Harold Hayes, 1965. Photograph by Walter Bernard.

Along with the heat, the summer of 1963 brought a palpable tension to the so-called United States. The May images of black demonstrators terrorized by fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham still resonated on June 11, when President John F. Kennedy sent the National Guard to Tuscaloosa to thwart segregationist governor George Wallace's attempt to block two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama. That night, Kennedy appeared on national television to announce that he would introduce a civil-rights bill in Congress the following week, but the hope that his speech promised was undercut the very next day by the murder of N.A.A.C.P. field secretary Medgar Evers in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, home.

By late June, race was Topic A in America. But up on the fourth floor of 488 Madison Avenue, in a corner office with a wraparound view of the Midtown Manhattan skyline, Harold Thomas Pace Hayes, the managing editor of Esquire magazine, was preoccupied with Christmas. At a time when typewriters, carbon paper, color transparencies, and hot type still constituted the primary tools of the publishing business, a single issue of a full-color monthly magazine took a minimum of three to four months to produce—"lead time" in industry parlance. This meant that, in order to get the December 1963 issue of Esquire onto the newsstands and into the hands of subscribers ahead of the post-Thanksgiving shopping rush, Hayes and his staff of editors and art directors needed to close the issue in the middle of August. There was one other factor to consider as well. The December Esquire was the parent company's cash cow, carrying twice as many ads as a typical issue, and Hayes had been at the magazine long enough to know that the men who controlled the purse strings expected him to invoke the comforting spirit of Christmas on that year-end cover—the better to put the magazine's readers in a receptive mood for the onslaught of liquor, fashion, and cologne pitches that awaited them inside.

So, with his ginger suede wing tips up on the desk and an inscrutable smile on his face, Hayes picked up the phone and placed a call to the man who did Esquire's covers, a Runyonesque character named George Lois who swore like a longshoreman but exuded the confidence of a shipping magnate. Lois did not work at Esquire, or even in publishing. He ran one of the most sought-after advertising agencies in the business—Papert, Koenig, Lois, which he'd formed in 1960 after blazing trails as an art director at Doyle Dane Bernbach. But, back in 1962, after a lunch with Hayes at the Four Seasons Restaurant, Lois had taken on the job of designing Esquire's covers in between servicing such agency clients as Xerox and Dutch Masters cigars.

To a magazine industry that, like the rest of the culture, was still throwing off the dull, mannered strictures of the 50s, Hayes's arrangement with Lois was shocking. Admen sold soap, not magazines. But provocation, on many levels, was exactly what Hayes sought. Since taking the reins of Esquire two years earlier, he had pushed to make every column inch of the magazine sing with a brash authority that made news and upset the powers that be. In Lois, he had struck gold. Here was someone who could articulate that irreverence—in visual terms—on the most important page of the magazine. Once a month, Hayes provided Lois with the editorial lineup and his thoughts about what that issue's cover story might be. And then Hayes did what he did with his writers: he stepped back and let Lois do his thing.

Given that December was the biggest issue of the year, however, Hayes exerted a little extra finesse once he got Lois on the phone. "George? Hey, buddy, I could really use a Christmasy cover for December," he told Lois in his elegant North Carolinian accent. The ad-sales guys were putting his feet to the fire.

"You got it," replied Lois, who, after some brainstorming, got on the phone with photographer Carl Fischer. According to the soft-spoken Fischer, the conversation began as it usually did when Lois called with one of his Esquire cover concepts: "I got a wild idea! Listen to this crazy idea!" the adman told the photographer in his staccato Bronx growl.

The December 1963 cover photographed by Carl Fischer, with Sonny Liston, "the last man on earth America wanted to see coming down its chimney."

The idea required that Fischer and an assistant grab a plane to Las Vegas, where they turned a room at the Thunderbird Hotel into a makeshift studio. When the knock at the door finally came, world heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston stood in the doorway with a little girl, who Fischer guesses was eight, and another boxer, former heavyweight champ Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber.

Louis had been enlisted by George Lois to get Liston to the shoot and facilitate his cooperation, which began to evaporate around the time Fischer presented the hulking fighter with a Santa hat and suit to wear before the camera.

In 1963, Sonny Liston wasn't just the heavyweight champ; he was, as Lois says, "the baddest motherfucker" ever kissed by fame. Frightening in and out of the ring, Liston—who had beaten the gallant Floyd Patterson in the fall of 1962—was an ex-con who had done time for armed robbery and assaulting a police officer. His ties to organized crime weren't alleged; they were fact. The N.A.A.C.P. perceived his dark past to be a liability to the civil-rights movement.

Christmas would never be the same.

Liston didn't exactly channel the spirit of Saint Nick when he learned what was expected of him. "[He] was very cranky," Fischer says. "He was not going to put on any fucking hat"—let alone a velvety red tunic trimmed in white. But by the end of the shoot, using Louis and the little girl as a persuasive Greek chorus, Fischer had the image Lois wanted—and it landed like a stick of dynamite in Harold Hayes's lap. Beneath the droopy Santa hat, Liston's dead eyes stared sullenly at the reader. His festive apparel seemed only to accentuate his hostility. Writing about the incident years later, the editor recalled showing the cover to the executives who worked in Esquire's business department. The magazine's advertising director suggested that Esquire refrain from putting a black Santa on its cover until Saks Fifth Avenue put one in its stores. The magazine's circulation director was stunned.

"Jesus Christ, Hayes," he said. "You call that Christmasy? What the hell are you trying to do to us?"

"It is Christmasy," Hayes told the executive. "Look at the Santa Claus hat."

Ultimately, nobody at Esquire tried to stop Hayes from running the cover. After all, under his leadership, the magazine was clearly thriving and would hit an all-time high circulation of just under 900,000 that fall. More important, Hayes didn't second-guess himself. "He had the exact thing that all of the great editors and producers and studio heads and politicians have, which is that he absolutely trusted his gut," says Nora Ephron, who worked with Hayes when she was a columnist and feature writer for Esquire in the early 70s. "He knew what he wanted. He acted on it."

Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas. Save for the magazine's logo and dateline, the cover ran without any type, or even a caption identifying the fighter. None was necessary. Years later, Sports Illustrated recalled that Liston looked like "the last man on earth America wanted to see coming down its chimney." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." The angry letters began to roll in, and stunned advertisers proceeded to pull out. Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover.

For Hayes, the gains outweighed the losses. Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote, looking back in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."

Adman George Lois, who designed and produced Esquire's provocative covers, 1964. Photograph by Timothy Galfas.

With the December 1963 issue, Esquire's metamorphosis was complete. Not only was it the first issue to carry Hayes's new title, editor—he had been running the magazine since mid-1961 under the lesser honorific of managing editor—but it was also the first to display the full range of literary and visual firepower that would make Esquire the great American magazine of the 1960s, if not the great American magazine of the 20th century.

Certainly, Esquire did not begin in the 60s. By the time John Kennedy was exploring his New Frontier, the monthly was more than 25 years old and had published Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up" series, along with a formidable list of writers who need be identified by only their last names: Dos Passos, Salinger, Camus, Huxley, Steinbeck, Waugh, Mencken, and Pirandello, to name just a few. Still, by the 1950s, the magazine had grown as dull as the Eisenhower administration. Enter Hayes, who, after a brutal four-and-a-half-year contest for control of the magazine, emerged—hardened and battle-ready—to lead Esquire into a new era. And what an era it was.

The Magazine of the New

Hayes's Esquire would identify, analyze, and define the new decade's violent energies, ideas, morals, and conflicts—though always with an ironic and, occasionally, sardonic detachment that kept the magazine cool as the 60s grew increasingly hot. Esquire would become the magazine of the New: "The New Art of Success," "The New Seven Deadly Sins," "The New Sophistication," and, ultimately, the New Journalism, the fancy term given to nonfiction that's written like a novel.

Even a very short list of Esquire contributors in the 1960s reads like a roll call for the profession's pantheon. James Baldwin dissected Norman Mailer in "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy." William Styron analyzed "My Generation." Philip Roth visited "Iowa: A Very Far Country Indeed." And Mailer twitted them all in "Some Children of the Goddess." Bruce Jay Friedman asked model Jean Shrimpton if she had any fantasies and watched her rummage through her purse in "The Imposing Proportions of Jean Shrimpton." Rex Reed braved the force of nature known as Ava Gardner in "Ava: Life in the Afternoon." Susan Sontag took a "Trip to Hanoi." Saul Bellow contributed "Literary Notes on Khrushchev." Edmund Wilson published "The Rats of Rutland Grange." Terry Southern juggled racism, majorettes, and moonshine in "Twirling at Ole Miss." Dorothy Parker captured "New York at Six-Thirty P.M." William F. Buckley Jr. explored the politics of Capote's 1966 Black and White Ball. Kenneth Tynan explained why "Dirty Books Can Stay." Anthony Lukas chronicled "The Life and Death of a Hippie." Dan Wakefield and Thomas B. Morgan profiled, respectively, Robert F. Kennedy and his younger brother, Ted, for a package called "Bobby & Teddy." Brock Brower examined "Mary McCarthyism."

Measured against the streamlined, A.D.D.-friendly magazine writing of today, not all of Esquire's 60s canon has aged well. Some of the prose is excessively woolly, some exceedingly self-important, and in a publication where articles in excess of 10,000 words were not uncommon, some stories come off as just plain interminable. There is also the sense that, toward the end of the decade, the magazine struggled with its own success—particularly when it came to finding new ideas and writers to top its previous achievements. For example, as smart as it may have sounded for the magazine to include author and political activist Jean Genet and macabre Beat author William Burroughs on the Esquire team that covered the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, their contributions, today, seem more wacky than worthy. Genet's piece was titled "The Members of the Assembly" because he spent several sentences focusing on the crotches of Chicago's police force.

The May 1969 cover, with Andy Warhol.

But what's really remarkable about Esquire's coverage of the 60s is how much does still hold up. Get past the gooey wave of nostalgia that reading old magazines inevitably delivers and the writing, photography, and art still crackle with telling details, unexpected insights, and laugh-out-loud humor.

As Nora Ephron says, Esquire and the 60s were "the perfect moment of a magazine and a period coming together—not trying to say the period was something other than what it was, but telling us everything about it." And though the decade climaxed in violence and hysteria that no monthly magazine could stay ahead of, Harold Hayes and his troops at Esquire not only cracked the code of the new culture but also engineered the genome for the modern magazine. Traces of its DNA can still be found in today's magazines, including this one.

Harold Hayes died in 1989. Like the chapters of his unfinished book, Making a Modern Magazine, the clues he left behind about his life and his work at Esquire are frustratingly incomplete and, like the man himself, hard to fathom. They—the chapters and the clues—are filed, along with a career's worth of correspondence, notes, and clippings, in the rare-manuscripts department of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, at Hayes's alma mater, Wake Forest University. (This trove of information is also featured at length in Carol Polsgrove's 1995 book, It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, but Didn't We Have Fun: Esquire in the Sixties.) The files show that Hayes was born April 18, 1926, in Elkin, North Carolina, but spent roughly half his childhood in coal country, Beckley, West Virginia, before moving, at 11, to the considerably more cosmopolitan environs of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The middle child of three, Hayes was the product of a nurturing, culture-loving mother—who, Hayes once said, wished her children "would be middle class gentility"—and a strict fundamentalist Baptist-minister father who insisted his offspring attend prayer meetings and revivals, and wouldn't let Esquire magazine into the house during Harold's childhood. This dogmatic upbringing left Hayes with what he called a lasting "moral hangover" that he resented by the time of his adolescence. He was somewhere between a hick and a naïf when he landed at Wake Forest—and as square as the trombone he had played in his high-school band.

