By the late 1970s, Si was looking for a vehicle to attract readers who weren’t traditionally drawn to Condé Nast’s fashion-focused offerings: men. At the time, the men’s magazine market was led by Esquire, the granddaddy of the genre that was founded in the 1930s and featured a testosterone-friendly mix of babes, ball games, and brown liquor, in addition to fiction and political pieces. Playboy had dispensed with the pretense of bikini pictures in favor of full frontal nudes, but it also published erudite conversations with novelists, philosophers, and politicians—including the 1976 interview with Jimmy Carter in which the presidential nominee nearly derailed his candidacy by admitting that he had “committed adultery in my heart.” Sensing opportunity in the men’s space, Si cast about for an acquisition that might fit neatly into the Condé portfolio. He found it in Esquire’s lesser-known, artsier corporate cousin, a fashion magazine saddled with an old-fashioned name: Gentlemen’s Quarterly.
The Quarterly descended from Apparel Arts, a garmento trade publication, founded in 1931, that featured lavish illustrations of masculine finery like hosiery, ascots, and pajamas. In 1957, its owner, Esquire Inc., created a four-times-a-year consumer supplement called “Gentlemen’s Quarterly,” which by the next year had subsumed the Apparel Arts title and was spun out as a separate publication, dubbed “The Fashion Magazine for Men.” GQ, as it came to be known, sported little of Esquire’s literary irreverence or hetero attitude; instead, there were blandly handsome male models and fussy style guides on when to wear an argyle sock. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy was incensed to discover that a stock photo of himself, smiling in the Oval Office in an Ivy League suit, had been used for the March cover of a magazine that his brother Robert mocked as a “fag rag.”
“I never posed for any picture,” JFK complained to his aides. “Any president who would pose for Gentlemen’s Quarterly would be out of his mind.”
In fact, it had long been an open secret that GQ was geared toward, and read mostly by, gay men. In the 1970s, under the editorship of Jack Haber, the magazine featured a full-color cast of Adonises in Speedos, men frolicking on the beach as the surf splashed their taut, suntanned flesh. This homoerotic aesthetic—which recalled the beefcake “muscle” portraiture passed among gay men like samizdat in an earlier, more closeted age—was exemplified by the magazine’s key photographer, Bruce Weber, whose highly suggestive spreads of playful, libidinous young men electrified readers like Tom Ford, who subscribed as a teenager in Santa Fe.
It’s possible that Si Newhouse, leafing through GQ’s pages, detected a kinship between the gleaming, Riefenstahl-ian bodies of its male models and the gleaming consumer goods that were regularly advertised in Condé’s stable of magazines. Both represented a subtle kind of pornography that quickened the reader’s pulse. The magazine’s circulation was small, roughly 350,000 readers, and its owners at Esquire barely blinked when Si approached them about a possible purchase. Once again, a Newhouse saw value in a distressed asset where others did not. At the start of 1979, shortly before his father’s death, Si wrote a check for $9.2 million, and GQ was his.
Except now he had a problem. In the early 1980s, there was still intense stigma toward gay men, and GQ’s reputation limited its mass appeal. “It wasn’t like today, where it’s okay for men to care about their style and their grooming and their clothes,” one longtime editor recalled. “You were considered a little funny if you cared that much about it.” Condé Nast quickly discovered that big advertisers were leery. Foreign automakers like BMW bought ads—in Europe, it wasn’t unusual for men to take an avid interest in fashion—but Detroit, with its manly Ford and Dodge marques, initially said no. When a Condé adman named Jack Kliger pitched GQ to a buyer at Philip Morris, the tobacco man leaned back in his chair.
“You want the Marlboro cowboy in your magazine, right?”
Kliger nodded.
“Let me explain something to you,” the man said. “Your cowboys are not our cowboys.”
Si and Alex, distracted by their troubled revival of Vanity Fair, puzzled over how to turn around GQ, but little at the magazine changed until 1983, when Fairchild, a rival magazine publisher, unveiled plans for a new men’s glossy called M. Alarmed by the competition, Alex approached Si with the idea of hiring Bob Colacello, until recently the editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. It is fun to imagine what Colacello, an effete Republican, would have done with GQ, but Si was looking to hetero-ize the place, and so he cast his gaze elsewhere. He needed an editor with straight-guy bona fides, who liked cigars and baseball as much as cuff links and cashmere socks—ideally someone with foppish taste in clothes and a healthy appreciation of the female form.
