LIFE June 7, 1968

# 'He tried to beat me with a dog and an astronaut'

by SHANA
ALEXANDER

"Well, we got Big Shorty," Mary McCarthy, the senator's cool-eyed daughter, told her father in Wisconsin on the night that Lyndon Johnson quit the race. "Now we gotta get Little Shorty."

In Oregon, they got him. Eugene McCarthy's victory over Robert Kennedy was the first time any Kennedy had been defeated in any primary, ever, and if Bobby was not quite firmly knocked out yet, he was "pretty well bloodied up."

That phrase was Clean Gene's own, and anybody who is surprised at its pugnacity doesn't know the McCarthys. Like his daughter, the senator has always concealed a hearty taste for combat behind that impeccable cool. Throughout the Oregon campaign, a new fighting spirit infused the entire McCarthy camp. "I'm more of a cave man than you are," Poet Robert Lowell told a CroMagnon-suited booster at one stop. But McCarthy was in some ways more of a cave man than anybody, and he was enjoying it. Of his front-seat canopies he said, "I would have been the first one shot from an ambush, if there had been an ambush." Instead, there was one of the greatest upsets in presidential politics since the night Harry Truman defeated the Little Shorty of 1948. And when Kennedy's defeat was confirmed, and a reporter asked whether McCarthy would now consider Hubert Humphrey his principal opponent, McCarthy said icily, "He always was my principal opponent."

Much later on that very important night in the drama of both men's lives, a night which seemed to free each one from his own old ghost at last, long after the most tireless reporters had gone to bed and the last jubilant supporter had stopped shouting underneath the windows of his hotel suite, McCarthy talked more about his and Kennedy's battle tactics.

"There always comes a time when you ought to change your weapons," he said. "Yet people hang on to the weapons of the old heroes until they lose a war. The British kept the longbow, and the Persians kept the short spear. The Romans kept the phalanx until Hannibal brought in elephants. Bobby tried to beat me with a dog and an astronaut."

CONTINUED

Nov 4, 66

LIFE November 4, 1966

THE
FEMININE
EYE / Shana Alexander

In Asia a reassuringly real First Lady

Watching Lady Bird Johnson at work, as I have been doing for the past week, it is apparent that the measure of a First Lady, even more than of a President, is taken by how much, how often and how genuinely she is able to respond. The Asian tour of President and Mrs. Johnson may represent the most heroic and sustained test of the capacity for human response that any First Lady has ever undergone, and even before the torch-blazing Manila fiesta that marked the midpoint of the big trip it was clear to the haggard and bleary correspondents accompanying her that Lady Bird had established some kind of new world's record in her narrow and exacting craft.

Less than a week out of Washington, she had already responded warmly and vocally to koala bears in Brisbane, kangaroos in Canberra, tattooed Maoris in Ohakea and a greenhouse full of begonias in Wellington, New Zealand. She had embraced babies in Melbourne, schoolgirls in New Zealand and nuns on a Philippine volcano top. She had swallowed with apparent relish fermented ava root, pink ice-cream kangaroos, ceremonial pig and roadside banana. She had watched and commented knowledgeably on sheep-shearing, brick-making, seine-fishing, war-dancing and cock-fighting; had cheerfully dedicated plaques, made speeches, raised flags, exchanged gifts, inspected schools, given parties, attended parties, excavated ruins, toured museums and, of course, planted trees over a 26,000-mile-wide area of the Pacific, making her enthusiastic way by jet, pony cart, yacht, jeep, motorcade and cable car in order to do so.

Lady Bird's responses are not strikingly original. "Good morning, friends, and isn't it a sparkling, beautiful morning?" she will say, spading another shovelful of earth around the roots of the little tree and sounding for all the world like the wake-up disc jockey on the Austin radio station. But though the words sound banal in print, they sound fine in Lady Bird's pleasant Texas drawl; and on a state visit in which so much appears formal, staged, contrived for purposes of protocol or to suit the needs of hordes of reporters and

photographers, her kind of warmth and spontaneity is especially attractive.

Any White House trip is a herd movement, a huge force of press, White House staffers, Secret Service, advance men and mop-up squads, each group moving at its own gait and often leaping, splitting and combining with one another to serve the shifting needs of the whole. Soon there is neither day nor night, no days off and no relief, just a continuous mass migration in which the supporting troops are perpetually sprinting to catch up with the principals, and in which the principals themselves must be always "on."

Mrs. Johnson's code name, "Victoria," was picked for her by some romantically minded Signal Corps man. She would not have chosen it herself. Aloofness is no part of her nature. Indeed, Lady Bird may well be the most approachable First Lady in history. She is practical, too. Knowing that she needs rest and the press needs copy, she sometimes invites a few women reporters into her private quarters for an informal chat. On the Samoa-to-New Zealand hop, she received them in her cabin aboard Air Force One, wearing a turquoise silk robe, without make-up, propped up in bed with three pillows, her New Zealand briefing notes in her lap. Under the extreme pressures of travel, this kind of informality on the First Lady's part carries its own form of graciousness.

As always, she was plain-spoken. She was enthusiastic about Samoa's Governor Rex Lee, who had just taken us on a tour of his remarkably bustling colony of Pago Pago. "How I like to see somebody who likes his job, and really works at it," she exclaimed, tapping the sheets with her black-rimmed reading glasses, and unwittingly providing an excellent portrait of herself.

