The legendary author joins to discuss his book ‘Growing Up Underground,’ an entertaining and humorous coming-of-age story at the center of New York’s youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s.
Debbie Millman:
True or false? Steven Heller came of age in the 1960s and has never done drugs, not even marijuana. Steven Heller stopped drinking alcohol as a young man when he found himself running through Greenwich Village in February with his pants off and decided he couldn’t handle it anymore. Steven Heller worked for the New York Review of Sex and Screw Magazine before becoming an art director at the very serious New York Times where he worked for decades. Steven Heller has written more than 200 books. Last one, true or false? Steven Heller has appeared on Design Matters more often than any other guest. Listeners, true, true, true and true and much of it is recounted in Steve’s new book Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York. Steven Heller, welcome back. It is always an absolute delight to see you back in our little recording booth.
Steven Heller:
I feel very unclaustrophobic in here.
Debbie Millman:
Good, I’m glad. Steve, let’s get right into the book. You start Growing Up Underground stating the following. This book is about, you guessed it, me. However, it is not a trek through the hills and valleys of my autobiographical topology, I focus instead on how blind luck put me in intriguing places with curious people from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. These first three sentences on their own lead me to my first three questions. Ready?
Steven Heller:
I’m ready.
Debbie Millman:
First question, I know you’ve been writing, rewriting, cutting and pasting snippets of your autobiography on and off for almost 20 years. The turning point to actually doing it came after reading designer Paul Sahre’s book, Two-Dimensional Man: A Graphic Memoir. How did that influence you?
Steven Heller:
It just made me competitive. It was unusual for a designer to write what was officially technically a memoir or autobiography. There are lots of monographs and there are lots of me, me, mes in the monographs, but Paul actually covered his life and I reviewed it for Eye Magazine and I said, “I’ve been sitting around with little bits and pieces of this for a long time, so I’d like to do one too before my coil unravels.”
Debbie Millman:
My second question about that intro was why the specific timeframe, that 10-year timeframe from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s?
Steven Heller:
Well, I was a big fan of John Reed who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World. I wanted to do something that was 10 years that shook my world.
Debbie Millman:
Then last question, do you really truly feel as if it were blind luck that put you in these intriguing places with these specific and intriguing people? What about the specific choices that you made to get to those places? I just have such a big issue with the idea of luck.
Steven Heller:
Well, I have an issue with luck and fate, but I think there was some divine intervention and that’s the reason why I never did drugs.
Debbie Millman:
Why is that, Steve?
Steven Heller:
Because in my superstitious semi-religious way, I said to myself, if I ever do a drug, something terrible will land on my head, the old piano falling out of the window.
Debbie Millman:
Roxane Gay, my wife, also feels that way. I think she’s done drugs one time and she’s written an essay about how that one time she smoked marijuana, she was so paranoid she was laying on the bed. She was so paranoid she was going to fall off the bed. She actually thought about tying herself to the bed and ended up in the hospital, but that’s a whole other podcast on a whole other day.
Steven Heller:
We’re funny people.
Debbie Millman:
You go on to state in the introduction that this is not a comprehensive life story. Rather, you’ve assembled a sampler of essays that revolve around two facets of your life. First, the personal, which includes a psychological rationale for being a typically rebellious teenager and the professional, which reveals how becoming rebellious led you into a career as a graphic designer and art director first with the underground newspapers and hippie pornography that we’re going to talk about, and how that ultimately led to a 33-year career at the straight and narrow New York Times. What made you decide to structure the book in this way?
Steven Heller:
Well, I didn’t think my total existence on the planet would make for good stories. I structured it in this way so that I would have less to write. I did a biography, as you know, of Paul Rand who lived to be 86, and then I did a few years after that, a biography of Alvin Lustig who lived to be 45. I always joke that I chose Alvin Lustig because he had less years, which meant less work. I figured 10 years was a good book-ended journey.
Debbie Millman:
Because anybody that knows you knows what a slacker you are in terms of shirking away from hard work.
Steven Heller:
Well, I have a ambivalence about work.
Debbie Millman:
You are what you refer to in the book as an appointment baby. Talk about that.
Steven Heller:
I think the appointment baby issue is really what triggered the final manuscript. I found out one strange day that my mother had made an appointment with her doctor to induce labor and have me, and I had never heard that story before and she seemed to be very proud of it. I realized that it fit her narcissistic way of living that she wanted to go on a trip, which my parents did often, all over the world. She wanted it on a certain date, which meant I had to be born prior to her leaving on her cruise, which meant that her figure had to return and she had to look as good as she could on said cruise. I became an appointment baby and I never heard the term before. I’ve heard about induced pregnancies, I’ve heard about cesareans, but the appointment baby thing seemed so 1950s.
Debbie Millman:
Did she get her figure back in time?