Someone who used to run Penthouse.
LIKE CONDÉ MONTROSE NAST, Arthur Cooper was born in New York City but grew up in the hinterlands, in a fatherless household led by a strong-willed woman. Bearded and barrel-chested, Art spent his childhood in Berwick, Pennsylvania, a flyspeck factory town where he was regularly beaten up for being the only Jewish kid at school. His father died when he was young, and Art was raised by his mother. (As an adult, he mailed her cash in an envelope every week.) Art adored the classic Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s, studying their lavish interiors and lush costumes. Most of all, he admired their depiction of WASP splendor, an idealized vision of the upper classes whose ranks he longed to join. “We grew up in the middle of the country, but we were close enough to big cities that we were exposed to it,” said Eliot Kaplan, a friend and fellow Pennsylvanian who went on to work with Art at GQ. “We knew we wanted to get out.”
In his youth, Art realized that clothing could be a potent semaphore of status. He began wearing double-breasted blazers—first Italian ready-to-wear, later bespoke Savile Row—and donned seersucker suits and a straw boater in summertime. His other passion was journalism. After Penn State and a stint at a Harrisburg newspaper, he made his way to Manhattan, where he wrote about culture for Time and Newsweek. From 1976 to early 1978, he was the editor in chief of Penthouse, the edgier, more explicit rival to Playboy. Afterward, he edited Family Weekly, a sleepy Sunday newspaper supplement that competed, feebly, with the much more widely circulated Parade. For a kid from coal-mining country, this was success, of a sort, but Art longed for more. On sunny days, he often walked a few blocks from his office to a pocket park by Sutton Place, where he would regard the Queensboro Bridge (Gatsby’s gateway to the “wild promise” of Manhattan) and muse about his dream magazine, which he called “Renaissance.” It would be a gentleman’s guide to cultivated living: the best of fashion, food, sports, and sex, braided with the literary flair of the 1960s Esquire that Art revered. Renaissance ran the gamut of Art’s own interests: basketball and horse racing and Broadway musicals and John O’Hara’s short stories and Jane Austen’s novels. At its heart was the yearning of a middle-class kid to belong.
At Family Weekly, Art tried to infuse his underpaid staff with the Renaissance spirit. The supplement “consisted mostly of 300-word stories wrapped around ads for porcelain dogs and tweezers,” recalled Kaplan, who worked there, “yet Art somehow made us feel like we were storming Normandy in the spring of ’44.” The budget was tiny; when Art encouraged a junior editor to call Nora Ephron and commission an article, Ephron almost laughed in her face. Still, Art’s ability to persuade big-name writers like David Halberstam and James Michener to write for him caught the eye of the Newhouses, who owned Parade. Si met with Art and liked him; it helped that Art’s wife, Amy Levin, was the editor of Condé Nast’s Mademoiselle. In the summer of 1983, the same year that Si brought on Tina Brown and Anna Wintour, Art Cooper was hired to replace Jack Haber at GQ.
To attract more readers and more ads, Art needed straight men to care about fashion and accessories and grooming and exercise. But the term metrosexual was still a decade away, menswear was a niche interest, and basketball players weren’t yet endorsing designer suits. Back then, to appear on the cover of GQ was to take a risk. When Art approached William Hurt, a hot actor about to star in The Big Chill, about posing for the cover of his first issue in charge, Hurt’s publicist balked. So, Art focused on something that straight men definitely cared about: girls. Bikini models and Hollywood starlets began appearing alongside the guides to boar-hair shaving brushes and mother-of-pearl cuff links. “What I wanted to do in repositioning the magazine was make it very clear, very quickly, that this was a heterosexual magazine,” Art later recalled. He hired macho writers like Joe Queenan to write about pedicures and shampoos. David Remnick, then a twentysomething Washington Post reporter, was assigned stories on Russian beauty pageants and a fitness boot camp.
