The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  Sure enough, the only serious side-boob backlash came not from subscribers but from the SI staff, some of whom had loathed Swimsuit for years. They viewed it as slick subjugation of women, humiliating and degrading for everyone. Some of them came to see me. The word “pornography” was used. When I polled the staff, I found that about a third felt this way. Another third thought Swimsuit was important to SI, but only because it made so much money. The rest didn’t care or thought polling them was funny, maybe even stupid. There had been very few female editors at SI, but the four editors of the Swimsuit Issue over the years were women, and the two I was working with—Diane Smith and MJ Day—were incredulous that so many of their colleagues just didn’t get it. Nobody ever got mad at SI for asking if they wanted to be in the Swimsuit Issue. The athletes who posed (and Beyoncé, too) all said they were flattered.

  In the middle of all this, I heard a story about my immediate predecessor at the magazine, Bill Colson, whom I had replaced in a surprise move by Time Inc. bosses Norm Pearlstine and John Huey a couple years earlier. Colson was a fine journalist and a bold editor who had won the managing editor job in a tryout (known within Time Inc. as a “bake-off”) by running a cover calling for the University of Miami to drop its corrupt football program in the interest of higher education. The Swimsuit story was that Colson had gone to Huey with the idea that the best thing for SI would be to can Swimsuit. He had obviously disagreed.

  My 2004 Swimsuit Issue sold a record 1,563,694 copies on the newsstand with Veronica Varekova on the cover, bikini top in hand. In anticipation of the 2005 issue, I ran a boxed notification on the “Letters” page with the headline “If You Don’t Want the Swimsuit Issue.” The notice provided a phone number for subscribers to request that they skip the issue and have their subscriptions extended by a week. Perhaps 20,000 paid subscribers, out of the total of 3.2 million, or 0.006 percent, asked not to receive the Swimsuit Issue. It sold 1,083,827 with Carolyn Murphy on the cover with her top on.

  —

  IF YOU LOOKED CLOSELY at any of the Swimsuit models, you saw youth but also a happy sophistication—something they were growing into. The editors joked that they were “specimens.” But there was an innocence, too. When a prospective model would come to the office with her portfolio, usually in jeans and without makeup, there was almost a Cinderella vibe to it. Personality mattered, too, because part of the contract called for appearances at events and parties. Confidence was something else they all had, along with the flawless skin. One of the photographers told me that once you shot for Swimsuit, the only women you could compare the models to were other Swimsuit models. That’s circular reasoning but it’s also true.

  By 2005 we had thousands of Swimsuit pictures, going back to the 1980s, up on SI.com, as well as the couple hundred or so in the magazine. I asked for the models to lose the pouty, come-hither coyness and start smiling more. Also no more rock humping, thong masturbation or fake surf orgasms. And the bikini tops had to be worn in more of the pictures. The Swimsuit department complied but thought I was nuts. The research—from focus groups and showing photos to young men hanging out at malls—was telling us that the sexier (more naked!) the models were, the more money we’d make.

  As Swimsuit rolled toward my last issue in 2012, there were shoots in Bondi Beach and North Narrabeen in Australia; Apalachicola, Florida; Bocas del Toro Province and San Blas Islands, Panama; Desroches Island, Seychelles; and Victoria Falls, Zambia. You edit as you go. Certain pictures emerge. The Swimsuit editors and the creative director have their favorites. So do three hundred assorted guys aged eighteen to fifty-four (150 recent buyers and 150 prospects) in fifteen malls across the country who look at cover mock-ups. In the end, the editor has to decide.

  I wanted to put Anne V on the cover, and the Swimsuit editors took her to the Seychelles with that in mind, setting her up with what they thought was the strongest combination of photographer, location and “suit theme” (bright colors). Most models had small cover windows, unless they became immediate stars, like Cheryl Tiegs or Elle Macpherson, and wound up with multiple covers. Every model was told she had a shot at the cover, and they all did. Anne had eight years in and had come close before.

