When editors were gods

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.

 

R.I.P. Victor Navasky

Victor S. Navasky, longtime editor of The Nation, died on Monday (January 23) at age 90.

Both during and after his run at The Nation, Navasky proved to be an astute and witty observer of the magazine scene. His books include the memoir "A Matter of Opinion" (2005), which recounts his experiences editing the influential but financially fragile liberal opinion magazine, and "The Art of Making Magazines" (2012), edited with Evan Cornog, in which an assortment of well-known magazine types share their wisdom.

In an unsigned editor's note in the 2007 edition of The New York Review of Magazines that is generally attributed to him, Navasky (we assume) wrote that, "The nice way to say it is that great magazines are the product of visionary editors. The other way to say it is that interesting magazines are spawned by self-centered megalomaniacs."

 

 

Happy centennial, Time magazine

This year (2023) marks the 100^th anniversary of Time magazine, as its cover has already started reminding us.

The first issue of Time, all 32 pages if it including covers, was dated March 3, 1923. A tiny masthead at the bottom of page 23 lists the soon-to-die-young Briton Hadden and the soon-to-be-really-rich Henry R. Luce as editors.

Before launching their magazine, Hadden and Luce had shown a prototype to H.L. Mencken, hoping for his approval. Mencken’s reported reaction: “It will never work.”

Time’s centennial follows by a year that of another hugely successful magazine of the 20^th century, Reader’s Digest. Though different in many respects, both magazines were created and edited to serve the same basic need, that of busy Americans who wanted to stay informed but didn’t have the time or desire to read everything.  

Setting a rather high bar for contributors, 1916

“Whatever appears in a magazine should manifest genius.

“A magazine editor should decline any contribution, even if the President wrote it, that is not obviously the work of a man of genius.”

—Alexander Harvey, in his weekly publication The Bang, April 17, 1916.

A biographical sketch written by H.L. Mencken notes that Harvey was at various times a newspaper reporter and editor, a novelist and short story writer, and the author of books on Robert Louis Stevenson, William Dean Howells, Percy Bysshe Shelley, socialism, and the “woman question.” He was also an editor of the magazine Current Opinion.

Editor accuses alleged kitten skinner, and the fur flies

On this day (January 6) in 1928, newspapers reported that Jesse Pomeroy, a longtime lifer in the Massachusetts State Prison, was suing Alice Stone Blackwell, noted suffragist and editor of The Woman's Journal, for $5,000. Blackwell had accused Pomeroy of skinning a live kitten in his jail cell, not in the pages of her magazine but in a 1925 letter to a Boston newspaper, opposing his possible parole. Pomeroy denied the accusation. Blackwell said her letter was fair comment. The jury sided with Pomeroy but awarded him just $1 in damages.

Is this what Isaac Asimov really thought of editors?

"Editors are fiends, one and all, and it is a worthy task to get even with them after being at odds with them. It would be a happier, a purer, a more fragrant world if every editor were buried under a huge heap of stinking maradram, though that, of course, would make the smell worse." — Azazel, a "two-centimeter extraterrestrial being" who appears in a number of Isaac Asimov's fictional works, speaking of the editors where he comes from. The story, which seems to have originally appeared in the magazine Analog Science Fiction & Fact, is included in the author's "Magic: The Final Fantasy Stories" (1996).

In addition to being an extraordinarily prolific writer, Asimov was at least nominally a magazine editor, of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. I worked for another magazine published by the same company, and while I don't know how hands-on he was as an editor, he did put in frequent appearances at his namesake's offices. One year, in fact, he dressed as Santa Claus and handed out the Secret Santa gifts at our company's holiday party. Unfortunately, he apparently overplayed his dirty old man persona, and he didn't reprise the role after that.

The editor and illustrator who fathered the famous New Year’s baby

The Saturday Evening Post didn’t invent the New Year’s baby, but it might as well have. While countless magazines have put babies on their covers to note the arrival of a new year — The New Yorker, Liberty, Collier’s, and Mad, to name a diverse few — the Post’s idealized infant, drawn for decades by J.C. Leyendecker, became the most familiar by far.

“If The Saturday Evening Post was known for one image, it was J.C. Leyendecker’s New Year’s Baby, which, since 1906, had been bouncing joyously onto the cover in top hats and various getups,” Deborah Solomon wrote in “American Mirror,” her 2013 biography of Leyendecker’s friend and fellow illustrator Norman Rockwell.

That would not have been possible but for the Post’s all-powerful editor, George Horace Lorimer.

John Tebbel, author of a 1948 Lorimer biography, noted that the New Year cover was “always a Leyendecker canvas and uniformly beloved by the Boss.”