GQ features were witty and well reported, but also, somehow, recognizably male. When Remnick profiled “the smartest woman on the planet,” advice columnist Marilyn vos Savant, he compared her to an “ecdysiast”—a million-dollar word for a striptease dancer—“lazing across a tiger-skin rug, eating a Popsicle and reading [Georges] Bernanos.” Art, a minor-league pitching recruit in his youth, persuaded athletes like Joe Montana, Dan Marino, and Isiah Thomas to appear, a rare incursion of the sporting world into Condé’s lofty realm. When Art presented Alex with a dummy cover featuring the baseball star Cal Ripken Jr., Alex was dumbfounded. “Who is this person?” he demanded. Art insisted, and the cover went on to be a hit.
Each issue was designed to make straight guys comfortable with a magazine that ultimately urged them to embrace their feminine side. Sports stars posed in Armani suits and celebrities dished on their preferred colognes, while Weber’s handsome cavorting men disappeared. GQ covers used to feature chiseled headshots of male models, faces that would not have been out of place in a Saks catalog or a shelf of bodice-ripper paperbacks. Art brought in handsome-but-off-kilter types like David Letterman, Donald Sutherland, and Michael Caine, offering a more accessible entry point for the average male reader. This GQ was something new: a fussy, fashion-forward lifestyle guide that hetero dudes could live with.
So, what kind of lifestyle was GQ selling? If Playboy evinced a hoary masculinity, GQ showcased a kind of elevated WASP splendor, a blend of The Official Preppy Handbook and proto–Patrick Bateman materialism that mirrored the mores of the Eastern establishment. It was aspirational, authoritative, and useful for arrivistes—the same formula that Condé Montrose Nast used at Vogue and Vanity Fair in a previous gilded age. And the eighties were the right moment for it. Fitness fads and the Wall Street boom meant that yuppie guys were looking for new ways to flaunt their lifestyles, from overpriced Filofax organizers to overpriced exercise bikes. With its careful balance of clothes and cars, aftershave and supermodels, the magazine gave men outside of urban and gay circles permission to express a sense of style. “For men, it had some fantasy,” said Jack Kliger, “but it was a fantasy about what they wore and what they drove, not who they slept with.”
In 1988, the magazine touted a survey, “The American Male Opinion Index,” that painted a national portrait of male vanity and insecurity: two-thirds of the respondents, it claimed, spent thirty minutes or more each day on grooming. GQ was normalizing the notion that men, like women, cared about their appearance. “It helped make it okay,” recalled one former executive, “for men to actually put moisturizer on their hands.”
At the same time, the nation’s managerial class was no longer exclusively male.“Now with women in the workforce, men have to look good, too, to compete,” a GQ executive told a reporter. How to be a man in the 1980s was becoming an increasingly fraught question, and GQ was convincing readers that it had the answers. By 1985, its circulation had grown past 700,000; by decade’s end, its formula had spawned an entire newsstand’s worth of copycats. “Men, it seems, read,” The New York Times observed in 1990, reporting on a recent crop of sensitive-yet-manly publications. “Even more revelatory, men shop, cook, go to movies, play with their kids and—Are you ready?—have feelings. So, why shouldn’t they have their very own magazines to lead them through the labyrinth of life?”
Around the time that Art started at the magazine, GQ’s brash young publisher, Steven Florio, presented a thesis statement of sorts. (In magazine parlance, a title’s publisher is in charge of business operations like ad sales and marketing, while the editor in chief oversees all editorial matters.) GQ’s ideal reader, Florio said, is “the first one in his family to graduate from college, who wants to drive a BMW and dress well. It’s new-money. It’s ethnic. It’s young Black men, young ballplayers, young Hispanics, young Italians, all of whom have come into a new lifestyle and need some direction.” This was the inclusive kind of exclusivity that Condé Nast thrived on. And Art’s idea of good living came from the heart of the American establishment. A summer fashion spread highlighted the dressing habits of Gerald Murphy, the wealthy expat who moved to the French Riviera in the 1920s and popularized espadrilles and Breton stripes. One article focused on the personal style of an unlikely role model: the head of the English department at Phillips Academy—Andover, the high-prep enclave. “The Natty Professor,” as he was dubbed by GQ, boasted of his eclectic wardrobe, which included three-piece Burberry suits, cowboy boots, and women’s leather jackets, because they “are often crafted with more finesse and style.” A regular feature called “Expensive Habits” promoted luxuries like a Charvet shirt—“For $300 apiece, you deserve perfection.” The leading men’s magazine of the 1960s, Esquire, had skewered the American elite; in the 1980s, GQ became the market leader by embracing it.
