by Sally Koslow
“We have the quote on tape from a writer for The Wall Street Journal.” Magnolia loved sparring with the lawyers, who tried to suck the blood out of any story.
Truth was, Magnolia Gold loved everything about being a magazine
editor. Publishing disease-of-the-week articles that saved people’s lives.
Rooting out gifted writers from small-town newspapers. Turning flac
cid manuscripts into vigorous prose. Giving people jobs, tickets to Broad
way shows, and invitations to press junkets, which whisked them off
to resorts in Bali that their salaries would never allow. Knowing which
button to push, thus motivating an employee to produce her best effort
and shimmer with pride.
Okay, to be fair, Magnolia also liked her perks, and not just the free
flu shot. Company retreats at Canyon Ranch, where the surprise speaker
might easily be a randy former president. The vacation, five weeks of
it—although she got hot and cold running FedEx’s and faxes wherever
she traveled, even to Cambodia. Knowing that her friends from Fargo
watched her on TV.
Magnolia liked it all. Being an editor in chief was the ultimate job
for the editor of the high school newspaper, especially one with ques
tionable grammar. There was never a morning when she didn’t want
to go to work. Her staff, she suspected, prayed she’d take the occasional
sick day, but Magnolia had the constitution of a mule, and feared that
if she took off, just to play, she’d be struck with a legitimate, lingering
illness. Her open secret was that she relished the grunt work as much as the glory. When the digits on her computer suggested, “Go home,
kid,” she had to force herself to leave.
Magnolia Gold felt born to be a magazine editor. When she was
growing up in Fargo, magazines had given her a window into a world
where people watched indie movies, wore clothes paraded on red car
pets, and referred to Donatella Versace as if she were their college
roommate. Now, working on a magazine required every talent God
granted her, and overlooked those He forgot, like the ability to pass
trigonometry. At the end of it all, a product existed that she could see and women liked. It didn’t even bother her that most of Lady’s loyalists read it on the toilet. Hey, they were busy.
So was Magnolia. Every morning, there was more to do than she
could ever complete in a day. That was fine, because inside her lurked
a procrastinator hanging around in flannel pajamas, and she had to
suppress her at all costs. Magnolia was no good at knitting or parallel
parking, but she almost always knew what women wanted to read
before they themselves did. Editors who grew up anywhere cooler
than Fargo—which is to say, everywhere—had probably never even
been in the same room with your average coupon-clipping, Wal-Mart
shopping American woman. Magnolia grew up with her, respected
her, and was her—if you could overlook the cosmic good fortune of a
sprawling Manhattan co-op and a plus-size expense account.
Her favorite moment was knowing she’d written just the right line
to impel hundreds of thousands of shoppers to stampede through the supermarket because they had to find out what the twelve steps were in this month’s hair rehab story. Early in her career, when she’d dashed
off “how not to be fat after 30,” it had garnered a “Dear Pussycat, That
was absolutely fabulous” note from Helen Gurley Brown. Magnolia
kept the treasure—typed on fading pink paper—in a folder marked
OPEN WHEN FEELING SUICIDAL.
Plain and simple, Magnolia had always adored magazines. They’d
taught her to relieve flatulence, give a hand job, and handicap the mar
riage prospects of Prince William. Now her fun wasn’t so much from
reading magazines, as from working on them, and the juicy center was
being surrounded by smart, talented people. Each editor, proofreader, and production associate on Lady was a jewel, handpicked. While Magnolia didn’t feel these gems belonged in a tiara she expected to
wear forever, she appreciated that her top colleagues had followed her to Lady from her last job.
She swiveled her tall leather chair toward her Mac, banging out
the editor’s letter. At half past one, Sasha brought her the usual from
the deli downstairs—grilled chicken, chickpeas, beets, cherry toma
toes, and romaine tossed with low-fat honey mustard dressing— which Magnolia gobbled along with USA Today.
A few manuscripts later, she looked at the clock. Could she call
California yet? Two o’clock. Excellent.
“How are we coming with December?” she asked. Lady still needed a cover.
“Reese Witherspoon—definite maybe,” replied the overpriced,
L.A. celebrity wrangler. This was good, very good. Booking the deadon perfect star guaranteed that Lady would sell 70 percent of its copies, which was roughly double that of most magazines.
When Magnolia looked up again, it was 3:45. Already? So much for
rehearsing her presentation for the meeting. She brushed her teeth
and combed her hair, glad she’d worked in an appointment over the
weekend to have her amber highlights refreshed.
It was time.
C h a p t e r 3
Oprah Envy
The boardroom was filled, every seat readied with a fresh yellow legal pad and an extrafine felt tip pen, Jock Flanagan’s
preferred writing instrument. Darlene Knudson, in black Prada from
plunging neck to rounded toe, positioned herself—as always—at one
end, opposite Jock, as if she were his equal. Like synchronized swim
mers, numerous high priests from circulation, marketing, publicity,
production and research—several outranking Darlene—flanked each
side of the twenty-foot rosewood table. Everyone was waiting for the
master and commander. As usual.