Steven Heller:
She said she did. In fact, when she was showing this video that she had made from an eight-millimeter film, my father was dutifully photographing her on B deck and he was on A deck and I wasn’t around anywhere. My wife, Louise Fili, she was showing the video too said, “Where was Baby Steve?” My mom said, “He’s at home with the housekeeper.”
Debbie Millman:
Shortly after you were born, she just left you, handed you off to the housekeeper and took a cruise with your dad?
Steven Heller:
Yeah, her figure was back.
Debbie Millman:
It’s sort of crazy to think about what women did back in those days in the ’60s. My mother proudly told me that she decided when she was pregnant with me that she was going to go on a diet and the first, this is what she told me proudly, the first thing she did after she had me was weigh herself.
Steven Heller:
Well.
Debbie Millman:
How is this something you think is good?
Steven Heller:
I think people worry about a lot of personal things that are perhaps triggered by the chemicals in the brain that happen when you’re in that kind of physical state.
Debbie Millman:
That’s generous of you.
Steven Heller:
I’ve become a little less cynical about the whole affair having written about it and having cut out a lot of the anger part.
Debbie Millman:
How did you get past that? What gave you the sense that that wasn’t something that would necessarily be helpful to the memoir?
Steven Heller:
Well, I didn’t want to write a revenge book because there was nobody I wanted to take revenge against. I mean, I’d do it all over again the way it happened because the way it happened is what’s turned out and I’m relatively happy within my constant depression. The paradox is that for 10 years before my mom passed away at 93, she was writing a memoir and she was doing it all in long hand on sheets of paper of different sizes and colors.
She had this huge file and that every time I would come to their house for dinner, which wasn’t often, but every time I did, she would pull the file out and say, “Can you please help me edit this?” It became an absurd part of my life. I just wanted to avoid it in such a visceral way that I would just say, “Nope,” cut her off and she’d continue. She was very persistent and tenacious. It was all about her travels around the world. I presume there was some interesting things in there because they had met a lot of interesting people, but I wasn’t about to spend a large chunk of my life and time rehashing her life.
Debbie Millman:
Do you still have those files and that writing?
Steven Heller:
I don’t know.
Debbie Millman:
That’d be an interesting read.
Steven Heller:
I have the eight-millimeter films my father took, but they’re films and we haven’t transferred them to digital.
Debbie Millman:
Early on in the book, you tell us your full legal name isn’t Steven Heller. Can you share what that name is, what your full legal name is and why you don’t use it?
Steven Heller:
No, because then people won’t buy the book.
Debbie Millman:
You’re going to want to make people? Spoiler alert.
Steven Heller:
No, I can tell you.
Debbie Millman:
Oh good.
Steven Heller:
It’s Harmon, H-A-R-M-O-N. It was the name of a baseball player who played second base and I think outfield as well for the Washington Senators and Minnesota Twins or some team like that. His name was Harmon Killebrew. Even though I wasn’t named after him as a kid, camp counselors and so-called friends would call me Killerbrew or Killer, but I thought the name being rather odd to find a person that I didn’t want to be. The names that people have now are so exotic and eccentric. I could easily have been called Moon or Moon Walker and live nicely with it in the ’60s, but that name wasn’t going to get me very far.
Debbie Millman:
Now, is it true that Louise Fili, your wife, the legendary designer, Louis Fili, told you that she probably would not have wanted to go out with you if she knew your legal name was Harmon Heller?
Steven Heller:
That’s what she said.
Debbie Millman:
Why? It seems uncharacteristically shallow.
Steven Heller:
It is uncharacteristically shallow of her, but at the same time, I wouldn’t want to have to yell, “Harmon.”
Debbie Millman:
When did you tell her about your name?
Steven Heller:
I told her a year after we met. I didn’t tell my son until he was about five or six years old.
Debbie Millman:
Now, from what I understand, and correct me if I’m wrong here with my research and the material from your book, when you were 15, your parents went on a month-long sight seeing trip to Russia and they sent you to live with a family friend in Stockholm, Sweden. The Swiss were the first folks who refused to call you Harmon. They felt Steve was easier to say. And so, you became Steven Heller at that time. Is that true?
Steven Heller:
Sweden changed my life.
Debbie Millman:
How so?
Steven Heller:
Forever and ever. Well, it changed my life in terms of the name. I realized I didn’t have to live with that albatross around my neck, but it also changed in terms of political consciousness and social consciousness. The people I lived with were very enlightened about world events. Vietnam was just beginning. There were many Europeans who were against our involvement and I lived with one family that was definitely communist. I was, let’s say, indoctrinated between courses of smoked fish and other things.
Debbie Millman:
Now, while you were there, in addition to your political awakening, you also grew your hair and in your book, you write about how at the time, strangers went out of their way to physically and verbally attack you when you came back because your wavy black hair was down to your shoulder and your hair then became a lightning rod for really rude comments and unwanted physical contact that culminated in an experience at the all boys prep school you attended. Can you talk a little bit about what happened at that point?
