Turnabout for Togetherness

When McCall's longtime Editor-Publisher Otis Lee Weise stalked out last winter (TIME. Nov. 17) after a fight about business-office interference in editorial affairs, 15 staffers went with him, left McCall's on the downgrade among the service magazines. But by this week, under tough-talking, tough-acting Herb Mayes, 59, who took over as editor two weeks after he was fired from the same job in Hearst's Good Housekeeping, McCall's was again just one big happy family-particularly because on the basis of present progress. McCall's plans to up its guaranteed circulation to a record 5,500,000 next February.

Although Predecessor Weise had stumbled over the issue of business-office meddling under McCall Corporation President Arthur Langlie, ex-Hearstman Mayes laid down the same law-and made it stick. "I'd rather shoot myself," he says, "than take any guff off the business side." From Good Housekeeping he brought with him a smooth team, including Managing Editor Margaret Cousins. Then Mayes began thinning out McCall's syrupy "togetherness" campaign; the "togetherness" legend no longer appears on McCall's covers. On taking over, he coolly dumped $400,000 worth of stories and articles because they were too dull, began spending $150,000 a month on new editorial material by top writers and personalities (e.g., Phyllis McGinley, Moss Hart), v. $82,000 a month under Weise. Mayes also polished up McCall's color photography, has expanded McCall's autobiographical digests, and will publish excerpts from the lives of Art Linkletter, Bob Hope and Maurice Chevalier. The latest acquisition: U.S. rights for a two-part abridgement of Sir Anthony Eden's memoirs, costing $300.000.

Happy at McCall's, scholarly-looking Herb Mayes works 65 hours a week including Sundays, dashes up and down the halls, teases attractive young lady staffers ("Salute me,baby!"). He has multiplied the number of products in McCall's "Use-Tested" program, is installing a beauty clinic and textile and chemical labs, plans to test food products, toilet goods and cosmetics in an attempt to catch up with Good Housekeeping's seal of approval testing program. Indeed, Herb Mayes's plans for McCall's have few limits: he predicts he will overtake the Ladies' Home Journal (circ. 5,685,245), grande dame of the women's magazines, "within less than two years."

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