When the first copies of Texas Monthly’s debut issue came back from the printer, founder Michael Levy worried the magazine might not make it to the next year. The 1973 launch came amid the worst of a bear market. As the financial magazine Kiplinger later wrote: “The 44% slide in the Dow that began on Friday, January 12, 1973, was agonizingly drawn out, sapping everyone’s patience and will.”
But then came a stroke of luck.
“Because we were so small, the printer forgot to send us a bill for six months. If it had, we would have been bankrupt,” says Levy.
This year Texas Monthly is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Its success has left Dallas-native Levy mulling the many miracles that have sustained it.
Levy was 26 when the first issue went to press. Born to a father who fled Europe during the early 1900s and a mother whose parents did the same, their only son was fiercely determined. After graduating from St. Mark’s School of Texas in 1964, he moved on to the renowned Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas School of Law.
He hired as his first editor William Broyles, an ex-Marine who had served in Vietnam. Looking back, Broyles remembers the early days with the same sense of fear and dread as his former boss.
“We started out with nothing,” says Broyles, who later became a screenwriter with such lofty credits as Apollo 13 and Cast Away.
“No coffee, no coffee machines,” he elaborates. “We had no stories, no storyboard. … We had nothing planned. No design. We had nothing. But Levy never wavered. His vision was that it was going to work. Levy believed that Texas was ready for its own version of Esquire or The New Yorker. And Mike believed that it had to be as good as any of those magazines. He really believed we could do it. He believed that Texas was ready. And he was right about that.”
Now retired at 76, Levy served as publisher of Texas Monthly until 2008. In 3 1/2 decades, the magazine’s circulation rose to 2.5 million. During its half-century, Texas Monthly has won 14 National Magazine Awards.
Levy credits much of that distinguished history to the editors who served under him: Broyles, Gregory Curtis and Evan Smith. He’s also proud of such high-profile scribes as Gary Cartwright, Jan Reid, Mimi Swartz, Patricia Sharpe, Steve Harrigan and Skip Hollandsworth, who embodied what Texas Monthly did best: bring an exotic new brand of nonfiction to a state that needed it.
It started with the very first cover story, which contained a phrase readers were unlikely to find anywhere else. Writer Sherry Kafka described her subject, Cowboys great “Dandy” Don Meredith, as having “extraordinarily pale eyes.” Try finding that in an American sports section in 1973.
Cartwright, another writer who soon became one of Texas Monthly’s most charismatic bylines, profiled another Cowboys legend, running back Duane Thomas, whom conventional sportswriters never understood. But Cartwright did.
As he wrote in an exquisite opening paragraph: “The first time I met Duane Thomas he told me about The Great Cosmos. The Great Cosmos was Duane’s attempt to express the inexpressible, and he used the term like a new toy. It was an interchangeable expression of faith and fear, of love and loneliness, of infinite acceptance and eternal rejection, a gussied-up extraterrestrial slang that still hovered painfully near his South Dallas streets.”
Still, there were blunders. Levy to this day can’t get over what he calls a “major, major, major mistake. We had a story on Dr Pepper. And we put a period after the Dr — which, of course, any red-blooded Texan knows you just don’t do. And that is the reason we ended up with a legendary fact-checking staff.”
As for his persistence, Levy says, it goes back to his parents, Harry and Florence, who taught him that “if you really do want anything of significance in life, you must work very, very hard.”
As for the magazine, he says, part of it was fate. “God,” he deadpans, “wanted there to be a magazine called Texas Monthly.”