At 4:25, he entered. As company presidents went, Jock was prime
time ready, from his monogrammed cuffs to his recently barbered
head of wavy hair, whose blackness he owed as much to chemistry
as genes. If it weren’t for an unfortunate overbite, he’d be truly hand
some, and looked a decade younger than his fifty-five years. Taking his
seat at the head of the table and offering no apologies for detaining
twelve executives who, collectively, earned close to five million dollars,
Jock let several minutes pass before he beckoned for Darlene Knudson
and whispered something in her ear. Finally, he spoke.
“Ready, kids?” he asked the group. “I’m going to turn this meeting over to Magnolia, because I know you can’t wait to see how she’s going to reinvent Lady, everyone’s favorite dowager.”
What’s with the snarky tone, Magnolia wondered? Whose fault was it, anyway, that Lady needed a facelift? It’s not as if during her interviews for the job Jock happened to mention that the magazine was two
million dollars in the red. The magazine looked like a frump when she
signed on, and she’d vastly improved it, even without the redesign she
was proposing today. Anyway, she could certainly hold up her head in public. As of a year ago, Lady had turned a profit. Plus, Magnolia had brought down the average reader’s age to forty-two, practically prepu
bescent among traditional women’s magazines. Jock should consider
her a sorceress. Still, there were limits to how much she could accom
plish with
her current resources. After presenting to the group today,
Magnolia hoped-hoped-hoped they’d finally approve the investment
for which she’d been pleading. The magazine needed everything—
glossier paper, a larger format, more room for jaw-dropping art, and
the budget to pay for top-notch photographers and writers. What any
editor would require to drag an aging diva into this century. If Magno
lia’s great-grandmother had lived in the United States, and not a shtetl near Minsk—or was it Pinsk?—she’d have been a Lady subscriber: the magazine was more than one hundred years old.
“Magnolia? Drumroll.”
She realized she hadn’t listened to a thing her boss had said in
the last ten minutes.
“Thanks, Jock,” Magnolia rose from her seat and walked to the
wall. “You’re all going to love what you see.”
Magnolia had been shocked but pleased when Jock had agreed to
Step One of her master plan, and had allowed her to hire the city’s premier design consultant to help her make over Lady. The vote of confidence had propelled her through the last two months of work. Until at
least ten on most evenings, she’d been working with Harry James, a
well-mannered Englishman. Medium height, with ramrod-straight
posture, he had longish hair which was receding ever so slightly, combed
straight back from his forehead. His chin had a pronounced cleft. As they pored over logos and layouts in his downtown design studio
at the end of Magnolia’s regular workday, it surprised her that Harry
wore a suit, always in a dark color with skinny lapels and a narrow tie.
He dressed impeccably. From this, Magnolia didn’t want to jump to
the conclusion that he was gay, though a fair number of designers cer
tainly were. Harry never mentioned a boyfriend, but he didn’t flirt
with her, either. They kept to the business at hand, which was tricky.
It was hard to change a beloved magazine, no matter how dowdy it may have grown. If Lady did a one-eighty, its identity would vanish— and so might its readers. Improvements had to be subtle. Yet the design
needed a distinctive point of view; when the magazine flopped open,
any woman in Random U.S.A. needed to know instantly she was looking at Lady, not another clone of Real Simple or a neon replica of Us. Today, each sample page of the magazine was mounted on heavy
black boards, turned back side out on ledges that lined the long wall
of the conference room. Magnolia inhaled deeply. “This is how we’d
treat the cover,” she said as she flipped back the first board. “We’d
clean it up—fewer coverlines. Refined logo. Richer colors.”
Jock and her colleagues got up from their seats and scrutinized the
design, gathering behind Magnolia. They all waited for Jock’s appraisal.
“Impressive,” he finally said with a nod.
One by one, she turned around the remaining forty boards, showing how Lady’s columns, special sections, and the splashy pages in the middle—where no ads were allowed—would appear redesigned for a
woman who didn’t want to buy a magazine that looked like what her
mom threw in her shopping cart with the mayonnaise.
As she took her seat, no one spoke. Magnolia thought she could
hear the head of marketing sucking an Altoid.
“You’ve nailed it, Magnolia,” Jock said. “This magazine is fresh, friendly, and modern—everything Lady should be.”
“Congratulations.” “Great job.” “I love it.” The compliments
popped like champagne corks.
Magnolia felt like dancing on the table. She hadn’t admitted to her
top editors how nervous she’d been—only Abbey, her best friend, knew.
Most editors in chief were years more experienced, and Magnolia always worried about making beginners’ mistakes. Maybe now, finally,
she could let herself relax. She smiled and thanked Jock and the group.
“This magazine has Estée Lauder written all over it,” Jock added.
Omigod, sweet. That was truly high praise. The beauty advertisers
were the most coveted—and cosseted—because they tended to have
the biggest budgets, and their ads looked so good they gave a maga
zine an upgrade. Half the time, readers couldn’t tell the beauty ads
from the magazine’s editorial anyway. Among the dozens of big-name
beauty advertisers, Lauder may as well have been named Leader.
