The Rothman Scandal (58 page)

She moved closer to him on the sofa now, and as she did so one thin shoulder strap of her long green chiffon hostess gown slipped from her shoulder, exposing a pale expanse of her upper breast, and it was a moment before she put it back in place. Once more, he was suddenly aware of the heavy odor of gardenia from her perfume. “I'm glad I told you about Primmy,” she said. “I've told so few people about her. I've never even told Herbert Rothman about her. But you're different, Mel. Somehow I can tell you things I'd never tell another soul. I think it's because you're the kindest man I've ever met. And may I tell you that you are also one of the most attractive men I've ever known? And shall I tell you of the terribly naughty thing I did that night we met? That night you came to my rescue, and drove me home—the overdressed damsel in distress at the Van Zuylens' beach party?”

“What was that, Fiona?”

She laughed softly, and touched his sleeve. “It was really very naughty,” she said. “And probably you'll think me quite mad. But after you dropped me off at the hotel, I suddenly had an overwhelming urge to see you again. Suddenly I desperately needed to see you again, and to talk to you again—the urge was overpowering. I called a taxi, and asked him if he knew where your house in Sagaponack was. It seems that everybody in the Hamptons knows Mel Jorgenson's house in Sagaponack! I took the taxi to your house, and told the driver to wait. I walked across the dunes to your house, but then—through the glass—I saw that she was there. I should have known that. So it was a totally crazy thing to do. But I had this absolutely uncontrollable desire to be with you, to talk to you, to have you hold me in your arms the whole night long, to have you make love to me.” She lowered her cheek to his shoulder, and whispered, “Mel—I've never felt this way before. I felt I had to be honest with you. I felt I had to share my feelings with you. I can't help my feelings, can I?”

“No, Fiona. I suppose you can't help yourself.” He started to rise.

“Please don't go, my darling,” she said. “Let me freshen your drink.”

“No, thanks,” he said. “I'd really better go.”

“Oh, please! I'm so alone!”

“Good night, Fiona.”

“You won't forget your promise, will you?”

29

When Ho Rothman purchased
Mode
in 1961, it was widely assumed that his aim was to add status and respectability to his family of publications which, at that time, had a somewhat tawdry reputation. “ROTHMAN SEEKS TO ERASE SLEAZE IMAGE,” said the
New York Times
at the time. This was only partly true. Ho's son Herbert, then thirty-eight, had just been given the title of president of the Publications Division of Rothman Communications, Inc., and Herbert Rothman and his wife Pegeen had hoped that the acquisition of a magazine such as
Mode
would help them gain acceptance and position in the social world of New York. Even more important to Herbert and Pegeen was the notion that publishing a venerable fashion magazine like
Mode
would help them attract a fashionable wife for their only son, Steven, who was then a freshman at Princeton. Debutantes still left Foxcroft and Porter to work in vaguely defined positions for insignificant salaries at
Mode
, where the magazine's headmistresslike spinster editor, Consuelo Ferlinghetti, had announced that she could tell how much a girl knew about fashion by the way she tied a scarf.

Of course, if the family had not acquired
Mode
, Steven and Alex would surely never have met. But Alexandra Lane was not at all the Social Register sort of wife Herbert and Pegeen had had in mind for Steven. By then, however, certain circumstances had caused Steven's parents to lower their sights considerably.

At the time, in addition to the string of small-city newspapers, Ho Rothman's Publications Division included
Homemaker
, a do-it-yourself magazine for young housewives;
Outdoors
, a sports magazine for men;
Teen
, a magazine, as the name implied, for teenage girls;
Teeing Off
, for golfers;
Your Wheels
, a magazine for car enthusiasts;
Dream House
, a shelter book on interior design, which had a sister publication called
Dream Garden;
a number of romance magazines variously titled
Strange Romance, Foreign Romance, Mature Romance
(for seniors),
Dark Romance
(for a black audience),
Illicit Romance
, and
Forbidden Romance;
and
Beefing It Up
, for bodybuilders. The company also published a Romance Comics series for young girls, Adventure Comics for boys, and a children's magazine called
Tiny Tots
. All these titles were extremely profitable.

