The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  Magazine mastheads have always reflected the lack of equality in the separate-but-never-equalness of the men’s and women’s magazines themselves. You could define the difference by the amount of so-called service they ran. Women’s magazines were full of advice and how-to pieces, many written by women who would have preferred covering politics to comparison-shopping for panty hose. Men’s magazines were understood to be more serious and ran journalism and important fiction. Perhaps men didn’t need any advice.

  Until the 1960s, most of the women’s magazines were even edited by men, most notably John Mack Carter, a diminutive Kentuckian and “bluegrass evangelist” for women’s magazines, according to Advertising Age. John Mack, as he was known, arrived at work one morning in 1970 to find his office at the Ladies’ Home Journal occupied by dozens of feminists demanding his resignation, as well as services like day care for staffers’ children. Some were sitting on his desk smoking cigars. He wasn’t about to give up his job, but he listened for eleven hours. “There was more discrimination than I thought,” he said later.

  John Mack also edited McCall’s and, ultimately, Good Housekeeping—the other top women’s titles in the “Big Three”—making him theoretically the most important shaper of women’s magazines from the 1960s into the ’90s, when he stepped down. They were “badly behind the times,” he told the New York Times in an interview in 1963. “They were using baby talk to communicate with their readers.” But the earth had already moved, so to speak, in 1962 when Helen Gurley Brown, a forty-year-old advertising copywriter and self-described “mouseburger,” published Sex and the Single Girl.

  It was an immediate best seller, although, preposterously, Helen was barred from saying “sex” during her afternoon television appearances, which made it impossible for her to mention the book’s title. She was soon a favorite on The Tonight Show, where she told Johnny Carson, “Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere.” And maybe Natalie Wood, playing Helen, even slept with Tony Curtis’s character in the movie—which contributed further to what Helen called “the hullabaloo.”

  It was a moment. Helen worked up a prototype of a women’s magazine and started showing it around. Gone were the etiquette tips and recipes. Her frank and hilarious observations about young women were both shocking and obvious. Of course they liked sex, and wasn’t it more interesting than the search for the perfect Jell-O salad? These women needed a magazine, and Helen became editor in chief of Cosmopolitan in 1965 with no editing experience. In its initial incarnation, in 1886, Cosmo was a “first-class family magazine”; it later became literary, publishing writers like George Bernard Shaw and Sinclair Lewis. But by the 1960s it was in economic free fall. Helen’s prototype and energy made her new Cosmo an immediate success. Her first issue sold out, featuring an article on the (then-new) birth control pill. She said her readers were single career women, and she was the first magazine editor to suggest having it all: “love, sex, and money.”

  Helen’s Cosmo was famously ridiculed to be about orgasms but it was also about health, careers, self-improvement, celebrities, fashion and beauty, and about being clear about what you wanted. Running pieces about orgasms was just smart editing: take something that is true but not talked about (premarital sex) and blow it out: Sleep with the boss? Why not?! Feminists branded her as anti-feminist at first but most came around: Don’t use men to get what you want in life. Get it yourself. If P. J. O’Rourke was a pants-down Republican, Helen was a feminist in a minidress and fishnet stockings.

  —

  WHEN I ARRIVED AT HEARST to edit Esquire, Helen was the star of the company. In the late sixties and early seventies, Helen’s Cosmo made greater profits than all the dozen or so other Hearst titles combined. That year, 1990, her newsstand sales averaged over two million copies and total ad revenue was over $150 million, not counting the twenty-seven foreign editions. She asked me to take her to lunch (an important distinction for Cosmo girls), and told me over her salad that the most important attribute for an editor was confidence. I wasn’t to let our adorable Hearst executives buffalo me. And I should stay close to my readers. One way Helen stayed close to hers was by riding the M10 bus down Central Park West to work every morning. And you know what? Those readers liked it when she got a little outrageous. And liked it best when they got real information.