But as much as the Boss revered Leyendecker’s work, “no illustrator, whatever his fame, had control over a cover of the Post. Like everything else in the magazine, the cover belonged to Lorimer. He would review a set of potential covers rapidly, dismissing most with a cursory glance and a terse ‘Out,’” Jan Cohn wrote in the 1995 book “Covers of The Saturday Evening Post.”

Leyendecker, a celebrated illustrator who created the iconic Arrow Collar Man for shirt ads and drew a record 322 Post covers, delivered his first New Year’s baby for the magazine’s December 29, 1906 issue, marking the coming of 1907. The baby, a girl with a bow in her hair and angel wings on her back, had a pinkish hue, made possible by the magazine’s two-color (black and red) printing process.

For 1908 the baby, possibly a boy, is accompanied by a stork. In 1910, he or she is joined by a Father Time-type codger symbolizing the old year. The baby appears to be attempting to sell the old man a copy of the Post. 

 

Leyendecker's 1908 New Year's baby and friend. Credit: Wikimedia Commmons

As the years went by, the baby changed with the times. In December 1911, a girl baby totes a sign promoting women’s suffrage. The December 30, 1916 cover shows a worried-looking baby surveying the world globe, the warring nations of Europe shaded in black. For December 29, 1917, six months after the U.S. entry into the war, a helmeted baby stands at attention and salutes, a sword conveniently covering his (or her) private parts.

The Post began printing covers in four colors in the 1920s. The baby was a little slow to adapt, but by the late 1920s and early 1930s, he or she was in full color as well.  The December 30, 1933 cover shows a top-hatted baby happily scanning a stock-market ticker tape, presumably hoping that the country’s fortunes would improve in 1934 and reflecting Lorimer’s upbeat, pro-business attitude.

When Europe went to war once more, Leyendecker’s tone became less optimistic. For the December 30, 1939 cover, the baby is wearing a gas mask. The following year, a crying baby dangles by its diaper from a sinister iron-gloved hand. For the January 3, 1942 cover, the baby is back in uniform — a military-style cap, at least — astride the globe and guarding the Western Hemisphere with a cocked pop gun. Given the magazine’s production lead times, it’s unlikely that it or Leyendecker had yet had time to react to the country’s entry into the war in December 1941. But in January 2, 1943, the baby is in full combat mode, helmeted, armed with a rifle, and jabbing a swastika with his bayonet. The magazine had rejected another Leyendecker concept for that year's cover, showing the baby hitchhiking to war, reportedly concerned that it hit a little too close to home for soldiers' families; the unpublished painting was auctioned off in 2020 for $275,000.

That cover would be the baby’s last. Lorimer had retired in 1936 and died in 1937. Under a new editorial regime, the magazine was now running more photographs on its cover. While Norman Rockwell and several other illustrators continued to produce covers, Leyendecker was out. He died in 1951 at age 77.

The magazine editor who ran for president (and was rejected)

Seventy-five years ago today (December 29, 1947) The New Republic announced that its editor, Henry A. Wallace, was resigning. The news came on the same day that Wallace delivered a radio address announcing his intention to run as an independent candidate in the 1948 presidential election. "When the old parties rot, the people have a right to be heard through a new party," he told listeners.

Neither announcement came as a total surprise. A week earlier The New Republic's publisher, Michael Straight, said publicly that Wallace would have to leave his post if he ran for office, adding that the magazine "will not be the organ of a third party."

Wallace had joined the magazine in December 1946 after serving one term (1941 to 1945) as vice president of the U.S., followed by a brief stint as secretary of commerce (1945 to 1946). Earlier in his career he had been the editor of a newspaper for farmers.

Ultimately, Wallace's Progressive Party ticket finished fourth in the election, trailing Harry Truman, who won in what was perceived as an upset; the Republican Thomas E. Dewey; and another independent candidate, the Southern segregationist Strom Thurmond. In total, Wallace received about 2.4% of the popular vote and exactly 0% of the electoral vote.

The magazine editor who gave the rest of us Festivus

December 23 is, of course, Festivus, the holiday “for the rest of us.”

While popularized by “Seinfeld,” it was actually invented decades earlier by a magazine editor, Dan O’Keefe.

O’Keefe spent 30-some years at Reader’s Digest. A 1978 issue lists him on the masthead as a senior editor. John Heidenry, in his book “Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader’s Digest,” refers to him as a senior staff editor in the 1980s, a notch up in the Digest hierarchy.

“Perhaps the most eccentric of the Younger Turks in Pleasantville was Dan O’Keefe, described by one associate as ‘a sophomore science nerd — very bright but painfully shy,’” Heidenry writes. “He was also widely regarded as [John] Wulp’s successor as resident intellectual, a man with strange interests in things like magic and philosophy…”

O’Keefe’s son, also a Dan, brought the Festivus concept to “Seinfeld,” where he was a writer. It made its debut in a December 1997 episode.