He did not exactly catch fire at college. Hayes characterized himself as a "happy-go-lucky" C student whose education was interrupted by a stint in the navy reserve. He worked on student publications and after graduating, in 1948, headed for Atlanta, eventually landing at United Press, where he covered the Georgia legislature and re-wrote wire copy. When the Korean War flared in the summer of 1950, Hayes enlisted in the Marines, where he rose to the rank of first lieutenant but never saw action. Once his hitch was up, a mutual friend helped arrange his first audience with Arnold Gingrich, the founding editor of Esquire, who, after years away from the magazine, had just returned as its publisher. Gingrich, an impeccably dressed Renaissance man who collected rare violins and played them badly, didn't have a position for Hayes and sent him on to a publisher developing a new magazine called Picture Week. Hayes was put in charge and nervously ran the show until, about two years into the job, he produced an end-of-the-year feature that foreshadowed the perverse point of view that would come to distinguish Esquire from its competition. While most editors used their year-end issues to recap the highlights of the last 12 months, Hayes had astutely sensed that there was much more entertainment value in looking at the low points and put together a piece that in an interview years later he called "The Hundred Bombs of the Year." The publisher took one look at the layout and fired the entire editorial staff.

Hayes was soon back on Esquire's doorstep, and this time Gingrich took him on as his assistant—hardly an illustrious title, but Esquire's publisher had plans for this new hire. Between 1933 and the end of that decade, Gingrich and a group of Chicago-based businessmen, led by a cunning hypochondriac named David Smart and his partner William Weintraub, had turned Esquire into one of the great magazine success stories of the early 20th century. (They also created Gentlemen's Quarterly, now owned by Condé Nast.) Their Esquire was an innovative mix of high and low culture—akin to "having Thomas Mann or Ernest Hemingway read their work aloud at a burlesque house," according to one critic of the time—delivered in a big, 13-inch-by-10-inch format and presided over by "Esky," a pop-eyed dandy with a walrus mustache who appeared on every cover and bore more than a passing resemblance to Gingrich.

But Esquire's original luster had long since faded by the early 50s, when the magazine moved from Chicago to New York to take advantage of the resurgent city's new status as both the center of the advertising universe and the clearinghouse of American culture. The appearances in 1953 of Playboy—founded by former low-level Esquire employee Hugh Hefner—and, the following year, Sports Illustrated only worsened matters. Management eventually realized that the magazine's future would have to be determined by someone younger and more in tune with the times. And so, in 1957, Gingrich began ushering Hayes and a handful of young, ambitious editors he called the "young Turks" into his cramped office, where he refereed one of the most vicious weekly story meetings in modern journalism. "I'm turning the magazine over to you," Gingrich told the Turks at one of those first meetings, which really meant that he would preside over them as they battled one another to place their respective story ideas in Esquire. Though it wasn't exactly stated that the last man standing would ascend to the top of the masthead, the combatants couldn't help but notice that the corner office that had belonged to the magazine's last editor—swept out in a purge of the previous regime—was being kept vacant. With this "beautiful red apple suspended way up at the top of the tree," Hayes wrote, the editorial meetings quickly turned brutal, loud, and even personal. "They were very bloody," said Ralph Ginzburg, another young Turk, who went on to start Eros magazine and push against the boundaries of the First Amendment. (Ginzburg, who spoke to Vanity Fair last spring, died in July.) "There was no predicting how nefarious, dirty, or low they would get."

"The Big Change"

The contest ultimately boiled down to Hayes and a well-connected former Life-magazine editor named Clay Felker, a St. Louis native and Duke University graduate whose father was managing editor of The Sporting News and whose mother was also an editor. Felker stirred Hayes's competitive instincts, but he intimidated him, too. In addition to possessing the more authentic-sounding title of features editor, Felker was known around the office as the "drinking editor," because he attended so many parties. He was also a remarkably fertile source of good ideas. "He had the keenest distant-early-warning system of any editor I ever knew," said Ginzburg. "He could spot something that was going to be a major trend six months before it happened."

Felker could be forceful and engaging when pitching his own ideas and politically lethal when torpedoing somebody else's. Hayes learned this early in the competition when, after he sold the idea of profiling the Communist Daily Worker newspaper, Felker embarked on a no-holds-barred (but ultimately unsuccessful) campaign to kill the story, and his tactics included a well-aimed swipe at Hayes's feelings of intellectual inadequacy. "The trouble with you is, you just don't know," Felker told his rival. Years later, Hayes would admit, in a 1988 interview with University of Kansas student Joseph Rebello, that the remark was "the most damning and insulting thing anybody had said to me in a working relationship," and it played a key role in his decision to apply for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. He was accepted, and, in 1958, left for Cambridge with Gingrich's blessing. This time, the C student did A work and returned the following year a much more confident and connected man. (According to Felker, however, Hayes "still seemed threatened by me.")

Hayes sometimes referred to the battle of the young Turks as "the Big Change," and by the end of 1960 one of the last remaining vestiges of the old Esquire was the caricature of Esky that dotted the i in the magazine's logo. A new Esquire had evolved, and it was a hybrid of Hayes's and Felker's respective editorial visions. Hayes wanted Esquire to be a magazine of ideas—politics, science, law, religion, sophistication. Felker saw power—and the powerful—as his unifying theme. Save for the fact that neither man wanted to share the reins, their worldviews weren't incompatible. They were both outsider perspectives built on smart writing, strong reporting, provocative visuals, and bringing a new sensibility to old subjects. Gingrich's mad plan had worked. Through all the infighting and backstabbing, Esquire had become a stronger magazine with an impressive roster of stars and newcomers. Felker had hired Gore Vidal as a political columnist and David Levine as an illustrator. He had also enticed Norman Mailer to cover the 1960 Democratic convention, from which the author of The Naked and the Dead produced an evocative and groundbreaking piece of literary nonfiction, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," which has since been heralded as one of the earliest examples of the New Journalism.

Hayes brought in William F. Buckley Jr. to write for the magazine. He was also instrumental in the production of Art Kane's historic 1958 photo of jazz greats gathered on a Harlem stoop, and the first magazine editor to employ Diane Arbus. In the July 1960 issue, as part of a special package devoted to New York, Arbus made her first Esquire appearance, with a photo-essay of the city's eccentrics called "The Vertical Journey," as did another future Hayes favorite, New York Times reporter Gay Talese, whose pointillist portrait of the city, told through little-known facts and observations, was the backbone of the issue.

Had not fate—in the form of The Saturday Evening Post—intervened, Gingrich probably would have let Felker and Hayes battle it out until one quit or killed the other. (Those who worked with Esquire's publisher often described his management style as "laissez-faire.") But after Hayes received a series of increasingly enticing offers to join the Post as an editor, Gingrich finally appointed him managing editor in the summer of 1961, the promotion reflected on the masthead in Esquire's September issue. Hayes moved into the coveted corner office. Felker began to look for a new job. "I was naïve," Felker says curtly, more than 40 years after the decision. "Hayes cultivated Gingrich. I thought that all I had to do was keep coming up with good ideas." Instead, in the fall of 1962, Felker moved on, and in 1963 resurfaced as a consultant at the New York Herald Tribune, where he eventually took over the newspaper's Sunday magazine, which had been revamped and renamed, simply, New York. There, he would soon demonstrate that his rise at Esquire had been no fluke.

Hayes did not wait for Felker to leave before he consolidated his power and got down to the business of expanding his staff. In late 1961, he hired a preppish Harvard graduate named John Berendt as an associate editor. Around this time, fiction editor Rust Hills hired an assistant named Robert Brown, who came with a master's in English literature from Yale (and would eventually succeed his boss). The following year, Hayes promoted Alice Glaser, a neurotic but brilliant Radcliffe-educated secretary, to the same station, and after Felker left, Hayes replaced him with former Time-Life Books editor Byron Dobell as his assistant managing editor. In 1963, Hayes hired a self-described North Carolina "hillbilly" named Robert Sherrill as an associate editor. Hayes and Sherrill had met at Wake Forest and become even closer friends when they both moved to Atlanta and lived in the same apartment complex. But when Sherrill arrived at Esquire, he found that his former schoolmate had changed.

"It was sort of dramatic, because the last time I saw him, he's one character, and the next time he's another one," Sherrill says, explaining that at Wake Forest Hayes was still "naïve, sweet, curious. He went wild over Tender Is the Night. He was almost a cheerleader." Nearly 20 years later, Hayes was "the same person, but he's tough," Sherrill says. "You'll have a hard time moving him."

The triple-witching effect of the Marines, Gingrich's boot camp, and Harvard had both hardened and emboldened Hayes, and the city had buffed him to a fine luster. An unconventionally handsome man with a full head of fair brown hair and bushy eyebrows that could look as untamed as the Manhattan skyline, he moved through Esquire's offices at a forward tilt, the metal taps on his shoes heralding his arrival, his mood, and his utter confidence in the task at hand. "There was a specific Harold clickety-click," says Kitty Krupat, who in the late 60s served as the magazine's chief editorial researcher.

Hayes edited Esquire as if he were its most fervent reader. And he was. "He had an innate sense of the way a magazine should be—his magazine," Sherrill says. "He loved structure and he loved the way people wrote. He could read something and almost immediately say 'Good' or 'Bad' and throw it over his shoulder."

And as he tweaked Esquire to reflect his vision, Hayes also indoctrinated the staff. "We never wondered what he wanted. We absolutely knew," says John Berendt. Though Hayes's Esquire retained many of the hallmarks established during the young Turks' turf war, its irreverent tone and sense of humor—"from black wit to custard-pie burlesque," as the editor once put it—evolved, particularly with the debut of a franchise feature called the Dubious Achievement Awards that Hayes had asked his art director, Robert Benton, and an associate editor named David Newman to pull together for the January 1962 issue. Though inspired by a Harvard Lampoon staple that recognized the worst acting and movies of the year, Dubious Achievements was really just another run at the "Hundred Bombs of the Year" piece that had gotten Hayes fired from Picture Week. A wry look at the Bay of Pigs fiasco and other low points of Kennedy's first year in office, Dubious Achievements was built around a recurring photo of the usually glowering Richard Nixon laughing maniacally. The caption beneath the photo read: "Why is this man laughing?" Benton says the juxtaposition of image and text was simply a reference to the turmoil of Kennedy's first year. "[Nixon] was laughing because he wasn't president," he says. And yet, the joke still seemed to be on the former vice president.

By using Nixon—an embodiment of the Eisenhower era—as the highbrow equivalent of Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman, Esquire had declared itself a brash corrective to the square sobriety of the 50s, and Hayes had taken a significant step forward in defining his magazine.

Ultimately, he wanted every column inch of Esquire's editorial content to reflect that tone. So, on Fridays, Hayes broke out the liquor and presided over a casual brainstorming session disguised as a cocktail party that would be attended by the staff and any contributors who happened to be in the building. When Berendt had started, Hayes used a copy of the day's New York Times to show him and Glaser how to convert daily news and feature stories into Esquire ideas by, Berendt says, "giving articles a special slant, by getting a principal in the story to write the piece, or by assigning a well-chosen writer with a specialty that fit the story." Not long after that, the editors were having Friday drinks in Hayes's office when, Berendt says, "Harold brought up the Times thing again and said, 'It's child's play. Anyone can do it.'?" This prompted one of the staffers to devise a challenge: pages of the Times were affixed to corkboard that covered part of the wall in Hayes's office, and darts were flung at them. The goal was to come up with an Esquire-worthy story wherever the dart landed. "It became very competitive," Berendt says. "People shouted out ideas and were very clever and hilarious about it, but Harold was absolutely ingenious."

"Point of view," "tone," "perspective," and "irreverence" were terms that got thrown around a lot on the fourth floor of 488 Madison. "Great P.O.V.," Hayes might scrawl on an idea memo when he came across something he liked. Or, after hearing a story idea, he might raise his hand in front of his face and rotate it, which meant that the editor needed to do the same with his idea. These qualities distinguished Esquire from the jaunty suburban earnestness of The New Yorker, or its duller competitors Harper's and The Atlantic. They also gave the magazine an urgency and a timeliness that monthlies didn't ordinarily have.

And with the July 1963 issue, Esquire made news with a feature called "The Structure of the American Literary Establishment," which was pure point of view. The focus of the feature was a two-page spread that looked like a cross between a chart and a lava lamp. Onto these pages, fiction editor Rust Hills had grouped dozens of writers, agents, playwrights, and critics into such categories as "Writers Who Get in Columns" and "The Cool World." The pinnacle was "The Hot Center," which spanned the centerfold of the magazine under a splash of red-orange ink. The chart was satirical and keenly observed—for one thing, a writer's heat seemed to have more to do with his agent than his writing—and it threw the thin-skinned literary world into a tizzy, particularly The New York Times Book Review, which had been relegated to "Squaresville" (and which then published a squarely earnest rebuttal that seemed to miss the humor of the piece). In addition to being the first of many Establishment charts to come—covering various industries and hierarchies—the feature "was an important turning point for Esquire," Berendt says. "It was Esquire taking charge and calling the shots."

