The Press: Advertising Is Advertising

Advertising Is Advertising

Edward Bok in his book about Edward Bok remarked:

“It is to the vision and the genius of the first editor of the LADIES HOME JOURNAL that the unprecedented success of the magazine is primarily due. It was the purpose and the policy of making a magazine of authoritative service to the Womanhood of America….”

If Mr. Bok recently read advertisements of The Ladies Home Journal, which appeared in the Press, it is possible that he pondered dubiously over the phrase “authoritative service to Womanhood.” For the advertisements ran in part:

…. now, in this audaciously frank autobiography, the most glamorous figure since Lord Byron shares with us his confessions and his memories.

Strange wastrel days. . . . tragic, cruel days when he struggled with a life that was bitter and raw.

Flashes of long-gone frolics

of boyish insouciance early

failures in the theater hungry

days and bedless nights and

ever the brave lift of a spirit that struck strongest in the face of defeat …. a will that brooked no curbing…

These astounding confessions bid fair to prove the sensation of the literary year. Written with a frankness of self-revelation unmatched in the century-and-a-half since the famous Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, it flames with the stark, blazing spirit of the artist who has become our greatest actor.

The actor, of course, was John Barrymore. But such true stories as were hinted at! Why did not Mr. Barrymore sell his life story to Bernarr Macfadden who popularizes frankness of self revelation unmatched”?

When the appearance of the advertisement was followed by the appearance of the Confessions in The Ladies Home Journal, Mr. Bok perhaps allowed himself a glance at the article as advertised—a glance that was reassuring.

Mr. Barrymore’s memoirs were neither rowdy nor pornographic, but the measured attempt of an intelligent man to comment cool-mindedly upon his own career. None of the fustian sentiment, like the smell of an old stage wardrobe—none of the gasconnading, the pomposities, the how-well-I-remember-the-night that clutter most actors’ reminiscences—nor yet the blatancy that distinguishes those of certain editors—were discoverable in the suave, faintly amused memories of John Barrymore.