Spy (magazine)

Spy was a satirical monthly magazine that ran from 1986 to 1998.^[1][2] The magazine was based in New York City.^[3]

Overview

Founded 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 a rebirth, it ceased publication in 1998. It specialized in intelligent, thoroughly researched, irreverent pieces targeting the American media, entertainment industries and making fun of high society.^[4] Many issues often featured brief photographs of nudity relevant to a story. Some of its features attempted to present the darker side of celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Steven Seagal,^[5] Martha Stewart, and especially, the real-estate tycoon Donald Trump and his then-wife Ivana Trump.^[6] Pejorative epithets of celebrities, e.g., "Abe 'I'm Writing As Bad As I Can' Rosenthal", "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump",^[7] "churlish dwarf billionaire Laurence Tisch" and "former fat girl Dianne Brill" became a Spy trademark.

Publication history

For a humorous magazine, Spy often was aggressive about straight feature reporting. In the summer of 1992, it ran the only serious investigative story on President George H.W. Bush's extramarital affairs with Jennifer Fitzgerald and other women.^[8] 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.^[9]

Features

Introduced in the May 1987 issue, Private Lives of Public Enemies (renamed Private Lives of Public Figures, then simply Private Lives in 1989) presented fictional representations of public personalities in unflattering situations.

Separated at Birth?, first presented in a feature article in December 1987, was a regular section which would present juxtaposed photos of two different personalities exhibiting visual similarity, to comical effect. The first of each pair was typically a public figure or celebrity, and the second was usually another such figure, but sometimes (usually in the last set) a more absurd subject such as a fictional character, animal, or inanimate object. Separated at Birth? became one the magazine's most popular features and was spun out into a set of paperback books.

Legacy

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.

In October 2016, Esquire magazine produced an online pop-up version of Spy during the last thirty days of the presidential campaign.^[10]

Books

• Separated at Birth? (1988, ISBN 0-385-24744-3): A collection of photographs from "Separated at Birth?"
• 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 CliffsNotes-style look at the literature of the nineteen-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)

See also

• List of defunct American periodicals

References

External links

• Spy magazine at Google Books
• Todd Leopold, “Spy magazine remembers ‘The Funny Years,’ ” CNN, November 16, 2006
• Ten Years Ago in Spy (retrospective site)
• "MONHEIT DEAD! Remembering Spy Magazine’s Elegant Blurbist, Messenger, and Nightclubber Extraordinaire"