Mode
, on the other hand, had not shown any black ink for several years, which was why it had been put up for sale. Ho had originally opposed the purchase, though not necessarily for that reason. He disparaged the publication as “a little sissy fashion book. You want pipple to think we are a bunch of sissy pipple?” In fact, when the purchase was announced, one of Ho's lunch-mates at the Harmonie Club greeted him with mincing gestures, uplifted pinky-fingers and lisping speech—which so infuriated Ho that he resigned from the club that afternoon and never set foot in it again.

Mode
, however, had a long and distinguished history. It had been in existence since 1872, and had published exclusive pictures of every American First Lady's inaugural ball gown since that worn by Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes. It had introduced American women to the vogue of the bustle. It had pioneered the lady's “duster” coat in the early era of the motor car. It had been first to publish the drawings of Charles Dana Gibson, and had thus launched the Gibson Girl look, which featured ruffled shirtwaists, and was therefore at least partly responsible for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in 1911, where 146 young sweatshop seamstresses lost their lives.
Mode
had been first to present American women with Christian Dior's “New Look” in 1947.

But by the 1960s
Mode
had begun to seem largely irrelevant. Circulation and advertising revenues had fallen. Its readership was mostly in doctors' and dentists' offices, beauty parlors, and a few country clubs. As far as being a fashion force was concerned, the magazine had become a little like the Bible—nobody ever really read it, but it was considered a good idea to have a copy around the house, even if it was one of last year's issues.

Needless to say, the acquisition of a classic publication such as
Mode
by the raffish and upstart Rothmans was greeted with consternation by the men and women who then edited and staffed the magazine, including Consuelo Ferlinghetti, its editor-in-chief, who had for years proclaimed herself the unquestioned High Priestess of American Fashion. “I don't see how I can possibly edit a magazine for these peculiar people,” Miss Ferlinghetti announced at the time. “They'll probably want to turn it into something called
Fashionable Romance
.” Ho Rothman countered by repeatedly referring to
Mode
as “Mud,” and to Miss Ferlinghetti as “Mrs. Spaghetti.”

Consuelo Ferlinghetti's name led a petition signed by forty-nine of the magazine's other editors, staffers, and contributors protesting the sale, which read in part:

We, the undersigned, find it intolerable to contemplate the sale of a magazine of
Mode
's distinction and reputation to a publisher of sensational yellow journalism whose known disregard for editorial integrity flouts the very traditions and standards of excellence upon which
Mode
was founded.

We unilaterally denounce …

We unilaterally demand …

Of course the petition had no potency whatsoever, since the sale of the magazine was already an accomplished fact. But it was widely assumed that the much-publicized signing of it would be followed by a mass exodus of editors and staffers. In fact, there were no immediate defections. The editors and staffers stayed on, albeit grumblingly and complainingly, and Consuelo Ferlinghetti's famously painted eyebrows arched skyward, and she placed a lace hanky to her nostrils, as if gasping for smelling salts, whenever the Rothman name was mentioned in her presence.

But such was the outcry of indignation over the magazine's sale that Herb Rothman felt it necessary to issue a statement to the press:

Both my father, H. O. Rothman, and I are getting a little tired of hearing Rothman Publications referred to as publishers of sensationalist journals, pulp magazines, and comic books.

True, we publish comic books, and we also publish a few magazine titles that might be described as pulps. But we also have two distinguished entries in the shelter field,
Dream House
, and
Dream Garden
, which are highly regarded by decidedly upscale audiences. It might be of interest to our detractors to know that both these magazines are personally subscribed to by First Lady Mrs. John F. Kennedy; that a subscription to our
Outdoors
goes to Prince Philip of England; and that our
Tiny Tots
recently received the distinguished Helen J. Pritzl Award for Outstanding journalism for Juvenile Readers.…

We are an organization constantly expanding our publishing horizons, constantly on the lookout for products of higher and higher quality. When
Mode
was offered to us, we saw an opportunity to extend our outreach further into the field of high fashion.