  Helen never carried cash, at least not when we went to publishing receptions, as we did sometimes. At some point during what were always cocktail events, she’d ask for “a fin for the ladies’ room.” The next morning there would arrive by messenger a crisp five-dollar bill and a short thank-you in her beautiful hand. Before she died in 2012, she and her husband, film producer David Brown, had donated $30 million to establish the Brown Institute for Media Innovation as a joint venture between Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Stanford University School of Engineering. When I heard about that, I thought of Helen riding the M10 to work while black radio cars were dropping the other editors in chief in front of the Hearst building. And I doubt it still shocks, but when I read a recent Cosmo headline about penis size, I noted that the piece also included real information, the kind Helen always insisted on: “[Ed. note: the average penis size is 3.61 inches flaccid and 5.16 inches erect.]”

  —

  THE WOMEN I WORKED WITH when I was a young editor didn’t read Cosmo or any other women’s magazines except Ms. and the fashion titles—and I looked at those, too. They read what I read: the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the Face, the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, New York, the Village Voice, the New American Review and the newspapers. Most of those magazines are still around and if you look at the mastheads you will find many women executive editors, deputy editors, managing editors, Web editors, mobile editors, art directors, copy chiefs, research editors, photo editors…Too bad only two of those magazines are edited by women (Harper’s editor Ellen Rosenbush; Mother Jones editor in chief Clara Jeffery).

  But before we put another nail in the self-carved coffins of the magazine business, note that two warhorse legacy titles now have women running the edit: Susan Goldberg at National Geographic and, at Time, the exquisite writer Nancy Gibbs, who was hired there as a part-time fact-checker in 1985. Vice magazine’s editor in chief is former intern Ellis Jones, who when she got the job in 2015 said, “Expect writing by even more female correspondents; expect new fiction and photojournalism and columns by big-name writers; and expect even more in-depth reports from global hot spots.” That same year the Guardian got its first female editor in chief, Katharine Viner. Marcia McNutt became the first female editor in chief of Science Magazine in 2013.

  If you look at digital-first operations, you see more women: Yahoo News (Megan Liberman, editor in chief); Slate (Julia Turner, editor in chief); CNN Digital (Meredith Artley, editor in chief); Politico (Susan Glasser, editor); and Refinery29 (Christene Barberich, founding editor in chief). And forget not Arianna Huffington, on top of her eponymous website that for the second year in a row (2015 and 2014, according to the Women’s Media Center) had the highest percentage of female bylines: 53 percent of contributors were women. Those same years, the awarding of bachelor’s degrees in communications (where journalism usually lives) was even more lopsided: men 37.5 percent, women 62.5 percent; master’s degrees: men 32.4 percent, women 67.6 percent.

  These are all rosy developments but other appallingly less optimistic research (by the Nieman Foundation) shows that back in 1998, 36.9 percent of journalists were women; that figure was 37.2 percent in 2013. Two years later, the Women’s Media Center analyzed 27,758 pieces of news content (TV, print, Internet, wires) and found that 62.1 percent was produced by men. As Ms. Magazine cofounder Gloria Steinem said, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

  —

  WOMEN’S MAGAZINES HAVE BEEN COVERING so-called women’s issues—abortion, sexual health, domestic violence—for a long time, and often out in front of newsweek
lies and newspapers run by men and subject to both gender-driven cluelessness and editorial arbitrariness. At the same time, it is very hard to find female journalists who buy into the idea of women’s issues in the first place. That these issues are only for women because they are covered more aggressively in magazines like Marie Claire or Elle is a distinction as absurd as the idea that nobody reads them. But then…

  Robbie Myers, editor in chief of American Elle since 2000, has a story about giving a Delacorte Lecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2008. She talked about the mix of stories and fine writing that gives her magazine its distinctive voice. During the requisite Q&A, a guy raised his hand. “I had no idea that you did ten thousand words on Senator Obama,” he said. “How do you feel about the fact that nobody reads it?”

  Myers pointed out that she had an audience of twenty million across print and digital in the United States alone and that American Elle was the largest syndicator of content in the Elle network of forty-five editions. “We have hundreds of millions of women around the world,” she said. “I’m sorry that you think we’re nobody.” The last time Myers told this story, it was for a 2015 piece about her in Women’s Wear Daily, so “nobody” probably read that, either.