  Over those same years, Swimsuit had gone increasingly digital. By 2012, besides the magazine we had a Swimsuit Daily blog, a supercharged tablet edition with scrolling, panoramic photo sequences, and two hours of video, available for iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Barnes & Noble Nook Color, Amazon Kindle Fire, Motorola Xoom and Android smartphones, and we had built a Chrome Web app to take advantage of HTML5. Did I forget to mention 3-D video for PlayStation 3? There was also an iPhone app that gave users a 360-degree view of body-painted athletes. SI.com/Swimsuit had an elaborate interactive music section with seventeen emerging indie bands. We sold coffee table books, calendars and trading cards and experimented with holograms. We had interactive polls in real time and produced TV specials and reality shows. We pushed it all out with Twitter, Facebook and Flipboard feeds. After David Letterman “revealed” the cover on his late-night show (complete with one of his top ten lists), and after the New York party, we flew our most important advertisers and the models to Las Vegas on a private 727 for three more days of sponsored Swimsuit casino events, which we called “experiential marketing.”

  The press release quoted me: “ ‘You will see innovation on every Swimsuit platform this year,’ said Terry McDonell, Editor, Time Inc. Sports Group.” Well, yes, you would, because SI Swimsuit was a franchise like no other and we sold it harder than anything else we had, including our journalism. We were reaching more than seventy million American adults (5 percent of the population), not to mention what we pulled from foreign editions. When I traveled internationally for SI, the first question I always got was about Swimsuit. In Beijing in 2006, when we were negotiating to launch Sports Illustrated China in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics, an official with the Chinese Olympic Committee kept referring to Swimsuit as the “Bathroom Issue.” We had Swimsuit there by 2007. Even in the United States, when people found out that part of my job was to pick the Swimsuit cover, things got silly. Serious businessmen asked what it would take—no, really, what would it take?—to get invited on a shoot.

  “I’ve never been on a shoot,” I would answer, always bringing disappointment.

  —

  THE COVER OF MY LAST Swimsuit Issue, in 2012, was not Anne V but nineteen-year-old Kate Upton, with no freckles and no sand on her butt. Over the years, Anne had always tested slightly below the models who made it: most recently Marisa Miller (2008), Bar Refaeli (2009), Brooklyn Decker (2010), Irina Shayk (2011) and, finally, Upton (2012), who had become a social media sensation with her sexy smartphone Dougie video from a Los Angeles Clippers game just before our mall intercepts.

  In Las Vegas for all the parties, Anne was as charming as ever, but at one of the casino concerts she came up to me with her then boyfriend, Adam Levine.

  “You should have put her on the cover,” he said.

  “I know,” I said, “but it’s a business.” That was hurtful and I was immediately sorry. The models all thought the editor decided, and that was true. But research had become so powerful you defied it at your own risk. It wasn’t just about instinct or relationships. It was about opinions in malls in places like Trumbull, Connecticut. The Swimsuit editors had promised to explain that to Anne. Maybe they had, maybe not.

  And then she told me that she knew she had never tested especially well. “Freckles,” Anne said, and laughed.

  −ENDIT−

  Ad Sales (672)

  SELLING ADVERTISING IS A FLIRTY, tough business way beyond the macho sexiness it was freighted with on Mad Men, which, unironically enough, opened with an establishing shot of the Time & Life Building in midtown. This was where I worked with Mark Ford, who was then the president of Sports Illustrated and sometimes referred to himself in the third person as “the sales donkey”—a bit of self-mockery that underlined rather than undercut his instincts as a sa
lesman. His cell-phone ringtone was Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” and he sold his ass off over boardroom tables, rounds of golf and thousands of drinks.

  “It’s a relationship business,” he’d say. Or, if he was negotiating, “It’s not my first rodeo.” We’d talk almost every day. Once, on an agency call in Chicago to introduce the iPad edition of SI when all we had was a simulation video and a bunch of jargon about “enhanced usability,” one of the agency guys whom Ford knew well because he ran lots of automotive business interrupted, wanting to know “How much?” Apple hadn’t even released the first iPad yet.

  “For what?” Ford said.

  “You tell me.”

  Ford came up with something he called an “Innovation Partnership.” SI would share iPad research and development for a year and discount a package of advertising pages in the magazine on top of that. The guy cocked his head to suggest he wanted a hard number.

