Battle Among the Women

When McCall's shook up its editorial staff, put on a thick, new coat of makeup and launched a hair-pulling drive to the top of the women's magazine field 2 1/2 years ago, the rival Ladies' Home Journal reacted as any proper Philadelphia dowager would. The Journal, tops in the field for two decades, publicly treated this lipsticked hussy with icy silence, confined its comments to catty asides. "It's fun to be challenged,'' said Editors Bruce and Beatrice Blackmar Gould, faintly amused. Their amusement turned to dismay as McCall's, some 350,000 behind the Journal in circulation in January 1959, caught up last year and soared into the lead, 6,857,677 to 6,838,282. Last week McCall's and the lady from Independence Square sharpened their claws and came out scratching.

The battle lines were drawn when the Journal's parent Curtis Publishing Co. bought part of the defunct Coronet's list of 2,325,903 subscribers. In an apparently pre-emptive move against what the Journal might do with such a list, McCall's fortnight ago, in full-page ads in major newspapers, proclaimed its intention to boost circulation to 8,000,000 by December, making it second only to the Reader's Digest (12,976,581) in the monthly magazine field. To lure advertisers, McCall's said it would charge them on the basis of its presently estimated circulation of 7,000,000 until next July, thus giving them a free ride for seven months on 1,000,000 copies each month.

Robert E. MacNeal, president of Curtis (Saturday Evening Post, Holiday), brooded in silence for a few days, then issued a statement blasting the bonus gimmick as "a hurried move calculated to preserve the illusion of leadership." Said MacNeal: "We see no virtue in winning a race to the poorhouse.'' But the Journal entered the race anyway, replied to McCall's by announcing a 10% cut in its ad rates.

Damn the Expense. Bankrolled by West Coast Industrialist Norton Simon, whose Hunt Foods & Industries, Inc., controls 43% of McCall Corp.'s stock, McCall's is out to clobber the Journal-and damn the expense. Thanks to its enormous magazine job-printing plant in Dayton, the parent corporation stays a million or so dollars in the black. But McCall's has been a money loser.

McCall's ad revenue climbed to $18.5 million for the first half of this year, up 29% from the same period last year and 93% from 1959, while the Journal dipped 4% to $13.7 million. But ad revenue is not the whole story. Paper, printing and mailing costs are up. Thus high circulation can be too much of a good thing, when ad revenue fails to keep pace. "Advertising rates are not high enough," admits McCall's Publisher A. Edward Miller, but he hopes for a burst of additional ads to close the gap. Even if he gets it, insiders predict that the magazine will not be showing a decent profit for years.

Glossy & Slick. In its drive to run up circulation, McCall's business side is provided with potent ammunition by able Editor Herbert Mayes, 60, who hopes to see a circulation of 11 million by 1965. Mayes hopped into McCall's editor's chair in November 1958, three weeks after Hearst's Good Housekeeping (a distant third in the women's field at 5,074,816) dumped him. Given a free editorial hand, he turned the shop into a maelstrom of ideas and activity, completely remade the magazine.

Using the tried and true "Three Fs"-food, fashion, fiction--Mayes added a new sense of topicality and immediacy to his text, used color lavishly, "bleeding" pictures to the edge of the page. Into his fat. slick product he crammed columns by Eleanor Roosevelt, the Duchess of Windsor and Clare Boothe Luce, prose by John Steinbeck and MacKinlay Kantor, frank articles on marital problems and mental health, racy memoirs by the likes of Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Ironically. Mayes's editing tactics were basically the same as those used by the Goulds to hype the Journal into first place 20 years ago, when they spruced up the Journal's appearance, tossed in articles on such controversial topics as venereal disease, and added columns that discussed marital difficulties in almost clinical detail. Appealing to a whole new generation, McCall's found success with its new look as swiftly as the Journal had in the 1940s. In little more than two years, its circulation jumped 1,500,000, v. a rise of 1,100,000 for the Journal.

"They are building a house of cards," warns a former McCall's executive, but McCall's has no intention of giving up the game. Last week, in full-page newspaper ads. it pointed out that there were 27.6 million female high school graduates in the U.S. in 1960--and that it is going after all of them. "Reading," said the McCall's ad, "is in."

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