The Passing Parade

For months, Multimillionaire John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, 53, has carefully assessed the competition-bruised New York Herald Tribune and wondered if he should exercise his option to convert the $1,200,000 loan he made last fall (TIME, Sept. 23) into a controlling interest. Last week, while his Herald Tribune plans seemed to be coming to a slow boil on a back burner, he took time off from his duties as U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's to conclude another deal that initiated him into big-time publishing. For a reported $10 million, Whitney bought bustling, prosperous Parade, the nationally distributed Sunday supplement founded by the late Marshall Field as an offshoot of his experimental ad-free Manhattan tabloid PM.*

Blare & Flair. Whitney's associates were quick to deny any connection between the deals for Parade and the Herald Tribune. "Parade was simply a good investment and was bought as such," said one. Even if Whitney does buy the Tribune, he will continue the paper's contract with Parade-rival This Week. More important, Whitney plans to call no new tunes for Parade. Publisher-President Arthur H. ("Red") Motley, 57, will remain on the job in full command with a new, long-term contract.

Under Motley, Parade has grown from a fife-and-drum outfit into a brass band with blare and flair. A onetime zither and Fuller Brush salesman, Motley quit as publisher of Crowell-Collier's American Magazine in 1946 to take over Parade, has since increased its client papers from 18 to 59 and its advertising sales from $1,808,562 to $19,400,000. With a circulation of 8,359,901, Parade is third in the burgeoning field of Sunday supplements behind This Week (11,960,921) and Hearst's American Weekly (9,751,945). One solid sign of Parade's growing strength: while the recession caused ad-revenue losses for most national magazines in the first half of 1958, Parade managed to pick up $2,300,000.

In the Pocket. Energetically back at work after a bout of illness last year, Marshall Field Jr., 42, plans to put the $10 million he got from the Parade sale into "concentrating and expanding the assets and activities of Field Enterprises, Inc. in Chicago and the Middle West." Last year Field spun off the profit-making Pocket Books for $5,000,000, finished a $21 million glass and aluminum palace for his flourishing Sun-Times (circ. 584,509) on the Chicago River. Field is now looking for name newsmen to bolster the Sun-Times, is said to be thinking of buying another Midwestern newspaper property (one rumored possibility: the jointly owned Rockford, Ill. Star and Register-Republic) or starting another book series like his profitable World Book Encyclopedia for children.

With Parade in his pocket, Ambassador Jock Whitney has a moneymaker that will help dam the drain on his fortune if he takes over control of the

Herald Tribune, plus a solid first link for the chain that some publishers are convinced is his eventual goal. At last report, Whitney was expected to make up his mind on the Herald Tribune within a month--and decide to buy.

* After losing some $5,000,000 on PM, Field sold it in 1948 to San Francisco Lawyer Bartley C. Crum and ex-Herald Tribune Editor Joseph Barnes, who turned it into the short-lived New York Star.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.