One day in the late 1980s—there is some confusion about the year—Art and Jack Kliger trekked to a meeting with Alex and Si. Inside Alex’s stark white office, Alex observed that chic women were often described as looking like a page out of Vogue; GQ, he proposed, needed a similarly pithy way to convey the essence of what the magazine stood for. Art proffered an idea: “Personal Style for Men.” GQ, he argued, showed classy men how to behave in the world: the smartest watches to wear, the best Globe-Trotter suitcase to lug. It should be required reading for men seeking the kind of cultivated life that Vogue presented to women.
Alex turned his gaze to a mocked-up photograph of a man in fine leather shoes and linen pants. Quietly, he took a pen and scrawled a phrase above the picture:
“Very GQ.”
After a silence, Art spoke up. “That’s it,” he said, as the others nodded.
To this day, being “GQ” remains a byword for being a well-dressed, stylish man. The magazine “turned those initials into an adjective,” the menswear designer Alan Flusser would say years later. “Art raised the consciousness of what it meant for a man to be fashionable.”
EVERY YEAR FROM 1986 TO 1996, GQ beat Esquire in advertising pages. William Hurt’s long-ago rejection had turned into a running joke for Art, who boasted to friends that Hurt would now “crawl across the desert” to be on the cover. Brandon Tartikoff, the TV executive, was so excited about his cover that he accosted an editor on a flight to find out if his issue had outsold Ted Danson’s. GQ was also minting literary talent. Art asked a Brit named Peter Mayle to write about traveling in France, an article that led to his best-selling A Year in Provence. Michael Kelly, who went on to edit The Atlantic, reported from Baghdad. When Art bought the rights to a short work of fiction called “Thirty Dildoes,” which had been rejected by Harper’s, he called up the author’s agent, Binky Urban.
“I’ll buy this on one condition,” Art said. “I want to change the name.”
“What do you want to change it to?” Urban asked.
“ ‘Sixty Dildoes.’ ”
Condé opened a string of international editions, hoping to make the phrase GQ into a global byword for suave. European men, whose own easy enthusiasm for men’s fashion had influenced Art, were now importing back GQ’s version of their own sprezzatura, a neat transatlantic feedback loop of stylish masculinity. In 1996, the magazine created its annual Men of the Year Awards—an essentially meaningless prize that doubled as a hugely successful marketing campaign. The awards were handed out at a $2 million ceremony at Radio City Music Hall that was later broadcast on VH1.
Si liked his editors to live the upper-class lifestyle they peddled. He didn’t have to tell Art Cooper twice. Art wore candy-striped Turnbull & Asser shirts and stocked his sixth-floor office with rare fountain pens and ashtrays from European hotels. He borrowed $1 million from Condé Nast to buy a country house on Candlewood Lake in Connecticut, where he hosted lavish staff retreats at Si’s expense. Years earlier, toiling away at Family Weekly, Art had daydreamed about a grand apartment by the East River; now he was living in a co-op on Sutton Place South. His pride and joy, however, was a different kind of status marker, the sort of thing that really mattered in 1980s Manhattan: a dedicated corner booth in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, arguably America’s most famous power-lunch spot. Art was a wine snob and gourmand who clinched a permanent spot for himself at the restaurant after publishing a flattering profile of its maître-d’, Julian Niccolini. (Headline: “Julian of the Spirits.”) Most weekdays, Art turned up at the Grill Room shortly after noon, ordering a martini and an extremely expensive bottle of Sassicaia wine, a progenitor of the Super Tuscan reds that GQ helped popularize. The bill could stretch past $500, but per long-standing policy, Art never saw a check; lunch for Condé Nast editors was charged to the company’s tab.