Steven Heller:
Well, in Sweden, they were far ahead socially of the US just as they were in England. What seemed like freak show, hippies called themselves freaks, was perfectly normal in Sweden, but I felt that hair had always defined me. It was the thing that was a lightning rod for my mother. She was always very particular about dress and appearance and grooming, and it was the easiest way to defy her by changing the norm.
I grew the hair long and I had no real sense that it would be offensive to anybody. I knew it would be different. I was self-conscious about doing it, but I did it anyway. But it really did cause people to be upset, they questioned what their lives were about. It triggered some sort of deep mass psychosis so that Greenwich Village was the only safe place I could be unless I disguised myself, which I essentially did and took strange circuitous roots through dangerous parts of the Lower East Side to get to MacDougal Street.
Debbie Millman:
They made you cut your hair when you went to school.
Steven Heller:
I went to a boys prep school and I went there because my parents had me tested at NYU a thematic apperception test, which to this day I despise. It was actually a fun test because they show you these drawings that had some things purposely going on. They’d have different objects. It was the opposite of a Rorschach test and it was intended to let your emotions dictate how you saw the narrative of the picture. There was one that just cracked me up, and I don’t explain why it cracked me up in the book because there’s a certain amount of embarrassment, but it was prurient to say the least. The graduate student who is giving me the test just made copious notes as I’m unable to speak, I’m laughing so hard, but it turned out that that test was the measuring stick that was used to determine whether I would have a normal co-ed life or become a regimented businessman to be.
Debbie Millman:
Why did they make you cut your hair? Why were they so brutal about your hair in that school?
Steven Heller:
Well, you got to remember that in those days, everybody was kind of organization man, except on a younger level. There was a lot of conformity and prep schools were conformist by their very nature. This particular school, which doesn’t exist anymore, thank heavens, had what was called a dean of discipline and his name was Demi. I used to think he was a demigod, but he would stand at the top of the stairway as we answered the bell for the first period, and he would literally measure the amount of fringe that went over your shirt collar. If there was too much, well he would tell you to have it cut by the next day or if there was too much, as in my case, he had other means.
Debbie Millman:
Which was rather devastating.
Steven Heller:
Which was very traumatic. I mean, the school was adjacent to the YMCA and there was a barber in the YMCA and he and Demi must have worked out a strategic tortured plan, kind of the equivalent of water boarding. It sent me into a tailspin. That combined with my mother’s obsession with it and being proper and all, I just started slowly or quickly going down the slope.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I mean, it’s really, from what I understand, what motivated you to start drawing pictures of your feelings and those drawings became a big part of who you were and they became a topic of your twice weekly therapy sessions and really, I think in many ways it seems like those drawings saved your life.
Steven Heller:
Being able to draw was a release after the haircut, which was basically taking a nice head of black hair and making it into what I look like now. I just went home and I stayed home and I had to only go to school, but I went out and bought myself some Dr. Martin’s dyes and some India ink and sketchbooks and started drawing. I had a particular apocalyptic view that I talk about in the book.
Debbie Millman:
I understand that your therapist was so enamored by your work that it helped you develop confidence about your drawing.
Steven Heller:
She helped develop confidence in everything. She was the one that told my parents what they were doing wrong and you needed some intervention like that. She told them the things that could trigger me and whether it’s a snowflake kind of thing or whether it’s a really good intervention, I opt for the ladder, but she also did like the drawings a lot, and so, I thought there might be something here and I should continue. I did continue until it was suggested that I try to sell them to The New Yorker of all places.
Debbie Millman:
Start of the time.
Steven Heller:
New Yorker didn’t have any use for them. I remember at 15 or thereabouts visiting the art director of Evergreen Review who was an illustrator named Dick Hess, and I noticed when I went to pick up my portfolio the following day, it hadn’t been touched and that sent me into a tailspin for about 6 to 12 months.
Debbie Millman:
Your dad orchestrated a transfer. In the middle of your junior year, you transferred to Walden where Neil Shevlin, your art teacher, liked your work. I understand that his encouragement gave you the courage to begin to show your portfolio to several underground newspaper art editors. You’ve got a very different response from those editors and art directors. How did you even know about these underground newspapers?
Steven Heller:
Well, when I was 15 or so, I saw on the newsstand a cover of the East Village Other, and I show it in a slideshow of mine. It’s not in the book, and it was a collage of General William Westmoreland, the commander in the field of Vietnam. Coming out of his fatigue uniform was a serpent and I just loved that. Then there was another cover that I saw and I bought the issue and it was of Cardinal Spellman who was the vicar of the US Army, and he was the cardinal in charge of the New York Archdiocese and he had died. The headline read, Congratulations on your promotion.
