Esquire at Mid-Century

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

A birthday celebrated in black tie and a 616-page issue

On the day in 1933 that salesmen started soliciting ads for Esquire, President Franklin Roosevelt closed all the nation's banks. The magazine, which emphasized men's fashion, was to be distributed primarily through clothing stores, but the first issue's newsstand copies sold so quickly that the staff frenziedly retrieved what they could from the haberdashers. Three years later, Esquire had a profitable circulation of 440,000 and was publishing works that are still remembered, including Ernest Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up. Other magazines that competed for big-name writers in those days are gone: the original Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Liberty. But Esquire, though it has undergone a series of shifts that have made it seem the magazine of a thousand faces, has endured.

Last week the magazine climaxed a yearlong celebration of its 50th birthday with a black-tie party for 2,000 people in New York City's Avery Fisher Hall. They gathered to honor a self-conscious "publishing event": a 616-page special issue of Esquire, hailing "50 Americans who made the difference." In attendance were some of the issue's glittery contributors, including Norman Mailer, William Whittle and Kurt Vonnegut back subjects, Polio Vaccine Pioneer Dr. Jonas Salk, Boxer Muhammad Ali, Pollster George Gallup and Feminist Betty Friedan. Perhaps the central figures, however, were Phillip Moffitt, 37, and Christopher Whittle, 36, the Tennesseans who bought out investors including then Editor Clay Felker for a reported $3.5 million in 1979, when Esquire was losing $25,000 a day. Chairman Whittle's gala announcement: "After 13 years, we have come back into the black." Established magazines, once they falter, are rarely able to turn around, and Esquire falls between two categories of periodicals, general interest and men's, that have been hit especially hard by reader defections. Playboy (circ. 4,250,000) and Penthouse (circ. 3,454,000) have each lost more than 12% in circulation; Esquire's nearest rival, GQ (for Gentlemen's Quarterly), is growing (circ. 558,000, up 7.5%) but has deliberately shifted from a clotheshorse consciousness to deal, like Esquire, with popular culture in the broadest sense. Under Whittle and Moffitt, Esquire's circulation has grown somewhat, from 652,000 to 730,000 (well below the mid-1970s peak of 1.25 million) while the number of advertising pages has soared from 535 in 1981 to 1,312 in 1983. Two major reasons for the upsurge: Editor Moffitt's success in appealing to affluent fellow members of the baby-boom generation, and a series of service-oriented features that openly tie editorial content to ads. The November issue's 68-page section on bars and drink recipes, for example, includes 23 pages of full-color liquor advertisements.

The typical Esquire reader, according to an independent survey, is a male college graduate between 25 and 34 who earns $33,000 in a managerial or professional job. In addition to fiction and some semiserious journalism, the magazine provides advice on trendy places to live (Santa Fe, for women and scenery), chic collectibles (signed handcrafted furniture), modish cookery and backpacking.

What may uphold Esquire's reputation among its readers as more than a fawning service magazine is that its hip tips are often offset by moralizing self-doubt, a quality Moffitt sees as a 1960s holdover. Says he: "We have done everything with this generation, our generation, in mind. The tone of our times, for them, is an unending series of crises: having babies vs. pursuing careers, how hard we want to work. These are questions of meaning." According to Moffitt, the best-read feature is Anthony Brandt's column on personal ethics, which has pondered the duty to keep a secret and the propriety of taking legal but dubious tax deductions.

Former executives of Esquire the business acumen of Moffitt and Whittle, but give the content less reviews. Says one longtime editor: have convinced Madison Avenue that is the hottest thing going, but I have doubts about their literary taste." gently concurs: "They are marketing people more than journalists. Theirs is a valuable publication, but is it Esquire? Only some of it is."

What exactly Esquire is has been answered differently almost decade by decade. In the 1930s it taught middlebrows a sense of style, at first sartorially, then literarily. In the 1940s it followed America's youth to war and turned so strongly to cheesecake that its contents had to be cleared in advance by the post office. The titillation -- tame by present standards, but daring for its day -- was phased out in the 1950s, when Founding Editor Arnold Gingrich (who died after semiretirement in 1976) returned to guide the magazine back to "quality"; it then be came perhaps the foremost outlet for well-known, mainstream writers. In the 1960s, it turned to raffish, at times sophomoric humor. In the 1970s, although it presented noteworthy journal ism by Tom Wolfe and Harrison Salisbury, Esquire groped for an identity. Then came Whittle and Moffitt, who were publishers of Nutshell, a guide distributed on college campuses. Esquire gave them a national platform and sentimental satisfaction. Recalls Moffitt: "Reading it as a teenager, I would would measure measure how how adult adult I felt." felt."

Having fulfilled one editorial dream, Moffitt enjoyed another in assembling the current issue. The whole is less impressive than its parts: the depth and focus of the profiles vary erratically, and many are marred by the writer's misplaced insistence on putting himself at the center of his story. But there are some splendid, mildly offbeat entries: Wilfrid Sheed's portrayal of the on-the-field polite ness and off-the-field anger of baseball's Jackie Robinson; Ronald Steel's evocation of Cold Warrior Dean Acheson; Alistair Cooke's precise homage to Jazz Composer Duke Ellington. "The common theme," says Moffitt, "is the power of the individual, our wanting it not to be true that institutions are everything." The is sue's merits -- earnestness, attention to social trends, appreciation of what makes a star in any line of endeavor -- are also the strengths of this incarnation of Esquire. It may not enjoy the cachet and influence it once did, but this institution has survived. -- By William A. Henry III. Reported by Richard Bruns/New York

With reporting by Richard Bruns/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.