When editors were gods

A Time capsule of magazine history

As of June 1, anyone can access the Time.com website, including 100 years of back issues, free of charge. Readers of this blog might want to check out the magazine's extensive (if often bite-size) coverage of its own industry over the decades. 

There is, for example, its 1977 portrait of Clay Felker, then riding high at New York magazine: "He is variously described by associates and acquaintances as autocratic, devious, dishonest, rapacious, egotistical, power mad, paranoid, a bully and a boor. Almost in the same breath, the same people call Felker a genius."

Or its 1929 account of a cloak-and-dagger operation by Cosmopolitan magazine and its "short, stocky, chesty Editor [Ray] Long" to publish a reminiscence by the departing president Calvin Coolidge without competitors finding out about it first. (Apparently getting anything out of Silent Cal was a very big deal at the time.)

Or a 1965 item announcing that one Helen Gurley Brown, 43, had been appointed editor of Cosmopolitan — a magazine she would soon make unrecognizable to readers of Ray Long's day. "The magazine is bubbling with enthusiasm over its new editor, even though she has had no editing experience," Time reported.

There's a lot more here, some of which we'll explore in future posts.

The next issue is always going to be better

"Automobile manufacturers, novelists, fathers and magazine editors all have one trait in common — an unrestrained enthusiasm for the future. A man involved in any one of these risky ventures is perfectly willing to talk to you about his current model (convertible, whodunit, elder child, June issue), but if you really want to see a spark in his eye and hear him burble with hopeful pride, ask him about his next effort — the 1956 car, the unpublished manuscript, the newborn baby, the July issue." — from an editor's note in Holiday magazine, June 1955.

It’s Editormania!

Editor’s note: The following fantasy (or whatever it is) is a departure for this blog, which normally finds enough to amuse itself in real-life magazine history. However, having written it and not having any other obvious outlet for it, we’re posting it here.

 

It’s Editormania!

“I would distress my publicity directors because people wanted interviews with me and I wouldn't do them because I thought editors should be unseen and unheard. Do the work. Shut up. Get on with it.” — Robert Gottlieb, interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” January 3, 2023.

The release of the documentary “Turn Every Page” has changed everything, several prominent editors say. The film, which focuses on the working relationship between the biographer Robert Caro and his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb, has given viewers a rare glimpse of what editors actually do and, in the process, led to a nationwide frenzy that can only be described as editormania.

“I’ve spent decades bemoaning the anonymity of the job,” one previously obscure editor says. “Now I’d give anything to have that back.”

On recent out-of-town trips, the editor reports, he has found himself chased through airports by eager selfie seekers and, in one instance, offered a romantic interlude in an unlocked utilities closet by a star-struck fan. He says he considered it, simply out of politeness, but ultimately declined.

“This,” he adds, “is not what I signed up for.”

Like all of the editors interviewed for this article, he asked to remain anonymous.

Personally touching an editor, or even an object once touched by an editor, has become an obsession for many fans. A wrinkled cocktail napkin believed to have been sneezed into by a well-known fashion magazine editor recently sold on eBay for over $800. “I think they want her DNA,” says one rival editor, speculating that the buyer might hope to clone her once the technology becomes available. "As if one of her wasn't enough."

The rival editor recently saw a pencil stub filched from her own wastebasket offered at the Buy It Now price of $499, while her used Post-its were going for $25 and up. She suspects that editorial assistants and junior editors at the company are sifting through the trash after hours and putting items up for sale to supplement their salaries. “I know living in New York is expensive for young people and I sympathize,” she says, “but what I would say to them is, ‘Don’t you realize that this could be you someday?’”

Some souvenir hunters have become even bolder, another editor reports. “I have had them come after me with scissors, trying to snip a piece of my clothing or even my hair,” she says. “One made off with my Lhasa Apso.”

A limo driver who often works for Manhattan-based magazine publishers says his life has changed, as well. “Used to be editors were easy,” he explains. “Now it’s like movie stars or boy bands. I’ve had fans splayed on the hood, pressing their noses against the windows, tailing us on scooters and electric bikes. I can spend half the day wiping off their fingerprints.”

On the other hand, he adds, the phenomenon has been good for business. Many publishing houses, he says, are now booking second and third limos to serve as decoys.

Some editors have given up on limos altogether. One women's magazine editor, formerly a self-described "Limousine Queen," now gets around town huddled in the back of a Boor's Head delivery truck.

But editors appear to be particularly vulnerable on foot. Tired of being accosted whenever he steps out of his office building, one 60-something book editor has taken to wearing a hoodie, not only on the street but even in the restaurants he frequents.

“The worst thing,” he says, “is when you’re walking down the street with one of your best-known authors, and a mob of groupies comes out of nowhere. The author starts to get his pen out, but then all anybody wants is the editor’s autograph. So the author has to stand off to the side, pretending not to care. I’ve had relationships ruined this way.”

Other editors say they can no longer go outside for a smoke without being pestered. “Even if they keep a respectful distance and don’t come up to you, the second you drop a cigarette butt, somebody’s diving for it,” one says.

