For Ladies Only

An operation was last week performed to change the sex of a famed periodical. The new management of Macfadden Publications, busy with redecoration since its divorce from 73 -year-old Publisher Bernarr Macfadden last spring, converted Physical Culture from a muscle magazine for would-be strong men to a beauty magazine for women only.

From onetime richest Macfadden magazine, Physical Culture had come gradually to smell of must and stale sweat. Its newsstand circulation fell to a senile 36,156, the smallest in the Macfadden tribe. But Oldster Macfadden, stubborn and misty-eyed, always remembered that Physical Culture 42 years ago started him on his climb to fortune, publicized him as a muscle messiah. As long as he had the say he flatly refused to turn it into a beauty magazine.

The new Physical Culture is edited by unobtrusive, 36-year-old Ernest V. Heyn, crack movie-magazine editor (Modern Screen, et al.), who went to Macfadden's Photoplay in 1937, last year merged it with Movie Mirror to make it top movie magazine (circ. : 800,000). It stresses health as the foundation of female beauty. With a print order of 275,000, alleged newsstand returns of the new Physical Culture indicated sales double those of the old muscle magazine.

Already it has a conspicuous subtitle, Beauty & Health. Odds are the old title will shrink and the subtitle grow to take its place.

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