Cover Guy.(The Talk of the Town)(George Lois)

The Big Idea at breakfast last week with Mr. Big Idea, the advertising and graphic-design legend George Lois ("I Want My Maypo"; "I Want My MTV"; the world as we know it), was probably "Well, it's about time." This was, by his reckoning, and in his words, "the angle of the dangle," the underlying sentiment, the thing you might put in a blurb. What's been overdue is high-calibre recognition for his magazine work. Later this month, the Museum of Modern Art will present an exhibition of Lois's Esquire covers from the sixties, which, though widely celebrated and frequently (if faintheartedly) imitated, have never had the full curatorial treatment. Sonny Liston glowering in a Santa hat, Andy Warhol drowning in a can of soup, Muhammad Ali with arrows, Roy Cohn with halo: these images helped Esquire define a decade that already had a lot of help in getting defined, and created a visual language that people in the media still feel they must learn to understand, if not speak well.

At breakfast, Lois, who is seventy-six, took his time getting around to this particular Big Idea. As zippy and reductive as he is in his work, at table he's a "So anyway where was I?" kind of guy--meaning discursive and expansive, as opposed to doddering or absent-minded. A big, fit Greek-Bronxian with a shaved head, a Columbo growl, and a profane tongue, he started at the beginning of his life (fistfights, flower deliveries) and over several hours worked his way up to vindication at the hands of the modern-art establishment.

This was at his apartment, in the Village, spacious and filled with tribal art. Lois's wife, Rosemary, to whom he's been married for fifty-six years, served the first course, a dollop of sherbet atop a bowl of fresh berries, as he recounted an early art-school epiphany about how an image had better have an idea. "Thank you, girl," he said, and Rosemary went back to the kitchen. "She's a piece of work. All my life I'd leave the house at five-thirty to go to work. I needed three hours to myself in the morning, and I never needed much sleep. And she's up making corn muffins, or whatever. Like, eight of them, so if anyone else was at work early he could have something to eat. She's the last of the Mohicans."

So, anyway, where was he? The Army, Korea, CBS, Madison Avenue, and the early days of the "creative ...