The problem is not limited to New York. The Dallas-based editor of a major hunting magazine says fans have begun camping out at his favorite duck blind, hoping he’ll make an appearance. At night, he says, they will often gather around his home, making loud quacking noises until he comes to a window.

The Los Angeles-based editor of a leading automotive magazine has seen his cars repeatedly stripped by souvenir hunters. At a recent racing event, he says, one fan had the nerve to ask him to autograph a catalytic converter stolen the week before from a station wagon parked in his driveway. “It wasn’t even my car,” he says, shaking his head.

In Phoenix, the retired editor of a popular sports weekly says he’s stopped attending Diamondbacks games, once a favorite activity. “I’m signing so many baseballs I barely have time to look up,” he explains. “I tell the fans, ‘Why don’t you go get a player’s autograph, for God’s sake? And, no, I will not sign your lady friend’s chest.’”

Not every editor is bothered by the new attention. The longtime editor of a trade magazine serving the funeral industry says it’s had its plusses. “The wife makes fun of my dark glasses,” he says, “but she likes the way that maître d’s now fawn all over us.”

Incidentally, “Turn Every Page” will be screened at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center on May 19, with a Q&A with director Lizzie Gottlieb to follow, as part of this year’s Biographers International Organization annual conference.

 

The editor in hell, 1921

"I had a vision of editors in hell. Each sat surrounded by literary men whose souls he had damned and whose work he had disfigured. These put bits of tarred twine between his toes and set light to them. After that they tied him down and read aloud yards of the stuff he had accepted. And that was the worst torture of hell." — from an unsigned item in the Musical Courier magazine, June 30, 1921. The magazine credits The Triad, an Australian publication, as the original source of this charming sentiment.

The mystery of where editors come from, 1921

"Where do editors come from? I don't know. You might as well ask me where the sparrows go to when they die. I have known about 355 editors intimately, and I never met the father or mother of any one of them, and certainly never heard the grandfather of any one of them so much as referred to. I think they come out of the ground in some slum when there is a hard shower after a long spell of dry weather." — from an unsigned item in the Musical Courier magazine, June 30, 1921. The magazine credits The Triad, an Australian publication, as the original source.

Next time, the same writer imagines where editors go after death and what awaits them there. Hint: It isn't pleasant.

The typical editor's office, 1927

“Today your editor is rather inclined to look like an East Indian potentate surrounded by all the pomp and ceremony that hedge a king. He sits inviolate and immured within paneling of Mexican mahogany, under mellowing oil paintings and surrounded by onyx pillars and Persian rugs and rosewood desk tops, with an undersecretary who receives you in the waiting room upholstered with brown Morocco, and ushers you into the anteroom with probably a Louis Quinze motif predominating, where you are received by the great one’s personal lady confidante and eventually passed into the royal presence itself.” — an anonymous “author’s wife,” who seems to have accompanied her hubby on visits to editors, writing in The Saturday Evening Post in 1927.

By all accounts the author was Margaret Stringer, whose husband, Arthur Stringer, was a well-known novelist, poet, and magazine writer. That same year she published a widely praised book on the topic, “Confessions of an Author's Wife,” also anonymously.

Michael Lewis on the 'sad lot' of editors

"[I]t has always been the sad lot of editors to remain impatiently anonymous while their writers — whom they regard invariably and sometimes justly as idiots — become famous." — Author Michael Lewis, writing in American Heritage magazine in 1994.

Lewis's piece riffs on a series of cigarette cards issued in the 1880s that depict 50 leading newspaper editors of the day. You can see them in all their bewhiskered glory here. To my knowledge (and, frankly, astonishment), magazine editors have never been similarly honored. 

An editor answers a common beef of rejected writers

"An experienced editor knows that it is not necessary to eat an entire ox to test the quality of the beef. A single paragraph anywhere in a manuscript gives him a clue to the quality of the whole." — Orison Swett Marden, editor of Success magazine, in his 1914 book "Hints for Young Writers."

Similar sentiments have been attributed to a number of famous editors (Edward Bok, George Horace Lorimer, etc.) though the food in question varies (apples, eggs, cheeses, etc.). Personally, I  like the "entire ox" version.

 

R.I.P. Warren Boroson (1935-2023)

Warren Boroson, a veteran magazine editor and writer, died on March 12 at age 88.

A former colleague and longtime friend, Warren is the subject of a lengthy obituary in the March 23 New York Times, which condenses the bulk of his career into a single sentence, while devoting nearly half a page to a lone episode he seems fated to be remembered for. (Of course, without that episode he might not have gotten an obit in the Times at all, let alone a big free one written by Sam Roberts.)

The episode involved a famous 1964 poll of psychiatrists published in Fact magazine. The story based on the poll concluded that a majority of psychiatrists believed the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater to be mentally unstable and unfit for the presidency. Goldwater’s lawsuit against the magazine (and Boroson personally) went all the way to the Supreme Court and led to the creation of the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater Rule, which says it is unethical for psychiatrists to pass judgment on people they have not personally examined.