  −ENDIT−

  Men’s Fashion (526)

  THE EDITORS WHO REPORT ON, curate and manipulate men’s fashion are tribal. The fashion week shows in Milan, Paris and New York are like Tlingit potlatches, where gift giving is the economic system and personal style is the currency. What’s on the runways isn’t the attraction. That’s just the business; the most interesting anthropology is in the eccentricity of the editors and stylists—not just what they wear but what they care about and how hard they work.

  The first fashion editor I worked with was Tony Melillo, who dressed like a European playboy and gave Smart a presence in Milan, Paris and London, as well as New York, with almost no budget—an impossibility without great charm, which he had enough of to talk Norman Parkinson and Horst P. Horst into shooting more or less for fun. When Tony brought “Parks” into the office so I could meet him, they were both wearing ascots.

  Another time he left for Europe with four trunks of conservative business suits and returned three week later with fashion shots by Alfa Castaldi of the wildest of the avant-garde elite in five Eastern-bloc cities—they all wanted to be in an American magazine. He also introduced me and the magazine to Alfa’s wife, fashion conceptualist Anna Piaggi, who reminded me of Pinkie Black except that her clothing collection included 2,865 dresses and 265 pairs of shoes. Anna was known as a “walking museum” and a muse to many designers, most famously Karl Lagerfeld. Then there was the stylist Vern Lambert, who always hung out with Alfa and Anna, and who had dressed Keith Richards in snakeskin boots and feathers when the rest of the Stones were wearing suits.

  “Fashion is all politics,” Vern said when we met. This was something he said often.

  —

  AT ESQUIRE, MELILLO AND I worked with Bob Beauchamp, the smoothly wry and established fashion director with wonderful taste who schooled me in the importance of fabric and detail; and the fashion editor, John Mather, who drank twenty espressos a day, made all the shoots happen, and was effectively antisocial when we all traveled to the shows in Milan. Perhaps most eccentric was the gifted writer Woody Hochswender, a tall, suave, masculine guy with orange-red hair, who gave up his popular fashion column in the New York Times to edit Esquire Gentleman. Woody also happened to be a Buddhist, a very tough Buddhist.

  They all warned me individually that working together would be impossible because of the deadliness of fashion politics, but the first issue of Gentleman was called a breakthrough by the important designers. When it launched, during the ’92 spring shows in Milan, Alfa and Anna came to our party—Anna making an entrance in a combination of vintage haute couture and what either Hochswender or Melillo identified as “maybe pieces from her collection of fast-food uniforms.” Vern Lambert came too, wearing candy-cane-striped silk pajama bottoms and a rainbow Aborigine jacket, his gray goatee styled under his chin with a child’s plastic barrette and a black ribbon.

  “Fashion is all politics,” he said. “But I didn’t feel like it tonight, so I didn’t dress.”

  −ENDIT−

  Liz Tilberis (2,862)

  IN THE SPRING OF 1992, Liz Tilberis came to visit in the Hamptons, in Wainscott, where I had a place. It was Easter weekend and that Sunday we went to a lawn party at Jann Wenner’s house. It was to be relaxed, but with an elaborate egg hunt for the children, and Jann’s guest list included a range of people from the media, show business and publishing. Turning into the long driveway, Liz joked that she was nervous, that this was going to be her first important party since moving to America from London and she wouldn’t know anyone.

  I told her she didn’t look nervous.

  “Of course not,” she said. “Can’t let it show, can we?”

  I said most of the guests already knew about her, knew she had come to New York to rejuvenate Harper’s Bazaar.

  “Do not abandon me,” she said, widening her green eyes, a look I came to know as a kind of ironic kabuki. She wasn’t nervous at all. She was going to work that party.

  I remember watching her, vivid with her shining white hair, from across the lawn. Driving home, she told me she had received six invitations for weekends over the summer.

  “Imagine,” she said. “They were all very nice, but they don’t know me at all.”

