“America’s Family Magazine” was out to raise a bigger family of readers. Last week, as a recruiting poster, Look ran a double helping of cheesecake on its cover: a hairy-chested youth and a golden-haired girl, lolling in bathing suits more fiction than fact. The whole magazine also had a new look. A new art director, Merle Armitage, had restyled the covers (with a white background), cleaned up the cramped typography, and given the magazine a fresh, well-ventilated air.
Look had never looked so healthy, or been so prosperous. In the second quarter of 1948 it had sold a record $2,867,000 worth of ads, half again as much as last year. For the 13th quarter in a row, circulation was also up. With 2,910,104 (up 361,000 in a year), the picture magazine had almost caught up to Collier’s (see below), currently less than 14,000 ahead.
The publishing team responsible for Look’s success was President (and Editor) Gardner Cowles and his blonde wife Fleur Fenton Cowles, 38, associate editor.
Woman’s Angle. Mrs. Gowles won her reputation as a career girl before Look did. As a 16-year-old Bostonian with a gift of gab, she talked herself into a $100-a-week advertising job with Gimbels in Manhattan. By 1936 she had an advertising agency of her own and was making $20,000 a year. On Passport No. 1492, she was the first U.S. businesswoman to visit Europe after V-E day. In 1946 she quit her agency to work with the Famine Emergency Committee. Nine months later she and Publisher “Mike” Cowles, friends since 1941, were married (he for the third time, she for the second).
“I was mad about his mind,” said Fleur. The madness was mutual. Mike Cowles found that his bride had so many ideas for Look that he put her to work on it. She knew little about magazine editing but she knew what she liked—and thought other women would too. She added sections for women, tied in the covers to fashion features, saw that every issue had “female appeal.” Look began capturing women readers. “Before,” says Fleur, “it was bought by two million men, and women read it sort of by inheritance.”
32-Hour Day. In Look’s Fifth Avenue GHQ, the two have offices to match their personalities. Mike Cowles, deliberate, slow-spoken, has a sedate, paneled, 13th-floor office, a neat, clean desk. His wife’s, eight floors below, has bright lime-yellow walls, a royal blue rug and a littered blond mahogany semicircular desk. Fleur dresses dramatically, sports an uncut emerald ring as big as a horse chestnut, talks fast and crisply, smokes and likes Scotch & soda. Both she and Mike wear black hornrimmed glasses. In their spare time, Mike plays tennis (“enormously good,” says Fleur), while she paints.
But they have little spare time. Between them, the Cowleses figure they put in about 32 hours a day thinking and arguing about Look. “Our real board meetings,” Fleur says, “are held in our library between 11:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m.”
Along with its new ideas, their magazine still warms over such old chestnuts as Mike’s pet Photocrime and Photoquiz. But the Cowleses have gotten away from regular features, each with a Gallup-polled guarantee of readers. “I’m used to pleasing advertisers to whom no idea looks good the second time they see it,” says Fleur. “We’re seeking the young, active audience,” says Mike.
Next month they will take a four-week tour of Europe. Fleur may do some articles (she has had one byline so far) on the trip. “Or maybe,” she says, “just a short piece saying it’s too big to explain.”
ncG1vNJzZmismaKyb6%2FOpmaaqpOdtrexjm9ucmlobIFwwMeeZKmqlajAbsDHnmSnnadiubC7ymg%3D