The Press: Coming Apartness

At 10:30 one morning last week, the staff of McCall's—The Magazine of Togetherness—began to come apart. Up to the desk of McCall Corp. President Arthur B. Langlie stalked Editor-Publisher Otis Lee Wiese with a one-sentence resignation. Ten minutes later, Advertising Director Bill Carr (like Wiese, a McCall board member and vice president) was in with his: "I understand that Otis Wiese is no longer with the McCall Corp. . . . This eliminates the last hope I've had for professional management in the company."

All day long and the next, the quit parade continued to Langlie's tenth-floor office in the magazine's Park Avenue building—John English, managing editor; Jay Stanwyck, director of research; Estelle Lane Brent, fashion editor; Betty Parsons Ragsdale, fiction editor; Marion Wheeler, production editor; Peggy Bell, features editor. By week's end 16 staffers had resigned, and, one by one, McCall's publicity department doggedly issued terse press releases with the news. Some of the departees were so angry that they left without cleaning out their desks, had their belongings shipped home. Shrugged Langlie: "I was very surprised when they left, although I must say I felt the spirit of cooperation didn't seem what it might be."

The Amateurs. The fuse to last week's explosion had been smoldering since 1954, when West Coast Industrialist Norton Simon (Hunt Foods, Ohio Match Co.) began to acquire a controlling 35% interest in the widely held McCall stock. He reorganized the board in his favor, and last year startled Madison Avenue by bringing in Langlie as president. Puritanical, parsimonious Lawyer Langlie was a three-time (1941-45, 1949-57) Republican governor of Washington (TIME, Sept. 3, 1956), but a publishing amateur.

As Langlie's subordinate, Editor-Publisher Wiese (rhymes with lease) was in the singular position of making more money than his boss ($65,000 v. $50,000). In addition, he understandably knew far more about the magazine. Now a grey-haired 53, Wiese was just 22 when he became editor of struggling McCall's in 1927. With a free hand, he built his magazine into a slickly edited blend of women's fiction and womanly fact that is second in circulation only to Curtis' high-heeled Ladies' Home Journal (5,695,399 v. 5,350,140). Wiese even thought up Togetherness—the celebration of the joys of cloyingly close family living—once called it "our greatest natural resource."

The Tie-In. As McCall's top man and Norton Simon's hired hand, Langlie demoralized staffers with his agonizingly slow decisions, and irritated them with his penny-pinching approach. Far more important, Langlie sometimes complained: "I can't seem to get my hands on editorial." Wiese became convinced that Langlie was aiming at governing the whole magazine.