New Esquire

Esquire, a lit'ry, prurient playboy in the '30s and a leering satyr in the '40s, is a mature and well-behaved 25-year-old this month. Circulation is a record 829,817, an increase of 43,661 over last year; ad revenues are up 12.4% this year. The $1 anniversary issue carries $1,040,000 worth of ads, and articles that are hardly for hairy-chested males or boudoir bounders: musings on his craft by Poet Robert Graves, blasts against conformity by Educator Robert Hutchins, and the early thoughts of Playwright Arthur Miller on his forthcoming movie about street gangs. Gone are the busty girls.

The man who recast Esquire is the man who made the mold in the first place: furrow-browed, loquacious Arnold Gingrich, 54, founding editor and present publisher. Gingrich was just 29 in 1933 when he put together the first issue of the magazine with a pair of Chicago men's-wear trade publishers named David A. Smart and William H. Weintraub. For $200 a throw, he got short stories and articles from such Depression-struck authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald, e. e. cummings, John Dos Passes, Ezra Pound and Dashiell Hammett (one exception: Ernest Hemingway, who got $1,000 for The Snows of Kilimanjaro), served up the cheesecake of Artist George Petty as dessert. Despite the 50-c- price tag, fashion-plating Esquire boomed to a circulation of 625,000 in 1937. Chortled Publisher Smart: "Why didn't somebody tell me about this publishing game before? It's a cinch."

During World War II, convinced that fighting men wanted their reading light and sexy, Esquire dropped almost all reading matter that required concentration. Major advertisers drifted away, suspicious of the reader who thumbed over the magazine's trashy mysteries, westerns and pinups. Gingrich left in 1945, but remained a stockholder. In 1952 Smart recalled him, gave him a free hand to change Esquire as he liked.

Gingrich likes works by Thomas Wolfe, Gian Carlo Menotti, Paddy Chayefsky, William Inge, Truman Capote. Says he: "Brains wear better than beauty."

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