As the 1990s dawned, the workplace culture at GQ stayed locked in time, more akin to the Mad Men world of the fifties and sixties. Art would squire models like Heidi Klum to the Four Seasons restaurant and then brag about it to his readers, highlighting Klum’s tight T-shirt and low-cut jeans and concluding, “It’s very nice to be the editor in chief of GQ.” After a post-lunch sambuca, Art might work a few hours before inviting favored staff members to drinks in his GQ office around 5 p.m. Writers of a certain vintage recall Art sipping Stoli on the rocks out of an old Penn State tumbler, holding court over the strains of Sinatra. By the late nineties, his alcohol consumption sometimes got out of hand. “You never wanted to have an afternoon meeting with Art,” recalled one former colleague, noting that the editor became progressively grumpier and drunker as the day went on. At the retreats at his summer house, Art liked to pit writers against each other on the tennis court, once awarding the winner a free Hugo Boss suit; by the time the cheese course arrived at dinner, Art could be blindingly drunk and hurling insults.
Chauvinism was rampant. At the magazine’s Christmas party in 1997, Art paid models to parade around in scanty, red-leather Santa’s helper outfits with fishnet stockings. Adrienne Miller, who started as an editorial assistant in 1994, encountered routine misogyny during her time there: a coworker admiring a photograph and exclaiming, “That’s the best set of tits I’ve seen all year”; a male colleague calling her into his office to ask, “What’s your favorite part of sex?” In a particularly unpleasant incident, which Miller later disclosed in her memoir, she and another young female assistant were taken to lunch by a GQ journalist and “a notorious restaurant maître d’.” Miller confirmed to me that the man was Julian Niccolini. She recalled that Niccolini repeatedly shoved his tongue into the women’s mouths as they shared a cab back to the office; their colleague in the front passenger seat never turned around. (Niccolini told me that he had no recollection of Miller or this incident, adding, “Everybody can come up with their own ideas.”) In 2016, Niccolini pled guilty to misdemeanor assault after a female patron charged him with sexual abuse, telling investigators that he tried to kiss her, ripped her bra, and tried to pull down her stockings; he was forced to resign from the Four Seasons two years later.
Miller, who attended state school in Ohio and knew virtually nobody in media circles when she arrived in New York, now credits GQ with ushering her into the city’s literary milieu. She went on to be Esquire’s literary editor for nearly a decade, publishing work by George Saunders and David Foster Wallace and winning the National Magazine Award for fiction. Her three years at GQ, Miller recalled, were both challenging and illuminating, opening her professional horizons and revealing the rigid limits that women faced in the media world.
“It was such an unbelievably complicated, ambivalent experience,” she said, “because I knew how lucky I was.”
FOR ART’S FAVORED FEW, a job at GQ could be life-changing in different ways.
Alan Richman was an army vet who had manned a machine gun in Vietnam before turning to sports writing in his native Philadelphia. He was eking out a meager journalist’s living, occasionally contributing wine columns to Esquire, when Art Cooper called one day and asked if he wanted to write about food for GQ. “I never had any intention of being a food writer,” he told me when we met for lunch at a diner near his home in Westchester. “It never crossed my mind.” Food writing in those days was relegated to restaurant reviews and dedicated magazines like Gourmet. Thanks to GQ, Richman soon found himself living like a king. Art dispatched him to Monte Carlo for a five-night stay at the Hôtel de Paris. His assignment: eat an elaborate meal at Alain Ducasse’s three-Michelin-star hotel restaurant. Ten times in a row. “Too Much Is Never Enough,” Richman’s essay about the experience, was a classic Condé confection of exotic opulence and European society—good taste on several levels. “I couldn’t believe things like this happened in the real world,” Richman said. “I didn’t think this world of lavishness still existed.” In 2008, Richman flew business class to Tokyo for a fourteen-day stay at the Park Hyatt (of Lost in Translation fame) for a feature on eating non-Japanese cuisine in Japan. When he handed in a $14,000 expense account, an editor asked him, “Is that all?”
But the real indulgences came during trips to Milan and Florence for the Italian menswear shows, which Art arranged for Richman to attend, all-expenses-paid. When I asked why the company would spend thousands of dollars to fly a food writer to a fashion event, Richman smiled. “My job,” he explained, “was to order wine.” Art wanted Richman to coordinate pairings for the dinners that he threw for important Italian advertisers. With no internet at his disposal, Richman racked up long-distance phone bills with sommeliers to locate the pricey Barbarescos and Barolos that Art preferred. “If Art didn’t like it—god forbid,” Richman said, shaking his head years later. In the competitive, status-conscious world of Condé Nast, choosing the wrong varietal could be a serious offense. Richman recalled Art once asking Robert Draper, a new GQ writer, to pick the pairing. When Art took a sip and grimaced, Richman snuck a peek at Draper and thought, “He’s done.” Two decades later, Draper stands by his choice: he maintains that the wine he recommended that night came from the sought-after Italian vintner Josko Gravner, now considered a pioneer of orange wines. “That moment at the Milan fashion shows was a pretty minor event for me,” Draper told me, “and it’s been a source of bemusement that I keep running into people that Alan has told one form or another of this tall tale.”
