his desk, as he did at moments of stress. “Sam,” he said, simply, “do you think we’ll be famous?” Even though it had been a full year since Lex hired me, it was still surprising to hear his high, light, musical voice coming out of a body that was stout in a prewar 20th-century manner. Lex was being kind by including me in his anticipation of fame, because he did not particularly like me.
Wigwag would make him, fleetingly, famous. A month after that meeting, I went into the office on the Sunday after the great San Francisco earthquake of Tuesday, October 17. I needed to catch up after being stuck on the West Coast all week on an abortive sales trip that was to include a late SFO dinner on Tuesday. I unlocked the office and panicked; but it wasn’t vandalism. It was a vast pile of curled-up heat-sensitive paper at the foot of our fax machine. The offerings were a jumbo roll-full of personal accounts of the earthquake experience sent to us by a score or so of the first 50,000 Wigwag subscribers out of an eventual 200,000. They had seen the first issue, and already it felt natural to them to share what they saw and felt with Lex’s magazine.
Even before we mailed that debut issue, Lex and Wigwag were celebrated. We were the emblem of the “kinder, gentler” era that—much to Lex’s annoyance—the George H. W. Bush campaign had ushered in. To give one example of many: Perhaps the very day Lex and I were talking, the September 15, 1989, Detroit Free Press hit the street—a paper read by the men and women who placed automotive advertisements in slick magazines (a breed not yet extinct). The front page of its feature section welcomed the kinder, gentler ’90s. The age of excess was over: In the coming decade, wrote Robin Givhan and J. Tanasychuk,
At the bottom of the page there were two archetypal ’90s images of sincerity and humility. On the left, a Gap ad for a $9.50 T-shirt—modeled by Veruschka. On the right, the cover of the first issue of Wigwag. The cover image, painted by our art director Paul Davis, one of the 20th century’s greatest American designers and illustrators, was Wigwag‘s answer to the New Yorker‘s Regency dandy, Eustace Tilley, who every February 21 reappears on the cover pretending to inspect a butterfly through an elegantly deployed monocle. For Wigwag, Paul painted an uninteresting, rather inattentive man in a crumpled fedora and a dull suit, walking his nondescript dog though a beautiful park. Like his rival, the Wigwag man is monocular: You can see only one of his eyes, but it is indifferent to the glorious autumn landscape. Something else—perhaps one of the great national sadnesses of the ’70s—flashes upon our man’s inward eye. The outward figure of our counter-Tilley Wigwag man, Paul Davis later confessed, he modeled on me, inspired by my then-fedora (soon to be destroyed by my then-dog).
‘A Letter from Springfield’—Florida, in this case
Wigwag man was a good picture of what Lex needed me to do for his magazine: to be its sole non-New Yorker emissary to the non-New Yorker universe of potential readers and advertisers, printers, lenders, and future owners. I pitched myself to Lex and his editors in his Horatio Street apartment, which was decorated with such sophistication that I thought it must be his parents’ and would have had a grand view of the sunset on the Hudson had it not been on the second floor. I told them that the New Yorker was the greatest repository of publishing talent and wisdom in the country. But no one at the New Yorker could even remember a time when a subscription had to be sold to a reader, not just renewed. None knew how to plead for a last-minute ad page in an unknown magazine: Its salespeople were skilled instead in gentle ways of breaking the news to advertisers that no more space was available. New Yorker folk did not know how to ask for credit, or good will, or investment, or mercy. I did. I got the job and, apart from a few people I hired, was the only non-New Yorker alumnus on the staff. Paul Davis was right to replace Eustace Tilley with an image of a Willy Loman who would do his best to make the magazine not just liked but well liked.
Being liked was not Lex’s problem: He was loved, and deserved to be, because he was endlessly lovable. He was also capable of jamming his charm into his pencil sharpener until there was nothing left of it. He was the most determined speaker of the word “no” I have ever known. So in order to move each issue forward, he had occasionally to be managed, and his editors, collectively if not always individually, were able to do so. I saw him once weeping with laughter amidst them, when they had evidently teased and shamed him out of some pointless obstinacy. He pleaded with them to stop: “Remember, I can dish it out,” he said, giggling, “but I can’t take it!”
Lex loved Wigwag and, more, the world he wanted Wigwag to present: tender, small-scale, poignant, precise, contingent, as pointillist as Paul Davis’s painting. He was endlessly inventive in finding ways to convey his view of the world to his readers, and ferocious in his struggle to drive his editors to enlist writers and illustrators into a magazine they feared no one would read. His ambition was not to create a media platform but a home. “ ’Wigwag’ is an American word that means ‘to signal someone home,’ ” he wrote in the first issue. “The word isn’t made up, and the name’s no accident. This magazine has a lot to do with home—who lives where, what it’s like, what they do there.” Instead of “Talk of the Town,” Wigwag opened with “Letters from Home”: a chorus of diaries written by writers living in Dripping Springs, Texas, Baltimore, Lewisburg, W.Va., Bangor, Maine. Our readers supplied a last-page “Map”: a personal diagram of where they were in their lives. The best was a diagram and list of private names for “The Dogs of Westhampton, Mass.” Every issue had a longer “Letter from Springfield”: a chronicle of the Angolan writer Sousa Jamba’s visits to the various Springfields around the country (almost every state has one), where he frequently found himself both lost and surprised to the point of tears by the warmth with which Springfielders welcomed him. Feature stories smiled at the good—Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood‘s Fred Rogers—and frowned at the bad—Dan and Marilyn Quayle’s pastor.