  “A million bucks,” Ford said. A glance at me. A cagey smile. He knew everyone in the room. “We’re six months ahead of everyone on this.”

  “We can work this out,” the account guy said, and we all went downstairs for some drinks.

  —

  TOP EDITORS ALL STRADDLE the line between editorial independence and publishing imperatives to get the money—call it the separation of “church and state” if you want to sound naïve. I went on sales calls whenever I was asked. Getting the editor to show up has always been a hoop some advertisers put magazine publishers through.

  I liked the client dinners my various publishers hosted at expensive restaurants. They knew the maître d’s. Good wine in private rooms, with extra waiters. It seemed effortless. Even the lowest sales assistant or advertising associate was eager to pick up checks (to be expensed, of course). This was not true of the SI editors, who always expected me to buy (understandable, but the entitlement was cloying). I would hear editors berate “ad guys”—as they were called everywhere I worked—for not reading every word of their magazines, but so what? Neither did most of the editors.

  The publishing side of any editor’s job expanded with the need for new editorial features to sell advertising against: Father’s Day supplements, roundups of new consumer electronic products for your “media room,” and guides to the best places to stay or eat or whatever. To resist was professional suicide, but when editors came through with a new idea, most publishers were deferential and grateful—a posture that has stiffened in the current era of editorial-looking “native” advertising, when what used to be called “advertorials” are sold as “premium content.” I don’t mean Innovation Partnerships that take advantage of new technology; I mean advertiser-approved marketing material disguised as journalism—like joke taxidermy.

  It takes great determination to sell advertising—print, digital or a combination—whether it’s advertorial or not. There’s a constant rate negotiation. Rate cards based on circulation and traffic, with their printed CPMs (cost for every thousand customers), are just a place to start. Advertising clients and their advertising agencies push back on everything.

  Every publisher I worked with had a compulsive work ethic. They ordered up market analyses and demographic studies and constantly refined their presentations to appeal to whomever they were calling on that day—and then negotiated like wolverines. Some might dispute this, but selling a $350,000 page required more than getting one-on-one with a client with an ounce of coke, a fifth of Cuervo Gold and a couple of Rolling Stones tickets.

  −ENDIT−

  Steve Jobs Thinks Your Work Is Really Stupid (1,262)

  WHEN STEVE JOBS CAME to Time Inc. in February 2010, wearing New Balance sneakers, jeans and a black mock turtleneck, I thought about his visit to Newsweek twenty-six years earlier in that little bow tie. He had arrived at Newsweek with one assistant to help him carry two of the Macintosh computers he was presenting then. There were at least eight people with him for his Time Inc. visit, and iPads were passed out to the top editors from Time, Fortune, People and the other magazines, all of us seated at a long conference table. Coffee and tea were offered by waiters in white uniforms. Steve sat at the head of the table and spoke elliptically about innovation, quality journalism and various business models while we played with his new machines.

  I had never touched an iPad, although I had been working on an app to run on one for four months. The assignment had been to create the first tablet magazine, and Sports Illustrated had done that with jury-rigged touch-screen technology pieced together from Hewlett-Packard. Finally, to show that we were ready for the coming iPad, we had made a video simulation of what SI would be like on the tablet. It was primitive, with “zombie hands” to explain the touch navigation, and I had done the narration, but the video had gone viral—we loved saying that—with more than a million views and everyone in magazine publishing had seen it.

  I turned on the new iPad and went to YouTube to see if the video would play. It did: “Hello, I’m Terry McDonell, the editor of Sports Illustrated, and here’s your new issue…”

  I turned it off quickly, but the editor of Fortune, Andy Serwer, asked Jobs if he had seen the video. He had. What did he think? I’m sure Serwer was pushing for an acknowledgment that as a company we were in the hunt—to use a popular catchphrase at the time. I’m also sure that most of the other editors in the room were tired of hearing about SI’s spurt of digital development and wouldn’t have minded Jobs knocking it down a little. I certainly didn’t know Steve Jobs, but I figured I still had to be on his radar and something very good could come out of SI’s iPad edition. I was hopeful.

