A Scanlan Is Born

Sandwiched between a dilapidated Irish pub and a skin-flick cinema in midtown Manhattan, the black door with its heavy brass plate proclaims "Scanlan's Literary House." Upstairs, in a garish former banquet hall, the scene is even more bizarre: a dozen cluttered desks and typewriters, one freelance writer demanding payment, a payrolled private investigator deep in conversation with an ex-con contributing editor. At center stage, ex-Ramparts Editor and Raconteur Warren Hinckle III and former New York Times Reporter Sidney Zion celebrate their unlikely accomplishment: Seaman's Monthly is born.*

"We did everything we weren't supposed to," chuckles Hinckle. "No marketing studies. No direct-mail campaigns. No promotion. No ads. We didn't I even do a dry-run issue." "Yeah," says Zion, "we wanted game conditions." Their capital: $675,000, amazingly raised by a public stock issue whose prospectus reads like an obituary.

The cover of the first Scanlan's, however, reads more like an ultimatum. Under a photograph of a certified check for $675,000, the editors herald their independence. "We don't even know the names of our stockholders," the boldface type proclaims. "Our deal with the underwriter was that the editors have absolute and dictatorial control of the magazine."

Woodstock West. Inside, raked muck mixes with mischief. A high school student describes S.D.S. arm twisting. Freelance Writer Hunter Thompson portrays French Ski Champion Jean-Claude Killy as a Chevy promoter (and describes Playboy magazine, which rejected the piece, as "a conspiracy of anemic masturbators"). There is a thoughtful history of Biafra, a long biography of Gangster Mickey Cohen by the late Ben Hecht, even a serialized comic strip. "The first number was supposed to be 80 pages," says Zion, "but we went up to 136 because we just didn't want to kill the stuff."

Or edit it either. The lead article, a muddled dissection of CIA, FBI and CBS involvement in an abortive 1967 invasion of Haiti (currently under secret investigation by a House committee), raises more questions than it answers. More persuasively, a Viet Nam veteran recounts several killings that grimly resemble My Lai. Brutality of another kind is the subject of a strong article on the "Woodstock West" folk concert held last December at Altamont race track in California. Why, Scanlan's wonders, was there not more attention paid to the fact that four people died, 700 were treated for bad acid trips, and that the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, hired by the Rolling Stones rock group for "security," rampaged with pool cues, killing an 18-year-old black?

Family of Flies. In a lighter mood, Scanlan's accompanies a health inspector on a kitchen tour of Manhattan restaurants. Next to stars awarded by New York Times Gourmet Craig Claiborne, Scanlan's gives its own uncleanliness symbols: garbage cans. The worst offender (three stars, four garbage cans): the outwardly elegant Colony, where "in the bakeroom a family of flies was eating out of open bowls of strawberries in heavy syrup."

Hinckle, the "Mike Todd of the New Left," and Zion, a former assistant district attorney in Newark who covered law and politics in his five years on the Times, have other joint ventures. They include Scanlan's Literary Supplement, a newsprint compendium of book reviews scheduled for biweekly publication in the fall, and their book middleman service ("To the author, we're the publisher," Hinckle sort of explains. "To the publisher, we're the author").

Still, the magazine is the foundation of Scanlan's Literary House. "We've got six months, maybe a year," says Zion, "to find 120,000 readers willing to pay a buck a copy. It's all up to us. If we fail, I'll blame Hinckle and Hinckle will blame me, but who's gonna come to that press conference?"

* In memory of John Scanlan, an Irish pig farmer, reprobate and father of several illegitimate children. Hinckle and Zion joined in toasting the 15th anniversary of his death in a pub near Dublin in 1968. The two never met the living Scanlan.

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