The Press: Breeches Boys

Esquire (“The Magazine for Men”) was established as a quarterly in October 1933. Its sexy cartoons, mannish stories and articles, big pages, colorful men’s fashion drawings, found instant favor with a large and admiring public. Its second issue appeared on a monthly basis. Last month Esquire reached a circulation peak, sent some 440,000 copies to readers throughout the land. Last week this big, slick publishing success branched out with a speculative journalistic sideline. The trade was informed, through the medium of a full-page advertisement in Editor & Publisher, that “The Magazine for Men” was entering the newspaper syndicate business.

First Esquire feeler into syndication came two years ago when Publisher David A. Smart sold a fashion feature, produced by Esquire artists, to 100 papers. This year, with newspaper advertising revenues rising, smart Mr. Smart figured that it would be a good time to offer papers some other features as well. Last July Esquire Features, Inc. was quietly formed in Chicago, Esquire’s home town. From the Chicago News went able, owlish Howard Denby to be the new syndicate’s vice presidentand editor. Quickly Mr. Denby allied the Esquire syndicate with the News by arranging for it to market two News features, Howard Vincent O’Brien’s column All Things Considered, and Naturalist Donald Culross Peattie’s A Breath of Outdoors. Counting the old fashion article, the Esquire syndicate offers prospective customers eleven different features, to be purchased singly or in block.

Funny material to be purveyed by the new syndicate had a heavy rural cast. As a possible substitute for the wise saws of the late Humorist Will Rogers, which McNaught Syndicate sold to 500 newspapers, Esquire Features offered a daily 150-word gag from Bob Burns, onetime vaudevillian whose radio hillbilly and cinema humor and music on a home-made “bazooka” were last week estimated in Variety to be earning him $400,000 a year.”*Pictorial humor was to be furnished by Esquire Cartoonist Paul Webb’s “Mountain Boys,” a group of grotesque, bearded, barefooted figures. In the current Esquire one of them is discovered by the side of a balky old car, gawking at an aged woman who is hanging from a nearby tree with a crank in her hand. Caption: “C’mon down an’ finish crankin’ ‘er, Gran’maw—Shucks—I’ll be late fer school.”

Other features included a Personality Institute for women, a children’s cut-out called The World Museum, a serialization of Laurence Greene’s historical scrapbook of U. S. Journalism, America Goes to Press (TIME, March 30). Publisher Smart and Editor Denby say they will be in the black if they can sell the Esquire feature list to 35 fair-sized papers. With 100 customers, they say they will see big money.

In any event, “Dave” Smart has in Esquire what is currently one of the most spectacular successes in the U. S. magazine business. Just as men’s fashion news led to the Esquire syndicate, so men’s fashion news led to Esquire. David Smart and his partner William Hobart Weintraub began their association in 1927 by teaming up to provide the clothing industry with a journal called National Men’s Wear Salesman, modeled on Printers’ Ink, admen’s trade magazine. Next Weintraub & Smart venture was the Gentleman’s Quarterly, a smartly illustrated stylebook for men’s shops to give away. As editor, they hired Arnold Gingrich, whose copy for Kuppenheimer clothes had caught Mr. Smart’s eye.

Most important step in the development of the Weintraub-Smart fashion enterprise came when the partners proposed to send out men’s style news by telephoto. First big tryout of the idea was on Nov. 18, 1930, the opening night of the late Florenz Ziegfeld’s Smiles. A tremendous list of stars was to be greeted by a hand-picked audience of rich and dressy Manhattanites. When the Fairchild Publications, dominant in the textile-apparel newsfield, cast doubt on this stunt’s authenticity, Editor Gingrich composed an angry letter of protest. Tough Mr. Weintraub, however, proposed as a sterner measure of retaliation an open invasion of the Fairchild Men’s Wear field, an idea in which Dave Smart heartily concurred. Result was Apparel Arts, an elaborate quarterly for clothing salesmen, with actual samples of fabrics pasted in its pages.

Customers in stores got to stealing Apparel Arts. So Messrs. Weintraub, Smart & Gingrich fixed up Esquire for the laity at 50¢ a copy. For their success they became known to their style news competitorsas “the breeches boys.”

In its short life of 35 issues, Esquire has reached an estimated yearly gross income of some $5,000,000. Two of its stanchest contributors of mildly salacious drawings, Commercial Artist George Petty and E. Simms Campbell, a talented young Harlem Negro, have become famed through its pages. Besides his work in Esquire, Cartoonist Campbell draws the Hart Schafiner & Marx advertisements, contributes to other magazines, while Cartoonist Petty, whose young ladies look as though they were made of soft pink pastry, has an agreement with Old Gold cigarets, was voted Favorite Artist by Princeton’s Class of 1936, last month helped judge Atlantic City’s Beauty Contest (TIME, Sept. 21).

Big literary names of Esquire have been F. Scott Fitzgerald, who this year detailed for the magazine’s readers his nervous and emotional collapse (see p. 54), Ernest Hemingway, who has seldom been absent, John Dos Passos, who contributed a draw ng to the first number, many a story and article since. Once a month, Esquire has brought forward a literary “Discovery,” one of whom was Novelist Louis Paul (The Pumpkin Coach, A Horse in Arizona}. His Esquire story No More Trouble for Jedwick is the magazine’s pride & joy because it won an O. Henry Memorial Award. Another “Discovery” was a plagiarist who sold unsuspecting Editor Gingrich a story by Ambrose Bierce. Esquire manages more than any other mass publication to date to give the impression that it is trying for literary distinction in each of its 40 or 45 monthly articles or stories. Mr. Smart is the first U. S,.publisher to get on to the idea that most valid literary names cost little money.

Esquire Features was last week modestly housed in businesslike offices on Chicago’s Walton Place. But Esquire and its trade companion Apparel Arts, now issued eight times a year, are administered in suites of offices in Manhattan and Chicago which carry out the cinema conception of magazine headquarters more thoroughly than any other U. S. publishing premises except those of the New Republic. In Manhattan, Partner Weintraub handles the fashion and advertising departments of both magazines. His outer halls are lined in pale gold satinwood, with a pale gold receptionist to match.

In Chicago, Publisher Smart holds forth as president of Esquire Inc. in offices vacated by Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Co. These editorial premises and Publisher Smart’s bachelor apartment across the street in the Drake Tower are decoratively notable for pigskin walls, chartreuse leather divans, duralumin lighting fixtures, look like quarters habitually occupied in cinemas by Actor William Powell.

Of Publisher Smart, who is just turning 42, Editor Gingrich once said: “In the grip of a headache, he sometimes looks older than God.”

* Last week “Bazooka” Burns was entertaining in Kansas City with Ben Bernie’s band at a seven-day municipal blow-out called a “Jubilesta.”