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"I think that what pleases me will please other women, what amuses me will amuse them. I would like to produce a magazine of pleasure and instruction, light enough and easy enough to throw away when you are through with it, for there's always another one coming up." — Diana Vreeland, then editor of Vogue in a 1964 newspaper interview.
Vreeland is credited with, among many other things, popularizing the word pizzazz.
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"Cannot the government see its way to relieve the stress thus occasioned by buying up all surplus manuscripts and destroying them, or else get the magazine editors to pledge to increase the number of pages they print and thus make it necessary for them to buy more freely?" — from an unsigned item that ran in newspapers in Nebraska and South Dakota in September 1933.
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"Touring their apartment, it's clear both Browns have indeed lived the good life — after all, they own four floors. The top tower level is a lush retreat featuring a canopy of four ficus trees. The third story, the couple's master bedroom, boasts a Brown wall of fame (David at the White House as a 13-year-old Boy Scout, Gurley Brown on Roger Daltrey's lap). Above the former maid's suite, where Brown hunkers down to practice ham radio, is the living area, crammed with stacks of coffee-table books." — From a 2007 article on longtime Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown and husband David Brown, a magazine editor turned movie producer, by Olivia Barker, Gannett News Service.
The observant Barker also made note of the pumpkin shag carpet in the living room, the bubble-gum shag in the master bedroom, the red-lacquered walls of the dining room, the leopard print rug in a home office, and the zebra-stripe wallpaper in one bathroom.
The Browns' four-story penthouse sat atop the Beresford, a storied and celebrity-stuffed apartment house on Central Park West. After their deaths it sold for $19.4 million.
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"An actor's nightmare, it is said, is appearing on the stage with no apparel; an editor's is an empty schedule." — Charles Hanson Towne, writing in 1933.
Famous in his day, largely forgotten in ours, Towne edited The Delineator, Harper's Bazaar, McClure's, and the Smart Set. He also wrote two memoirs, "Adventures in Editing" (1926) and "So Far, So Good" (1945), and was a well-regarded poet, to boot.
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"Editor-Publisher MacAusland's private sanctum is a glamorous conglomeration of French period furniture, marble fireplace, paintings, cut glass and flowers, shared by his four dogs — three French poodles and a Yorkshire terrier." — Rene Cappon of the Associated Press in a January 1957 article about Earle MacAusland, founder, publisher, and longtime editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. Gourmet, the article reported, occupied "a sumptuous suite of offices in the penthouse of a super-refined Fifth Ave. hotel."
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“Nancy has homes in New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut — in addition to a three-story Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue. The New Hampshire hideaway — a charmingly renovated barn — is her most-telling blithe spirit badge. There’s a fringed surrey in the hallway in which coats can be dumped, a buggy on the second floor for impromptu sitting, and an old-fashioned sleigh in the living room so that cocktail party guests can climb in and chat in relative privacy.” — Marian Christy of the Boston Globe, describing the assorted abodes of Nancy White, editor of Harper’s Bazaar from 1958 to 1971.
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“The magazines’ youngest editor Otis L. Wiese, has joined the pent-housers on what is perhaps the grandest scale of his craft. His duplex mosque in the East 80’s includes 12 rooms, 5 baths and a variety of terraced gardens. Mr. Wiese came out of Iowa and when he took his post several years ago had just turned 21.” — Pioneering gossip columnist O.O. McIntyre, who seems to have had a particular fascination with magazine editors, writing in March 1935.
Wiese edited McCall’s magazine from 1928 to 1958.
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“As for his personal habits: He likes fish chowder, has fine automobiles but does not drive them, has forty suits, shaves himself twice daily and has a shower in his office.” — From a CBS radio network press release on a forthcoming appearance by Ray Long, editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, April 1931.
One of the best-known magazine editors of his day, and reputedly the highest-paid, Long shot himself in 1935 after failing to repeat his success in the movie business. He was 57.
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