Every other company waited to see where they put their ads, and fol
lowed their direction.
“I appreciate the hard work you’ve done on this, Magnolia,” Jock
continued. He cleared his throat and fidgeted with the lapels on his
Brioni jacket. “And now let’s consider Darlene’s idea.”
Darlene’s idea? Whoa. This was her meeting, Magnolia’s. Her head was suddenly full of noise. Her publisher’s name wasn’t on yesterday’s
e-mail that had confirmed the agenda. Why hadn’t she known about
this? This was reminding her of last summer, when Darlene sched
uled a critical six-month review with Jock for eight A.M. on the Mon
day morning when Magnolia would be returning, jet-lagged, from a
two-week vacation in the Yucatán.
Magnolia scanned the faces up and down the table. None of the
others looked surprised.
Darlene stood up, smoothing the wrinkles on her snug black pencil
skirt. She walked to the door of the conference room and let in her
assistant, who distributed a shiny red folder to each person at the table.
Darlene turned to Magnolia and smiled. “Great design, really great.
But what I’m going to show everyone today is a license to mint money.
We have an extraordinary opportunity at hand, and I know you’re all
going to want to get on board.” She grinned at the group, revealing her
large, frighteningly white teeth. “You all know Bebe Blake,” Darlene, a
former Big Ten football cheerleader, said in her stadium-worthy voice.
Who didn’t? Bebe’s name was in the tabloids every other day. She
was always suing someone. After a career as a singer, then as an actress,
she had a syndicated talk show, which Magnolia knew had been in steady decline. Somewhere in there had been one or two five-minute marriages. Bebe had been on Lady’s cover twice since Magnolia had taken over. Not only did neither issue sell especially well, both experi
ences were odious. The last time, Bebe’s publicist, the profession’s head harpy, had ordered Lady’s art director Fredericka off the set because Bebe couldn’t abide the woman’s Düsseldorf diction.
“Bebe wants her own magazine, and she’d be willing to take over Lady and turn it into Bebe.”
She’d be willing? Take Lady, where Eleanor Roosevelt used to write a column, and turn it into a magazine for show business’s lead
ing flake? Is Darlene smoking crack?
“Trust me, Bebe—that’s what she wants to call the magazine— could be like minting money,” Darlene concluded.
“Like Darlene says, this could be just the ticket for Lady,” Jock chimed in. “Bebe is a marketing genius. When she plugs the South
Beach Diet peanut butter cookies on her show, the next day cookies fly
off the shelves. And she’d be willing to promote the magazine on air.
Take a look.”
“Minting money,” Darlene repeated. And again. And again, as if a
computer chip had malfunctioned. Magnolia wanted to knock Dar
lene on the head to get her to stop.
The group opened their folders. Inside were four pages
of article
ideas, most of which Magnolia recognized as recycled from other
magazines. But what stood out was the red type. Now that she was
reading on, she saw that the color red, Bebe’s signature hue—which
extended to her hair—would be featured prominently throughout the
magazine. Every cover would have a red background. The magazine
would end with “Seeing Red,” an essay Bebe planned to write herself,
where she promised to “vent, no holds barred.” Oh, yes, the world was
waiting for a download of Bebe Blake’s opinions, of that Bebe seemed
to be sure.
“The magazine that’s well-red, that’s the kicker Bebe wants,” Darlene said. “Genius, no?”
Okay, joke’s over, Magnolia thought. Everyone is going to groan
now, then toast my idea. She pictured confetti raining on her head. Apparently not.
“Well, done, Darlene,” Jock said. “But this isn’t a dictatorship.
I value the opinion of everyone in this room. Tell me what you think.
We know where Darlene stands, so we’ll start with Milt.”
Milt Herman, one of the grand poobahs, was the son of Scary’s
former president and was the same guy who advised Magnolia, based
on an obscure study from 1987, never to use a celebrity’s photo if her
teeth were parted. When she’d ignored that dictum with a laughing shot of Jennifer Aniston, she’d put out Lady’s best seller of the year. Milt had never forgiven her the success.
“I go with Bebe. I see it as a huge win-win, just like Oprah’s maga
zine,” he proclaimed.
That’s it. Oprah-envy, Magnolia thought. From its premiere
issue—which needed to be printed twice because her fans snapped up
all the copies in two days—Oprah Winfrey’s magazine was the
biggest triumph the magazine industry had seen in the last twenty
five years. Every other company—and apparently Bebe, too—was
jealous of Oprah’s slam dunk.
One by one, all the good soldiers fell in line praising the Bebe idea.
Magnolia spoke last. “I beg you to reconsider,” she said, trying to stay
calm. “First, Bebe’s not Oprah. Nobody is. Oprah’s the closest thing
this country has to a saint. You can trip any woman anywhere and she
can explain what she stands for. If Oprah ran for president with Tom
Hanks as VP, she’d win by a landslide.”
