Esquire magazine under Harold Hayes, who ran it from 1961 to 1973, was as distinctive as its oversized pages. When the magazine shrank to the conventional 8 1/2 X 11 in 1971, its impact diminished as well: the institutional loss of nerve may have had its effect.

Hayes, the son of a Baptist minister, grew up in West Virginia and North Carolina. He graduated from Wake Forest, where he edited a prize-winning student magazine. After two years in the Marines and a stint with United Press in Atlanta, he looked for magazine work in New York and found it at Pageant, "a low-budget Reader's Digest," Carol Polsgrove calls it. Hayes learned magazines from Harris Shevelson, the editor, who asked his undereditors to come up with a hundred article ideas every other week.

A friend put Hayes in touch with Arnold Gingrich, the founding editor and then publisher of Esquire. After their second interview, in 1956, Gingrich wrote later, "I took him in like the morning paper." Five years later, after Gingrich had turned the magazine over to Ralph Ginzburg (who was soon fired) and Clay Felker, he picked Hayes as managing editor. (Felker bounced back famously to edit a supplement to the New York Herald Tribune that became New York magazine.)

Under Hayes the magazine took off. Readers of this chronicle of the Hayes years are invited to consider how much of his and the magazine's success had to do with the luck of the draw: it had the sixties to work with. But that's always a question with no definitive answer: every editor has his times to contend with, like a swimmer in shifting currents that could carry him toward or away from where he wants to go.

In putting together her lively and readable book, Polsgrove, who teaches journalism at Indiana University, interviewed fifty people and sifted through a great many letters, memos, and other personal papers belonging to Hayes, Gordon Lish, and others. She has a good story to tell, and she makes the most of it.

Like the best editors, Hayes displayed gifts for picking good people and letting them work -- although he had his own ideas of what they should do. He made the decision, unthinkable for most editors, to give George Lois absolute control over covers -- Hayes had no final say in creating them and couldn't veto them (at least, not more than once). The results were provocative and visually stunning photographs: a Christmas cover of Sonny Liston glowering malevolently beneath a Santa cap; Lt. William Calley, accused in the My Lai massacre, posing with Vietnamese children.

Hayes called himself apolitical and apersonal. His passion was the magazine and its possibilities. In its service he could be controlling, even overbearing. When Thomas B. Morgan, who had written forty pieces for Esquire, asked Hayes for a raise from $1,350 to $1,500, Hayes said no; only Norman Mailer got $1,500 -- and "Norman Mailer is going to win the Nobel Prize." Hayes offered $1,450. Morgan pressed, arguing that he received $6,000 from Life, $4,000 from Look -- this was in 1963 -- but he loved Esquire. The editor was more than firm: "When I die and they're lowering me into my grave, just before they close my casket, my last words are going to be, 'Fourteen-fifty for Morgan, fifteen hundred for Mailer.' " Morgan never wrote for the magazine again. But Tom Wolfe did, along with Gay Talese, Garry Wills, and Michael Herr.

Esquire was often more lavish with expenses than fees. Hayes dispatched an editor to India to spend a week with Allen Ginsberg; Talese spent three months reporting and editing his justly celebrated "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold"; and Hayes himself indulged in a trip to Paris and London to try to persuade Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and Eugene Ionesco to cover the 1968 Democratic convention. (Esquire had always been grandiose in its editorial ambitions. Even Hayes and Felker had once felt that it was fruitless to try to approach French president Charles de Gaulle to write about honor. Founding editor Gingrich's curt comment: "Let De Gaulle do his own refusing." De Gaulle said yes.)

Hayes succeeded in signing up Burroughs and Genet, to the horror, as it turned out, of Esquire's business side, which seems to have spent much of the sixties viewing the filler around its ads with mounting alarm, distaste, annoyance -- and, to their credit, forbearance.

But Genet surely tested them, and provided one benchmark of how Esquire was shaped by its times. The magazine dispatched a team of heavy-hitting writers to Chicago in the summer of 1968: not only Burroughs and Genet, but Terry Southern and John Sack as well, with editor John Berendt along as babysitter. Of course the writers became part of the scene, speaking at a Yippie press conference, shadowed by a plainclothesman.

Then the pieces came in -- and Hayes published them. William Burroughs produced a satire in which a purple baboon named Senator Homer Mandrill runs for president and delivers racist diatribes. And Genet, seizing his chance to Žpater les bourgeoises amŽricains, offered this description of a Chicago cop: "The thighs are very beautiful beneath the blue cloth, thick and muscular. . . . His legs are long, and perhaps, as you approach his member, you would find a furry nest of long, tight, curly hair." He saw another police officer "holding his billy club in his hand the way, exactly the way, I hold a black American's member."

"Rough going" was how Hayes diplomatically described this copy in a memo to the business side, which accepted his reasons for insisting the pieces run as written. Hayes acknowledged that he owed much of his freedom to publisher Gingrich, who was an assiduous and tolerant reader of all copy. Commenting on a particularly forbidding short story manuscript, he scribbled to Hayes: "The only parts of this I could understand were 6, 7, 9, 13, 15, 17, 19, 22, 24, 27, 29 & 31. No objection to them. In fact, if another person than Gordon [Lish, the fiction editor] can understand the other sections, I have no objection to them either. AG." Probably the main reason for forbearance, as always, was financial success. In 1967, after twenty-eight consecutive months of increases (pumped by cut-rate subscriptions), circulation had topped a million and the magazine reported profits of $3.4 million, up from a loss of almost a half million five years earlier.

Polsgrove notes Hayes's antipathy to public feminism -- "127th on my list of priorities," he wrote in a speech in the early seventies, "somewhere down there below prison reform and smog control" -- arguably a useful failing in the editor of a men's magazine. Nevertheless, he hired women as editors over the years and assigned women writers "non-female" subjects.

I wish Polsgrove had paid more attention to the heating up of the tone of American magazines like Esquire and New York, the print equivalent of voices in a restaurant rising to a shout in order to be heard across the table. Magazines' answer to television has been specialization and stridency -- and television has responded in kind with its tabloid innovations. This search for mindless ways to be interesting has gone so far that Hayes's Esquire now looks like a visually sophisticated literary journal -- as long as you don't look too closely, say, at the men's fashions or the fall back-to-college issues.

Hayes's departure from the magazine came because, in management's eyes, he overreached. He wanted to be Gingrich's successor as publisher, but also wanted to keep control of the editorial department. Gingrich believed strongly that Hayes should step aside as editor and make room for new blood, as Gingrich himself had done. Hayes asked for both jobs when the magazine was no longer hot: during the previous five years, Newsweek reported at the time, circulation had risen only 150,000. Management resisted giving him what he wanted, so he resigned, which appears to have been what management wanted him to do.

He worked in television for a few years, then finished out his career on the West Coast, as an editor of California magazine, and as a writer, notably of books on Africa and an article for Life about Dian Fossey that was the basis of the movie Gorillas in the Mist. In 1989, at sixty-two, he died of a brain tumor. His legacy to magazines was his vivid demonstration of what a strong editor can do to give a magazine itself, more than its individual articles and stories, a distinctive voice, personality, and attitude toward the world it mirrors and interprets. "Magazine editing is not just the act of choosing," he wrote, "it is an act of assertion." In the introduction to the collection of pieces from his tenure, Smiling Through the Apocalypse, Hayes summed up the magazine's passage through the decade: "Against the aridity of the national landscape of the late fifties we offered to our readers in our better moments the promise of outright laughter; by the end of the sixties the best we could provide was a bleak grin."

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