It was just the kind of humor that I needed. I had grown up with an uncle who was a terrific man, professor at Columbia. His daughter, my cousin, is now Vice Dean of Law at Columbia. My other cousin, his daughter, is a cellist in Paris. He was the one who saved my butt. He told my parents to send me to the shrink or I would fall into the pit and never come out. He was the one that told me about the birds and the bees, told me about contraceptives, was frank with me just about everything and introduced me to the great comics of the era, Mort Sahl, Nichols and May, Jules Feiffer, who was my hero and who I later worked with. I fortunately had that support. I didn’t have it 24 hours a day, but I remember the phone call on a Saturday morning where he called to tell my parents that I should be allowed to drop out of school.
Debbie Millman:
High school?
Steven Heller:
No, college. By that point, there was something else going on at NYU that led to my release, but he convinced them that I didn’t need college. He, of course, was a PhD and his field was among other things, academic freedom.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you started working after you graduated high school that’s why I was like, “Wait, I thought you graduated high school.” You were offered a job at the free press doing old school paste-up by the art director JC Suares, and he left the paper three weeks after he hired you. You became the defacto art director at 16 years old-
Steven Heller:
At 16.
Debbie Millman:
… of The New York Free Press. What was that like for you?
Steven Heller:
It was kind of unreal, but it was a job. I mean, I had been working since I was 12. I worked actually in the art department of Bergdorf Goodman. I worked for an advertising agency when I was 12 or 13. Didn’t last long at either place and screwed things up royally in both places, but working was not unusual or aberrant for me. When I was brought on, it just felt like, okay, this is the way life is. I was taught how to do something, not very well, but I fit the bill that they needed, but it was that stuff that got me interested in design, particularly design and illustration.
Debbie Millman:
You also decided at that time or around that time to create your own magazine with gift money that you saved from your bar mitzvah. How much money did you save and what made you decide at that point to start your own publication?
Steven Heller:
Well, I know exactly how much I made because my father was an accountant for the Air Force and he kept meticulous records. It was to be put away for college. College was not expensive then. NYU was probably $500 a semester and School of Visual Arts was even cheaper. But after experiences in both NYU and SVA where I was either thrown out or left depending on how you read the records, I had some of that money available to me.
Debbie Millman:
Well, just as an aside, you now have two honorary doctorates. Well done, Dr. Heller.
Steven Heller:
Denada.
Debbie Millman:
You titled the magazine Borrowed Time. Why that particular name?
Steven Heller:
Because I felt we all lived on borrowed time. I was reading a lot of Sarte and Camus at the time. The thing that kept me sane while I was in high school was reading Russian literature.
Debbie Millman:
That was my minor in college, by the way. I don’t know if you know that about me.
Steven Heller:
I didn’t know that. Well, Russian literature is not a lot of laughs.
Debbie Millman:
No, that’s why I love it.
Steven Heller:
But I would find myself alone during certain periods of time and I would go into the bathroom of our Stuyvesant Town apartment and there was a riser, a heat riser, steam riser, and you could hear into other people’s apartments through the riser. I would sit and listen to other people’s conversations and read my Russian literature. I didn’t feel alone, and at the same time, I felt kind of morose. I enjoyed feeling morose. I figured the Russians enjoyed feeling morose. I remember reading Lermontov and how depressing hero of our time was and how good I felt.
Debbie Millman:
Yep. I completely understand about Russian literature. People often ask me, “Oh see, that means you speak Russian?” I’m like, “No, no, no. I read it in English translation.” It was the content that I was so desperate to read and related to.
Steven Heller:
Well, at Walden, there was actually the woman who much later became the headmaster taught a Russian literature course. It was like you’d go in there all jolly and you’d come out with clouds over your head
Debbie Millman:
Weeping. Your friend Timothy Jackson was going to be the art director of Borrowed Time, but after Brad Holland answered an ad you placed for illustrators, he took over the role. I think that it’s safe to say that Brad Holland is one of the very big influences in your life and in the direction your life took at that point. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Steven Heller:
Well, I devoted a whole chapter to Brad as my mentor. For those who don’t know who he is, he’s one of the greatest illustrators in the United States and really helped change the course of illustration from being a profession of visual mimics to creating content, creating ideas that would supplement or compliment texts. He had come off the boat, so to speak, from the Midwest. He had worked at Hallmark cards at the rabbit division is what he called it. He answered an ad for contributors.
Most of the contributors who answered the ad were just local hippies who I would see around periodically around Washington Square. Brad was the first serious artist that I met other than Neil Shevlin, who was my art teacher, who I learned later committed suicide. Brad just wanted to be able to place his drawings somewhere. He had just gotten hired by Playboy to do a monthly column. He had done something for Avant Garde. He had done all these little books for Hallmark. He was a true professional and he taught me what a typeface was. He taught me what a paste-up was. He taught me that you line things up, that there’s a grid that you follow. He gave me in a month’s time a full graduate program.
