He helped Esquire to inspire
George Lois created many of the magazine's iconic covers. See some in a NYC collection.
By Charles McGrath
New York Times
AP
This undated photo released by the Museum of Modern Art shows the April 1968 cover of Esquire Magazine, which shows Muhammad Ali posing as St. Sebastian pierced with arrows. The magazine cover, designed by George Lois, was one of the most iconic images of the decade, tying together the incendiary issues of Vietnam, race and religion. Now his work is showcased in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art titled "George Lois: The Esquire Covers," that will showcase 32 of his famous covers. (AP Photo/Museum of Modern Art)
NEW YORK --
George Lois, one of the most influential admen of his generation, is the sort of person who has a dozen brainstorms an hour, at least half of them good. Among the better ones were the early Xerox commercials showing a chimpanzee deftly operating a photocopier, the “Think small” ads for Volkswagen and the “I want my MTV” campaign. He also dreamed up Lean Cuisine and the “I want my Maypo” slogan.
But among certain groups of people – magazine collectors, veterans of the 1960s, admirers of brilliant design – Lois is best-known for the covers he created for Esquire from 1962 to 1972. There were 92 in all, including one that never ran: an anti-war cover intended for the December 1962 issue, which was dropped because the State Department was insisting that American troops would be out of Vietnam by Christmas.
Thirty-one of them are part of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York running through March 31.
Visitors will see Richard Nixon having lipstick applied, LBJ holding a Hubert Humphrey dummy, Andy Warhol drowning in a Campbell's soup can, Muhammad Ali posing as St. Sebastian and a grinning Lt. William Calley, the leader of the massacre at My Lai, with four Vietnamese children.
There's also the image Lois created for the December 1963 issue, in response to a plea from Harold Hayes, Esquire's editor, for something “Christmassy.” It shows boxer Sonny Liston wearing a Santa hat – probably the last person white Americans hoped to see coming down the chimney in those days.
Many of Lois' covers were controversial. The Liston cover cost the magazine $750,000 in dropped advertising. But they were immensely successful at drawing attention.
Little text
What was remarkable then – and seems even more so now, when almost every magazine cover is a thicket of text lines running behind or on top of a celebrity – is that the Lois covers were almost textless. They achieved their effect by communicating a single idea through an image. Some were untouched photographs, but, in an era before Photoshop, some were created by the primitive technique of cutting and pasting, using photographs, clip art and sometimes hand-drawn elements.
“I remember when we were doing the Warhol cover,” Lois recalled. “I explained to Andy what I had in mind, and he said, ‘Oh, will you have to build a very big can?'”
Few editors have the nerve to try to imitate what Lois did. Esquire's May cover this year, of a woman shaving her face, is a sort of homage to the 1965 Lois cover of Virna Lisi doing the same thing, except that in the background there's a lot of busy type needlessly explaining, “We Shot This Image to Catch Your Eye.”
Lois is 76 now, and not quite the hunk he used to be in the days when he was known in the ad business as the Golden Greek. “People see pictures of me back then and ask, ‘What happened?'” he said recently. “I'll tell you what happened. Fifty years is what happened.”
Lois grew up in a Greek-speaking household in the Bronx, where his father ran a flower shop, and he is still a bit of a neighborhood guy. He is funny, profane and opinionated.
“I've always been about the big idea, the big idea,” he explained over a long morning interview – a monologue really – that stretched into lunch, prepared by Rosemary, his wife of 56 years.
How it got started
The Esquire connection came about, he recalled, in June 1962, when Harold Hayes – a courtly, soft-spoken Southerner who favored white suits even before Tom Wolfe – called looking for advice about covers.
When Lois learned that Esquire covers were conceived and assigned by an editorial committee, he likened the process to gang rape and said to Hayes: “You need to get one guy who understands the culture, who likes comic strips, goes to the ballet, visits the Metropolitan Museum.”
According to Lois, Hayes replied, “Hey, pal, could you do me a favor? Could you do just do me one cover – to show me what … you're talking about?”
The cover Lois did – for the October issue, which came out a few days before the Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston fight that year – showed a Patterson look-alike sprawled, possibly dead, in an empty boxing ring. This was a huge gamble, because most experts had picked Patterson to win.
The cover was a hit, and Lois had a job. No committees. Lois dealt solely with the editor.
Lee Eisenberg, an editorial assistant in the early '70s who eventually became editor of Esquire, said: “The Lois covers were one of the key reasons I and a lot of people there were drawn to Esquire in the first place. We loved them.”
