Dickens, Dali & Others

One of the slickest of U.S. slick magazines was born--along with baseball, Buffalo Bill, the Pennsylvania Railroad, New York's first tattoo parlor and Carry Nation--100 years ago. This week, to show how gracefully it had grown old, it unveiled a centenary self-portrait that managed to appear both candid and flattering. The 348-page Christmas annual that came from the presses of swank, sophisticated Town & Country was the heaviest (2 Ibs. 11 1/2 oz.) issue in its history. It was also the richest, with around $250,000 worth of ads.

The picture showed a Town & Country with its snooty tongue tucked in a still unwithered cheek. For its lead article, man-about-town-&-country Editor Henry Adsit Bull ran a 50.000-word T. & C. autobiography that confessed to a few youthful indiscretions: it had brazenly pirated the works of Dickens, Thackeray and their Continental contemporaries (a common crime of the time), even while campaigning for a copyright law that would make such piracy illegal.

To set off this magnum opus, there were old snapshots and paintings, an album of "The Belles of Our Time," whose 13 beauties included Mrs. Dandridge Spotswood (1908), later the Baroness Eugene de Rothschild; Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson modeling for her husband's "Gibson Girl" (1896); Jennie Jerome, mother of Winston Churchill (1906). There was also a tour of Bohemias (homegrown and foreign) that wound up in a lush wilderness of fashion, liquor and perfume ads. Editor Bull's dollar-a-copy production number was certain to sit well where Town & Country is read: in paneled libraries, and under the dryers in a host of beauty salons.

Up from a Nickel. In the beginning (and until 1901), Town & Country was the homely Home Journal, originally a newspaper-size nickel weekly. Its founders were Nathaniel Willis, the man who helped make European travel fashionable, and George P. Morris, the man who wrote Woodman, Spare That Tree. For the provincial U.S. of 1846, their aim was high: "... to give the cream of new books, to keep a watchful lookout for genius in literature, music and art."

Their first assistant was Edgar Allan Poe; their first book review was J. G. Whittier's report (favorable) on Longfellow's Evangeline. Willis and Morris crammed down the throats of "the upper 10,000" the new works of De Quincey, Swinburne, Leigh Hunt, Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand and anyone else they could buy or steal.

Their journal strayed far from the path they blazed, got lost more than once in the plush-horse latitudes of high society. But later editors kept up their fight for women's rights, gumptiously ran Chabas' September Morn (1912) in protest against the prudish post-Victorian ban on nudes. To instruct the well-to-do in the things it was well to do, they helped make skiing, motoring and flying socially acceptable.

Absent Treatment. For its past 21 years, Town & Country has been unobtrusively owned by William Randolph Hearst. Slight, worldly-wise Editor Harry Bull, like Hearst, went to St. Paul's School and Harvard, won fame of a sort in 1924 when he bested the then Prince of Wales in a pillow-fight aboard the Berengaria, returning from Europe. He worked briefly for TIME, moved to Town & Country from the late International Studio in 1931, became editor in 1935. Owner Hearst has never darkened Bull's editorial door, or given Town & Country's small staff of 13 anything but postpublication criticism.

For snob appeal, T. & C. once carried a double-truck "social calendar" and a nightclub column; but by the time Bull tossed them out the magazine had somewhat outgrown its adoration of Society. During the war, deprived of travel news and automotive ads, it took refuge in fashions ; now it is broadening its base to run more of its famous literary letters from abroad, more sports, more art. (This year it has doubled its 25,000 circulation.) Its theater critic: Harry Bull, only editor member of Manhattan's Drama Critics Circle.

Town & Country, which claims to be the U.S. discoverer of Ludwig Bemelmans. Evelyn Waugh, Henry Miller and Oliver St. John Gogarty, is now alone in the once-crowded field that held Vanity Fair, Spur, Horse & Horsemen, Country Life and the Sportsman. It has survived by getting under Hearst's wing, and by getting back on the old Home Journal beam. "We found out," says Harry Bull, "that sportsmen can't read."

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