FRANCES LEAR: A Maturing Woman Unleashed

Flawlessly attired in a black Chanel suit, Frances Lear gazes for a moment out her office window at the Madison Avenue traffic below. Then, whippet-like, she whirls to confront the semicircle of editors at her morning story conference. “What’s the word we want?” she asks. Through owlish goggles she scrutinizes their faces, as if seeing them for the first time. Before anyone can answer, she darts to her chair and provocatively settles her slender black-stockinged legs on a cluttered coffee table. She sits stiffly, ladylike. Her expressive hands, with their buffed, not polished nails, beat the air. “Older women of our generation have been described as depressed, sad, menopausal, decrepit, unproductive,” she blurts. “God, I feel I’m running through a maze of negative perceptions like a tractor.”

Quietly, Lear recedes as the band of vocal editors suggests fresh definitions: “sensual,” “off the nest,” “reborn,” “glamourized,” “well maintained.” “Too much like automobiles,” trills Lear, shooting across the room like a small comet. At 65, she’s delicately handsome: 5 ft. 6 in., 115 lbs., with a taut dancer’s body, sandblasted jawline, thick uncolored platinum hair and barely a trace of makeup except for one “expensive cosmetic,” the face-lifting, her first done in her late 40s. Her fastidiously tailored look is accented by understated braided-gold Cartier jewelry and a black-band Tiffany watch. But behind the reserved, nearly studied exterior, her agile mind freewheels playfully. She conducts the meeting by digression, challenging and revising every assumption presented and switching subjects to alight on a new idea before circling around to finish the last. The method is collaborative: a free-form Scrabble game that reflects her scanning, multitrack way of thinking. Gradually, eventually, problems are solved: story ideas jell, stereotypes are smashed, cliches dissolved and media-worn phrases reconstituted into acceptable headlines.

Frances Lear is on a roll. Her high-risk venture of creating a magazine for mature women is a splashy success. Just four years ago, with $30 million from her $112 million divorce settlement from television producer Norman Lear, she conceived Lear’s, a bimonthly publication catering to “The Woman Who Wasn’t Born Yesterday.” This past March, with a photograph of Lear gracing the anniversary issue, Lear’s went monthly, with a circulation of 350,000. The average age of her readers is 51, the average yearly household income a startling $95,600. New issues are fat with glossy ads aimed at this blue-chip audience. Lear, a lifetime liberal committed to democratic causes, had qualms about going so far upmarket but did so “to sell the idea to advertisers, which would ensure success.” Failure was not in the cards.

Like the rhythm of her editorial meetings, Lear’s office is comfy random clutter. Most kindly described, the impromptu decor is Beverly Hills garage sale. Three roughhewn country kitchen tables, each with computer terminals, serve as desks for Lear and two secretaries. Chinese porcelain lamps keep incongruous company with industrial carpeting and overloaded bulletin boards. From her secretary’s desk, Lear unearths a stash of Milky Ways. She gingerly peels the wrapper, nibbles, carbo-loaded for re-entry. “Let’s explore the French mystique,” she interjects. “Why do French women remain sexy until they are very old?” Her editors bubble with cultural reasons and names: Simone Signoret, Catherine Deneuve. Lear postulates a theme: “So it is genetic; they like sex, celebrate sexuality, while American women have a puritanical streak that restricts them.” Protest comes when one editor reminds Frances that their survey found the Lear’s woman likes men, specifically older men. “Sure, they don’t have to explain the Korean War to them,” quips executive editor Audreen Ballard. Laughter erupts. For summer fashion Lear endorses slinky-skirted bathing suits: “Remember, need and taste are the keys to this market.”

The editors exit as the art director enters with layouts and galleys to be approved. First, the horoscope page. Lear reads Cancer, her sign. “This makes no sense. What does it mean? We need a story on what exactly constitutes a good horoscope.” Lear’s restive eyes skid to a stop as she views a transparency of a creamy-faced 50-year-old beauty. “This one bothers me. The beauty is too static, too beige, one cast. She looks like she’s been laid out. We want depth of character in the face.” Gone. Next, the blowup of a near naked Tarzan accompanying the article “My Son the Body Builder.” “Where’s my magnifying glass?” asks Lear as she hunches over the light table to study the ripply pecs. “Wheeee, this is fun! It sprights up the book.” Her secretary interrupts. A chauffeured car is waiting to deliver Lear to a television taping. “Where’s the script?” Lear chirps as she loops the strap of her Fendi bag, schoolgirl-style, over her glistening sable coat. “Will I have cue cards or a monitor? Now, where’s my Milky Way? My, it’s fun being the new girl in town.”

The birthing of her brainchild has nonetheless come with pain and angst. Hungry for success, Lear plunged straight into the cutthroat magazine enclaves of Manhattan. Reports of this berserk Beverly Hills housewife with bags of cash, attended by cook, butler, masseuse, personal trainer and psychologist, who held meetings in her opulent duplex at the Ritz Tower wearing a satin bathrobe, crackled along the editorial phone lines that feed Manhattan’s extensive magazine gossip vine. Up against this hostile environment, a cornered Lear unleashed her blowtorch anger. She scorched some hefty professional egos and earned herself a “loose cannon” label. She hired editors, picked their brains and jilted them at whim. Consultants came and went like midtown buses.