Bracing as the Sonny Liston cover was in a country that had gone to the barricades over racism, it was swiftly eclipsed by the shock and grief produced by another national tragedy. On November 22, 1963, about a week after the December issue of Esquire reached newsstands, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. For the first time since Hayes had taken over the magazine, Esquire's three-month lead time looked like it might become a liability. The January issue was at the printers, which meant that photos and text made inaccurate or tasteless by the assassination had to be literally blacked out of copies that hadn't already shipped. It was too late, however, to remove Kennedy's picture from the Dubious Achievement–themed montage cover. Worst of all, the magazine would not be able to weigh in on Kennedy's death until 1964. Its coverage would have to be original.

But as Hayes watched news reports of Kennedy's death and its aftermath, he sussed out the direction he needed to take. He had noticed that the excessively moist media coverage of Kennedy's life had all but deified the man. So, in the waning days of 1963, he wrote to New York Times correspondent Tom Wicker and asked him to write about "Kennedy without tears." In a letter dated December 22, 1963, Wicker responded, "Some of those myths are going to take a hell of a lot of unsentimentalizing," but he agreed to the assignment and produced a memorably clear-eyed assessment of Kennedy's political life for the June 1964 issue.

"Kennedy Without Tears" served as both headline and cover line for the story, and George Lois provided a sly riff on that thesis. A full-page, sepia-toned photograph of Kennedy stared straight out at the reader while, from the bottom of the page, a man's hand holding a white handkerchief—both depicted in full color—dabbed at a spot beneath the president's left eye. Above the handkerchief, spilled tears beaded up on the photograph. Was the man attached to the hand weeping? Or was the slain president crying for his lost legacy? Soon after the issue went on sale, the New York Herald Tribune, a newspaper known for its own brand of insouciance, threw a third question into the mix: "Has Esquire magazine leaped off the bridge of good taste?"

Actually, it had moved so far ahead of the curve that the laggards could not see it, and in the July 1964 issue Hayes published what proved to be a profoundly prescient feature by Benton and Newman. "The New Sentimentality" proposed that a new sensibility had quietly but firmly taken hold in America—an ironic, unsentimental, self-interested sensibility that had roots both in the Kennedy administration and in the French New Wave films of Godard and Truffaut. Eisenhower was "the last bloom of Old Sentimentality." Lyndon Johnson, Jackson Pollock, Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack, and the children's-book character Stuart Little were other symbols of the Old Sentimentality. English model Jean Shrimpton, artist Roy Lichtenstein, the Beatles, Sonny Liston, and Charlie Brown signified the New. Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart were among the few who were relevant in both categories.

Benton and Newman did not reference Esquire in the piece, but like Monroe and Bogart, the magazine moved in both worlds without really embracing either. Esquire dwelled in the conflict between the new world that was rushing in and the old ways that were shuffling out. "With Harold, I think, it was just one big carnival," says Tom Wolfe. "I don't think he ever cared for a second who won an election, any of that stuff. I think it all seemed amusing. It all offered such great journalism. And I think that's really the only form of objectivity in journalism: that you are either having so much fun with the material, or you feel what you're doing is so important that you don't care about any political gains."

On paper, Norman Mailer sounded like Esquire's literary soul mate: the Great American Novelist who had switched to great American nonfiction in the 60s, a man who challenged political correctness with every angry breath, as well as a writer who could give perspective to a paper clip. But his relationship with the magazine was star-crossed at virtually every turn. In 1960, after writing "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," he had a public falling-out with the magazine, in part because Gingrich had altered Mailer's headline to "Supermart." After Esquire apologized to the writer within its own pages in 1962, Mailer returned to write a regular column, "The Big Bite," and, beginning in January 1964, a serialized novel, An American Dream. Esquire ran the book over eight issues, with Mailer writing on deadline, and the two parties drove each other nuts. Mailer's attempts to bull through the limits of sexual and scatological language in a commercial magazine brought out the Marine in Hayes and the prude in Gingrich, who had not forgotten Esquire's bruising—though eventually successful—landmark Supreme Court battle in the 1940s; the nation's staunchly Catholic postmaster general, Frank Walker, had attempted to revoke the magazine's precious second-class mailing permit because, he claimed, Esquire was publishing obscene material. Exhausting bargaining sessions involving Hayes, Mailer, and the magazine's lawyers ensued, and Sherrill recalls the day that managing editor Byron Dobell appeared at his cubicle with a smile on his face and jerked his head toward Hayes's office. Sherrill got up from his desk and quietly joined the other editorial staffers eavesdropping outside Hayes's office as their leader haggled by phone with Mailer over expletives contained in his latest installment. When Hayes saw his staff lurking, Sherrill says, he smiled and rolled his eyes before presenting his latest offer to the novelist on the other end of the line. "Norman," Hayes said, "I'll trade you two 'shits' for a 'fuck.'?"

The breaking point came that same year when Mailer wrote about the Republican convention in San Francisco. Again, he wrangled with Esquire's lawyers. Mailer wanted to call the piece "Cannibals and Christians," but the lawyers worried that the Republicans might claim malice. Mailer settled for "In the Red Light," but split again with the magazine. In later years, he seemed to carry a grudge. Hayes's son, Tom Hayes, remembers Mailer once refusing to get on an elevator with his father, and when associate editor Tom Hedley tried to get the writer to profile Fidel Castro, Hedley says, Mailer told him, "It probably could be one of the best pieces I've ever written, [but] I'll never do it for Harold Hayes. You know why? Because he'll put my asshole over Castro's eyebrow on the cover." (Mailer declined to be interviewed for this piece.)

If Esquire was a magazine where novelists could apply their literary talents to nonfiction, it was also a place where a handful of journalists wrote articles that read like short stories. The writer most identified with that legacy is Gay Talese, a man whose Calabrian profile is as sharp as his tailored clothing. Having made his bones in journalism at the stylistically restrictive Times, Talese found the freedom that Esquire gave its writers "narcotic," he says, and he particularly excelled at profiling achievers who had fallen a little—or a lot—from the pinnacle. Thus, in November 1965, at Hayes's behest, Talese embarked on the long, harrowing trip that would lead him to produce the greatest literary-nonfiction story of the 20th century. Talese flew to Los Angeles and checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to prepare for an interview the following day with Frank Sinatra.

"A Kind of Psychosomatic Nasal Drip"

The April 1966 cover, touting Talese's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," illustrated by Ed Sorel.

Sinatra—in the second decade of a comeback that had begun with the 1953 film From Here to Eternity—was Talese's kind of subject, but not long after the writer had settled into his hotel room, a call came telling him the interview was off and that in order to reschedule it Talese would have to agree to submit his profile to Sinatra's handlers prior to publication. This was unacceptable, of course, but Hayes told Talese to keep working. As the days turned into weeks, Talese relayed his progress, or lack thereof, in a series of letters to Hayes that are filed at Wake Forest. They show a writer bouncing from hope to despair to paranoia and back as he works furiously to deliver the goods by shadowing the notoriously controlling Sinatra and talking to everyone who might be able to shed light on the entertainer without setting off any alarms. "I may not get the piece we'd hoped for—the real Frank Sinatra," Talese wrote in one letter, "but perhaps, by not getting it—and by getting rejected constantly and by seeing his flunkies protecting his flanks—we will be getting close to the truth about the man."

That last sentence provides the key to "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," the piece that Talese published in the April 1966 issue of Esquire, after three months of writing and research. Talese built his story on the conceit that Sinatra's attempts to record a song for an NBC television special had been thwarted because he had a head cold. "Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel," Talese wrote. It "affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who … depend on him for their own welfare and stability."

Talese's story doesn't just capture the essence of Sinatra, it reveals the inner workings of the climate-controlled biosphere the singer had constructed around himself—and the inhospitable atmosphere coalescing outside its shell. It is clear in the reading that by late 1965 the hat-suit-and-tie culture that enabled Sinatra's 50s comeback was fast being replaced by something closer to a Nehru jacket. "In a sense, he was battling The Beatles," Talese wrote of the purpose behind the NBC special, but the Fab Four were just a part of the problem. Having already fallen once from the public's favor, Sinatra was fighting like hell to remain relevant, and beneath his sometimes obnoxious swagger, Talese divined the pathos of an increasingly vulnerable entertainer.

What's not evident from reading the piece is the conflicted relationship that Talese had with his editor while he was writing it. On one hand, he says, the backbone that Hayes showed during the reporting process was reassuring. "I was really worried about how much money I was wasting" while waiting and waiting at the top-shelf Beverly Wilshire, Talese says, but Hayes told him to keep his eye on the prize. "If you needed any support, he was tough," the writer says. "He would back you up. I loved that about Hayes."

On the other hand, Talese saw his boss's smile as a "tricky" one, especially after a blowup he'd had with him over a 1962 piece entitled "Harlem for Fun." Hayes had originally assigned the story to the novelist James Baldwin, asking him to build it around illustrations by artist Tommy Keogh. But when Baldwin turned in his manuscript, his narrative had nothing to do with the art, which was already at the printer. Hayes turned to Talese, who checked into a Harlem hotel and banged out a piece to his editor's specifications. "You know that term 'Take one for the team'?" Talese says. "Well, I got hit in the head." Sometime later, when the two men were haggling over Talese's contract, Hayes told him, "Look, we published that 'Harlem for Fun,' which was not your best piece." Talese was furious. "I said, 'Listen, you fuckhead. I did that as a favor to you. It wasn't my assignment. You only gave it to me because Baldwin screwed up.'?"

From that point on, Talese says, he never trusted Hayes, and he secretly vented some of his anger over that mistrust in the issue in which "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" appeared. That month, a small item about Talese ran in the "Backstage with Esquire" column, a behind-the-scenes look at the stories and writers in the issue. The "Backstage" piece was illustrated with a photo of the two shirt boards on which Talese had written the final outline for his Sinatra piece, and while it's not visible to the naked eye, a magnifying glass placed over the left shirt board reveals the words, scrawled in Talese's handwriting, "Fuck Hayes."

Talese says the complexity of his relationship with his editor is best described by something his Italian great-grandfather used to say: "Those who love you make you cry." Despite their skirmishes, Hayes "was the editor who had the most meaning in my life," Talese says. "I never had another relationship like that. Never."

Tom Wolfe's relationship with Hayes was not as intense, but it did have its memorable moments, particularly the cunning way in which Hayes brokered the first piece that Wolfe published in Esquire, in the October 1963 issue—a profile of the boxer Cassius Clay called "The Marvelous Mouth."

Clay was still months away from his February 1964 heavyweight-championship upset of Sonny Liston, immediately after which he would change his name to Muhammad Ali, but, again exhibiting his prescience, Hayes wanted Clay in the magazine. So, Wolfe says, the editor personally got the fighter on the phone, and found that Clay expected to be paid for his cooperation. He was coming to New York to make a spoken-word recording, but his backers weren't going to give him much spending money to enjoy his stay. Hayes explained that he didn't pay for stories, that it was "an honor" to appear in Esquire, but Clay wouldn't budge. "Get this," says Wolfe, who was working full-time as a reporter at the New York Herald Tribune when the assignment came through. "Harold says [to Clay], 'O.K., I'll give you $150. I'll give you $50 when you first meet our man on Monday, $50 on Wednesday, $50 on Friday when he finishes up.'?"

Clay took the bait, the first $50 installment was forked over, and "off we went," Wolfe says. "He'd made a deal, and he was going to tolerate me," but just barely. On Tuesday, however, the two men were in a taxi crossing Central Park when, out of the blue, Clay "gets real chummy." As the pair were walking through Central Park, Clay "puts his arm around me and he says, 'This is a great day. It feels like Wednesday, doesn't it?' I didn't catch on at first," Wolfe says with a laugh. "He wanted his next $50. So, I said, 'I'm sorry. They don't give it to me until the day I give it to you.'?" Even more astute than Hayes's deal with Clay was the editor's decision to use his most flamboyantly nimble writer to nail down the giddy, kinetic outlandishness of boxing's most flamboyantly nimble fighter. In that sense, "The Marvelous Mouth" has a nice cosmic symmetry to it. It marks the Esquire debuts of two men who would bring an unmatched level of showmanship to their respective professions.

