Show Goes On

Under normal circumstances, the 238,000 subscribers to Show Magazine would be getting their copies of the July issue next week. But circumstances have seldom been normal on Show, and there is not going to be any July issue. Last week Show's millionaire proprietor, A. & P. Heir Huntington Hartford, paid $3,000 for an ad in the New York Times to explain why.

"We have been tightening our belts with a reduced staff," confessed the ad. "The undersigned, by the way, has rolled up his sleeves and is at work as Editor-in-Chief. And though we are skipping the July issue due to our reorganization, our combined July-August issue will be worth waiting for!"

Huntington Hartford's disingenuous public pitch constitutes his last-gasp effort to rescue a losing proposition. Show has cost him $6,000,000 in its three years of life, and although both circulation and ad revenues are up this year, the magazine is falling into the hole by $100,000 per issue. Hartford has tried to sell, but can't find a buyer. On the boss's orders, Show's President Frank Gibney cut the staff from 70 to 30 hands and aimed at turning the corner into black ink by 1965. But then Hartford impatiently rolled up his own sleeves, and Gibney resigned. "Two people can't run this organization," said Hartford.

In his self-appointed role as shirtsleeve journalist, Hartford has decided to open Show's pages to TV coverage --a medium that Gibney resolutely ignored as beneath Show's notice--and to compensate for the lost July issue with a dividend issue to be tacked onto the end of subscriptions. From now on, promised Hartford in the Times ad, Show would go out, more or less regularly, to those subscribers "who don't always get their copies, and those who keep getting them whether they want them or not."

Underscoring the vicissitudes of publishing show-business magazines, Theater Arts, a venerable monthly of 48 years, last week was missing and presumed dead. It had not distributed an issue since January. The New York Times finally noticed its absence with a theater-page obituary, but others seemed less willing to say farewell to Theater Arts (last circulation: 50,000): neither the printer, who refused to distribute the February issue until the magazine paid an overdue bill for $31,000; nor Editor-Publisher Byron Bentley, who kept his office open until May 28, when the phone was disconnected; nor Movie Distributor Sidney Kaufman, who has been vainly trying since last fall to buy out Bentley's interest. But unlike Publisher Hartford, no one was prepared to set a definite date for another issue.

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