Debbie Millman:
You wrote this about what Brad taught you, and I want to read it because I think it’s so special. You write, Brad became my teacher, not in the ways of illustration, but in publication design in general and visual thinking specifically. I learned aspects of type use I hadn’t appreciated before. Notably, I learned to achieve expression through letters and their accents, voices and pitches. This is the expression that different faces bring to text and headlines. I admired Brad’s passion and listened spellbound as he told me about his duals with editors and art directors over his principle to never render anyone else’s ideas. I understood that Brad was not only fighting the conventional wisdom that an illustrator was merely the extension of an art director’s, or worse, an editor’s hands. He was also trying to radically alter, if not expunge, the conventions of slavishly sentimental illustration and create a more intimate personal art.
You and Brad joined forces with underground cartoonist Yossarian and created a plan to conquer the alternative art and cartoon world by offering subscriptions. You made a few hundred of the first and only issue of Borrowed Time and sent it to every underground newspaper that you could. Then you waited for the landslide of return subscription cards to arrive in the mail. What happened next?
Steven Heller:
Well, it was slightly different. We actually went out in front of the Fillmore East and sold them to people waiting online to see Big Brother in the holding company or whoever else was playing Johnny Winter’s brother. I remember Edgar Winter was in line for some reason.
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Steven Heller:
He kept calling me gentleman. What we did was we started a syndication service called the Asylum Press. Brad did the logo. Well, we made a bunch of silkscreen posters of it. I have one framed in my office still. We thought we’d send this work to underground papers around the world and get some nominal fee for doing so. It didn’t really amount too much of anything except we did the one piece… Brad’s work was being picked up in any case. I mean, my stuff never really went that far. I got picked up I think by the Underground Press service, picked up by one of the Columbia University radical papers during the uprising there, but mostly, it was running in the New York Free Press where I had a weekly spot.
Debbie Millman:
Why did you decide to stop drawing?
Steven Heller:
I decided to stop because I wasn’t that good at it.
Debbie Millman:
According to who?
Steven Heller:
According to Brad, in a way, in a tacit way. He never said, “Hey, good work.” I assumed if you don’t say, “Good work,” that means you don’t think it’s good work. I wanted some sort of accolade, which I wasn’t getting. Also, I couldn’t draw realistically to save my life. I could draw expressionistically. There are a few of the images in the book and there was another reason, a silly reason in retrospect, but it was a reason nonetheless. My mother actually liked the drawings.
Debbie Millman:
Didn’t she collage with them?
Steven Heller:
She made a collage on a table. My mother would’ve been an artist had it been another time of life. She created children’s clothing lines. Some of it was about design. Most of it was about sourcing, but some of it was designy. She liked the drawings and wanted to show them to her friends. I say in the book, she used them like her travel photographs. I let her do it, but it really upset me that it was being exploited and co-opted. One reason for ending was my frustration with that. It was self-indulgent.
Debbie Millman:
Your drawing was self-indulgent or her behavior?
Steven Heller:
No, my drawing was self-indulgent to be sure, but to quit was self-indulgent. I was doing it for spite.
Debbie Millman:
I wish you hadn’t. In any case, by the time you were 17, ripe old age of 17, you became the first art director of Screw Magazine, which was the pioneering underground sex review that really helped trigger the 1960 sexual revolution. It was founded by Al Goldstein. How did you first meet Al and what gave him the sense you could art direct what was ostensibly a national magazine at 17 years old?
Steven Heller:
Well, first of all, it wasn’t a national magazine at the time.
Debbie Millman:
But it became one.
Steven Heller:
It became one, but we grew into it.
Debbie Millman:
But you grew into it with your talent, so it still counts.
Steven Heller:
Well, there was no talent involved. I mean, the pictures in the book will show that to anybody. I was working at the Free Press, our typesetter and managing editor was a guy named Jim Buckley, who was, I always thought very straight and narrow. When Al Goldstein came into our office unannounced one day, he came to sell a story. The story was about being an industrial spy for the Bendix Corporation. Goldstein had a lot of strange sub-careers.
He was a very neurotic, mixed up guy, but he could write his way out of a paper bag, as they say. He offered the story to our editor who thought it was worthy of publication. Not only that, it was worthy of going on the cover as the cover story. Unbeknownst to me, they came up with this idea to start a sex paper. Goldstein was writing these blood and gut stories, lover kills intruder with ice pick up the nose kind of thing for these tabloids that were run by a guy named Myron Fass.
The tabloids were national inquirer type things, except worse. They wouldn’t run anything related to sex. They thought sex was dirty, but ice pick murders were a-okay. Goldstein wanted to break that tradition of hypocrisy. Since he was also interested in getting laid a lot, he figured the best thing to do was start a sex paper.
Debbie Millman:
Ah, the ’60s.