When Wolfe became a sensation at Esquire—where he would meet his wife, the former Sheila Berger, in the art department—he was already working hard for both the Herald Tribune's daily paper and its Sunday magazine, New York, where Clay Felker had taken over as editor. So, when Esquire began vying for Wolfe's byline as well, Felker reportedly was not happy. But if the ingredients were there for Hayes and Felker's earlier rivalry to turn into something more public, and ugly, that's not what happened. Though the two editors' paths would continue to cross in odd and ironic ways, any lingering tensions between them tended to be expressed—at least for public consumption—under the guise of friendly competition or blithe ignorance. For his part, Felker says, he never read Esquire much after he left the magazine. And though Wolfe doesn't recall this episode, Hayes wrote in one of the chapters of his unfinished book that, once, when Wolfe owed assignments to both Esquire and New York, "and was ducking us both," he sent the writer "a wire suggesting the pressure had eased up on his New York deadline" and that the writer should go ahead and finish his Esquire assignment. "I signed it 'Felker,'?" Hayes wrote, adding, "He still turned his piece in late."

By the end of 1966, Harold Hayes had watched approvingly as a number of his star writers established footholds in longer forms. Gay Talese was working on his fourth book, an opus about The New York Times called The Kingdom and the Power that had begun as a 1966 Esquire piece. Tom Wolfe had put out his first collection of articles, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and was working on a book about Merry Prankster Ken Kesey. And Peter Bogdanovich had moved to Los Angeles to work in the very medium he covered for Esquire: film. Bogdanovich had charmed his way into the magazine four years earlier after getting into a spirited argument with Hayes over motion pictures at the 1962 premiere of Howard Hawks's Hatari. "I said, 'God, you have bad taste in movies,'?" Bogdanovich recalls. "I was very flippant with him." But Hayes remembered his tormentor when Bogdanovich called days later to sell a piece he'd written on Hollywood. The story, "Talkies," ran in the August 1962 issue. "It was one of the great, exciting moments of my life," Bogdanovich says.

"The masculinization of the American woman," March 1965.

As he became a regular presence in Esquire, Bogdanovich and his then wife, Polly Platt, became close friends with Hayes and his first wife, the actress Suzette Meredith. The Bogdanoviches lived near the Hayeses' apartment, which was on Riverside Drive and West 100th Street, and often the couples would meet for dinner. "I remember one time when we went over. He had just seen Hello, Dolly! [which premiered on Broadway in January 1964], and he had the original-cast album," Bogdanovich recalls. "He said, 'Listen to this! This is terrific.' And he played me that tune, the title song. He played it three times. 'Isn't that great!'?" Bogdanovich laughs, as if he still can't quite believe that Harold Hayes, the man who loved to puncture pomposity in Esquire, could fall for such an overinflated musical. "I said, 'It's O.K., Harold.' But he just loved it."

Because Hayes's talent as an editor seemed to come from such an instinctual place—a realm defined and colored by his personal tastes and experiences—he had some definite blind spots. "There was nobody smarter than Harold on certain things and nobody dumber than him on certain things," says Robert Benton. "What Harold was comfortable with, he was brilliant at. And what he wasn't comfortable with made him uneasy." Hello, Dolly! was something that the jazz-loving, trombone-playing husband of a stage actress could understand. Rock 'n' roll was another story. And so Esquire devoted comparatively little space to it. Hedley recalls the time Hayes "embarrassed me in a meeting when I said Bob Dylan was one of the most important poets, musical writers, of any time." "How old are you, again?" Hayes asked him after a good laugh.

Hayes may not have grasped the cultural influence of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, or even Sonny and Cher, but in 1965 his instincts as an editor, and, perhaps, as a former Marine, established Esquire as an authority on the escalating war in Vietnam. By 1965 the U.S. had committed 200,000 troops and begun Operation Rolling Thunder, a three-year bombing campaign against the Vietcong. Esquire had run some coverage of the conflict, but nothing like the story that John Sack, a former CBS News bureau chief in Madrid, pitched in a letter to Hayes. Sack, who had been a soldier in the Korean War, proposed to follow an infantry company through boot camp and into its first battle in Vietnam and write about it for Esquire.

His story led the October 1966 issue, and, like the best Esquire stories, it was suffused with humor. But as the soldiers of M Company traded the jitters of basic training for the insanity of real, live war, Sack's tone grew progressively darker, before finally going black when a grenade thrown, on orders, into a hut killed a seven-year-old Vietnamese girl.

From the cold horror of this scene came Esquire's starkest cover. Against a black background, the words of the soldier who discovered the child's body were printed in white:

"Oh my God
—we hit
a little girl."

It was a knockout combination of art direction and literary journalism that brought the horror and the humanity of a distant war home in a way that no three-minute TV report could.

Nineteen sixty-six was a very good year for Esquire. According to Carol Polsgrove's It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, but Didn't We Have Fun?, The Sunday Times of London named Esquire one of "the world's great magazines," circulation topped one million, and advertising revenue jumped 25 percent to $10.5 million—still a far cry from the $17 million that Playboy raked in, but remarkably good for a magazine aimed for its readers' heads without the added value of a centerfold.

The following year, Bond girl Ursula Andress appeared on July's cover with a Band-Aid slapped over her brow for a special issue on violence, an increasing and troubling feature of American life. The package included a photo-essay about violence in the arts called "Now Let the Festivities Proceed," by then contributing editors Robert Benton and David Newman, who were just weeks away from seeing the premiere of their own groundbreaking contribution to the topic. The duo had written the script for Bonnie and Clyde, which was released to U.S. audiences in August 1967. Directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and a radiant Faye Dunaway, Bonnie and Clyde was more than just a violent movie.

It was an Esquire movie—its characters, dialogue, and detachment all expressions of the New Sentimentality that Benton and Newman had diagnosed three years earlier. "We had written the treatment for Bonnie and Clyde when we did 'The New Sentimentality,'?" Benton says. "One was an expression of what we felt about the other." The film contained no traditional heroes. Its main characters were a couple of beautiful but inept criminals who became celebrity revolutionaries by robbing banks—The Man, in the jargon of the times—then succumbed in a blood-soaked, bullet-riddled, balletic climax. Along the way, people died gruesomely to the madcap bluegrass sounds of Flatt and Scruggs's "Foggy Mountain Breakdown." Sex was depicted with a perverse frankness. It was the seminal statement of a new, unsentimental era of moviemaking. Says Benton, "One of the reasons I think Bonnie and Clyde worked is that we came out of a magazine culture. We came out of the urgency and the irreverence of that specific Esquire world."

The Chinese Curse

Muhammad Ali, as Saint Sebastian, on the April 1968 cover photographed by Carl Fischer, a comment on his refusal to serve in Vietnam and the subsequent loss of his heavyweight crown.

After witnessing the carnage of the Tet offensive, in January 1968, a gifted young writer named Michael Herr wrote Hayes from the city of Hue on February 5 to plead that Esquire scrap two stories he'd written on the war—including one on the Vietnam Establishment—and let him crash a new one. "Before the Tet offensive, the war had a kind of easy sameness to it, and writing against [Esquire's] lead time was no problem," Herr explained to his editor. "Now, all the terms have changed, all the old assumptions about the war, about our chances for even the most ignoble kind of 'victory' in it, have been turned around." The year had just begun and the U.S. seemed caught in a frightening tailspin—but not Esquire. For spring, Lois had come up with two classic covers. April depicted Muhammad Ali, photographed by Carl Fischer, as the arrow-pierced Saint Sebastian, martyred for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. For May, Lois had taken a stock picture of Nixon asleep on Air Force One during his vice-presidential years and merged it with a custom photo of a cluster of hands wielding makeup tools, including a tube of lipstick. "Nixon's Last Chance. (This time he'd better look right!)" read the cover line, a nod to his sweaty performance during the 1960 debates with Kennedy.

But reality quickly became more shocking and unpredictable than any story or cover image that Esquire's brain trust could produce. On March 31, faced with the escalating disaster of Vietnam and the prospect of a drawn-out and divisive battle for the Democratic nomination, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election. On April 4, while the Ali cover was still on the stands, Martin Luther King Jr. was truly martyred in Memphis. And in the early morning of June 5, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was shot and mortally wounded at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

The magazine's 35th Anniversary Issue, October 1968.

America was coming unmoored, and Esquire's lead time made it look slow, even callous. "What can you do when the coverage of one assassination comes out after the next one?" Hayes asked the writer Garry Wills. Though a number of staffers and writers who worked with Hayes in 1968 don't recall seeing him unnerved by these events, Hayes began to invoke a traditional Chinese proverb—a curse, actually: May you live in the most interesting of times. "He would say that all the time, and shake his head, [as if asking] 'What is going on?'?" Hedley remembers.

In the ensuing months, Esquire muted some of its wilder satirical impulses. "The best we could provide was a bleak grin," Hayes wrote in the introduction to the magazine's aptly named anthology of 60s articles, Smiling Through the Apocalypse (which was prefaced by the Chinese curse). For the October 1968 issue—Esquire's 35th anniversary—the magazine displayed a cover depicting John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. standing together at Arlington National Cemetery. The casualties of a decade condensed into one solemn image, without tears, but also without Esquire's trademark irreverence.

"Nixon's last chance. (This time he'd better look right!)," May 1968.

At the end of 1968, Hayes had sent a memo to the staff in which he'd written, "I'm scared." Newsstand sales were down 20,000 from 1967, the magazine was hiring too many "hacks," and the competition was not. Willie Morris's Harper's—which had scored big that year with Norman Mailer's "On the Steps of the Pentagon"—was surging. So was New York, which Felker had spun off into a stand-alone magazine in April 1968 shortly after the Herald Tribune folded. With Wolfe on board, as well as Gloria Steinem and a provocative new writer named Gail Sheehy, New York was poised to become one of the great magazines of the 70s, and the blueprint for every other city magazine that would follow it. (It would also take on a number of former Esquire employees, including managing editor Byron Dobell, assistant art director Walter Bernard, and editor-writer Aaron Latham.) And though Hayes didn't mention it in his memo, there was also an upstart out of San Francisco called Rolling Stone that was using New Journalism techniques to explain the burgeoning rock 'n' roll culture.

But Hayes rallied the troops once more, and by 1969, Esquire was showing signs of its old self. Michael Herr's fever-dream dispatches from Vietnam were the best writing on the subject. A Hayes discovery named Jean-Paul Goude had arrived from Paris with his Bentley and was shaking up the magazine's look as its new art director. An unorthodox new fiction editor, Gordon Lish, who signed his office memos "Captain Fiction," was doing the same with Esquire's literary pages. And a sardonic writer named Nora Ephron debuted in the February 1970 issue with a profile of Helen Gurley Brown. At one point, Hayes would even assign his new associate editor, Lee Eisenberg, the impossible task of wooing New York's hot women writers—such as Sheehy (whom Felker would marry in 1984)—over to Esquire.

Esquire's resurgence could not last, of course. The economy was slumping, and Hayes would soon lose a distracting battle against the business side's move to shrink the publication to the smaller size that had become standard for magazines. August 1971 was the last oversize issue and featured a solemn, elegant sepia-toned photo of Mafia kingpin Joe Bonanno, dressed to the nines. The cover story was an excerpt from Gay Talese's new book, Honor Thy Father. Talese had become a best-selling book writer, as had Tom Wolfe. And though they still kept in touch, both had moved on, as had John Berendt, Tom Hedley, and Hayes's friend Robert Sherrill. Berendt would edit New York magazine and become a best-selling author, too, with the publication of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, in 1994. (His most recent book, City of Falling Angels, is dedicated to Hayes and Felker.) Tom Hedley would conceive the story and co-write the script for Flashdance. Benton and Newman had embarked on a successful career in Hollywood, which would include the original Superman movies, and so had Bogdanovich, who in 1971 would release his masterpiece, The Last Picture Show. All three would collaborate on the 1972 film What's Up, Doc? In 1973, Hayes moved on, too, forced out of Esquire after management sought to bump him upstairs with the title of publisher and he insisted on retaining editorial control. George Lois broke with the magazine soon afterward.

