50 Girls & One Man

Unlike their more sophisticated sisters on the women's fashion magazines, the staffers at Seventeen take off their hats in the office. But they joke that whenever a staffer gets a raise or a promotion, she can wear her hat for a few minutes at her desk before she hangs it up. Last week, Executive Editor Alice Thompson was entitled to wear the biggest hat in the place: she was made publisher of Seventeen.

Alice had earned the job. Under the motherly guidance of Executive Editor Thompson and Editor in Chief Helen Valentine, Seventeen has grown in five years from a gangling kid to something of an Amazon (circ. 1,000,000). Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Valentine, with an editorial staff of 50 girls and one man (Edwin Miller, the 27 -year-old bachelor movie editor) have turned Seventeen into a moneymaking monthly by taking dead aim on teen-age readers (average age: 16.2).

Teen-age Editors. The magazine gives them low-priced fashions, fiction, sensible articles such as "how to get along with parents" and frank discussions of teen-age problems which other magazines shy away from. Once a year, the teen-agers take over the magazine and supply all the writing and illustrations for one issue.

Despite Seventeen's success, advertising has been getting harder to sell (Seventeen's 1948 ad receipts of $3,300,000 were slightly below 1947). Owner and part-time Publisher Walter Annenberg decided it was high time he had a full-time publisher to get promotion, advertising and editorial departments working together to plug the magazine. With his Philadelphia Inquirer, pulps (Official Detective Stories and Gags) and a string of daily racing forms, he was too busy to do the job himself, but Alice Thompson seemed just the hand to entrust it to. To fill her old spot he snagged pretty, blonde Andree Vilas, 34, once editor of Junior Bazaar, then managing editor of Glamour, and currently managing editor of Charm.

Teen-age Tester. Attractive new publisher Thompson has had to learn plenty of other new jobs in her time. Except for a brief stint in advertising, she has been in the magazine business ever since 1930, when she started with Conde Nast as a $30-a-week assistant in Vogue's promotion department. Before long she was editing both the Vogue Pattern Book and a cheaper one which the company had decided to start. It was such a hit that she sold Conde Nast the idea of a fashion magazine aimed at a cheaper audience than Vogue's; two months later, in March 1939, Glamour was on the stands.

She edited Glamour for almost two years, then did a stint on Liberty and Look before she joined Seventeen, which her old friend Helen Valentine was running. Since then Mrs. Thompson has commuted to Manhattan every day with her adman husband, John Beaton (twice-married Alice Thompson uses her first husband's name in business) from their ten-room farmhouse in Fairfield, Conn. At home, Mrs. Thompson does much of her work and at home she often finds out exactly what her readers want to hear about. Her daughter, Judy, is just 17.

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