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What may uphold Esquire's reputation among its readers as more than a fawning service magazine is that its hip tips are often offset by moralizing self-doubt, a quality Moffitt sees as a 1960s holdover. Says he: "We have done everything with this generation, our generation, in mind. The tone of our times, for them, is an unending series of crises: having babies vs. pursuing careers, how hard we want to work. These are questions of meaning." According to Moffitt, the best-read feature is Anthony Brandt's column on personal ethics, which has pondered the duty to keep a secret and the propriety of taking legal but dubious tax deductions.
Former executives of Esquire the business acumen of Moffitt and Whittle, but give the content less reviews. Says one longtime editor: have convinced Madison Avenue that is the hottest thing going, but I have doubts about their literary taste." gently concurs: "They are marketing people more than journalists. Theirs is a valuable publication, but is it Esquire? Only some of it is."
What exactly Esquire is has been answered differently almost decade by decade. In the 1930s it taught middlebrows a sense of style, at first sartorially, then literarily. In the 1940s it followed America's youth to war and turned so strongly to cheesecake that its contents had to be cleared in advance by the post office. The titillation — tame by present standards, but daring for its day — was phased out in the 1950s, when Founding Editor Arnold Gingrich (who died after semiretirement in 1976) returned to guide the magazine back to "quality"; it then be came perhaps the foremost outlet for well-known, mainstream writers. In the 1960s, it turned to raffish, at times sophomoric humor. In the 1970s, although it presented noteworthy journal ism by Tom Wolfe and Harrison Salisbury, Esquire groped for an identity. Then came Whittle and Moffitt, who were publishers of Nutshell, a guide distributed on college campuses. Esquire gave them a national platform and sentimental satisfaction. Recalls Moffitt: "Reading it as a teenager, I would would measure measure how how adult adult I felt." felt."
Having fulfilled one editorial dream, Moffitt enjoyed another in assembling the current issue. The whole is less impressive than its parts: the depth and focus of the profiles vary erratically, and many are marred by the writer's misplaced insistence on putting himself at the center of his story. But there are some splendid, mildly offbeat entries: Wilfrid Sheed's portrayal of the on-the-field polite ness and off-the-field anger of baseball's Jackie Robinson; Ronald Steel's evocation of Cold Warrior Dean Acheson; Alistair Cooke's precise homage to Jazz Composer Duke Ellington. "The common theme," says Moffitt, "is the power of the individual, our wanting it not to be true that institutions are everything." The is sue's merits — earnestness, attention to social trends, appreciation of what makes a star in any line of endeavor — are also the strengths of this incarnation of Esquire. It may not enjoy the cachet and influence it once did, but this institution has survived. — By William A. Henry III. Reported by Richard Bruns/New York