The Goldwater Rule was back in the news in recent years, when a certain president’s behavior raised questions that members of the psychiatric profession appeared best equipped to address, if even they could.

I worked with Warren at Sylvia Porter’s Personal Finance magazine in the late ‘80s, where he was a senior editor. The Goldwater experience hadn’t totally spoiled the fun of polling for him, but his polls were now confined to mutual fund managers and other financial worthies, whose ethics rules seem to have been a bit looser.

The Sylvia Porter editorial crew in Central Park, 1988. That's Warren kneeling beside
the magazine's editor, Pat Estess.

 

Warren had more contact with Sylvia than most of us; as far as I know she never set foot in our offices. Regarding her unfortunate late-career habit of publishing PR handouts virtually verbatim, he famously observed that, “half of America read Sylvia’s columns, and the other half wrote them.”

At some point prior to SPPFM he had worked at Money magazine under, I believe, its founding editor, William S. Rukeyser. Warren once told me that he’d discovered the common denominator among personal finance writers and editors: “We were all English majors.”

Warren also mentioned that he had worked in some capacity at Pageant magazine, whose boy wonder editor, Harris Shevelson, he recalled, “Told entire staff, on Friday, to come in Monday with 100 story ideas!” (This must have been early in Warren’s career because Shevelson was killed in a famous East River plane crash in 1959, having already left Pageant.)

Another stop in his career was Next, an early 1980s magazine about the future that, unfortunately, didn’t have much of one.

In 2017 Warren sent around an email with the subject line “My Contribution to the Goldwater Rule” that to my knowledge was never published elsewhere.

In that email Warren explained how he came to work for the late Ralph Ginzburg, the founder and editor of Fact magazine: “I had been a college English major, and now at age 29 eager to become a famous writer. But I found myself working in the public relations department of Western Electric, then a part of AT&T. So I jumped at the chance to join Ginzburg’s staff, first at Eros magazine, a pretentious, hard-cover sex magazine (Time called it a four-letter word: b-o-r-e); then at Fact, an angry, muck-raking magazine. Fact published some trash, but also excellent articles, including an essay by Arnold Toynbee against the Vietnam war.”

Separately, Warren told me that he had taken a magazine writing class with Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire in its 1960s New Journalism glory days, and a fellow classmate, Frank Brady, had helped him get the job with Ginzburg.  (Coincidentally, Hayes and Ginzburg were contemporaries at Esquire, and Hayes had beaten out both him and Clay Felker for the top job there. Each went off to create their own magazines.)

As to the infamous Goldwater article, Warren explained that the poll was Ginzburg’s idea and that his own contribution was to have been “a psychological profile of Goldwater. I based my article mainly on a famous study of fascist sympathizers after World War II, a study called The Authoritarian Personality. And I spoke with a noted psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson, author of ‘Young Man Luther,’ who was encouraging. My article argued, among other things, that Goldwater was trying to prove his masculinity with his relentlessly tough stance against the Soviet Union.”

But, he said, Ginzburg had someone “whom I never met, rewrite my article. He did, taking out all mention of authoritarianism. I was so furious that I resigned from the magazine and insisted that my name not appear on the article.”

Ginzburg, he added, “was a clever, ambitious, contradictory person; a liberal in politics, but also somewhat unscrupulous. His main failing: oversimplifying things. He did know a good deal about mailing lists and promotion.” Warren said he considered the Goldwater poll “slapdash.”

The Goldwater article, to the extent that Warren was responsible for it, wasn’t his only controversial contribution to Fact. Another was a piece about Reader’s Digest titled “The Pleasantville Monster,” in which he characterized the magazine as a “cross between the John Birch Society Newsletter and a Sears Roebuck catalogue” and went on from there.

That article also proved memorable, at least in Pleasantville. He was still persona non grata at The Digest when I worked there 30 years later.

 

Although sometimes they'll buy you lunch

"The only advantage in meeting editors is to let them meet you, have a point of personal contact with you, and know whether their stories are written by a square guy or a hophead." — H. Bedford-Jones, writing in The Author & Journalist magazine, 1931.

Bedford-Jones (1887-1949) was a journalist, novelist, and short story writer, so prolific in his day that he was considered the "King of the Pulps."

 

The secret of success in magazine work (also circuses)

"A shrewd understanding of human nature, a real sympathy with it, is the secret of success in magazine work, as in running a department store, a church, or a circus." — James Eaton Tower, editor of Good Housekeeping magazine, writing on "Educated Women in Magazine Work," a chapter in the book "Vocations for the Trained Woman: Opportunities Other Than Teaching" (1910).

Tower was the ring master of Good Housekeeping from 1899 to 1913.

A nostalgic tribute to a 1970s time capsule

Today's print edition of The New York Times has a charming piece about Apartment Life magazine, long defunct but an amazing time capsule of 1970s furnishings, clothing, hairstyles, values, and all-around grooviness.(Old magazines, maybe more than any other medium, seem to have this power to take us back to another era.)

The Internet Archive has quite a few back issues of the magazine, though, alas, in black-and-white.