The elder O’Keefe told The New York Times in 2004 that he’d come up with the idea and celebrated the first Festivus in 1966. It evolved through the 1970s, becoming an O’Keefe family tradition.

“In the background was Durkheim’s ‘Elementary Forms of Religious Life,’ saying that religion is the unconscious projection of the group,” he explained to the Times, sounding very much like the man Heidenry described. “And then the American philosopher Josiah Royce: religion is the worship of the beloved community.”

O’Keefe died on 2012 at age 84. Festivus lives on.

Callous, chortling editor joke, 1922

The callous editor, into whose presence the aspiring humorist had forced his way, handed back the latest batch of laugh-inspiring offerings.

"You editors," remarked the joke artist, "take life too darn seriously."

"On the contrary," chortled the editor, "I could take yours with positive glee."

— From The American Legion Weekly, June 9, 1922

Incidentally, the weekly's own editor at that time was Harold Ross, who'd gain later fame as the founding editor of The New Yorker, launched in 1925.

What were the Seven Sisters magazines—and why were their editors usually men?

For much of the 20th century, magazines were the most influential and lucrative mass medium in the United States. Newspapers tended to be locally focused and rarely more than regional in their readership. Radio wouldn’t become a major force until the 1930s and ‘40s, and television until the 1960s. As late as 1962, national magazine ad revenues topped $875 million, compared to $800 million for network television.^[1] And during much of that era, few magazines were more influential or lucrative than the so-called “Seven Sisters.”

The “sisters”— Better Homes & Gardens, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, Redbook, and Woman's Day — advised women on how to dress, how to cook, how to decorate their homes, how to raise their children, and even how to think about politically charged issues such as birth control, the Vietnam war, and women’s rights.

Though it seems hard to fathom today, the chief editors responsible for dispensing such advice to women were, more often than not, men. Better Homes & Gardens, for example, was edited by men from its founding in 1922 until 1993. Family Circle would have an unbroken series of male editors from 1932 until 1988. Good Housekeeping, founded in 1885, wouldn’t hire its first female editor-in-chief, Ellen Levine, until 1994.

Woman’s Day appears to have been the lone exception, with a succession of female editors since its launch, by the A&P supermarket chain, in 1937.

Ladies’ Home Journal had a slightly more tangled history. Though its first editor was a woman, the wife of its owner, it would be edited by men from 1889 until 1935, when a husband-and-wife team, Bruce and Beatrice Gould, took over. While they were billed as equals on the magazine’s masthead, the executive who appointed them was quick to tell the male of the pair, “Bruce, don’t forget — you’re the boss.”

When the Goulds retired in 1962, their handpicked successor was another man, crewcut 33-year-old Curtiss Anderson. Perhaps on the defensive due to his age and gender, he told The New York Times, “I have always subscribed to the idea of the professional editor — the individual who can edit any magazine with taste and imagination.”

If Anderson seemed youthful at 33, his rise wasn’t unprecedented in the manly world of women’s magazines. Otis Weise, the “boy wonder” editor of McCall’s, had taken that job at age 22 and managed to keep it for another 30 years, until 1958.

Despite his taste and imagination, however, Anderson didn’t fare well politically and was out by 1964. His successor, and two more after that, would also be men. Only in 1973 would Ladies’ Home Journal get its first female top editor, Lenore Hershey. Never mind that its advertising slogan, since 1946, had been “Never underestimate the power of a woman.”

While many male editors-in-chief had women on their staffs, sometimes as their seconds-in-command, there was no question who was in charge or who set the agenda for what their magazines would or would not cover.

Edward Bok, a Dutch immigrant who edited Ladies’ Home Journal from 1889 until 1919 and built it into the first magazine with a circulation of over 1 million, used the power of his position to launch numerous crusades, some admirable and some otherwise, by today’s standards. Bok banned ads for quack remedies from his magazine, inveighed against the slaughter of endangered birds to decorate women’s hats, ran courageous articles about the taboo subject of venereal disease, and hired a staff of 35 editors just to answer readers’ questions by mail. At the same time, he disparaged women’s suffrage, explaining later that he “felt that American women were not ready to exercise the privilege intelligently”— though to his possible credit, he did allow suffrage proponents to make their case in his pages.

Bok's authority at the office was not to be questioned. In 1912, when he caught some of his young female employees practicing a popular but supposedly risqué dance called the Turkey Trot during their lunch break, he fired all 16 of them on the spot. 

A famous figure in his day, Bok won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1921 autobiography and retired to Florida, where he built a 205-foot-tall shrine to himself, the Bok Singing Tower, at the base of which his remains now reside. But perhaps his most lasting legacy was as a patriarch of sorts to the several generations of male editors who succeeded him at the helm of major women’s magazines.