Some of the materials found in the Wake Forest archives suggest that the 70s must have been humbling for Hayes as he attempted to get back into the red-hot center of the magazine world. Though in later writings Hayes professed a begrudging admiration for Clay Felker, he didn't shy away from his former rival's old turf. There is a typed, undated one-paragraph memorandum addressed to "Rupert," presumably Rupert Murdoch, whose 1976 purchase of New York magazine and The Village Voice led to Felker's unplanned departure as the editor of the former. In the memo Hayes writes: "I don't know how you feel about New York at the moment, but it looks weak to me." Give him two years and a free hand, he adds, and "I could make it into a very strong magazine for you." It's unclear if Hayes even sent his letter; at any rate, he never got the opportunity to prove his assertion. (In 1978, Felker returned to his old stomping grounds to edit the short-lived Esquire Fort Nightly, which was published every two weeks instead of monthly.) A foray into television met with mixed results: Hayes was well received as host of an interview show that ran on New York's local PBS station in the 70s, but his and art critic Robert Hughes's debut as the original co-hosts of ABC's 20/20 newsmagazine, on June 6, 1978, would go down as one of the great disasters of network television. The New York Times's TV critic branded the show "dizzyingly absurd," ABC News chief Roone Arledge went on record saying he "hated the program," and Hayes and Hughes were replaced the following week by Hugh Downs. In the 80s, Hayes would move to Los Angeles to take a stab at editing another of Clay Felker's creations: California magazine, which Felker had founded as New West.

But Hayes's second act would not come from editing, it would come from writing about a subject as impenetrable as he was: Africa. Hayes had ventured to the continent in late 1969 at the urging of longtime Esquire photographer Pete Turner and "fell in love with it," says his second wife, Judy Kessler. "He had to know everything about it." Beginning in 1977, he wrote three books on the subject. The last, which was finished and published after his death from a brain tumor in 1989, dealt with Dian Fossey, the subject of Gorillas in the Mist, a movie adapted from a Life-magazine article Hayes wrote about her murder. Africa would also become his final resting place. Late in the summer of 1989, Tom Hayes took his father's cremated remains up in a helicopter and released them over the Masai Mara game park, on the border of Tanzania and Kenya.

Hayes always had "a keen eye for the mood changes," as Arnold Gingrich once wrote, so maybe he foresaw some of the curves ahead. But back in the summer of 1970 he was still very focused on his one true ambition: editing his magazine. And the November 1970 issue was going to be a Molotov cocktail. Hayes had brokered a deal for exclusive rights to the story of Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr., the soldier facing trial for the My Lai massacre, in which he stood accused of murdering more than 100 villagers, some of them children. Hayes had paid Calley a lot more than the $150 he'd given to Cassius Clay—$20,000 for his participation with three exclusive articles written by M Company's John Sack; the first would run as the cover story. The cover, by the way, was a masterpiece. It made the Sonny Liston cover look like a Disney cartoon. The image showed Calley in uniform, surrounded by Vietnamese children. He was the nation's Frankenstein monster. And in the photo, he was smiling.

For Harold Hayes, Christmas had come early.

Frank DiGiacomo is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

From the John Springer Collection/Corbis.

Be your gender what it may, you will certainly have heard the following from a female friend who is enumerating the charms of a new (male) squeeze: "He's really quite cute, and he's kind to my friends, and he knows all kinds of stuff, and he's so funny … " (If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, "Funny? He wouldn't know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce béarnaise.") However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: "She's a real honey, has a life of her own … [interlude for attributes that are none of your business] … and, man, does she ever make 'em laugh."

Now, why is this? Why is it the case?, I mean. Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

All right—try it the other way (as the bishop said to the barmaid). Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. If you can stimulate her to laughter—I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight—well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further.

Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift. Indeed, we now have all the joy of a scientific study, which illuminates the difference. At the Stanford University School of Medicine (a place, as it happens, where I once underwent an absolutely hilarious procedure with a sigmoidoscope), the grim-faced researchers showed 10 men and 10 women a sample of 70 black-and-white cartoons and got them to rate the gags on a "funniness scale." To annex for a moment the fall-about language of the report as it was summarized in Biotech Week:

The researchers found that men and women share much of the same humor-response system; both use to a similar degree the part of the brain responsible for semantic knowledge and juxtaposition and the part involved in language processing. But they also found that some brain regions were activated more in women. These included the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a greater emphasis on language and executive processing in women, and the nucleus accumbens … which is part of the mesolimbic reward center.

This has all the charm and address of the learned Professor Scully's attempt to define a smile, as cited by Richard Usborne in his treatise on P. G. Wodehouse: "the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, which partially uncover the teeth; the curving of the naso-labial furrows … " But have no fear—it gets worse:

"Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon," said the report's author, Dr. Allan Reiss. "So when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it." The report also found that "women were quicker at identifying material they considered unfunny."

Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny—for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine? And remember, this is women when confronted with humor. Is it any wonder that they are backward in generating it?

This is not to say that women are humorless, or cannot make great wits and comedians. And if they did not operate on the humor wavelength, there would be scant point in half killing oneself in the attempt to make them writhe and scream (uproariously). Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence. Men will laugh at almost anything, often precisely because it is—or they are—extremely stupid. Women aren't like that. And the wits and comics among them are formidable beyond compare: Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, Fran Lebowitz, Ellen DeGeneres. (Though ask yourself, was Dorothy Parker ever really funny?) Greatly daring—or so I thought—I resolved to call up Ms. Lebowitz and Ms. Ephron to try out my theories. Fran responded: "The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what's more male than that?" Ms. Ephron did not disagree. She did, however, in what I thought was a slightly feline way, accuse me of plagiarizing a rant by Jerry Lewis that said much the same thing. (I have only once seen Lewis in action, in The King of Comedy, where it was really Sandra Bernhard who was funny.)

In any case, my argument doesn't say that there are no decent women comedians. There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three. When Roseanne stands up and tells biker jokes and invites people who don't dig her shtick to suck her dick—know what I am saying? And the Sapphic faction may have its own reasons for wanting what I want—the sweet surrender of female laughter. While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition.

Substitute the term "self-defecation" (which I actually heard being used inadvertently once) and almost all men will laugh right away, if only to pass the time. Probe a little deeper, though, and you will see what Nietzsche meant when he described a witticism as an epitaph on the death of a feeling. Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone's expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with—and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough. (Perhaps not by coincidence, battered as they are by motherfucking nature, men tend to refer to life itself as a bitch.) Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is. Jokes about calamitous visits to the doctor or the shrink or the bathroom, or the venting of sexual frustration on furry domestic animals, are a male province. It must have been a man who originated the phrase "funny like a heart attack." In all the millions of cartoons that feature a patient listening glum-faced to a physician ("There's no cure. There isn't even a race for a cure"), do you remember even one where the patient is a woman? I thought as much.

Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals. And there is a huge, brimming reservoir of male unease, which it would be too easy for women to exploit. (Men can tell jokes about what happened to John Wayne Bobbitt, but they don't want women doing so.) Men have prostate glands, hysterically enough, and these have a tendency to give out, along with their hearts and, it has to be said, their dicks. This is funny only in male company. For some reason, women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be so riotously amusing, which is why we admire Lucille Ball and Helen Fielding, who do see the funny side of it. But this is so rare as to be like Dr. Johnson's comparison of a woman preaching to a dog walking on its hind legs: the surprise is that it is done at all.

The plain fact is that the physical structure of the human being is a joke in itself: a flat, crude, unanswerable disproof of any nonsense about "intelligent design." The reproductive and eliminating functions (the closeness of which is the origin of all obscenity) were obviously wired together in hell by some subcommittee that was giggling cruelly as it went about its work. ("Think they'd wear this? Well, they're gonna have to.") The resulting confusion is the source of perhaps 50 percent of all humor. Filth. That's what the customers want, as we occasional stand-up performers all know. Filth, and plenty of it. Filth in lavish, heaping quantities. And there's another principle that helps exclude the fair sex. "Men obviously like gross stuff," says Fran Lebowitz. "Why? Because it's childish." Keep your eye on that last word. Women's appetite for talk about that fine product known as Depend is limited. So is their relish for gags about premature ejaculation. ("Premature for whom?" as a friend of mine indignantly demands to know.) But "child" is the key word. For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle. This womanly seriousness was well caught by Rudyard Kipling in his poem "The Female of the Species." After cleverly noticing that with the male "mirth obscene diverts his anger"—which is true of most work on that great masculine equivalent to childbirth, which is warfare—Kipling insists:

But the Woman that God gave him,
every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue,
armed and engined for the same,
And to serve that single issue,
lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be
deadlier than the male.

The word "issue" there, which we so pathetically misuse, is restored to its proper meaning of childbirth. As Kipling continues:

She who faces Death by torture for
each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must
not swerve for fact or jest.

Men are overawed, not to say terrified, by the ability of women to produce babies. (Asked by a lady intellectual to summarize the differences between the sexes, another bishop responded, "Madam, I cannot conceive.") It gives women an unchallengeable authority. And one of the earliest origins of humor that we know about is its role in the mockery of authority. Irony itself has been called "the glory of slaves." So you could argue that when men get together to be funny and do not expect women to be there, or in on the joke, they are really playing truant and implicitly conceding who is really the boss.

The ancient annual festivities of Saturnalia, where the slaves would play master, were a temporary release from bossdom. A whole tranche of subversive male humor likewise depends on the notion that women are not really the boss, but are mere objects and victims. Kipling saw through this:

So it comes that Man, the coward,
when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council,
dare not leave a place for her.

In other words, for women the question of funniness is essentially a secondary one. They are innately aware of a higher calling that is no laughing matter. Whereas with a man you may freely say of him that he is lousy in the sack, or a bad driver, or an inefficient worker, and still wound him less deeply than you would if you accused him of being deficient in the humor department.

If I am correct about this, which I am, then the explanation for the superior funniness of men is much the same as for the inferior funniness of women. Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates. This is the unspoken compromise. H. L. Mencken described as "the greatest single discovery ever made by man" the realization "that babies have human fathers, and are not put into their mother's bodies by the gods." You may well wonder what people were thinking before that realization hit, but we do know of a society in Melanesia where the connection was not made until quite recently. I suppose that the reasoning went: everybody does that thing the entire time, there being little else to do, but not every woman becomes pregnant. Anyway, after a certain stage women came to the conclusion that men were actually necessary, and the old form of matriarchy came to a close. (Mencken speculates that this is why the first kings ascended the throne clutching their batons or scepters as if holding on for grim death.) People in this precarious position do not enjoy being laughed at, and it would not have taken women long to work out that female humor would be the most upsetting of all.

Childbearing and rearing are the double root of all this, as Kipling guessed. As every father knows, the placenta is made up of brain cells, which migrate southward during pregnancy and take the sense of humor along with them. And when the bundle is finally delivered, the funny side is not always immediately back in view. Is there anything so utterly lacking in humor as a mother discussing her new child? She is unboreable on the subject. Even the mothers of other fledglings have to drive their fingernails into their palms and wiggle their toes, just to prevent themselves from fainting dead away at the sheer tedium of it. And as the little ones burgeon and thrive, do you find that their mothers enjoy jests at their expense? I thought not.

Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can't afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren't that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor. One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman's universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like. Oscar Wilde was the only person ever to make a decent joke about the death of an infant, and that infant was fictional, and Wilde was (although twice a father) a queer. And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because they are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks. Good grief! Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she's just had? ("And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful." Peaceful?)

For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical. But without tragedy there could be no comedy. My beloved said to me, when I told her I was going to have to address this melancholy topic, that I should cheer up because "women get funnier as they get older."

Observation suggests to me that this might indeed be true, but, excuse me, isn't that rather a long time to have to wait?

Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

In his obituaries, last August, it appeared that Mark Birley, the London club owner who died at the age of 77, might go down in history as the man who first wrapped muslin around lemon halves to prevent them from squirting randomly or spilling seeds on his patrons' perfectly prepared turbot. That horrified his aristocratic friends, for to them Mark had always been so much more—a towering, sardonic, pampered monument to English style, who managed to exemplify the cultivated manners of the playing fields of Eton while introducing edible food in beautiful surroundings and replacing stuffiness with sexiness in Mayfair nightlife. In 1963, when he opened Annabel's, the first of his string of exclusive, members-only clubs and restaurants—which would eventually include Mark's Club, Harry's Bar, the Bath & Racquets, and George—Swinging London had not yet exploded onto the scene, and when it did, it was largely a working-class phenomenon. Birley made the Beatles the first and only exceptions to the strict dress code at Annabel's, where men were required to wear jacket and tie. If Frank Sinatra or Ari Onassis happened to be in the house, Birley would make sure he was well taken care of, but would never drop by his table to chat. "That would be the headwaiter's job," David Metcalfe, the Duke of Windsor's godson and a founding member of the club, informed me.

Annabel's had no cabaret, but occasionally performers such as Ray Charles and the Supremes would play one-night stands. When a promoter for Ike and Tina Turner demanded a table for a sold-out performance of theirs at Annabel's, he was denied. After he stormed out and threatened to cancel the performance, a compromise was reached whereby he would be greeted profusely upon entering and taken to a seat at the bar. In the process, however, he overheard Birley say, "I don't care if he comes down the fucking chimney," and so Ike and Tina Turner did not appear that night.

Birley became a familiar sight around Berkeley Square, seated in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes, puffing a Cohiba, with Blitz, his Rhodesian Ridgeback, seated up front. For many in London's disappearing tribe of old-boy toffs, he represented the quintessential English gentleman, exquisitely turned out, providing impeccable quality and service through a deeply loyal and perfectly trained staff. His eagle eye missed nothing, be it the careless fold of a napkin or the slightly crooked angle at which a painting was hung. He was the upper-class social set's final arbiter of taste, and cost was never a concern. At Mark's Club, for example, each silver pepper mill was valued at $800; each mustard pot, $1,000; each blue-striped Murano glass, $100. At Harry's Bar, the flowers cost $120,000 a year. Birley wandered the world—especially Italy—seeking the best new cocktails and recipes, meeting with world-class chefs, and poaching exceptional waiters. Over the years and all during his marriage, he seduced numerous women, but his real loves were his clubs and his dogs. People could never tell what he was thinking as they bowed, scraped, and competed for his favor, because his stiff upper lip never so much as quivered, even when he endured unimaginable family tragedies.

In 1970, on a visit to the private zoo of John Aspinall, owner of the Clermont Club, the casino above Annabel's, Birley's 12-year-old son, Robin, entered a pregnant tigress's enclosure with his mother and brother and Aspinall and his family. The animal grabbed Robin's head in her mouth, and the boy's face was left permanently disfigured. In 1986, Birley's handsome firstborn, Rupert, 30, ventured out into dangerous waters off the coast of Togo, in West Africa, and was never seen again. Though Rupert was his father's favorite, any discussion of his demise was strictly forbidden. Similarly, Mark never uttered a word about his wellborn wife, Lady Annabel Vane Tempest-Stewart, for whom his tony club was named, having two children with James "Jimmy" Goldsmith, the late billionaire, before she and Mark were divorced. (She later married Goldsmith and had a third child with him, and he would have two more children with another mistress during their marriage.)

Mark and Annabel remained friends and soulmates until his death, united in their love of dogs as much as in the parenting of Rupert, Robin, and their daughter, India Jane (so named because Mark loved the word India). "He never commented on anything except dogs or something funny—a painting, food, or wine," India Jane, who is a painter of portraits and dogs, told me of her "formidable" father. "He never showed his deck of cards." She added, "We all had our work cut out for us with Pup. He could scowl and smile at the same time. For a child it's a very, very odd feeling. With an adult it's bliss, because you can figure out the subtlety, but with a child it's terrifying."

"Mark really wanted his children to be born at age 21. He liked the children when they were grown," Lady Annabel explained to me at Ormeley Lodge, her house in southwest London. In fact, she said, he didn't really want children at all. "Rupert was a mistake—I became pregnant totally by mistake," she said, adding, "Mark was O.K. with one, but he never really wanted another." In her 2004 book, Annabel: An Unconventional Life, Lady Annabel writes of how Mark tapped her on the shoulder in the hospital shortly after Robin was born and exclaimed, "Darling, you must wake up. There must have been a mistake. I think you've been given the wrong baby—this one is simply hideous." Lady Annabel told me, "I can't blame him for not being a brilliant father, because he never really asked to have any of them."

Given the eccentric family dynamics, it is perhaps less than surprising that a huge fight is now simmering between India Jane, 47, and Robin, 50, over their father's will, in which he left more than $240 million before taxes. Robin is challenging the will, which gives the bulk of the estate to India Jane's two-and-a-half-year-old son, Eben, whom she had by a lover, a Canadian named Robert Macdonald, a voice coach and teacher of breathing techniques who was studying to become a psychiatrist. She was married at the time to her second husband, Francis Pike, a banker turned writer and real-estate developer, who currently lives in Berlin. India Jane is now divorced from Pike and no longer with Macdonald. In the will, Robin was left two tax-free bequests, for £1 million ($2,039,400) and £5 million ($10,197,000). Robin's four-year-old illegitimate daughter, Maud, who lives in charity housing with her mother and who never met her paternal grandfather, was left nothing.

Mark Birley apparently anticipated that his will might be challenged. Vanity Fair has learned that he wrote a letter to India Jane, to be disclosed with the will, in which he explained why he had done the unthinkable. Last June, shortly before he died, Birley—without notice and against the wishes of his family, close friends, and staff—abruptly sold his clubs for $207 million, a far higher price than anyone could have predicted. Even though his esteemed friend and adviser Sir Evelyn de Rothschild was willing to see if the offer could be matched, Birley went ahead and sold to one of those outsiders who are becoming so prominent in the acquisition of London's high-end properties, the self-made millionaire Richard Caring, son of an American G.I. and a British nurse, whose fortune came from the garment trade in Hong Kong, and who has bought a number of the most fashionable restaurants in London, including the Ivy, Le Caprice, J. Sheekey, and Daphne's.

Mark said in the letter that he had sold the clubs to protect them from Robin. "If Robin would have control of the clubs, the clubs ultimately would not be worth anything, and Robin certainly would not be looking out for his sister," Miranda Brooks, a close friend of India Jane's, explained to me.

There had been a previous will, by which Robin and India Jane would each have received 50 percent of the estate. However, in that will, Mark also left his valuable London house and property to India Jane. Peter Munster, one of Mark and his family's closest friends and the executor of that will, says, "Robin was less than satisfied with anything other than a completely equal distribution." Regarding the current situation, Munster adds, "Mark had reservations about Robin's judgment in relation to his future expansion plans for the clubs and the risk that might have entailed. But he never would have brought Robin in if he hadn't trusted him. The message is: There was no hate in the family. There was no vendetta."

The Dodgy Detectives

Mark lost faith in his son after Robin used more than $400,000 from Annabel's accounts to pay former London policemen claiming to be private detectives to supply him with what turned out to be totally false information about Robert Macdonald, in an investigation that Robin had instigated. In 2003, following a series of health setbacks—a knee operation, two serious falls, and a broken hip—that made it impossible for him to walk, Mark had brought Robin and India Jane into the business for the first time. "My sister and I got on very well and worked well together," Robin told me in an exchange of e-mails. "Basically, I ran the company, and she attended to the look of the clubs." By all accounts Robin did an excellent job of bringing in a younger, more with-it crowd to Annabel's, which in the 90s was being described as a place where "the middle-aged meet the Middle East." Robin had previously been running Birley Sandwiches, a chain he founded, which had shops in London and San Francisco. According to friends of Robin's, Mark forced him to sell the two in San Francisco in order to concentrate on Annabel's. (There are currently eight in London.) Then, in 2004, quite unexpectedly, India Jane, who was 43 and childless, became pregnant by Macdonald. Shortly after the birth of her son, who was a potential heir, Robin, suspicious of Macdonald and the situation, secretly gave the go-ahead to the former cops to find out whether India Jane's boyfriend was out for her money. (At that time, India Jane did not have much income and Macdonald lived modestly.)

"He was from a completely different social set … and I also think Robin did not want him in the business," one of Robin's friends said of Macdonald, adding that he was "a Canadian." The alleged detectives provided Robin with tapes of women tearfully claiming to be wronged ex-lovers of Macdonald's and saying he had fleeced them. Actually, the women were out-of-work drama students. The hired investigators also called on India Jane in the summer of 2006, frightening her when they insinuated that they had a lot of information about her. "It was highly improbable, unreal, and very, very unpleasant," she told me. "It was very sinister. These people were thugs." India Jane hired her own detective, who managed to track down one of the people involved. "He said it was Robin," she told me. She subsequently listened to the tapes, which were "crackly and fuzzy," she said. "I can't imagine anyone being taken in by that crap." She added, "It was very cruel. The intent was to ruin Robert Macdonald. I would then seem to be influenced by a famous financial fraudster."

Meanwhile, that summer, David Wynne-Morgan, Mark's longtime P.R. man and friend, who had started working with Robin at Mark's behest, delivered a dossier of the material on the tapes to Keith Dovkants, a reporter at the London Evening Standard. The idea was to break the sensational story in the papers before Mark or India Jane knew about it. Wynne-Morgan said that, although he felt certain that Robin was sincere in his belief that his sister was being taken, he suggested that he tell his sister what he had learned from the investigators, but Robin demurred, thinking she would not believe him. India Jane says her brother told her the same thing later, when she confronted him. "But you were so infatuated," she says Robin explained. "I believed I was acting in the best interest of my sister," Robin informed me. "My father was too ill at the time to have any additional worries."

In the course of fleshing out his story, Dovkants spoke to India Jane, and to Robert Macdonald—in the presence of lawyers Macdonald had to hire—and he was introduced by one of Robin's investigators to two of the women on the tapes. After concluding that they were frauds, Dovkants notified Robin, who, according to the story that ran in the Evening Standard on October 13, 2006, met with the man who had supplied him with the tapes and also concluded that he had been duped. The story quoted Robin apologizing, saying he was in "absolute despair," because he had believed he was, as he later told me, "acting in the best interests of my sister. She refuses to accept that, but it's true." I asked Dovkants if he felt he had been set up. "I am not going to tell you what I think the motive was [for giving the story to him]. It appeared to be an honorable motive at the time," he said.

Macdonald received a cash settlement from Robin and had all his legal costs paid; he also got an official apology. So did India Jane. Characteristically, she never discussed the matter with her father. "I'm having a bit of a problem with Robin" was all she told him, she says. "Sort it out" was all he replied. It's worth noting that nobody involved has sought to recover the $400,000 Robin paid the hired investigators. "Nobody wants to draw it all out," India Jane said.

By then, Robin had also used hundreds of thousands of pounds more from the business for his own expenses, without telling his father or India Jane, who was all this time his partner in running the clubs. According to India Jane, she learned about the missing funds only when Kam Bathia, the finance director of Annabel's, came forward to say he was planning to resign because he could no longer continue to dole out cash to Robin. Robin, however, is arguing that he had every right to take the money for his expenses because of a deal he had struck with his father—a deal, Robin says, his father later forgot he had made. Robin, according to the agreement, would halve his salary of more than $200,000 in exchange for 10 percent of the profits from Annabel's. In fact, those profits had doubled since he started managing the business. The deal, an associate of Robin's says, was contained in a letter that Bathia sent to Robin's accountant. "I know nothing of such a letter, and Kam never mentioned it to me," says India Jane. A person close to Robin summarized his position: "Robin's not looking for charity. He's not like a dog being given a bone from the table. He feels he's created something and should be compensated. The will was changed on a false premise. He didn't steal the money his father thought he did." Bathia is not commenting.

