The Press: Look, No Fringe

A decade ago, spectacled, aggressive Gardner (“Mike”) Cowles likes to recall, “I, personally, started Look, and devoted a whale of a lot of time to it. I was the works, and I really ran everything.” But for most of that decade, the picture magazine he sired was run by others. It saw its founding father only in the little time he could take from running the family’s Des Moines Register & Tribune and radio stations, and working as a top OWI executive.

Last week Mike Cowles reversed this pattern. From now on, he will live in his bachelor apartment in Manhattan’s Waldorf Towers (he was recently divorced), commute to Iowa every other weekend. As Cowles moved into the editor’s office at Look, jovial, 42-year-old Harlan Logan, his editor since 1942, moved out. Said Logan, not so jovially: “Mr. Cowles and I are in general disagreement on what is a family magazine.”

Man with a Plan. An athletic six-footer with a Phi Beta Kappa key (Indiana U.), Logan was a “magazine doctor” who had analyzed 110 U.S. periodicals as an English professor at New York University. He joined Cowles in 1939 as a consultant, worked up to be general manager of Look in a year.

Staffers found him an enthusiast for elaborate planning. A handy man with a presentation chart, Logan added several fancy sidelines, e.g., a crew of picture-book specialists to create such books as Wallace Stegner’s One Nation, the Look at America series, etc.

Faced like other publishers with increased costs and lowered profit margins, Mike Cowles decided two months ago that Look could get along with fewer hobbies. In a major shakeup, Editor Harlan Logan’s pet projects—and 75 staffers, including the entire crew of Look books—were dropped.

“These departments,” said Mike Cowles last week, “were Mr. Logan’s babies. He was greatly sold on them, and still is. When costs started going up, I decided that some of these ‘fringe’ departments, while interesting, must go. … I felt that our primary job was to put out a magazine.”