A birthday celebrated in black tie and a 616-page issue
On the day in 1933 that salesmen started soliciting ads for Esquire, President Franklin Roosevelt closed all the nation's banks. The magazine, which emphasized men's fashion, was to be distributed primarily through clothing stores, but the first issue's newsstand copies sold so quickly that the staff frenziedly retrieved what they could from the haberdashers. Three years later, Esquire had a profitable circulation of 440,000 and was publishing works that are still remembered, including Ernest Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up. Other magazines that competed for big-name writers in those days are gone: the original Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Liberty. But Esquire, though it has undergone a series of shifts that have made it seem the magazine of a thousand faces, has endured.
Last week the magazine climaxed a yearlong celebration of its 50th birthday with a black-tie party for 2,000 people in New York City's Avery Fisher Hall. They gathered to honor a self-conscious "publishing event": a 616-page special issue of Esquire, hailing "50 Americans who made the difference." In attendance were some of the issue's glittery contributors, including Norman Mailer, William Whittle and Kurt Vonnegut back subjects, Polio Vaccine Pioneer Dr. Jonas Salk, Boxer Muhammad Ali, Pollster George Gallup and Feminist Betty Friedan. Perhaps the central figures, however, were Phillip Moffitt, 37, and Christopher Whittle, 36, the Tennesseans who bought out investors including then Editor Clay Felker for a reported $3.5 million in 1979, when Esquire was losing $25,000 a day. Chairman Whittle's gala announcement: "After 13 years, we have come back into the black." Established magazines, once they falter, are rarely able to turn around, and Esquire falls between two categories of periodicals, general interest and men's, that have been hit especially hard by reader defections. Playboy (circ. 4,250,000) and Penthouse (circ. 3,454,000) have each lost more than 12% in circulation; Esquire's nearest rival, GQ (for Gentlemen's Quarterly), is growing (circ. 558,000, up 7.5%) but has deliberately shifted from a clotheshorse consciousness to deal, like Esquire, with popular culture in the broadest sense. Under Whittle and Moffitt, Esquire's circulation has grown somewhat, from 652,000 to 730,000 (well below the mid-1970s peak of 1.25 million) while the number of advertising pages has soared from 535 in 1981 to 1,312 in 1983. Two major reasons for the upsurge: Editor Moffitt's success in appealing to affluent fellow members of the baby-boom generation, and a series of service-oriented features that openly tie editorial content to ads. The November issue's 68-page section on bars and drink recipes, for example, includes 23 pages of full-color liquor advertisements.
The typical Esquire reader, according to an independent survey, is a male college graduate between 25 and 34 who earns $33,000 in a managerial or professional job. In addition to fiction and some semiserious journalism, the magazine provides advice on trendy places to live (Santa Fe, for women and scenery), chic collectibles (signed handcrafted furniture), modish cookery and backpacking.