  “I think it’s stupid,” Steve said. “Really stupid.”

  “Why?” I asked, jumping in, maybe too fast.

  “It’s just a video—it’s not real.”

  “You gave us no choice,” I said. “And our app will work great on your appliance.” I still loved the word appliance.

  “You made this?” he asked, I think realizing we had met before.

  At this point, Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore joined the meeting. “Queen Ann,” as she was sometimes called, was full of small smiles for everyone, almost bubbly, as was her style, but then suddenly grew confused by the mood of the room. I handed her the iPad, and when she turned it on, it defaulted to the SI video: “Hello, I’m Terry McDonell…”—which was funny until she couldn’t turn it off.

  “Isn’t it great,” she said, handing the iPad back to me.

  The irony here was that “Queen Ann” was a shorthand variation of “the Launch Queen.” She’d earned the epithet from top management in acknowledgment of her work as the publisher of People when she’d overseen the rollouts of InStyle, People en Español, Teen People and Real Simple, giving Time Inc. a competitive edge in the women’s category for the first time. So she really had been an innovator, but now she couldn’t find the power button.

  After Ann left for yet another important meeting, Serwer asked Steve about getting access to Apple’s creative process. That was a good one if you knew their history—going back to a March 2008 Fortune piece titled “The Trouble with Steve Jobs,” which reported his eccentric cancer diet and raised questions about his involvement in the backdating of Apple stock options. Jobs had asked Serwer to kill it, and had then gone over his head to Time Inc. editor in chief John Huey, but Huey held the line and the piece had run.

  I was expecting something far harsher than what Steve had said about SI’s iPad app, but he didn’t answer at first. I think Time managing editor Rick Stengel said something about how better access would make for more interesting journalism and he’d like to be first in line.

  “That will never happen,” Steve said finally, looking at Serwer, “after what you did.” He was talking about that Fortune story two years earlier, but instead of showing anger he was swallowing hard and his eyes were tearing.

  “You kicked me when I was down,” Steve said. I think that’s when everyone in the room realized how sick he was.

  Serwer said he was sorry, that he was
just doing his job, that it wasn’t personal. But you could see it was very personal for Steve, who nodded, took a breath and moved on haltingly to his ideas about how publishers like Time Inc. had to be careful about “overpricing what you’re selling.”

  Overpricing what you’re selling? Suddenly he was negotiating, even though none of the editors in the room had the authority to do anything beyond have an opinion. So…Apple would be taking its customary one-third and holding on to the credit card data. Apple might be willing to give us some of that data back—“customers’ names and stuff”—but not the credit card info, which, he said, was protected by Apple’s privacy policy. We were fucked.

  The meeting ended with the iPads being collected and Steve pushing away from the table while saying, “I’m interested in magazines.”

  —

  I HUNG BACK as the other editors filed past to say good-bye. When they were gone, I reminded Steve where we had met, and about Newsweek Access. He said he remembered, and that Tom Zito had sent him a photo from the SI 2007 Swimsuit Issue of Marisa Miller on her back on a white beach, naked except for an iPod. Was I responsible for that? I was. I had sent it to Zito to send to him, and I knew what he had e-mailed back to Zito—who had forwarded the e-mail to me.

  “Really,” Steve said, and waited.

  “ ‘Does she want a job at Apple?’ ” I said, quoting his e-mail.

  “A joke,” Steve said.

  “I know.”

  “Like this meeting.”

  An hour after Steve left, his top developer-relations guy called to say that “Steve and the team” really thought there was a lot of cool stuff in the SI demo and they’d love to work with us to create a version of SI for the iPad release, which was then only sixty days away.

  SI was ready to go; but the first Time Inc. digital magazine—the first digital magazine, period—to run on the iPad was to be Time. Steve “wasn’t into sports,” as it was explained to me a week later, and Time had always been one of his favorite magazines. Time had agreed to put him on the cover after he made some calls himself—and it became clear that Apple’s approval was required not only to run an application on the iPad but also just to get into the Apple App Store. The leverage was embarrassingly obvious. Stengel thanked SI in his “Editor’s Letter” when the issue launched, but there was no mention of the Machiavelli Club.