"I wasn't fond of what was going on with the teen magazines. I wasn't objecting to it, I was just uncomfortable with it. It seemed like the seedier side of show biz to me. I thought, 'Why are they doing this? This is a good thing you got going here; the shows are good, the scripts are good, the people are good.'
"The woman who ran Sixteen magazine would come around the set all the time with a camera hanging over everybody. I kept thinking, 'What a weird job.'
"So one day a friend of mine came in and he said, 'I was just in the supermarket and went to the magazine section. Do you know how many covers of teen magazines you were on?' I said, 'No.' He said, 'Every single one.'
-- Mike Nesmith (via 'Mike's Mansion' at Emily & Heather's MONKEES inc.)
(click on cover to enlarge image)
This piece ran in the April 1967 issue of 16 Magazine, right at the height of Monkeemania.
A couple of the pertinent dates in the article appear to have been 'cleaned up'; Other sources show the date of Michael Nesmith's marriage to Phyllis Barbour to be June 27th, 1964, with his first son Christian being born on January 31st, 1965.
Also of interest is the wedding photo in which Mike's mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, appears standing to the right of her son.
As we are all so well aware, she was the enterprising secretary who invented Liquid Paper in 1951.
When Bette passed away in 1980, the half of her Liquid Paper fortune that didn't go to Mike went to fund the Council on Ideas, a "think tank devoted to exploring world problems".
The council convenes biennially at a facility in New Mexico, and is administered by Bette's Gihon Foundation, a private philanthropic organization with a governing board of trustees headed by Mike.
See also:
- 'Think Diffident', a Wired Magazine article about Nesmith and the Council on Ideas.
- A bit more about Mike's first wife, Phyllis Barbour Nesmith at GLEEB.
- A detailed Nesmith bio page at the Rhino Records website.
- Excerpts from the biography 'Total Control: The Monkees' Michael Nesmith Story' are available for reading online at Google Books.
- WildeImages, a celebrity photo gallery site by Nurit Wilde, a former Nesmith companion and mother of his son, Jason.
"I wasn't fond of what was going on with the teen magazines. I wasn't objecting to it, I was just uncomfortable with it. It seemed like the seedier side of show biz to me. I thought, 'Why are they doing this? This is a good thing you got going here; the shows are good, the scripts are good, the people are good.' 
