This week Parisiennes got a new women's magazine, Elle (She), with a strong American flavor. Its editor, fluffy-haired Mme. Helene Gordon Lazareff, came to the U. S. to get it started.
Postwar France has no color photography as yet, and few flashbulbs—so Mme. Lazareff borrowed a collection of French accessories, including 15 chic Lilly Dache hats, for the first covers, to be photographed in Manhattan. She believes that French humorists are now turning out only bitter satire—so she bought a double-page spread of cartoons by the New Yorker's not-so-bitter James Thurber.
To bring French women up to date on what has happened to the rest of the world in the past five years, Mme. Lazareff, in a frantic fortnight in Manhattan, gathered up data on postwar kitchens, Sinclair Lewis' Cass Timberlane (to run serially), news of Sinatra, Van Johnson and other wartime discoveries.
Then, her shopping bag full, Mme. Lazareff flew back to Paris. Now that
Frenchwomen have the vote, she said, they will get generous doses of current affairs and politics in Elle, besides chapters of Colette's new autobiographical novel, L'Etoile Vesper.
Helene Lazareff knows how to mix such ingredients into a palatable Franco-American dish. She started out as an ethnologist, lived with an African tribe two months and sold a series of articles about the adventure to L'Intransigeant, caught on with Paris-Soir, married its editor, Pierre Lazareff. As the editor of Marie-Claire (a sort of Ladies' Home Journal with a French accent), she ran its circulation to 1,250,-ooo copies a week before France fell. As wartime refugees in the U.S., the Lazareffs kept busy, he with the French section of OWI and she with Harper's Bazaar and the New York Times. M. Lazareff now edits France-Soir.
His wife's 20-franc (40^) weekly will be no child of Marie-Claire. Said Mme. Lazareff: "Something has happened in between. The youth in France are much less fluffy. The chichi is passe. . . ."