Smiling Through the Apocalypse

SMILING THROUGH THE APOCALYPSE - Esquire in the Sixties traces the editorial journey of legendary Esquire Magazine Editor Harold T. P. Hayes. Twenty three years after his father's passing, Hayes' son Tom, interviews Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Nora Ephron, Peter Bogdanovich, Gore Vidal, and many others, to find out what it was that made his father one of the greatest magazine editors of all time. His narration leads you through compelling stories about his father's rise to success including how his father flags down the Dizzy Gillespie tour bus in order to get a story for the college magazine, offering Cassius Clay $150 to let Tom Wolfe follow him around for three days, and defending his decision in running a cover showing My Lai Massacre mass murderer Lt. William Calley with a Cheshire cat smile, posing with grim faced Vietnamese children. It is a story of challenge, triumph, and defeat, that paints an explicit portrait of an era through a man who gave unprecedented journalistic freedom to an extraordinary group of writers, photographers and artists.