Steven Heller:
I happened to be sitting in an office adjacent to the typesetting machine, and somebody must have asked, “Who’s going to paste this up?” They looked at me and I looked at them and I did. It looks like I just chopped things out of books and threw them on a page. It was very easy in those days because you could use wax, which also felt very soothing on the hand.
Debbie Millman:
How did you get Milton Glaser to design the Screw logo?
Steven Heller:
Well, that came many years later. I worked for Screw for first six issues and then Goldstein and I got into a big fight about the change of the logo. I didn’t know how to draw letters or do typography or lettering, but I knew that what we had was terrible. I knew that what he wanted to use, which some friend of his made was just as bad, if not worse. He called me one night to say, “We’re using it.” I said, “I’m not going to use it.” He was often not the most pleasant person, although I really loved him dearly, but he made me cry. The next day, I quit and started my own sex paper.
Debbie Millman:
What was that like?
Steven Heller:
That was just like normal. Why not start a sex paper? I had an idea with my co-publishers that we would do something different from what Screw did. Screw was kind of the funny, but raunchy. We were going to be more serious and artistic. We managed to get Grove Press to finance the first issue. We got full color printing on a heavier news print. I got type faces from these $1 a word places and I was actually able to design something that was not as embarrassing as Screw, but I was also called the only person in New York that could make a sex paper fail.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
Steven Heller:
Because we couldn’t sell. The first few issues sold. It was called The New York Review of Sex. Then, we called it the New York Review of Sex & Politics.
Debbie Millman:
Politics, yes.
Steven Heller:
Ultimately, the New York Review of Sex & Aerospace and then it was gone.
Debbie Millman:
While you were working on the fourth issue of the New York Review of Sex & Politics, you received a telephone call from the New York District Attorney’s Office. What did they tell you?
Steven Heller:
They said, “Don’t leave. We’re coming over. You’re under arrest.”
Debbie Millman:
And you obeyed, you did not leave.
Steven Heller:
No, I had no place to go. I was cowed by authority anyway. My partners who were much older than I-
Debbie Millman:
You were still a minor.
Steven Heller:
I was a minor and my partners weren’t around. One of the cops who came, I call him the heavy set one. He had come to our office a few weeks before and bought a bunch of papers saying he ran an adult bookstore. That was the evidence they needed.
Debbie Millman:
It was a sting operation.
Steven Heller:
It was a sting. The younger cop, the thinner cop, Toody and Muldoon from Car 54, he was an idealist. He was interested in disrupting the mob and Screw, the New York Review of Sex, all the other underground sex papers were distributed by mob families. That’s a whole other story and a whole other book. But he said, we’re not looking to shut you guys down, but we are interested in disrupting organized crime.
Debbie Millman:
But they were rounding up all of the Blue Magazines.
Steven Heller:
There was a lot of vice policing in New York City. Gay clubs were being raided all the time. It was the era of the massage parlor. At a certain point, it calmed down. But apparently, all you needed was one or two people or organizations to complain to the District Attorney about something and he’d go after, unless, of course, there was some legal reason he shouldn’t. We I think were able to prove in state supreme court that it was prior restraint, and legally, they had no right to take our publications off the newsstand. In those days, you had to be a veteran to run a newsstand. There were a lot of blind newsstand dealers, so they didn’t even know what they were selling, but they would have their papers taken from them and sometimes be arrested. It was a crazy time legally.
Debbie Millman:
In the period between that arrest and the trial, you were arrested again in another roundup. Somehow during the blitz of briefs and testimony, it was determined that the DA did not adhere to the law and you were exonerated on all charges before going to trial. At that point, your newsstand distributor gave you an ultimatum, either you include more hardcore sex, so first it was being taken off the newsstands because it was too lewd, now the distributors wanted you to have more hardcore sex to interest a viable readership or he fooled you. I believe that’s when you went back to Screw.
Steven Heller:
No, that’s when I went to a magazine called Rock. I went from sex to rock and roll.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, the Rock Magazine, not… I have so much sex on the brain that I was like, “That’s right. Rock Magazine, the magazine for men with rocks.”
Steven Heller:
No, I remember it was Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll.
Debbie Millman:
I have a dirty mind, I’m sorry.
Steven Heller:
I didn’t work for High Times, although I knew a bunch of the editors there.
Debbie Millman:
But you were in jail for a bit, right? You were held?
Steven Heller:
I was held in a detention pen twice. The first time it was with the prostitutes because I was underage and I had a long ponytail at the time and they were all playing with it. It all seemed very cute and they were making jokes. It wasn’t the most pleasant place to be in the tombs in New York City. I’m sure it still isn’t. But the second time I was arrested, I had turned 18. I was no longer with the goyles. I was with hardened vagrants and drunks and other people that were put in the tank for night court.
Debbie Millman:
You have a rap sheet?
Steven Heller:
No, I was able to expunge the rap sheet. I thought it would help me expunge other things, but it never did.
