James Wolcott on George Lois

The latest issue of Vanity Fair--a magazine which always gives me the bizarre feeling that it's ashamed to be TOO interesting--has a neat profile of legendary ad man and art director George Lois. Lois' covers for Esquire in the Sixties should be required viewing for anybody interested in magazines (and Carol Polsgrove's history, "It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, But Didn't We Have Fun?" is also worth reading if you can find a copy). It's an excellent example of what "a magazine" used to be, and still is, at least in my dreams.



In addition to making many interesting points and illuminating a tiny corner of American culture which truly deserves it, the author, James Wolcott, excoriates current magazine culture for its wanness and vapid timidity (my adjectives, not his). I'm always up for a good excoriation, but predictably I have a quibble or two. Which I will now inflict upon thee.



Wolcott writes, "Although the audacious covers he designed for Esquire in the 60s and early 70s are lauded as one of the marathon achievements in magazine history, these testimonials are nothing but talk--magazines have never played it safer. Circulation soared during the Hayes-Lois years and dove when they left [in 1973, I think--MG] yet no one seems to have picked up the baton, or the hint...There are practical hitches [in doing that kind of magazine today] as Lois himself concedes. No editor worth his monogrammed stationery wants to forgo prerogative and strike the dream deal that Lois enjoyed with Hayes, who committed himself to run whatever cover Lois finally dropped on his desk, damn the primal screams of outraged advertisers and cranky subscribers."



Note the missing element in this equation: ownership. In Wolcott's version, it was Hayes' lack of ego and faith in Lois that allowed those spectacular covers to exist. And certainly that's true. But as we all know, the person who signs the checks has the final say. If memory serves, in the Sixties Esquire (now owned by Hearst) was owned by Alfred Gingold, the magazine's one-time Editor, who had been around since the magazine's unlikely, spectacular launch in 1933. If it wasn't Gingold, it was still Esquire's Founder, David Smart. Read: individuals, and ones prone to take the occasional gamble, not a mammoth corporation. Convincing one person a cover is appropriate is a hell of lot easier than convincing a board of people.



It's all well and good to suggest that the Sixties was an age when giants like Hayes and Lois walked the Earth, and today's creatives are just spineless, but that ain't what's going on, and Wolcott knows it. Magazines are owned by massive corporations now, with lots of fingers in lots of pies. There are advantages to this, mainly on the publishing side; but the big negative falls on editorial freedom: they perceive that they have much too much to lose, to give some (extremely transitory) creative person his/her head. And from their perspective, they're probably right. It's one thing to convince Alfred Gingold to put his ass on the line--it's another thing entirely to convince S.I. Newhouse to put all his assets on the line.



Separation of publishing and editorial--"church and state"--is a nice idea, but it doesn't really exist anymore, because corporations publish magazines for one goal alone: to make money. Furthermore, they're not convinced that provocative editorial content does that for them, so they don't want it. I'm not arguing against the logic, but if all EVERY magazine wants to do is make as much money as possible, we see the kind of lassitude and homogeneity that results. And if today's creatives are spineless, it's because the process by which people rise in the business relentlessly rewards that. Only those people whose idea of fun is naturally very close to an advertisers' will make the cut. Conventionality, proper respect for money and power, is rewarded at every turn. And that's perhaps why all of these editors have monogrammed stationery in the first place!



Later, when talking about the post-People necessity of putting a celeb on every cover, Wolcott writes, "Celebrity culture prevails only because it's invaded a vacuum--the battleground vacated by Norman Mailer's armies of the night." But they didn't leave--they were pushed! And continue to be so! Celebrity culture didn't start to dominate because people got tired of thinking, much as it benefits the "pushers" to say so--it rose because magazine owners believed that they could make more money if the content of their issues was apolitcal and ephemeral. And if you crank that out for a generation, very few people will have enough imagination to ask for something different, even if the business was flexible enough to give it to them. Which it isn't--mediocrity reinforces mediocrity.



Back to Esquire. By the mid-70s, after shrinking in size to save money--and, it was generally felt, weakening the impact of those gorgeous covers--Esquire was out of business. Then it was restarted (by a guy named Philip Moffitt, I believe), changed owners a bunch of times, and slowly morphed into the harmless, pleasant thing it is today. Back in magazine school I remember reading a quote that said Moffitt had a revelation when he discovered that an issue with Truman Capote in it didn't sell any better than one filled with cheap fluff. If the only point of this is to make money, the conclusion is obvious.



THAT was the change: a conscious decision to change magazines (at least in America) from a full-fledged, free-standing wing of the culture that sank or swam issue-to-issue on the quality of its material, to a fundamentally parasitical form that latches on to the dominant media (TV, Hollywood) to siphon off some money for its owners. Magazines like that had always existed--film star magazines, TV Guide--but after People, everything became based on the power of another medium. Why try to provoke and entertain month-to-month when celebrity is forever? Why pay for the best writers when a magazine with the right star on it will sell better anyway? Even if corporate ownership hadn't put the breaks on it, the entire reason for challenging editorial content disappeared in this paradigm shift.



Before you bring up The New Yorker, let's get clear that it's been a long time since that magazine has been viable in any conventional sense. So they made what, a million dollar profit last year? Even if that is an authentic profit and not simply shifted costs (another benefit of corporate ownership), spending many, many millions to make one is not something a normal business would tolerate. We're all pulling for them--me included--but The New Yorker is a prestigious toy. While I'm sincerely glad somebody will foot the bill, its recent vigor doesn't represent anything close to a renaissance in the gentle art of magazines. In fact, it may say that all the talent and interest left in the business can be summed up in one magazine.



It is true that other things--the speed of news, the decline of reading as a habit--helped this process along. Esquire simply couldn't dominate certain corners of the culture now as it did then, with its three-month lead time. But the fact remains that greedy people making short-term, cynical decisions, and not some baleful lack of talent, have made the American magazine business what it is today: a wasteland. What serious creative person wants to write filler between the ads? I'm afraid it will have to get a lot worse, before it gets any better--especially on the distribution end, the mega-corps have stacked the deck against any new way of doing things. (Do you have enough money to give a year's worth of free ads? And guarantee at least 250,000 readers? I thought not.) But from brain-drain to reader flight, I think the industry's wounds are mostly self-inflicted. I'd like to think that Harold Hayes, were he alive today, would agree.