  —

  OUR PACT WAS that she would help me with Esquire’s fashion and I would help her with “getting on in America.” We joked about it as she got on fine on her own, not just staffing her magazine and settling her sons in private school but becoming a Knicks fan. Her “field study” took her to gardens and museums, but also to Q-Zar, a laser-tag arena in New Jersey, for a “jolly riot.” Within less than a year, she and her husband, Andrew, had slept in the Lincoln Bedroom as guests of the Clintons. “My team,” she called Andrew and the boys, but it wasn’t sappy. What worried her, she said, was being too English: “Mustn’t ever use that word jolly.”

  For my fashion education, we traveled together to Milan, flying overnight from JFK to Malpensa, eating caviar and drinking vodka. On that flight I learned that she had refused to be confirmed at her all-girls boarding school (“I didn’t believe in God”) and had been expelled from art school for entertaining a man in her room. I also learned that she had almost moved to New York five years earlier to head Ralph Lauren’s design team. She had decided to stay in London when, two days after she’d given notice, Anna Wintour, who was then the editor in chief, told her that she was moving to New York—to become the editor of House & Garden (ten months later, she would be running American Vogue). Liz could have British Vogue if she wanted it.

  Of course, topping British Vogue had been another jolly riot. Bruce Weber’s first Vogue cover shoot was for Liz—a laughing model wearing minimal makeup. Pure Liz, her colleagues said. And it became an even better story when the proofs came back touched up with lipstick red because the printers were sure there had been a mistake. “They actually made it better,” Liz said. When she persuaded the Princess of Wales to pose for a British Vogue cover, the image was clean and simple—the look Diana made her own from then on. “It just made sense for her as a modern princess,” Liz said. “And I’m a little like Machiavelli.”

  Our first day in Milan was to end with a benefit in the courtyard of an old castle that had been tented with an enormous tarp against the forecast showers. It began to rain hard in the afternoon, and by evening the waiters were poking up at huge puddles on the sagging canvas with long poles. Sting was on the program and waved to Liz as we entered. She looked from the candle-set tables to the dripping canvas and announced that we were going immediately to Bice.

  We couldn’t find our car and started walking toward the restaurant in the downpour, getting soaked. Within a block, a limo driver—not ours—pulled over. He knew Liz and li
ked her, thought she might want a ride.

  “Fashion,” she said, climbing in, “is about long black cars when you need them.” The driver told us the tent had collapsed.

  Walking into Bice, we saw Valentino and his inner circle at the large round table in the back corner—like a tableau I had seen before but couldn’t place. The women, all in red gowns, were exquisite, the men handsome in black suits, but their frowns gave the scene a starkness. Valentino made a slight nod in our direction, and when we walked over he asked if the collapsed tent would reflect badly on the fashion houses. (Armani and Versace, both based in Milan, and Valentino, from Rome, had organized the event.)

  “Not on those from Rome,” Liz told him, and she went around the table complimenting everyone on how chic they looked. “Totally Valentino,” she said, and when the great designer smiled slightly the mood changed and we were invited to join them for dinner.

  “I wish we could have shot that table just exactly as it was when we walked in,” Liz told me as we left Bice after midnight. “The cold power of it, like those Bronzinos of the Medici.”

  Early the next morning, we began a round of appointments at designer showrooms. All went more or less the same way: Liz explaining to me (so the designer could hear) how brilliant the new line was, and then whispering to the designer what a formidable editor I was. We had a simple lunch in the backyard of the Armani palazzo with Giorgio and his top aide at the time, Gabriella Forte, while his Persian cat, Hannibal, hunted through the garden. Giorgio, too, was concerned about the collapsed tent, but he and Liz talked mostly about the distinctive cuts he was showing that season, and the importance of fine tailoring.

  Our week in Milan paid off in many new advertising pages for Esquire, but when it was over Liz thanked me for helping her get through it. Her advice was to bring presents the next time I visited, something personal that this or that designer could relate to, perhaps a cat toy for Hannibal.