17 Men & a Girl

Esquire magazine hasn't had a girl it could call its own since a judge gave the Varga girl back to aggrieved Artist Alberto Vargas (TIME, May 13). Vargas said he had been outsmarted in the fine print of his contract with Esquire's Publisher David Smart. Last week at a Hollywood cocktail party, Publisher Smart unveiled the Varga Girl's successor. The new deal was not one girl but a gallery full, drawn not by one artist but by 17 of them.

For his best paid and most featured new girls, Smart signed on a pair of Hollywood studio draftsmen named Joseph De Mers and Fritz Willis, who work mostly as a team, passing the drawing board back and forth. Says De Mers: "I paint a while and he paints a while." Every month for the next three years they have contracted to produce, individually or together, five versions of the girl (see cut). Their fee: $1,000 a throw.

Esquire's foot-in-mouth pressagent Russell Birdwell immediately started lighting up the red fire for the De Mers-Willis girl ("Her glance is as predatory as some wild thing, her movements as lithe and bodily outspoken as those of some jungle creature."). Apparently no one had passed him the word that Esquire had changed its tune. Said Publisher Smart: "The Varga Girl gave you the idea she couldn't do anything but recline. The new Esquire Girl is more wholesome. She's the kind of a girl you'd marry, or try to. She'll be regular art-museum stuff."

Peru-born Artist Vargas, on his own now, intends to put out girlie calendars like the ones he did for Esquire. The new Varga Girl too, for reasons unexplained, is going to be less sultry. Said Vargas: "She's teen-age and decent. She will wear little playsuits and be more covered up."

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