Spy (magazine)

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January 1994 cover

Spy magazine was a satirical monthly founded in 1986 by Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter, who served as its first editors, and Thomas L. Phillips, Jr., its first publisher. After one folding and rebirth, it ceased publication in 1998. Spy was named after the fictitious magazine which employed Jimmy Stewart's character, Macaulay "Mike" Connor, in the movie The Philadelphia Story.

Primarily a magazine of satirical journalism and humor, but also featuring some more serious investigative journalism, the New York-based Spy traced its influences to “H.L. Mencken and A.J Liebling and Wolcott Gibbs from the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s; parody-Time-ese of the ’40s and ’50s; New Journalism of the ’60s and ’70s; Private Eye, the scabrous (and much jokier) British fortnightly; and the ways we just happened to write,” as Andersen and Carter would later write in Spy: The Funny Years. It specialized in intelligent, thoroughly researched, irreverent pieces targeting the American media and entertainment industries. Some of its features attempted to present the darker side of celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger (printing a nude photo of him and a picture of his father's Nazi party membership card), John F. Kennedy, Jr., Martha Stewart, and especially the real-estate tycoon Donald Trump and his then-wife Ivana Trump. The mogul was repeatedly described as a "short-fingered vulgarian," and such pejorative epithets became a Spy trademark. New York Times op-ed columnist A.M. Rosenthal became Abe "I'm Writing as Bad As I Can" Rosenthal, and his wife Shirley Lord was dubbed a "bosomy dirty-book writer." Media mogul Laurence Tisch was invariably described as a "churlish dwarf billionaire."

Spy’s popular features included "Separated At Birth?" (side-by-side photographs of two different celebrities, similar to Private Eye's "Lookalikes") and "Celebrity Math," which presented thumbnail headshots atop simple mathematical models representing the components of celebrities (e.g. Fabio - Catherine Deneuve = Billy Ray Cyrus).

Despite its relatively short life, Spy was among the most influential of American magazines, chiefly for its detached and ironic tone, its use of quasi-scientific charts and tables to convey information, and its elaborate, classically influenced typography and layout. The magazine was also divisive: Many established journalists considered it abrasive and tawdry, whereas many younger ones felt it precisely reflected their worldview.

Spy briefly broke even in 1989, but was ultimately not successful as a business, particularly after a recession affected the U.S. economy beginning in the early 1990s. The founders sold the magazine to European buyers in 1991; several months later Carter left the magazine; Andersen departed 18 months later, replaced by Tony Hendra. The magazine briefly ceased publication in 1994, was revived soon after under new ownership, and finally went out of business in 1998. Its last editor was a recent Harvard graduate, Bruno Maddox.

For a humorous magazine, Spy was often aggressive about straight feature reporting. In the summer of 1992 it ran the only serious investigative story on President George H.W. Bush's alleged extramarital affairs with Jennifer Fitzgerald and other women. The following year, Spy ran an article entitled "Clinton's First 100 Lies," detailing what it described as the new president's pattern of duplicitous behavior. After O.J. Simpson was acquitted on charges of murdering his former wife and her friend, Spy ran a cover story under the headline "He's Guilty, By George!" presenting a long list of details that its writers said proved conclusively that Simpson was the killer; he did not sue. The cover illustration parodied that of the much-hyped premiere issue of George magazine, with Simpson standing in for Cindy Crawford.

The infamous nude shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger

Spy used lawyers to vet such potentially libelous material, but its stories often angered their prominent subjects, occasionally driving away advertisers.

In October 2006, Miramax Books published SPY: The Funny Years (ISBN 1-4013-5239-1), a greatest-hits anthology and history of the magazine created and compiled by Carter, Andersen and one of their original editors, George Kalogerakis.

[edit] Books

Separated at Birth? (1988, ISBN 0-385-24744-3): A collection of photos from "Separated at Birth?"
Spy Magazine Presents The Warhol Diaries Index (1989)
Private Lives of Public Figures (Drew Friedman, cartoons from Spy, 1990)
Spy Notes on McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City/Janowitz's "Slaves of New York"/Ellis's "Less Than Zero" and All Those Other Hip Urban Novels of the 1980s (1989, ISBN 0-385-24745-1): A Cliffs Notes-style look at the literature of the eighties
Separated at Birth? 2: The Saga Continues (1990, ISBN 0-385-41099-9)
Spy High (1992)
George Kalogerakis, Kurt Andersen, and Graydon Carter, Spy: The Funny Years (2006, ISBN 1-4013-5239-1)