Lex had a personal relationship with his readers that was easier for him, perhaps, than the relationships he had with his colleagues, who mostly adored him unrequitedly. In his shyness, he never permitted us to have the fashionable Christmas party that I envisioned, which might have enhanced the magazine commercially and me socially. But he gleefully embraced a plan that would award a unique prize: Wigwag‘s editor would arrive at a lucky subscriber’s house and cook a holiday dinner for his hosts. It would be a reenactment of Christmas in Connecticut (1945) with Lex as both Sydney Greenstreet, a stout, distinguished New York magazine editor, and S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall, a stout, gemütlich New York neighborhood chef. He loved it and spent hours planning it.
Wigwag‘s office was suffused with nostalgia for the world of movies, and for the great days of the New Yorker, which ended, as far as we were concerned, when Si Newhouse fired Mr. Shawn, as he was always referred to in the office. Lex liked to affect the mannerisms of the New Yorker‘s founding editor, Harold Ross, but put to his own use. He would occasionally moan, as Ross did, that “nobody tells me anything,” except that what Lex meant, I thought, was that he hoped nobody would tell him anything with which he might have to disagree. He would say “I haven’t got time for this!” precisely the same way that Ross, in James Thurber’s account, would say it: “impatiently, to anyone—doctor, lawyer, tax man—who interrupted, even momentarily, the stream of his dedicated energy” and his attention to his magazine. Lex expected these allusions to be recognized; but another imitation of a venerable New Yorker tradition was an affliction. He shared with his mentor Mr. Shawn a terrible fear of elevators. I learned of it when I started searching for office space for the magazine in pre-recession 1989. He said to me casually, “Oh, Sam, don’t look at anything any higher than the third floor. I like to walk up to my office” (a remarkable curtailment of space possibilities in Manhattan). Only once in our time together did I have to insist he ride an elevator: to meet the men behind the Absolut Vodka ad campaign. When the doors closed on us in the elevator car, alone save a few puzzled ad people—well, I’ve never known a man to hold my hand and fight back tears with more dignity or courage.
Lex kept the magazine pages themselves free of insider New Yorker nostalgia. Nevertheless, his magazine was nostalgic through and through, not for the glorious past but for the glorious present. To every subject the magazine touched he gave, if he could, a sense of evanescence. If, like the ’90s, Wigwag was about coming home, then home was something that could dissolve in an instant, like Brigadoon, or the town of Bedford Falls, whose existence rested on the frail shoulders of Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. Wigwag was Lex’s home, and he assumed it was that for all of us who worked for him. He also assumed that when Wigwag died—and he was certain it would die—something would die for all of us.
Once he shocked me with the hardness of his vision. We were still in the early confident days of looking for money. I noticed some grumpiness among the staff, 90 percent of whom were editors, since I served as publisher, circulation director, ad marketing director, publicity director, and CFO. I asked Lex if anything was up. “No,” he said, “it’s just the normal attitude of people who know they have the best job they’ll ever have in their lives.”
Yet for none of us was Wigwag the greatest thing we were to do or the best job we would ever have (with perhaps one exception: me). Managing and assistant editors Nancy Holyoke and Harriet Brown lit out to Wisconsin to start a magazine and book publishing empire for Pleasant Rowland, the founder of the American Girl dolls. Lex’s editors helped make Pleasant a near-billionaire. Harriet’s book on anorexia, Brave Girl Eating, has helped thousands of families—maybe yours. You must read the wonderful books—on Christian Science and English usage—by Caroline Fraser and Mary Norris; you have probably read Robert F. Worth’s dispatches from the war in the Middle East. Evan Cornog is now Hofstra’s J-school dean. And as for Wigwag, its use of illustration, color, and type has transmigrated, as souls are meant to do, to the media world at large—not least to the New Yorker.
Lex, who wrongly imagined a diminished fate for his most talented people, resolutely sought one out for himself. He spent much of his time on philanthropy: Good work, but the nonprofits Lex helped would not have collapsed, like Bedford Falls or Wigwag, without the support of an irreplaceable George Bailey. For a time he served as a strategic planning committee executive at Time Inc. A Wigwag-era predecessor on that committee described her job during the recession of ’91 as “saying no to Sam Schulman [and Wigwag].” I hope Lex had more fun.
Even after his early death at 59, Harold Ross retained his hold on the New Yorker. Thurber’s The Years with Ross describes how it felt: “Ross is still all over the place for many of us, vitally stalking the corridors of our lives, disturbed and disturbing, fretting, stimulating, more evident in death than the living presence of ordinary men.” For decades I’ve hoped that Lex would resume disturbing, fretting, and stimulating us or some successor to us, as he did for a time that none of us expected to pass so quickly, or to echo so faintly.
Sam Schulman, a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, was publisher of Wigwag.
