Magazines: Look How Outrageous!

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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.