Wiser today, and equipped with a settled, trusted staff, Lear ruefully recalls the chaotic gestation: “In the beginning, I knew nothing about the magazine business. I knew I had a good idea. Everyone told me so, but they all bet against my doing it.” In addition to exasperated editors, she was confronted by battalions of advertising and research “pros.” She recalls them as gnomish little men who denigrated an audience of older women and told her that old “broads” and “gals” didn’t want to see pictures of themselves. They smugly reiterated the Madison Avenue maxim: Youth is beauty. “The reason some men fear older women is they fear their own mortality,” explains Lear, who despite the tumult plowed ahead and chose to remain a solo financial player to ensure her control of the enterprise. Kevin Buckley, the first editor during the bruising start-up, nonetheless credits Lear “as the first to see that most magazines neglected or talked down to millions of Americans. The success was inevitable and a pleasure to behold from a distance.” The rapid growth of Lear’s magazine has encouraged competitors. This month a new entry, Mirabella, aimed at 30-to-50-year-old women, may nibble at the younger readers in Lear’s audience.

/ If Frances Lear has a serious enemy, it is the youth culture, which she blames for confining some women to birdcage existences. “Many older women are inhibited and afraid to act. It is such a waste of human potential,” she laments. “We must look into the mirror and smile.” She caustically castigates the youth culture for denying sexuality to mature women and instilling in them a sense of inferiority. Her frequent fantasy is to annihilate the Playboy magazine mentality that she blames for psychologically crippling women by attaching a Playmate’s age and dimensions to female sexuality. “Someday we will have porn films with 55-year-old women in them,” predicts Lear. “Already, we know there is plenty of action in Sun City.”

An orphan, Frances was adopted at 14 months and reared in Larchmont, N.Y. When she was eleven, her father committed suicide after losing all his money in the Depression. Frances felt that her mother, a beauty of German Jewish origin with a keen sense of high fashion, betrayed her by “marrying a bad husband for economic security.” A competitive child, she captained the basketball team and edited her high school yearbook. Her mother died when she was 18. To support herself, she went to work as a stock girl, eventually graduating to fashion buyer at Lord & Taylor. When Lear learned that her manic-depressive episodes, which she now controls with lithium, could have a genetic component, she began a search for her biological parents. She returned to the small Jewish orphanage, with its stacks of cribs and bunk beds (“My competitiveness comes from having had to scream the loudest for attention”), and managed one night to get drunk the lawyer who had arranged her adoption. Much as she pleaded, he never revealed the identity of the parents.

There were two short marriages (“In those days, it was the only way you could go to bed with a man”) before she met and married Norman Lear, then a TV writer. In 1957 they moved from New York City to Los Angeles, where she stayed at home and reared their daughters. Although Frances was the inspiration for Norman’s acerbic TV character Maude (“All of Norman’s work is autobiographical — Archie Bunker was based on his father”), the show- business community was a peculiar culture that reduced Frances, who did not want to be either a starlet or a producer, to an atrophying, bitterly depressed Hollywood wife. After much therapy, she chose to end her 28-year marriage. (Norman Lear, 66, has since married a psychotherapist, with whom he % has had a son.)

Lear discreetly sidesteps rumors of a boyfriend, but she says, “For older women, like older men, money is a plus when it comes to attracting the opposite sex.” Except for weekly dinners with her two daughters, entertainment means magazine business. Parties are held at her Southampton beachfront mansion or cavernous Fifth Avenue apartment with its giant de Koonings, vast Persian rugs and a paralyzing view of Central Park. The service is formal but the tone relaxed. At a recent dinner for potential advertisers, Georgette Mosbacher, flame-haired CEO of La Prairie skin-care company and wife of the Secretary of Commerce, griped acidly about “the hatchet job” the Washington Post magazine had done on her. “What did they call you?” Lear asked. ” ‘Glamorous,’ ” drawled Mosbacher. “Take it, honey,” barked Lear. “They call me ‘eccentric.’ ” Under the gleam of crystal refracted by lemony candlelight, Lear presided over dinner for twelve served by a squadron of waiters. Playing impresario, she deftly focused scattershot conversations into one group topic, spawning debates over the reasons matte eye-shadow sales are soaring (one theory: softens the wrinkles) and whether there will be a woman President — “Not in my lifetime,” insists Lear. Quick and sharp- witted, she suffers fools not at all and snubs sycophants with an icy glance. But when she is surrounded by sympathetic friends, her conversation expands. She defends her obvious vanity: “This quality continues into old age and drives the desire to remain sexual, slender and fashionable.” A self- styled vegetarian with a diet of fish, vegetables and pasta, Lear says, “People think older women who are thin don’t work at it. They work harder at it.” Each season she buys a new wardrobe of Chanel clothes and cruises about Manhattan on 65 pairs of black flats. “At every age a woman should feel she is dressed her best,” advises Lear. “Often intelligent women feel embarrassed about concentrating on fashion. They shouldn’t. It isn’t trivial.” Though a feminist, she readily exalts the sexual power of feminine beauty. Blissfully she recalls lounging about a country-club pool in her 20s. “I was wearing a fuchsia top and bottom, brief for those times. My body was just right. Well, the men just kept on coming over to me. At that moment, beauty was power.” As the priestess of age preaches her formula for mature beauty to Madison Avenue, once again heads are snapping.