There were some editors, according to Levine, who attempted to give their readers more substance while still pandering to advertisers; but they were few, and they didn't last long. She remembers Glamour's legendary editor in chief Ruth Whitney (1967-1998) confessing to her that she'd "sneaked in an article about abortion." Says Levine, "Ruth knew where to put these serious articles in the book so that the advertisers wouldn't freak out, and she knew to run them without illustrations so that they wouldn't call too much attention to themselves. She knew how to play the game."
But sometimes the rules of the game were brutal. "When [women's glossies] salespeople went out to sell against Ms.'s salespeople, they would say to advertisers unspeakable things like 'You don't want to be in a magazine where your ad may be facing a picture of a vagina.' They were really gross about it -- that's where the real warfare took place."
Competition for the Cosmo dollar further intensified with the arrival of a new crop of publications, like Elle, Allure, Sassy, In Style, Jane and Marie Claire, and it became harder for editors to, in the words of Levine, "put out the magazine with the material an editor thinks the readers want and need." Publishers, still focused on subscriptions, now cared even more about newsstand and advertising sales.
The glossies' new objective was to offer readers "the most/newest/hottest bunch of features, which would either be wildly entertaining or rock bottom useful or life-changing, or ideally both," says Brown Weissman. "Sensitive, literary short stories simply didn't fit into this equation. Their appeal was too amorphous, inconsistent, unquantifiable." Levine says that even Ms. magazine, renowned for turning away ads for products deemed unhealthy to women, did not triumph in the battle to keep fiction in the mix. "You could sell against beauty, opinion, profiles of celebrities, but not fiction. That was the argument we heard at Ms. all of the time."
Editors, pushed by advertisers, assumed that a short story would not draw readers to one magazine over another. Instead, the glossies chose to compete in a concrete realm, where quality would be reflected by immediacy, usefulness and quantity. "That's one of the reasons that numbers [e.g., "452 New Looks" (Marie Claire), "The Top 10 Threats to Your Health" (Glamour)] became so popular as cover lines and as organizing concepts for articles," says Brown Weissman. "They were definite and crisp and seemed to promise a limited but essential array of facts, ideas or tips that the reader could use immediately."
The formula has changed very little. These days Cosmopolitan is primarily devoted to dispensing its signature advice about sex and how to keep a man ("7 Bad-Girl Bedroom Moves You Must Master," "Cosmo's Guide to Dating Mucho Men," "Wrap Him Around Your Finger"). There are requisite articles on beauty and fashion, health and fitness and a page dedicated to career counseling, as well as two "news" features ("I Believe Survivor is a Scam"). Harper's Bazaar gives fiction little more than a nod -- usually a brief listing of upcoming book titles. And Redbook has morphed into a guidebook on the 21st century marriage.
Meanwhile, men's magazines have endured various identity crises, still managing to maintain their literary traditions. Adrienne Miller, Esquire's literary editor, says she publishes 10 short stories a year. "We've been doing so since the 1930s," she says. "We all want more pages than we have. But fiction is so important in Esquire's history that no matter who owns or edits Esquire, as long as there's an Esquire, I'm quite certain there will always be fiction."
Playboy's fiction editor, 30-year veteran Barbara Nellis, says that literature is as much of a tradition at Playboy as the centerfold. "Even amidst the tough economic times, when there have been fewer pages, we've never ever cut out all of anything. Maybe we did fewer pages of something, maybe we did a shorter story. But we never gave up the fiction."
The reason men's magazines can continue to publish fiction, according to Edie Locke, Mademoiselle's editor in chief from 1970 to 1980, is because "they can show clothes and they can show a certain amount of grooming, but they can't give you 10,000 pages of hairstyles, or five more ways to put on eyeliner. They have to fill the pages with something."
But fiction doesn't function as filler in the magazines that still publish it. Ask any advertiser: There are plenty of ways to use pages, and fiction is not the most effective vehicle for product tie-ins. The fact is that fiction is considered an integral part of these magazines' efforts to promulgate an image of the modern American man as worldly-wise, cultured and sophisticated.
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