After the decadence of the 1980s and 1990s, GQ ran into trouble in the new millennium. British imports like Maxim and Stuff were hawking a crasser, dumbed-down version of GQ’s aspirational approach, and readers were lapping it up. These so-called lad mags were all dessert and no vegetables: acres of areolas with none of the literary talent or long-form journalism that Art admired. They were also cheaper to produce and popular with the young men that advertisers coveted. Art begrudgingly tried to adapt. In 2001, a GQ cooking page featured a buxom model with her face cropped out, holding a tray of chicken tenders beneath her chest. “Breasts for Guests,” read the headline for an accompanying recipe. Some editors cringed when GQ ran a cover photograph of a topless Tyra Banks, hair partially covering her breasts; the headline read, “Tyra, Please Pull Your Hair Back!”
At one point, Art got roped into a public feud with Greg Gutfeld, the libertarian editor of Stuff, who had published a cartoon mocking Art as overweight and bald. Art fired back a letter calling him boorish and ignorant, which Gutfeld gleefully leaked to the Daily News. “We were making fun of the GQ guy who thinks an eight-thousand-word piece on his dying dog was the greatest thing ever,” Gutfeld told me years later, with pride. Maxim and Stuff, he said, “were magazines made for guys who don’t read magazines.” It was a harbinger of a coarser turn in the culture. Gutfeld eventually migrated to television, where he became a late-night host on Fox News. Today, he is a pro-Trump TV star who commands a nightly prime-time audience of millions.
WITH MAXIM’S CIRCULATION prancing past GQ’s, Si Newhouse decided that a change was needed. Si asked Art to step down in early 2003, eventually replacing him with a deputy, Jim Nelson. Like other felled Condé potentates, Art was devastated. “He was so lost and brokenhearted afterward,” recalled Kate White, a former colleague who went on to edit Cosmopolitan. “It was so much a part of his identity.” Si, as he did with the editors he liked, tried to soften the blow: Condé gave Art airline tickets for an around-the-world trip—and rumor had it that Si agreed to keep footing his bills at the Four Seasons.
It was there, on June 5, 2003, shortly after his retirement party, that Art sat down for lunch in his usual corner banquette with David Zinczenko, the editor of Men’s Health. As he ordered a Dover sole, Art rubbed his neck and complained that he was sore after a morning workout; he had recently taken up a faddish exercise routine, “Power of 10,” that emphasized weightlifting over cardio. Art excused himself from the table and laid down on a leather couch by the bar overlooking East Fifty-second Street. When Alex von Bidder, the restaurant’s co-owner, asked if anything was amiss, Art waved him off: “I’m fine. I overdid it a bit. Would you please call my wife?” Zinczenko told the staff to call an ambulance. Art had suffered a stroke, and fell into a coma; four days later, he died, almost twenty years to the day he started at GQ. He was sixty-five.
Tragedy aside, there was a kind of romance in Art dying where he did. His protégée Kate White considered it an apt twist of fate: “It’s as if it was scripted by Art.” He had spent his life longing to be at the epicenter of the establishment. When he arrived, he bent it to his will, reshaping the habits and priorities of a generation of men who, like him, yearned to be, or at least look, elite. GQ set the course for a new kind of masculinity, the metrosexuality, dandyism, and male self-care that have since saturated the culture. To be “very GQ” is still to emulate Art’s imagination of the good life: WASPy, Europhilic, denoted by a crisp tuxedo and perhaps a pair of velvet slippers. These days, it’s vanishingly rare that a single editor, or single publication, could ever replicate such an effect. “GQ is an aspirational book,” Art once said, of the magazine he curated. “You feel like you crashed a very civilized cocktail party, and everyone’s too civilized to throw you out.”