An advertising poster for The Ladies' Home Journal, 1896. (New York Public Library Digital Collections)

In that autobiography, The Americanization of Edward Bok, he addressed the question of why men were better suited to edit women’s magazines than women themselves were. It’s worth reprinting a cringeworthy chunk of his argument:

There is a popular notion that the editor of a woman's magazine should be a woman. At first thought, perhaps, this sounds logical. But it is a curious fact that by far the larger number of periodicals for women, the world over, are edited by men; and where, as in some cases, a woman is the proclaimed editor, the direction of the editorial policy is generally in the hands of a man, or group of men, in the background. Why this is so has never been explained, any more than why the majority of women's dressmakers are men; why music, with its larger appeal to women, has been and is still being composed, largely, by men, and why its greatest instrumental performers are likewise men; and why the church, with its larger membership of women, still has, as it always has had, men for its greatest preachers.

In fact, we may well ponder whether the full editorial authority and direction of a modern magazine, either essentially feminine in its appeal or not, can safely be entrusted to a woman when one considers how largely executive is the nature of such a position, and how thoroughly sensitive the modern editor must be to the hundred and one practical business matters which today enter into and form so large a part of the editorial duties. We may question whether women have as yet had sufficient experience in the world of business to cope successfully with the material questions of a pivotal editorial position. Then, again, it is absolutely essential in the conduct of a magazine with a feminine or home appeal to have on the editorial staff women who are experts in their line; and the truth is that women will work infinitely better under the direction of a man than of a woman.^[2]

Bok’s spiritual successors would include men like Herbert Mayes, a high school dropout who edited Good Housekeeping from 1942 to 1958 and McCall’s from 1958 to 1961. So powerful was Mayes that he could boast in a 1980 memoir that, “My office door was always open to the magazine’s [ad] salesmen provided they came in on their knees.”

The novelist Judith Krantz, who briefly worked for Mayes at Good Housekeeping, recalled in her own 2000 memoir that he “was unrelenting in his criticism, he barked the most unbelievably insulting things to people, he had no sensitivity to any feelings, no matter how justified, his progress down a hall of the magazine was preceded by a wave of fear, editorial meetings were mass anxiety attacks. His employees spent entire lunches whispering together, comparing monster stories about him.” And she seems to have liked him more than most.

Then there was John Mack Carter, an amiable Kentuckian from all appearances, who spent almost his entire career running women’s magazines, including the three biggest: McCall’s from 1961 to 1965, Ladies’ Home Journal from 1965 to 1973, and Good Housekeeping from 1975 to 1994. (From 1973 to ’75, he edited American Home magazine.)

Carter remained a power in the industry until shortly before his death in 2014, but he may be most widely remembered today for a single incident in March 1970. As recounted in newspapers at the time and more recently in books such as Lynn Povich’s 2012 The Good Girls Revolt, an estimated 100 feminist protestors occupied his plush corner office for 11 hours, smoked his cigars, denounced him as a male chauvinist pig, and demanded that the magazine put out a “special women’s liberation issue,” for which they had already mocked up a cover. In a compromise, Carter agreed to allow them an insert in a future issue.

Carter reportedly kept his cool throughout it all, although it’s hard to imagine he wasn’t at least a little peeved about the cigars.

Besides Mayes and Carter, other men with more than one women’s magazine on their résumés included Wade Hampton Nichols, Jr., who ran Redbook from 1949 to 1958 and Good Housekeeping from 1959 to 1975, and Robert Stein, who edited Redbook from 1958 to 1965, and McCall’s from 1965 to 1967 and 1972 to 1985.

In between Stein’s two McCall’s stints, the magazine’s editor was, of all things, a woman, Shana Alexander, who had previously worked at Life. Though her editorship ended in acrimony all around, Alexander went on to fame on TV’s 60 Minutes, where she regularly debated the conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick, a segment that became the inspiration for many a Saturday Night Live parody (“Jane, you ignorant slut!” “Dan, you pompous ass!”).

Today just four of the sisters survive in print form: Better Homes & Gardens, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, and Woman’s Day. All but Better Homes are currently edited by women.

 

Footnotes:

[1] 1971 Business Statistics, U.S. Department of Commerce, pages 55-56.

[2] For Bok's complete song and dance on this question, see The Americanization of Edward Bok, starting on page 160.

 

Ah, that explains it!

This 1957 promotion for The Saturday Evening Post bravely attempts to answer the perennial question "What does an editor do?," with the assistance of Marilyn Monroe.

The recumbent man in the photo is Pete Martin, a Post senior editor who was known primarily as a writer and celebrity interviewer. The ad appeared in the trade magazine Advertising Age.