Resurrecting a Legend

Conde Nast brings back Vanity Fair--but not entirely to life

Among the voluminous ranks of bygone American magazines, few are recalled as wistfully by readers as Vanity Fair, the raffish, snooty cultural monthly that blossomed in the optimism of 1914 and withered in the middle of the Depression in 1936. Vanity Fair never reached more than 99,000 buyers, and it reportedly lost money for Publisher Conde Nast (1873-1942) in all save one of its 22 years. But it featured writing by Thomas Wolfe, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Parker and P.G. Wodehouse and photographs by Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz. In an indulgent appraisal in 1960, Cleveland Amory contended that Vanity Fair had been "America's most memorable magazine."

The memory was particularly strong at the Conde Nast company; it is the nation's sixth largest magazine group (1982 advertising revenues: $180 million), and has been a leader in an industry-wide trend toward seeking the affluent, educated readers whom advertisers covet. Conde Nast is noted primarily for magazines about fashion and fitness (Vogue, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Self), but company executives believed that a cultural magazine could have even greater appeal "upscale" and invested as much as $15 million to develop the idea. Next week 732,000 copies of the first Vanity Fair in 47 years will be sent to newsstands and more than 600,000 charter subscribers.

Conde Nast officials insisted when announcing the revival: "You will not find a more handsome, readable magazine in America." That boast prompted high, perhaps unreachable, expectations. The first issue is certainly lavish (290 glossy pages) and diverse. To accompany an entire short novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature, the magazine bought rights to a dozen new paintings and drawings from celebrated fellow Colombian Fernando Botero. There are lively, offbeat articles: Gore Vidal reporting from the Gobi Desert, Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould speculating on why .400 hitters have disappeared from baseball. More predictably in a culture magazine, there are discerning reviews by Novelist Robert Stone of Joan Didion's Latin American reportage in her book Salvador, and by Staff Editor Walter demons and Los Angeles Times Music Critic Martin Bernheimer of Wagnerian opera productions for film and television.

First issues are often erratic; the new Vanity Fair is eccentric. It has not found its personality. A profusion of thick dividing lines and varying column widths fight to keep a reader's attention from straying to the words. The writing often reflects a lack of firm editing. Short reviews offer mostly glib opinion with scant analysis; the writers, moreover, apparently believe that if one metaphor per sentence is good, several are better, even if contradictory. A rambling rumination on "an American loss of nerve" by former New York Times Critic John Leonard has, aptly, a running leitmotiv of Japanese fog. In other articles, the language is occasionally odd, opaque, even incorrect.

Editor in Chief Richard Locke, 41, former deputy editor of the New York Times Book Review, and his 30-member staff have shown good taste in selecting writers and artists. But the first issue of Vanity Fair does not seem to have a point of view, which may leave readers puzzled as to what the April issue will offer. Part of the problem is that the inaugural is stacked up against some of the best of a vaunted parent. The liveliest bit of journalism in the new magazine is a portrayal of Malibu Beach by James M. Cain. It was first published--in Vanity Fair--in 1933. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.