First to Last

In distorting the shape of U.S. journalism, the late William Randolph Hearst wielded no instrument with more effect than the American Weekly, his peculiar contribution to Sabbath reading. A supplement parasitically attached to Hearst's Sunday papers, and purveying what detractors called "the three Cs" (crime, concupiscence and corruption), the Weekly scored a conspicuous financial success in a newspaper barony frequently awash in red ink. Right up to the Chief's death in 1951, the Weekly, with nearly 10 million circulation, made money. But last week, the businessmen who now govern the remnants of Hearst's empire were jettisoning American Weekly clients right and left in a desperate effort to keep the supplement afloat.

Since January, the Weekly has pulled out of Sunday newspapers in five cities. It will shortly disappear from 21 more, in a deliberate retrenchment that will reduce its circulation from 8,544,535 to 4,000,000. When this is done, the Weekly will survive only in Chicago's American and nine Hearst Sunday papers--which will continue to take it because they have no choice. Having failed to remain first in a field of its own creation, Hearst's supplement' will henceforth run a distant last.

Science & Sex. First or last, the Weekly has left its indelible thumb smudge on the newspaper scene. It was created in 1896 as the American Sunday Magazine, Popular Periodical of the New York Journal for use as a weapon in the mortal struggle between Hearst's Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's World. Pulitzer brandished a Sunday supplement of his own, the Sunday Magazine--but he had to do without the help of his imaginative Sunday editor, Morrill Goddard, 30, whom Hearst had hired away earlier that year, along with the World's entire Sunday staff.

Goddard edited the Hearst supplement according to his conviction that readers' tastes were not much above Pithecanthropus level: "The habits of savagery have been welded into the mind and body of man for ten thousand centuries, while it is only sixty centuries that he has had more or less leisure and opportunity to develop the finer things of life." Asking himself what a literate Neanderthal might enjoy, Goddard answered the question every Sunday, with stories about sex ("The Outrageous French Bathing Suits"), sex cum science ("Science Explains Why Chorus Girls Are Suffering from a Love Famine"), sex cum violence ("Beat Her Lover to Death in Her Vengeful Fury"). The miracles of science were revealed to the supplement's caveman readers, who were told that kisses carried a real electrical shock, that an aggressive vegetable ruled Mars, and that the earth gained weight as it flew through space collecting the debris of "dead and worn out suns, worlds and moons."

Hearst himself loved the American Weekly more than its readers did. It was his pet. Not until 1917, when an underling suggested that Hearst was missing a large source of revenue, did the supplement begin to carry advertising. And when non-Hearst newspapers begged the Chief to let them carry the Weekly too, Hearst turned them all down. His selfishness turned out to be a serious mistake.

Numbers Game. In 1935 a group of 21 independent newspapers decided that if they couldn't join Hearst they would lick him. This Week, their competitive supplement, began life with 4,293,000 circulation--about two-thirds of American Weekly's--and has been growing sturdily ever since. Other national supplements came along: Parade in 1941, Family Weekly in 1953, Suburbia Today in 1959. What had been a comfortable 40-year monopoly for American Weekly turned abruptly into a survival fight.

It was a fight that American Weekly could only lose. Unnoticed by Hearst, the U.S. newspaper reader had crawled out of the jungle and was demanding more edifying fare than the Weekly supplied. By comparison, the new supplements seemed positively intellectual, and as the Weekly declined, they thrived. The Weekly's descent was greased by Hearst's stubborn insistence on staying first at any cost. "It was an obsession," says Arthur H. Motley, 61, publisher of the supplement Parade.

"So Hearst played the numbers game, gathering circulation wherever he could, even in markets where his supplement didn't belong." The first non-Hearst paper was admitted to the fold in 1938, and after that the Weekly sued wildly for nearly any outsider's hand.

By 1951, when Ernest V. Heyn, a troubleshooter from Macfadden Publications, was brought in to reinvigorate the Weekly, it had fallen behind This Week in both circulation (9,430,349 to 9,924,-115) and ad revenue ($12.5 million to $20.6 million). In seven years with Hearst, Heyn erased the Neanderthal look, added a dozen more Sunday papers and doubled the gross.

Something Had to Give. But in all too many cities, the Weekly was competing directly with This Week and Parade. The Sunday supplement field was overextended, and something had to give. From 1957 to 1960, the Weekly's ad revenue plummeted from nearly $25 million to $10.9 million, and it is still falling. Over the same period, This Week's gross rose from $39.2 million to $41 million, Parade's from $19.4 million to $23 million. In circulation, the Weekly also ranks third, against This Week's 14.1 million and Parade's 10.2 million.

Whether the American Weekly can survive even after surgery is open to argument. "A supplement," says Ernest Heyn, now editor in chief of Family Weekly and Suburbia Today, "is only as strong as the pattern of its newspapers." The Weekly must now draw its strength from the Sunday editions of a newspaper empire that has been dwindling away for 25 years.

-The tenth, the New York Mirror, prints its own supplement.

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