Debbie Millman:
While you were at Rock, now it’s all coming back to me, that’s where you met Patti Smith.
Steven Heller:
I met Patti Smith there.
Debbie Millman:
She was an editor, right? An editor and a writer.
Steven Heller:
Well, she was a writer, reporter. I mean, anybody who was a writer was kind of an editor. She was an interesting character who often talked about her ambitions to be a rock and roll star and mentioned a few names in passing a lot that were of interest to me like Sam Shepard, the playwright. I loved his work, particularly Operation Sidewinder. She never mentioned Robert Mapplethorpe. She mentioned Todd Rundgren a lot and I was not a fan of Todd Rundgren.
Debbie Millman:
For shade.
Steven Heller:
But we hung out a little bit. At that time, Rock Magazine was producing rock and roll shows at the New York Academy of Music, which became the Palladium. I would do programs and posters and things for the shows. Most of the shows were oldies shows, 1950s doo-wop groups, really great ones too. But one show we had was Van Morrison, Linda Ronstadt, and Tim Buckley. She and I went to the show and that’s where we kind of disappeared. She went one way. I went the other.
I had heard that she was fired from the paper because the publisher wanted more reportage and she was writing more lyrical stuff. But she met her lifelong music partner there, Lenny Kaye, who was a writer for us, who I always liked. I’m still in touch periodically with him. It just became this one little blip in her life and in my life, it meant something years later when she became a punk icon.
I ran into her one day because her kids went to the same school that my son went to. I said, “You don’t remember me, I’m sure, but we used to hang out.” She looked at me and she kind of in a daze said, “Oh yeah, I remember that. What are you doing now?” I said, “Well, I’m art director of The New York Times Book Review.” She said, “Oh, they just gave me a bad review for a book of poems.” That was the end of it.
Debbie Millman:
You then went back to Screw and that’s when you worked with Milton. Talk about that experience.
Steven Heller:
Well, when I went back to Screw, I wasn’t sure I was going back to Screw. I had finished what I could do with Rock. I was going to do an interim gig at Screw because I met the woman who became my first wife there. The magazine just looked like shit. I had learned to discern good from bad or at least good for mediocre. I suggested that they get a redesign. Since I figured I wasn’t going to be working there very long, let somebody else redesign it and I’ll pick up the pieces.
I had heard about Push Pin for the longest time and I convinced Al and Jim to contact Push Pin and see whether they’d be interested. Seymour Chwast, co-founder with Milton who is my best friend now, admitted to me that there was no question that they would do it because they did anything that would pay money. Goldstein was willing to pay a fairly sizable amount at that time. They took it on as a serious job. Milton did some logos and Seymour did some logos. Seymour’s, as I remember, more decorative. Milton did one that was just so corporate, it seemed a total anomaly. He did a Helvetica logo, all caps, and he took the middle part of the E and extended it like a hard-on into the W.
Debbie Millman:
One of the great logos of the 20th century, Steve.
Steven Heller:
Probably.
Debbie Millman:
It really is. Really so witty and-
Steven Heller:
It sure beats out I love New York.
Debbie Millman:
Well, definitely on par.
Steven Heller:
But I didn’t appreciate it.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Steven Heller:
I really didn’t. I didn’t appreciate the Helvetica and the pages inside were stripped of any kind of decorative elements. He redesigned the Peter Meter, which was Al Goldstein’s measuring stick for-
Debbie Millman:
Device.
Steven Heller:
… films. He redesigned the shit list, which was also one of Goldstein’s favorite tools. But they used Helvetica, Lightline Gothic, straight columns. There was no ragging or anything like that. The photographs were basically straight black and white pictures on a full page, no bleed because it was a tabloid. When they gave us the pages to work with, they had tissues over them. I put it my own tissue over their tissues. I made copious notes about why this is bad. Goldstein sent it back to Milton and had me surreptitiously listen on the other extension. Milton was rather annoyed by it. I lost my battle and the Glaser issue came out and we continued to follow his lead for about six months. Then a year later, I had somebody come in with an airbrush and balloon up the Helvetica so that it could be run as a duotone and give a sense of marqueeness.
Debbie Millman:
In 1973, Brad Holland had a party wherein you met the great Ruth Ansel, then our director of The New York Times Magazine. There, you talked about the magazine business. You asked if you could show her your portfolio. She agreed. The meeting went better than you could have ever expected. What happened next?
Steven Heller:
Well, we had lunch and we seemed to get along. I was looking for another job. I wanted to be a designer. I wanted to be an art director. Herb Lubalin was always a hero. There were other designers who were doing things that were of interest to me like Lester Beall, Frank Zachary, who was the art director of Holiday Magazine. I related to him. I didn’t know what he did, but his name was on the masthead as art director so I thought he must be great. We later became good friends.
