The Press: Fleur’s Flair

Every time Fleur Fenton Cowles tried to tell her publisher-husband, Gardner Cowles, about the kind of monthly class magazine she would like to start, she found herself repeating: “It’s got to have flair.” Says Fleur: “I couldn’t get around the word. I just had to use it.” After she had dreamed and importuned for two years, Publisher Cowles decided that Fleur was absolutely right. This week, 46-year-old “Mike” and his 50-year-old brother John, who already own two magazines (Look, Quick), four newspapers and four radio stations, announced that they will publish a new magazine next February. Its name: Flair. Its editor: Fleur Cowles. She has already quietly signed up a staff headed by General Manager Arnold Gingrich (ex-editor of Esquire).

Fleur’s Flair, which will be shown this week in a limited edition to 5,000 potential advertisers and subscribers, looks like a fancy bouillabaisse of Vogue, Town & Country, Holiday, etc. By covering “fashion, art, literature, travel, decor, theater and entertainment,” Editor Cowles expects to lure enough readers to guarantee advertisers a circulation of 200,000 (at 50¢ a copy) at the start.

Flair’s sample issue has an off-white hard cover, with a second, illustrated cover visible through a triangular peephole. Flair abounds with other tricks. There is an accordion-style pull-out on interior decoration, a pocket-sized book insert, a swatch of cotton fabric, even a page written in invisible ink that can be read when it is heated by a lighted match.

Flair’s Fleur, 39, who was a topflight advertising executive before she became the third wife of Publisher Cowles three years ago, will keep on doubling in brass as an associate editor of the picture magazine Look (circ. 3,075,000) and the three-month-old, capsule-sized newsweekly Quick, now up to 400,000, according to Mike Cowles.

Straw-haired, sleekly groomed Fleur Cowles doesn’t own a hat, usually wears tailored suits, a rose, and black horn-rimmed glasses, is never without a huge (1 in.) Russian emerald ring (“It’s my trademark, it’s me, it’s Fleur — rough, uncut, vigorous”). Says she: “I’ve worked hard, and I’ve made a fortune, and I did it in a man’s world, but always, ruthlessly, and with a kind of cruel insistence, I have tried to keep feminine.” For a sampling of Fleur’s insistent femininity, readers could look to Flair.