Stuck with a Magazine's Genes

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

The revived Look is sinking, but LIFE, reborn as a monthly, is doing well Esquire, older than either of them, has had its ups and downs, and now has a new ownership seeking to restore it. Any magazine that has been around a while has genes that are risky to tamper with, according to Editor Clay Felker who in less than two rocky years lost $5 million to $7 million of his own and his British backers' money in trying to turn Esquire around.

Esquire's sturdy genes go back to Depression 1933, when the posh magazine was launched for sale in men's clothing stores instead of on newsstands and cost 50-c- while the Saturday Evening Post sold for a nickel. It promoted men's fashions, a merchandising emphasis that continues to this day. But a part of the editorial genius of its founding editor Arnold Gingrich was a taste for good writing. At a time when Ernest Hemingway's stories were too unconventional for the Post, Gingrich admiringly sent him free slacks and a windbreaker, and got him as a regular contributor. For Esquire's first issue, Hemingway brought with him Ring Lardner Jr. and John Dos Passos. Gingrich believed that an editor edits best who edits least. Esquire's third element was sex--from the Petty and Varga pinups to harem cartoons-- which got the magazine in early trouble with the postal authorities.

The themes sometimes got lost in the variations. During World War II, Esquire concentrated on sports, pinups and adventure fiction; Gingrich, who had left the magazine, had to be invited back to give it intellectual tone again. At this point Hugh Hefner, a circulation promotion writer at Esquire decided to start a magazine of his own, freely borrowing Esquire's formula while gambling that the courts might now be more lenient about nudity. Instead of Esky the bug-eyed lecher as a trademark, Hefner created the Bunny. Facing Playboy's runaway success but unwilling to become a "skin book," Esquire made a wobbly retreat from barbershop sexism. Soon its advertising men protested that Esquire had become too stuffy and intellectual.

But some of Esquire's best years were the 1960s, when its editors' carefree irreverence suited the disillusion and cynicism of the times. The magazine's New Journalism brought the techniques of the novelist to matters of fact-profiles were not concentrates of fact gathering but freewheeling, pinwheeling displays of the author's prejudices. Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese could be wonderfully readable ("I don't deal in direct quotations," explained Talese, "I'm into what people think"). Meanwhile, Esquire's black-humor covers became intentionally outrageous, such as posing a benign Lieut. William Calley with a group of Asian children. The magazine's basic outlook, said Harold Hayes, one of its best editors, was to be "smart-ass."

Another word for it is nihilistic. It was brilliant to assign Norman Mailer to cover the 1964 political conventions; it was sick to have 1968 covered by the French Playwright Jean Genet, Novelist William Burroughs (Naked Lunch) and Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg. That same nihilistic strain infected the magazine's outworn Dubious Achievement Awards, apparently meant for readers of Mad magazine who had aged but not grown up.

Clay Felker, returning in 1977 as a majority owner of the magazine he had once worked on, portentously declared that the "new Esquire" would provide the civilizing function for today's professional or managerial man"-- a kind of Madison Avenue gibberish that could only confuse readers. He added a lot of business stones. But Esquire's genes caught up with Felker: "I made the mistake of trying to change the magazine too much."

Esquire's new editor is 32; the publisher, a onetime college friend of his, is 31. Editor Phillip Moffitt, having now reached the average Esquire reader's age (the 30's) is sure he knows exactly what his generation wants: less of the old smart-ass Moffitt's generation, he says, saw the emptiness of their parents' lives but have now outgrown their own cynicism. Economically, "they assume they can make it if they work," says Moffitt. So "after survival needs, they want to know who they are, they want more meaningful vacations, careers and relationships." They also want to be "better consumers." (That oldtime Esquire merchandising again!) Moffitt is hardly nihilistic. He wants Esquire to provide helpful guidance to behavior that would leave a fellow "feeling right, feeling good about himself." Back somewhere in the genes, the bug-eyed Esky must be rolling his eyes about that.

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