In September 2006, after Mark learned about the money Robin had used, he threw him out of the business, and India Jane took over completely. The staff was told Robin was taking a sabbatical. On October 26, two weeks after the Evening Standard story hit, Robin married Lucy Ferry, who had formerly been the wife of Bryan Ferry, the lead singer of Roxy Music, with whom she had four sons. Mark was invited to the wedding but did not attend. India Jane, however, did. It was yet another rocky misstep for Robin in a father-son relationship long fraught with tension. "Robin desperately wanted his approval, and Pup's approval was very spare," India Jane told me. She added, "He was highly motivated, Robin, and his motives were dubious."

Growing Up Birley

Adding to this dysfunctional stew is the perception among India Jane's friends and Robin's that their mother always favored her sons. "Annabel is unabashedly on Robin's side," someone close to Robin told me. "India Jane was always a Cinderella figure in the background," explained Lynn Guinness, a longtime, dear friend of Mark's; the young woman apparently did not marry well enough or behave to suit her family. India Jane refers to herself as "an old hippie." Lady Annabel told me the relationship between her children is "not a subject I can discuss. As a mother, I want to keep myself out of it." India Jane calls Lady Annabel and Mark "quite eccentric parents," whom she claims to have "adored," and Lady Annabel in turn describes India Jane in her memoirs as "wonderfully eccentric."

"I was always being shunted around," India Jane says of her childhood. At one point she had to give up her small bedroom so that her father would have more room for his boots and shoes. She later became a model for the painter Lucian Freud and began collecting antique erotica. Her first husband, Jonty Colchester, was an interior decorator whom she had met when she was an art student. Despite her pedigree, India Jane did not make much money as an artist, and her marriage to Francis Pike, during which she went off to India for a period, was, one of her friends told me, her attempt to discover "the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie."

Robin was an ongoing source of sadness and guilt to Lady Annabel after she allowed him to enter the tigress's enclosure at Aspinall's. She tended him through the "years and years of surgeries" that could begin only when his face was fully formed, at 16. Despite his disfigurement, Robin never had any trouble getting girls, but he always bore the scars of his father's neglect. "He got more overt attention from Jimmy [Goldsmith] than from Mark," says a friend of Robin's who is close to the family. "He felt that a betrayal." According to Lady Annabel, "Robin and Jimmy did have a very close relationship. I don't know whether that affected Mark. Mark never said anything."

Robin, whom friends describe as impulsive and quick to anger, took up his stepfather's cause when Goldsmith formed the Referendum Party, an anti–European Union offshoot of the Conservative Party. In the early 1990s, Robin supported Renamo, a far-right-wing political group in Mozambique. Robin also became convinced that Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, was being wrongly hounded by Spanish prosecutors seeking to try him for human-rights abuses, and in 1998 Robin helped arrange for him to stay in a fancy estate outside London. In the 1970s, Goldsmith had gotten Robin a position in the U.S., with his Grand Union supermarket chain, and some years later Robin started his sandwich business there and in England. When David Wynne-Morgan delivered a letter of apology from Robin to Mark after the debacle of the tapes and suggested that Mark should forgive Robin, Mark in turn showed Wynne-Morgan a letter from 20 years earlier in which Robin had written, "I wish with all my heart that Jimmy Goldsmith had been my father."

Today, Lady Annabel is 73. When she and Mark married, she was 19, the daughter of the Eighth Marquess of Londonderry. Her father, who did not much care for Mark, was on his way to drinking himself to death, after his adored and exceptionally beautiful wife, Romaine, died of cancer at 47. In her fascinating memoirs Lady Annabel recalls Mark's first Christmas at Wynyard Park, her family's vast estate. "Mark remained quite calm one evening when Daddy persuaded the local vet's daughter to remove her clothes and dance naked on the dining-room table while he drank champagne from one of her shoes, held impassively by Robert the butler."

Mark had grown up "unloved," Lady Annabel told me. "I think he had a miserable childhood. Because of his childhood, he was a fairly closed-up person. There was a reserve that people couldn't quite penetrate." Mark's New Zealander father, Sir Oswald Birley, was a painter of portraits of the British nobility. He was 50 when Mark was born, and unhappy with his striking and dramatic wife, Rhoda, whom Lady Annabel describes in her memoirs as a "bohemian hostess" with a large circle of artistic friends. Rhoda reputedly maintained an affair with a Scottish lord. Mark's sister, Maxime, was a renowned beauty who later married Count Alain de la Falaise and became an international society figure and fashion leader. "Mark never stopped loving me," Lady Annabel said. "He took on a paternal role and signed his letters Dad. I think he was absolutely incapable of being faithful. He was a serial adulterer. Like a butterfly, he had to seduce every woman." Throughout, she added, he was always discreet. "He hid it very well, because he loved me, and he was heartbroken when I left."

Mark graduated from Eton—where he showed that he had inherited his father's ability to draw—in 1948, after which he lasted only a year at Oxford. "He was a sophisticated child," his old Etonian housemate Michael Haslam remembers. "He told me once his ambition in life was to have a nightclub—I guess because it was very glamorous. He had this passion for glamour and good things in life." He also had a penchant for getting people to do his bidding and make themselves look silly. "He would make me these horrid bets, like walking around the square in my dressing gown," Haslam recalls. "I got quite a lot of the way before I got caught."

During his National Service, from 1948 to 1950, Mark ended up with British troops in Vienna. According to his fellow serviceman Elwyn Edwards, "He was very amusing. He told me he had wanted to be in the Intelligence Corps, as his father had been in World War I, but the next thing he knew he was sent to camp Catterick, in Yorkshire, shoveling coal. His father was painting Monty [Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery] at the time and happened to mention it, so Mark was removed from Catterick and sent to us. He never made the Intelligence Corps." Edwards says that Mark supported himself while in the service by selling "gentlemen's white handkerchiefs," which he bought at the military PX and then exchanged for dollars on the black market. "Even then he had the makings of a good businessman."

A dining area in Annabel's.

By the time Mark was 30, he was married with two young children, managing the first Hermès store in London. In 1961 he was approached by John Aspinall, who was planning to open the Clermont Club in an attractive Palladian house designed by William Kent at 44 Berkeley Square (later made notorious as the locale frequented by Lord Lucan before 1974, when he killed his children's nanny—having mistaken her for his wife—and then allegedly escaped the country with the help of his very rich friends from the club). Aspinall asked Mark if he wanted to start a nightclub in the basement. "He had to go cap in hand to raise money for Annabel's, but I was always certain of success because of the way he did up houses," Lady Annabel said. The founding members were charged five guineas ($14) annually to belong, and many of them continue to pay that fee today. Annabel's now has 9,000 members, each of whom pays up to $1,500 in annual dues. Thus, Mark was able to attract those who would not only pay annual dues—even though they might not eat there more than a couple of times a year—but also pay top prices for the drinks and dinner served. In his eulogy at Mark's funeral, Peter Blond, a fellow old Etonian, remembered running into Mark on the street before the opening and being taken to the unfinished basement: "In the gloom of the cellar, lit only by a string of naked lightbulbs looped around a vaulted ceiling, he outlined his plans for what was to become the most famous nightclub in the world."

From its overcrowded opening night, Annabel's transformed London social life. Some of the old snobbish clubs, such as the 400, in Leicester Square, which required dinner clothes, were already on their way out, and Mark's more raffish set didn't have many places left to go to, apart from the Milroy, on Park Lane, a private establishment with a nightclub upstairs called Les Ambassadeurs, and Siegi's, on nearby Charles Street, which had a back room for gambling. Soon Mark was presiding over his own private zoo of social lions. "Annabel's quickly became the place to go," David Metcalfe said. Men could gamble half their fortune away upstairs and pop down for a drink or a dance. European royalty and dowagers would rub elbows with, in Wynne-Morgan's phrase, "the right sort of young."

The Taste-Maker

Mark Birley was there every night, watching the good and the great mingle, couple, and uncouple. Part of his genius at Annabel's was to create a dramatic ambience that felt both elegant and cozy, a series of marvelously scented small sitting rooms with comfortable sofas and big pillows, a bar on the side and the dance floor at the back, with an eclectic mix of witty cartoons and dog paintings on the walls. Nina Campbell, the young decorator he took on, who stayed with him through every establishment, told me, "As a woman, you could go to Annabel's and they would look after you. The staff would make you a special drink. It was like a great big wonderful family—you felt embraced as you arrived."

Annabel's was certainly a great big wonderful family for one special crowd, and Birley accrued major glamour and social power. He never allowed the press inside unescorted, so nothing got leaked and celebrities were left alone. "In the beginning, everyone vaguely knew each other, which was not the case thereafter," says Mark's old friend Min Hogg, the founding editor of The World of Interiors. "It was a terribly good place for 'the gang' to meet each other." She adds, "You were attended to like mad, in surroundings that could be someone's house."

Throughout his four decades in business, Birley watched every penny but spared no expense. He spent a year making trips to Brazil in order to create three weeks of Carnival at Annabel's, complete with samba musicians and topless showgirls. Valentino staged fashion shows at the club, and there was a New Orleans fortnight with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and food from Antoine's, as well as a Russian fortnight, when Viscount Hambleden came every night and danced on the tables in Cossack boots, while Gypsies warbled "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'?" in Russian.

On the gala opening night, Annabel met Jimmy Goldsmith, who was already a widower with a child and a remarried husband with a girlfriend. By 1965 their romance had taken flight. "Jimmy was such a larger-than-life figure he just swept me off my feet," Lady Annabel said. "I didn't mean it to go as far as it did." In the British upper-class tradition, the Birley boys were packed off to boarding school when they were eight, but India Jane was allowed to stay home until her teens. As a result, she saw more of her father than her brothers did, and he was always interested in her talent. When India Jane entered a series of art schools, he continued to be very supportive. Growing up, India Jane said, she was not particularly aware of her family's unconventional arrangement and structure. "When little children go to bed, they don't know what their parents are doing." Pup, she recalled, was around "for tea. He was a familiar figure when I was little."

Robin was a different story. "I think what Robin needed was someone to put his arm around him and tell him he would be all right," a friend of Mark's said. "Mark couldn't do that. It was contrary to his whole nature. When Annabel went off with Jimmy, Jimmy was the complete opposite. He was very good at wearing his emotions on his sleeve, and he built Robin's confidence up. Robin and Mark had a sort of love-hate relationship."

An interior at the Bath & Racquets, which Birley opened in 1990.

Mark lavished his attention on his growing business. "You were buying into a world: Mark Birley's life and how it should be lived," says his onetime number two Gavin Rankin. "Mark completely changed the face of civilized dining in London—revolutionized it." With Mark's Club, which opened after Mark bought out Siegi's, in 1973, Rankin says, "he took the concept of an English men's club, turned it on its axis, and made it far nicer than any gentlemen's club." In 1990, when Mark could not find a health club to meet his requirements, he opened the Bath & Racquets, complete with onyx-lined shower rooms. Harry's Bar, which he opened in 1979, is still one of the most elegant and expensive restaurants in London, while George, which opened in 2001, is far more casual and attracts a younger crowd. "People would always pay for the frills," Rankin says, "and if you could be unassailably the best, then the market was yours."

All the clubs and restaurants are located in Mayfair near Berkeley Square. Although Birley traveled to Hong Kong, Brazil, and New York with the stated intention of duplicating Annabel's, he really just wanted "to see what was going on," says Wynne-Morgan. "He never started anything he couldn't walk to." According to Willie Landels, who did graphic design for Mark, "Having lunch was one of his great occupations. He lunched mainly at the clubs, and one ate much better when one dined with him, because all would try to outdo each other trying to please him. He was very spoiled that way."

Staff and Dogs

The indispensable element that permeated all of Birley's establishments was a carefully chosen staff, who tended to stay for years and thus could be counted on not only to greet members by name but also to know their likes and dislikes. "Mr. Birley was ahead of his time," says Alfredo Crivellari, the former manager of Annabel's, who worked there for more than 35 years, until his retirement at the end of 2007. "He headhunted earlier than anyone else. He would go round and find the best." When Birley interviewed Crivellari f or a waiter's job, he asked only two questions. Are you married? Yes. Do you have a mortgage? Yes. "?'You start work on Monday,' he said. He knew I was committed." Although Birley was "slow to bless and quick to chide," Rankin said, he was also keenly aware of the staff's importance. "Everyone was made to feel vital." He once revoked the membership of one of his best customers at Annabel's because the man had been rude to a waiter: "I can always replace you, but not a waiter."