Mode
is a distinguished publication, with a long and proud history. We contemplate no changes at the magazine that will in any way tarnish, or alter, that reputation. In a series of meetings and conversations with Miss Ferlinghetti, we have assured her that she will continue to have complete editorial autonomy at the magazine, running it and producing it as she and only she may wish.

With the acquisition of
Mode
, the motive of cupidity has been ascribed to the Rothman family. Though the purchase price has not been disclosed, none other than the
New York Times
has asserted that we bought
Mode
“at a garage sale price.” Let it be clearly stated that
Mode
is not now, nor has it been for many years, a money-maker. Nor do we expect it to become one in the future. With an expensive four-color printing process, it is a costly magazine to produce. Its editorial staff, and its contributors, are among the highest-salaried and highest-paid in America. Its circulation is small (less than 200,000) and select, and its advertising pages have been traditionally limited to ten percent of content.

We intend to respect and continue these long traditions and policies. We intend to continue to serve that small, select audience of readers, and that select group of advertisers.…

There was a certain amount of misinformation in Herbert's statement.
Mode
's staff was far from high-salaried and, in fact, the staff, from Miss Ferlinghetti down, had recently agreed to a twenty percent salary cut in an effort to bring overhead down—a fact that had made the idea of buying the magazine much more attractive to Ho Rothman. As for contributors, there were none at the time of the purchase. They had all been notified that the magazine would henceforth be staff written, in another attempt to reduce costs. The ten percent advertising-to-editorial ratio was immediately abandoned by Ho in order to increase revenues. Regular advertisers in other Rothman publications were offered deep discounts if they would also advertise in
Mode
. And any advertiser who spent more than $100,000 a year in other Rothman publications was given four full-color pages in
Mode
a year, free, as a bonus—a ploy designed to make the magazine quickly look fatter, healthier, and more desirable—to readers, as well as to advertisers and their agencies. A word-of-mouth campaign quickly spread along Madison Avenue to the effect that any agency media director who was able to persuade a client to buy a full-page color ad in
Mode
could expect a two-week paid vacation for himself and his family in the Poconos, courtesy of Ho Rothman. A full-page black-and-white ad was worth one week. As for Jackie Kennedy and Prince Philip, both received free “comp” copies of the magazines mentioned, and could not honestly be called subscribers.

And as for Consuelo Ferlinghetti's tenure in the top editorial chair, she was then eighty-three years old, and Nature could probably be counted on to terminate her stewardship of the magazine. Indeed, four years later she walked out of her Fifth Avenue apartment, wearing a raincoat (“Well, after all, it
was
raining,” someone commented at the time) and absolutely nothing else except a pair of Ferragamo slippers, and was arrested for exposing herself in front of a group of Buckley schoolboys near the Alice in Wonderland storytelling statue in Central Park. It was then that Herbert Rothman's son, Steven, just out of Princeton, was assigned the editor-in-chiefship of the magazine.

“The money is peanuts, I'm afraid,” Lucille Withers said to her that day in the autumn of 1966. “All the Rothman publications are notoriously cheap. On the other hand, the exposure would be terrific, and it would look damn good on your résumé. Here, let me read you what their letter says.

They were sitting in Lulu Withers's office, and Lulu picked up the letter on her desk. “‘For a summer, 1967 feature on “That Fresh Midwestern Look,” we are looking for a particular girl, age range eighteen through twenty-two, to model the designs of the young Indiana-born designer Bill Blass. We are looking for a girl with a fresh, open face, preferably blonde, who will photograph well in Blass's sporty designs, as well as in his more sophisticated evening clothes, and we would prefer that this be a “new” face that has not appeared previously in a national publication. We will be shooting outdoor college campus shots as well as elegant interior shots, and so we want a girl who will look right at a fraternity-house party as well as at a formal, seated dinner. Send composites, et cetera, et cetera. With the right young lady, this could be a cover feature.' Anyway, I immediately thought of you, Lexy,” Lucille said, putting down the letter.