Look How Outrageous!

Each month, somebody, somewhere, nearly bursts a blood vessel over the cheeky covers of newly prosperous Esquire. In June, the magazine's cover took off on Jacqueline Kennedy. In a doctored photograph, Esquire showed her sledding with Crooner Eddie Fisher, under the quote: "Anyone who is against me will look like a rat -- unless I run off with Eddie Fisher." Last November, a ventriloquist's dummy made to look like Hubert Humphrey graced the visible part of a foldout cover. Said the dummy: "I have known for 16 years his courage, his wisdom, his tact, his persuasion, his judgment, and his leadership." When the cover was opened, the full picture showed the dummy superimposed on the lap of, yes, Lyndon Johnson, who in turn was saying: "You tell 'em, Hubert."

The covers are meant to shout "Look at us! Look how outrageous we can be!" Sometimes the contents match the packaging. Every month, at least one Esquire article snipes at a sacred cow or takes some other unorthodox approach to a topic in the news. Recently, the magazine has offered "The Holy Kennedys," "The Late General MacArthur, Warts and All," "Bobby Baker Has It Made," "Two Cheers for the National Geographic," "In Defense of Cassius Clay," "The Life and Suspiciously Hard Times of Anthony Quinn," and "The American Newspaper Is Neither Record, Mirror, Journal, Ledger, Bulletin, Telegram, Examiner, Register, Chronicle, Gazette, Observer, Monitor, Transcript, nor Herald of the Day's Events."

Pseudotypical. The magazine can indeed be bold and occasionally brilliant, and sometimes superficial or old hat or appallingly tasteless. Such features as a parody of Scientific American, a roster of "The 100 Best People in the World" (Harry Bridges, Orson Welles, Charles de Gaulle), and recurring lists of what is In and what is Out might have had difficulty making the Harvard Lampoon. A cover like the tear-stained photograph of John F. Kennedy, which ran less than a year after his assassination, was patently concocted for shock. Another cover showed a morose nude jammed, derriere-first, into a garbage can. The article it advertised--"The New American Woman: through at 21" --was so heavily rewritten (seemingly to fit the cover illustration) that Freelance Writer Harlan Ellison refused to let Esquire use his byline. The article described a pseudotypical Los Angeles woman, prone to suicide, sexually jaded, hooked on pills and astrologically obsessed, who was supposed to be the wave of the future for all American women coming into their early 20s.

Regular features include acerbic book reviews by Malcolm Muggeridge, pedestrian travel notes by Richard Joseph, political commentary by Dwight Macdonald, a music column by Martin Mayer. Sprinkled throughout are a few of the oldfashioned, full-page cartoons of yesteryear's Esquire.

The mixture works. Circulation has climbed every month for the past 28 months, now stands at 1,050,000. (More than 25% of the readers are women.) In 1962, Esquire, Inc. lost $431,175. Last year profits totaled $3,450,000.

Playboy-Prodded. Esquire has seen several downs and ups. When it was born in 1933, the outgrowth of a men's-wear trade magazine, Editor Arnold Gingrich sought literary quality to complement his fashion features--and got it at $100 a story from Depression-pressed authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald, e. e. cummings, Dashiell Hammett, Ezra Pound, Thomas Wolfe and Thomas Mann. One exception: Ernest Hemingway, who characteristically demanded and got $200. Much of Esquire's fiction has remained on that level, with postwar bylines including Joyce Gary, William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, Sinclair Lewis, Albert Camus, Edward Albee, John Steinbeck and Truman Capote.

During World War II, the monthly pared its literary content, beefed up its G.I. appeal with pulpy westerns and mysteries and a parade of cheesecake by Illustrators Varga and George Petty. Following the war, Gingrich and Owner David Smart disagreed over the magazine's direction and Gingrich left. "It became a sort of uptown Argosy," says Gingrich. By the time he returned in 1952, "the original advertisers had left, ad revenues were down, and the whole climate was such that those associated with its early phase refused to touch it with a ten-foot pole." Gingrich set it back on course again, but not without difficulty. "In 1953," he recalls, "our circulation still included people who couldn't read without moving their lips." During the next three years, Esquire accelerated its evolution. The advent of Playboy hastened the process, because Gingrich wished to disassociate his magazine from Playboy and its imitators.

Organized Anarchy. Nonetheless, Esquire did not do away with its gatefold pinup until January 1957. The magazine was still struggling. But by then, Gingrich had hired Editors Harold Hayes, Ralph Ginzburg, Clay Felker and Rust Hills to give the magazine a fresh and somewhat corrosive tone.

Most of the acid was expended in contentious editorial conferences until Ginzburg was fired in 1958 and Felker moved on in 1962, later to become editor of New York, the Sunday magazine section of the now defunct New York Herald Tribune.

Hayes, a soft-spoken North Carolinian who started his career as an assistant editor for Pageant magazine, remained. He rose to managing editor in 1962, editor in 1963. He pacified the staff, tackled a perennial dull-cover problem by persuading Gingrich to try out George Lois, one of the adman inventors of the Volkswagen campaign. Lois, in real life a partner in the advertising firm of Papert, Koenig, Lois, Inc., gives away the $600 he gets for each cover to a Greek charity. Hayes also put across the idea that the magazine's editors should think up the table of contents instead of simply choosing among stories suggested by contributors. Each Friday, Managing Editor Byron Dobell and six editors drift into Hayes's New York office for a story conference described as "organized anarchy." Occasionally they are joined by one of the magazine's two contract writers, Gay Talese, author of a long Esquire indiscretion about his old employer, the New York Times. When article ideas are nailed down, Hayes meets with Lois at New York's swish Four Sea sons restaurant; Lois takes it from there. "Reduced to its simplest terms," says Hayes, "our success relates to the fact that Gingrich got some smart, young guys together and gave them the freedom to thresh things out. As a result, Esquire has its own thumbprint now."

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