Good Man & True

The publishers of True had talked about "striking boldly into an uncharted field . . . sounding out the public appetite for tabloid journalism in magazine form." But the public appetite for True proved small. In six years as a sexy, fact-detective pulp, True got only 240,000 readers--and was barely making carfare. Then it decided to go straight. By last week, the reformed True was up to 1,400,000. It entered the small company of magazines that guarantee to sell a million copies a month.

The reformation was part of a campaign by Fawcett Publications Inc., founded on the late Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, to make itself respectable. The reformer was a drawling newsman named Bill Williams, 42, who had cut his reporter's teeth on crime stories. (Once, he barely escaped death in a crossfire between Dillinger and the FBI.)

Born on a South Dakota ranch, beefy Bill Williams played on two college football teams (Wisconsin and Centre College, Danville, Ky.). He had been a Burns detective, a Yellowstone guide, and city editor of the Minneapolis Journal before he joined Fawcett in 1941. He was put to work editing Mechanix Illustrated, ran its circulation up from 216,000 to 440,000. Then he was handed True and told to make it a "general magazine for men." He tossed out the horror tales, switched to slick paper, went hunting for good writers (C. S. Forester, Budd Schulberg, Lucian Cary) and began paying them good prices. Last fall he sent Richard (Guadalcanal Diary) Tregaskis off to write a round-the-world diary (at $2,000 an entry, plus expenses) for True. "For stories we really want," says Williams, "we'll outbid anybody, even the Saturday Evening Post"

True, aiming at what Williams calls "the competitive American male, the man who admires skill, and who wants stories he can talk about at his bar or his club," became a yeasty mixture of sports, science, adventure and personality pieces. And the magazine began to make money.

As editor, Williams gets $20,000 a year and does most of his dickering with authors after office hours, at a nearby bar.

Despite its fast growth, True's position is none too secure. Some 95% of its sales are on newsstands, and Editor Williams is well aware that a collapse in the magazine market will hit the newsstands first. But he's not worried. Says he: "It simply means that True can't afford to have a bad issue."

Junior Bazaar, which was started 28 months ago for teenagers, found the going too hard. It announced its suspension as a separate publication. Starting in June, Junior Bazaar (circulation: 150,000) will appear as a 16-to 20-page section of its flossy parent, Harper's Bazaar (315,000).

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