New Lease

Jacqueline Cochran, cosmetic manufacturer, crack airplane pilot and sometime commander of the Army Air Forces' WASPS, got set last week for another dash into the war--this time as a Pacific correspondent for Liberty.

There was more to it than just another name-in-the-news. Jackie Cochran's husband, famed Financier Floyd Odlum, had been dickering for Liberty for several months. (Marshall Field tried, and found the price too high.) Last week the sale price (nearly $5,000,000) was set and just about in the bag.

Salvage Job. Liberty has tried hard to live down an unhappy past. Its masthead each week carries a significant sentence: "No longer connected with Macfadden Publications or the Chicago Tribune." The magazine's founding fathers, Colonel Robert R. McCormick and Captain Joseph Patterson, launched it 21 years ago as a poor man's Saturday Evening Post, won readers but never did influence advertisers. Then Bernarr ("Body Love") Macfadden took over, cheap-jacked its contents, built up 2,700,000 circulation, but still lost money.

Three years ago, when Liberty was dropping a million dollars a year, Printer John Cuneo took it over for the printing bill, and decided to keep it going rather than let his huge presses stand idle. He called in his ace magazine salvager, handsome ex-Hearstling Paul Hunter, who had rescued Screenland, Silver Screen and Movie Show for him. Hunter ordered Liberty's circulation pulled up out of the barbershop trade, to reach people with more buying power. At first, under Hunter, circulation continued to drop--to a low of 1,112,000. He now has it up to 1,262,000 (about as far as the paper supply will go), has spruced up the editorial fare, and claims to have made a million dollars last year.

"All Liberty lacks today is package," says Hunter, moaning low over his lack of better paper to match his better contents. Pointing to the pulp layer in the middle of a slick paper sandwich, he sighs: "We have to print novels on toilet paper."

Even the by-line of Jackie Cochran and the big purse of Odlum's Atlas Corp. (oil, airlines, utilities, Manhattan's swank Bonwit Teller store, movies) could not solve the wartime paper problem. But it might well help develop Liberty's new lease on life into a more successful pursuit of advertisers.

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