The Girdle Gazette

One advertiser calls it "a consumer magazine with strong trade influence." To others, it is "a trade magazine with strong consumer influence." In either case, it managed to carry more fashion advertising than Vogue or Harper's Bazaar last year even though it missed an entire month's publication. Among cloak-and-suiters it is known--half affectionately and half derisively--as "The Girdle Gazette." It is the New York Times Sunday Magazine, one of the more curious phenomena of U.S. journalism.

Frilly Flavor. In the generally pallid Sunday-magazine field, the Times entry glows with health. The mass-circulation supplements were created to serve an almost unmanageably diffuse national audience, and lately they seem to have lost the ability to mix the right formula. After 67 years, Hearst's American Weekly, first of the supplements, is preparing to drop out of its last nine papers and fold in September. This Week (14,270,753 circulation in 43 papers) and Parade (10,950,664 in 69) have suffered advertising losses up to 20% .

By contrast, the Times Magazine racked up $13 million in advertising last year, despite its costly, strike-born blackout, and accounted for more than 10% of the newspaper's total ad revenues. When the 15-week newspaper strike ended in April, the magazine returned with a robust, 200-page issue, fattest in its history. Department-store buyers, fabric makers and dress manufacturers all over the country read it avidly for the ads that tip them off to what's hot in the fashion capital of the U.S. Largely because of this clientele, the Times's Sunday circulation outside New York City is more than 500,000 out of a total circulation of 1,300,000.

The magazine's evolution into a sort of Insiders' Newsletter for the soft-goods trade traces to the end of World War II, when Advertising Manager Monroe Green, 57, sent his salesmen after the Times's neighbors in the Seventh Avenue Garment District. Even after manufacturers began their exodus to the South and to Montreal in search of cheaper labor, they continued advertising, just to keep up with the competition. Now, says Green, thousands of women who turn to the magazine "read the ads as news."

With its frilly advertising flavor, the magazine is always in danger of being looked at instead of being read. TV's Jack Paar once complained that he found "the crotch ads" distracting, and New York Post Columnist James Wechsler called the magazine "the sexiest place in town."

Five for One. Though he seems to be in a lonely minority, Sunday Editor Lester Markel, 69, who also runs the News of the Week in Review, the Drama and the Book Review sections, somehow manages to ignore all those girls in hip-hugging scanties. "This magazine is governed by the complexion of the news," says Markel, and not by the tastes of the woman who needs a new foundation. "I edit for Markel. I print things that interest me." What interests the crusty, 40-year veteran are broad-stroked stories on important, reasonably current topics--desegregation, the Common Market, disarmament--and if they often seem dull, what wouldn't alongside the clothes-shedding Spring-maids or the rounded Spun-lo panties girl?

Markel and his staff generate up to 90% of the magazine's story ideas, then farm them out to Times reporters and to outside contributors such as Senator Barry Goldwater, Economist Seymour Harris or British Economist Barbara Ward, a perennial favorite. The fee is a flat $300 for all--or, as Markel puts it, "We pay $1,500 and then charge $1,200 for the idea."

Though Markel regularly returns pieces for rewriting, critics complain that there is still a plodding sameness and predictability about most of the magazine's articles. One possibly apocryphal story tells of a speech Markel gave to the Times's Washington Bureau. One staffer asked whether much editing was done. "Yes, quite a bit," Markel replied. "We once asked Barbara Ward to rewrite a piece five times." "And printed all five versions," growled a voice in the rear.

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