Features
Spy's popular features included "Separated at birth?" (side-by-side photographs of two different celebrities, similar to Private Eye's "Lookalikes") and "Celebrity Math", which presented thumbnail head shots atop simple mathematical models representing the components of celebrities (e.g., Fabio - Catherine Deneuve = Billy Ray Cyrus).
The magazine also specialized in often elaborate stings and hoaxes that explored the American phenomenon of celebrity. Notable efforts in this regard include: the purchasing by the magazine of a bona fide Scottish noble title, a test of the U.S. Postal Service in which letters were addressed only with the photograph of the intended recipient (the letter sent to Cardinal John Joseph O'Connor was successfully delivered), and, to test the ethical limits of the public relations industry, the successful pitching of a chain of fast-food restaurants that served burgers of freshly ground rabbit meat and was fronted by a fuzzy-eared mascot who told customers how delicious his species was to humans.
For a humorous magazine, Spy often was aggressive about straight feature reporting. In the summer of 1992, it ran the only serious investigative story on President George H.W. Bush's alleged extramarital affairs with Jennifer Fitzgerald and other women. The following year, Spy ran an article entitled "Clinton's First 100 Lies", detailing what it described as the new president's pattern of duplicitous behavior. After O.J. Simpson was acquitted on charges of murdering his former wife and her friend, Spy ran a cover story under the headline "He's Guilty, By George!" presenting a long list of details that its writers said proved conclusively that Simpson was the killer; he did not sue. The cover illustration parodied that of the much-hyped premiere issue of George magazine, with Simpson standing in for Cindy Crawford. Spy used attorneys to vet such potentially libelous material, but its stories often angered their prominent subjects and occasionally drove away advertisers.
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Famous quotes containing the word features:
“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)