In the manner of a feudal lord, Mark took care of his own—provided doctors, paid for weddings, gave extravagant gifts, wrote gracious notes. When a waiter left to go back to Thailand to begin a restaurant and the business failed, Mark went to Thailand, paid his debts, and brought him back. No one was ever told to retire, but after they stopped working for him, he would pay for a taxi to bring them back for one hour a day so that they would have to get dressed and have a good meal. Bruno Rotti, the manager of Mark's Club, said that when he stopped working full-time Mark had a small bronze bust cast of him and kept it on a table at the club, "?'so there will always be a Bruno,' Mr. Birley told me."

The motto for Birley's staff was "It shall be done." "Quality is only met with precision," said Sir Evelyn de Rothschild. "We couldn't do anything without his notice," said Rotti. "?'That young lady's hair has grown a bit too long—have it cut or put it up. It's a bit untidy.' 'There is a basket left out in gents.' He was a perfectionist." David Metcalfe added, "If he was there, they always knew it—he'd always watch and not hesitate to comment, often in a very caustic way. 'I would have thought by now … ' 'I would have thought the very least you could do … ' 'I'd be rather grateful if … ' That meant he was furious." Mohamed Ghannam, a barman at Annabel's who functioned as Mark's butler, concurred: "Such sarcastic remarks he made—you'd never forget the bollocking and you'd never do it again."

Hostesses trembled in Birley's presence. "People were very nervous to have him stay or eat," Landels said. "He was quite severe. I remember once we stayed somewhere and in the middle of the morning he told the hostess, 'The way the breakfast tray was laid was very bad. The napkin must be very white and very starched. Orange juice should be served in glasses of this shape, not that.'?"

Despite the scowls and judgments, Mark had many friends who were awed by his taste and adored him. "He was always coming to the rescue of people," said Lynn Guinness. "He had a very dry sense of humor, a sense of the ludicrous. He was a marvelous man in so many ways." Metcalfe added, "On a good day, when Mark wished to be, he was charming. But charming and having charm are completely different. He was very selfish and self-involved." Lady Annabel said, "It's quite difficult to live with a perfectionist, but the thing is, life with Mark was fun. Our breakup was because of Mark's infidelities, not because I fell in love with Jimmy."

India Jane calls her father "the funniest man in the world." Although she was clearly his favorite and visited him daily, Mark himself seemed to take his greatest pleasure outside his family. "He was not the sort of person to have a woman make him happy," Mohamed Ghannam explained. "He was very happy with his dogs and working with staff." Ghannam, 58, spent most of his life with Birley. He was 18, one of 11 children, when he was sent from Morocco, through the recommendation of a member of the English Parliament, to train to be a waiter at Annabel's. When his visa was up, after one freezing month, he wanted to go home, but Birley's secretary tore up his return ticket and enrolled him in school. He would come in to work at night. Mark paid his rent for seven years. Early on, Ghannam recalled, "their Christmas was coming, and Mr. Birley wanted me to spend it with them, with Lady Annabel. And from then until now I spend Christmas with the whole family."

Ghannam, married, with three daughters who have all attended college, is perhaps the ultimate family retainer. "Mr. Birley taught me how to dress, how to behave, how to talk to princes, dukes, and princesses," he said. "Once, I made a gin martini for the Queen." He did not take one holiday during the last 15 years of Birley's life, but he would accompany him to Spain, Morocco, or wherever he spent his vacation. Every Sunday he would go to his employer's fashionable house, Thurloe Lodge, across from the Victoria and Albert Museum, just to make a special cocktail for Mr. Birley. Mark was also pampered on a daily basis by his caregiver, Elvira Maria, and her niece. His staff saw him more than his family did. According to Ghannam, "He said his dogs came first and his family second."

Toward the end of his life, when he lived on one floor and was unable to walk, Birley let George, his black Labrador, have the bed with the comfortable mattress, and he slept in a reclining chair next to the bed. His other dog, Tara, was an Alsatian. "I used to talk to George the dog in order to bring Mark back to life again," Sir Evelyn de Rothschild said of visiting Birley in his last months.

Lady Annabel said she was the one who introduced her first husband to dogs. "I come from a doggy family," she told me. "I'm writing a book about Mark and his relationship with dogs. Everybody knows about the clubs and his love life, so that is the angle I've taken. He adored dogs. He told me, 'I go to these dinners, and I sit down and think, God, I wish I was in my lovey, comfy bed with my dogs. There is nothing I like better.'?" Lady Annabel keeps her own dogs in Colefax and Fowler duvets, and she has written an entire book about one former pet, Copper, a mixed breed, who she swears used to ride the bus by himself and visit pubs and hold his paw up to cross the road. India Jane provided the illustrations.

According to The Daily Telegraph, Mark left more than $200,000 in his will to the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals, and during his lifetime he had a beloved mutt named Help that he had rescued from the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home. Help did not care for two Saint Bernard puppies Mark bought, so they were sent to Austria to be there for him when he skied in the winter. "Mark thought Saint Bernards looked good in the mountains," Wynne-Morgan said.

Once, the actress Joan Collins was invited to Mark's house for a small, fancy lunch. After she was seated, she screamed and pushed her chair back. Under the table, Blitz, the huge Rhodesian Ridgeback, had been licking her ankle. "Take that dog out of here!" she cried. Mark gingerly coaxed Blitz out from under the carefully laid table, and the dog lay down in the hallway, his head between his legs, looking miserable. After Mark finished the first course, he excused himself and went out to apologize to his pet. "I'm so sorry, Blitz," he was overheard to say. "That bitch will never set foot in this house again."

End of an Era

No one wanted Mark to sell the clubs. His friends and family all implored him not to. Some, including David Tang, the Hong Kong mogul, also asked him to forgive Robin. Tang reported that Mark said, "Nobody talks to me about Robin—I don't like it." Mohamed Ghannam got away with more than most: "He's your son, Mr. Birley—doesn't it matter? It's only money. My God, you lost Rupert—you're not going to lose Robin just because of a stupid mistake?" Robin was Ghannam's boss at Annabel's, and Ghannam and others were ordered to report daily to Mark on how things were going. Ghannam thought Robin worked very hard and did an excellent job. "Robin has a heart of gold," he told me. "He does whatever you ask." Robin said, "I loved the clubs, and I believe I had a real feeling for what my father created." But it was too late.

The buzzer at Mark's Club.

Ghannam was pushing Mark in his wheelchair in Marrakech last June when the moment came. Mark had gone to Morocco to buy a house on a property developed by his friend Lynn Guinness and his former son-in-law Francis Pike. India Jane and Miranda Brooks were also visiting. The house was nearly ready, but Mark suddenly started demanding last-minute changes. According to Ghannam, they all told him it was not possible to do those things. Ghannam said, "I tried to tell them, 'Stop! Don't tell him what to do.' Because I knew immediately, That's it. That's the end of this house. He only said, 'Mohamed, it's time for lunch.'?"

Then, instead of calling the lawyers from Casablanca, who were ready to close on the property, Mark summoned Richard Caring's lawyers from London, who arrived the next day by private jet. Caring told me he had been trying to buy the clubs for more than a year. "It was a bit of a shock when it really happened." Mark had already grilled Caring thoroughly and had gotten him up to a great price. "If you believe in quality, top-of-the-pile sparkle," Caring said, "you don't do better than this." India Jane was beside herself. She had thrown herself into running the clubs since Robin's departure, and her father had said nothing to her about any sale. "I really did cry and cry, and I am not a crier," she said. When Sir Evelyn de Rothschild suggested countering the offer, Caring reminded Mark that they had a deal. After the sale, Lady Annabel asked Mark to give each of the children $10.3 million, but Mark reportedly just rolled his eyes. When asked what he planned to do with all his money, he replied, "I'm going on a cruise."

Mark had never discussed his will with his children. India Jane and Robin, once easygoing siblings and partners who would play jokes and have food fights, actually saw each other when Robin came around to collect some suits and ties of their father's the day before India Jane heard that her brother was contesting the will. "It came out of the blue," she told me. "I have absolutely no animosity towards Robin," whom she described as a "wild, wild creature." She added, "Sometimes I wish he'd go live in the Congo forever. It's all so unnecessary. At times it makes me want to weep."

The big question now is: How can Robin possibly break the will? It will be very difficult. Mark made sure that a doctor came from London to examine him for his mental competency at the time of the sale, and the doctor said he was compos mentis. (Robin's side argues that it wasn't his regular doctor.) The same procedure had occurred earlier, when Mark made his will, which leaves India Jane his house, last evaluated at $35 million, and allows her to live off the income of the trust until her son is 25. Thus, the trustees, not India Jane, have final say. "People think it is something I am in control of. I'm not," India Jane said.

According to Miranda Brooks, India Jane told Robin that, if he would wait for the period of probate to be over, she would try to help him if she could. Peter Munster says, "The will cannot be changed unless there is evidence. The reason is that a minor is involved, and he is the main beneficiary. If the will were to be changed, the trustees would have to go to court. If it would be changed to the detriment of a child, the court would be loath to change anything."

When Mark was operated on for his knee, Lady Annabel said, "he drank quite a lot and mixed it with painkillers, and he kept having falls." She said he fell two weeks after the operation and fractured his hip. And he would not do physical therapy. "That's when it all began," she said.

During the time Birley was drinking and taking painkillers, he apparently was disoriented, his memory was impaired, and he was not himself. "He was taking a whole cocktail of medications," Lynn Guinness explained. "When they changed that, the confusion stopped." Guinness said that every morning when he was with her, he would get the figures of Annabel's take from the night before. "He got this incredible deal from Caring. How does someone off his head manage to do that?" India Jane asserted, "My father was right on the button" regarding his business. His caregiver, Elvira Maria, a beneficiary in the will, agreed: "Mr. Birley was never confused about business or money." I asked her if what I had been told was true, that shortly before he died he had spoken of a rapprochement with Robin. "He never mentioned that," she replied.

Robin's partisans disagree about Mark's mental state, and they feel that Robin needs to be more fairly compensated for giving up his San Francisco businesses. "[Mark's confusion] was bad for a few months, particularly at the time that Robin's part in the investigation of India Jane's lover came to light," says David Wynne-Morgan. "He had short-term-memory loss until he died." Shaun Plunket, a cousin of Lady Annabel's who is now married to Andrea Reynolds, Claus von Bülow's former companion, phoned Mark frequently from upstate New York. "He was losing it for the last year, and I detected it on the telephone," he told me. "He was not living a happy life at all." Peter Munster disputes that: "If lawyers were to call witnesses, there are several people, such as myself, who would stand up in court and say that Mark knew precisely what he was doing."

Mark was making plans to visit Lynn Guinness again in Morocco the night before he died of a massive stroke, on August 24. India Jane was with him at the end. His death came as "a terrible shock" to Lady Annabel, who said, "I thought he'd go on for years, he was so primped." Of the sale, she said, "I think maybe in his heart he felt that nobody could run it like him."

India Jane arranged the funeral, at St. Paul's church in Knightsbridge, which was attended by Margaret Thatcher, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, the Duchess of York, and staff from as far away as Australia. The most dramatic moment came at the end. "When the coffin was carried from its place before the altar towards the door of the church," said Peter Munster, "it was followed by Mark's driver, Don, leading his two beloved dogs, George and Tara, whilst a piper played a lament."

For now, probate is frozen, so the real value of the estate is not yet determined. "Mark would be horrified at the publicity," Lynn Guinness says, and India Jane, who has a new romantic interest, a rare-clocks dealer, swears that all she wants to do is "play with the baby and feed the kittens. I am very, very boring." Lady Annabel speaks frequently with both Robin and India Jane. "We talk all the time," India Jane told me. "She prattles on about dogs and we don't talk about it." And what if the case ever gets to court? Miranda Brooks says, "Jane's got no illusions about that. If her mother has to appear in court, we know who she'll favor." Does India Jane really think her mother would testify for Robin against her? "I don't know," India Jane says, "and I really do mean it. I can't even imagine. It's a bit of the unthinkable."

Maureen Orth is a Vanity Fair special correspondent and National Magazine Award winner.