Ruth and I talked magazines and she looked at the portfolio, which had stuff in there that was from Screw and stuff that was from other places and other things that I did at Screw. We did other publications, some that weren’t sexual. She seemed to like what I did with type or she wasn’t wearing her glasses. She offered to me a temporary position designing pages for the magazine. Said she had to show her boss, Lou Silverstein, who was the great newspaper designer and assistant managing editor of The Times. I got a call a few weeks later saying Lou wanted to see me about another job.
By this time, most of my friends who were illustrators were working for the op-ed page. It was like that was the creme de la creme-
Debbie Millman:
Holy grail, absolutely.
Steven Heller:
… of illustration and of alternative journalism at the time. Lou said, “I’d like you to help out with the op-ed page.” I kind of pressed him, “Do you mean art director?” He went, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Art director.” He offered me less than I was making at Screw. There were less benefits. Screw gave incredible benefits and I figured this would be a good career move. I took the offer.
About two weeks after I started, I had two offices. I had an office in the art department, long desk in this crazy old 1930s art department, and I had an office up on the editorial floor around the library and in that area where all the editorial writers. Here were the kings and queens of editorial journalism and I was one of the members of the group.
I got a call from the guards downstairs and they said, “There’s some guys down here with very long hair that want to see you.” I figured the guards were just being guardy. People with long hair were still suspect. He said, “And you have to come down and we can’t let them in until you come down.” I came down and the first thing I saw when I turned the corner from the elevator bank were three apes, three people dressed in ape suits. They took me into a limousine and brought me to the market diner where the owner came out with a big bucket of bananas. That was just one of three different times Al Goldstein did his best to embarrass me at The New York Times.
Debbie Millman:
But it didn’t work. You ended up not only working for the op-ed page, you also ended up becoming the art director of The New York Times Book Review, this section that is one of the most read sections of any newspaper in the world. You did that for 33 years.
Steven Heller:
I did that for a long time.
Debbie Millman:
You worked for six different editors while you were at The New York Times Book Review and you write about how this job became the foundation of your professional life as an art director and all that followed, but you conclude the book stating that that is another story.
Steven Heller:
That is another story. I had grown up. It’s called Growing Up Underground. I had come out of the caverns of New York. I knew Hilly Kristal who started CBGBs. When I saw CBGBs for the first time before he opened it, I thought, this is disgusting and I had no desire to be part of that group. Certain friends of mine were already making their way out of the underground. The op-ed page was this transitionary point. I did it for two and a half or three years, whatever it was. I did the Book Review simultaneously for six months or more. I didn’t get along with the op-ed editor
Debbie Millman:
Charlotte Curtis.
Steven Heller:
Charlotte Curtis, who Gay Talese warned me to watch out for when I got the job at the time as he was working on his book, Thy Neighbor’s Wife. He spent a lot of time at Screw and I just figured that was a good place to end because if I started on the Book Review, everything else falls into place after that and I didn’t know how to make it into the same kind of story.
Debbie Millman:
Will there be a sequel to this memoir to tell those stories? Seems like there’s so much more to still be told.
Steven Heller:
Well, I’m not sure. I liked the idea of writing something that was very personal. I’ve written a lot of objective essays, journalism reportage. This was, as you said upfront, about me. I don’t see myself as a fiction writer, but I do see something that happened during those 30 years that could make a possible roman a clef. (romanaclef?)
Debbie Millman:
I’ve known you a long time. I’m very fortunate you had your lunch with Ruth Ansel. I had my lunch with you, the lunch that changed my life, that helped me write my first book, which you essentially handed to me on a silver platter, invited me to co-found the masters in branding program where we’re speaking in my little podcast studio.
It is a glorious, glorious book. I’ve read it several times. I have spent the last hour plus talking with you about just a sliver of some of the remarkable stories that you recount in this book, time working at Interview Magazine, working with so many of some of the world’s greatest art directors and illustrators. For listeners that might want to hear more about Steve’s many experiences at The Times or his role as co-chair at the School of Visual Arts, MFA Designer as entrepreneur, or his 40 years at the helm of Print Magazine or the other 199 books he has written, we have 14 episodes with Steve in the Design Matters archive that you could listen to in anticipation of the sequel to this remarkable memoir.
Steve, I just want to thank you so much for everything that you do in the world, for your writing, for your reportage, for your generosity, and for your friendship. Thank you for joining me today to talk about this remarkable new book of yours. Thank you so much for making so much work that matters.
Steven Heller:
Well, I must thank you. You’re the first person to interview me on this book.
Debbie Millman:
It’s good.
Steven Heller:
I have looked forward to it for a long time. Our friendship is very important to me and dear to me, and it’s been a great ride.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Thank you. Steven Heller’s latest book, his memoir is titled, Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York. You can read more about Steve and read about all of his other wonderful books he’s written at hellerbooks.com and you can read his daily Heller column on printmag.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.