Editor's Note

By Donald Morrison

THE MAGAZINE MAZE

by Herbert R. Mayes

Doubleday; 378 pages; $14.95

Novelist John Marquand called him the third best editor he had ever known, after George Horace Lorimer and Maxwell Perkins. William Faulkner, Rebecca West, Willa Cather and other major writers found him a staunch and generous companion. Marc Connelly and William Saroyan phoned him when they needed money. One of the few dissenters was Evelyn Waugh, who called him, with characteristic bile, "an emaciated Jew lately promoted within the Hearst organization from editing a weekly paper devoted to commercial chemistry."

Waugh was miles off the mark. Even at 80, Herbert Mayes is still lithe, but he has never been emaciated, anatomically or creatively. And though he once edited Hearst's monthly American Druggist, he was, when Waugh wrote for him in the 1940s, one of the nation's most eminent magazine editors. By the time he retired in 1969, Mayes had guided the old Pictorial Review, as well as Town & Country, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and McCall's.

None of this made him a celebrity. As he notes in this wry saga, it was his publications and authors who became household names. Those authors live again in a series of anecdotes. John O'Hara, who once threatened to "break every bone in your body" after Mayes refused to send him $25,000 forthwith for the right merely to read the manuscript of Ten North Frederick for possible excerpting. Eleanor Roosevelt, a onetime McCall's contributor, who offered him a ride home one night, though she did not have a car. "Let's both go out and stand on the curb," she advised, "and pretty soon somebody will come along in a car and recognize me and offer us a lift." (She was right.)

When writers paused for breath, Mayes would start talking. By the time he had finished, their names were often affixed to contracts. F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of his authors; so were Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk, Agatha Christie, Art Linkletter, Clare Boothe Luce, Ogden Nash, Hubert Humphrey, Jacqueline Kennedy, Lucille Ball and Maurice Chevalier, and most of them are worth a story or two. Mayes treated them with amused kindness, helped them through personal crises and paid them well, even for that golden age of magazines: $10,000 per short story for Somerset Maugham; a Ford station wagon shipped to Dublin for Waugh. Today Mayes rails against magazines for being parsimonious and tells his younger colleagues: "Publishing would be nothing but another business if it weren't for the editors who give it some semblance of a profession."

He does, however, recognize that it is mostly a business. "The prime objective of a magazine is to survive," he concludes. Realizing that, Mayes was able to swivel easily from masterpieces of short fiction to such fare as "My Husband Won't Talk to Me About Sex, Money or the Children," or "Let's See What the Insurance Companies Offer." He dined with the literary titans, but never lost touch with the housewives and career women who made up his readership. As Mayes sees it: "The multimillion-circulation magazine is a reading supermarket, with much to choose from and at a price almost everybody can afford. To cheer a little, in form a little, challenge a little--such tasks represent no mean achievement." For a magazine, for an autobiography, or for a life.

--By Donald Morrison

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