A big part of Lady Bird's job is, of course, to assist her husband in his ceremonial duties. The President appears restless and preoccupied during native rituals, seldom bothering even to fake it very well, but Lady Bird invariably enacts the good Asian wife. At the Pago Pago airstrip, 50 native chiefs armed with leis formed a receiving line. "Okay, chief, hurry it up!" barked a Secret Service man. The President accepted only half a dozen garlands, but Lady Bird, following behind him, allowed the leis to be heaped higher and higher around her neck until, as the drums rolled, she appeared on the

palm-thatched ceremonial dais landed to the ears. The crowd responded with a tremendous roar.

But at every stop the crowds roar, bands blare, the platitudes roll. In a short time the senses can take no more, and the whole tour dissolves into what Lady Bird calls a "blurred montage" of sights and sounds. Despite the spate of briefings, schedules, note-taking and other devices to maintain order and ward off chaos, the mind skitters and slides helplessly through confusions of time and space. The haunting question of the whole trip then becomes: what and how much is real?

One muggy Manila evening after another long day of inspecting villages, visiting schools and planting the inevitable tree, Lady Bird rested in her fourth-floor suite and chatted about the past incredible week. Exhausting as it is, she has been trained for it by years as a political wife, and her interest is sustained by the thought that "I'll never pass this way again." Nothing frightens her about the huge crowds that have been engulfing the presidential motorcades, she says, except the thought that small children may be hurt. As she says this, a violent student demonstration erupts suddenly in front of the hotel, directly below her curtained windows. The chanting begins: "Go - home - John - son!" growing louder and louder until for a few moments the whole bedroom appears to be filled with the noise.

It is an ugly, even frightening sound, but Mrs. Johnson smiles and remarks breezily, "Sounds like the Texas-Okla-homa football weekend," and carries on with what she has been saying. The most important fact about this conference, she says, is "the very fact that it is happening. Asia is two-thirds of the people on the globe. This is a joint statement to the world by seven Asian nations"—here she taps the blanket with her clenched fist for emphasis—"and it is so important that the United States is one of these nations."

Of all we had seen, I asked, what had she enjoyed the most? There was a long pause while the whole blurred montage seemed to unravel in her mind's eye. Then, "I guess I was really most impressed with that sheep-shearing operation in New Zealand because I'm a farmer at heart." The slender woman in the big bed grinned then, shook her dark hair back against the pillows, and seemed in that unreal time and place most attractively and reassuringly real.

628

Newsweek April 28, '69

PRESS

## Lady at the Top

Women's magazines are written for women and about women but for the most part they are edited by men—possibly on the assumption that only men can run the administrative machinery necessary to put out a magazine. And so it was something of a switch when Edward E. Fitzgerald, the president of the McCall Publishing Co., last week appointed Shana Alexander, 43, columnist for Life magazine, as editor of McCall's (circulation: 8.5 million), thus making her the first woman to hold the top editorial position at the country's biggest women's magazine since 1921.

The truth is that, in recent years at least, the men haven't been doing very well with the magazine. McCall's has had a heavy turnover of editors in the past several years and in the process has acquired something of a wavering personality. The number of McCall's advertising pages dropped from 407 for the first five months of last year to 387 for the first five months of this year, while those of its competitor, The Ladies' Home Journal (circulation: 6.8 million) rose from 385 to 477.

Mrs. Alexander was born in New York City, the daughter of songwriter Milton Ager ("Happy Days Are Here Again"). She is divorced and now lives with her 5-year-old daughter in a white wooden house overlooking the Pacific in Santa Monica. In 1961, she became Life's first woman staff writer, and since 1965 has been writing the magazine's twice monthly "Feminine Eye" column.

**Cornfields:** In 1968, Mrs. Alexander was one of the handful who covered Sen. Eugene McCarthy's campaign from its beginning in New Hampshire to the end in Chicago. In one article she described her impressions of a walk in the countryside with McCarthy like this: "To accompany the Senator on such a ramble is a little like strolling through cornfields with AESOP or LA FONTAINE, for McCarthy's talk is a continuing stream of animal metaphor. In it, beasts lope or slither or plod by, tails flick, wings flap, hooves pound, creatures crawl and creep, each animal coming along just on cue to animal the precise image McCarthy seeks."

"I have written about what it feels like to be everything from Tony Curtis to a pregnant elephant," says Mrs. Alexander, but she adds that she has no editing or administrative experience to prepare her for the job of commanding McCall's 50 or so editorial staffers. "I have to educate myself about women's magazines but I think I know something about women," she adds. "I intend to be like Katharine Hepburn in all of those Spencer Tracy movies. I don't intend to wear my hat in the office."

Mrs. Alexander abhors gossip columnists and magazines that give women "junior-level reading matter," but she

approves of sexual candor and the way Helen Gurley Brown runs Cosmopolitan. How will Shana Alexander run McCall's? "They seem to want a strong personality and they have the silly idea that I have one," she says. "I don't know if I have any flavor left, but if I do, hopefully some of it will ooze onto the pages of McCall's."

Newsweek—Bob Grosh

Mrs. Alexander: Lots of flavor left

## A Gastronome's Revenge

Maurice Chevalier was there, and so were Mrs. Moshe Dayan, Baron Alain de Rothschild, Bernard Lanvin, the Maharanee of Baroda and a host of other regulars on the Paris scene, including New York Times Paris correspondent John L. Hess, 51, who seldom dines as well anywhere as he does at home. The notables were gathered in honor of the publication in France, in French for French readers, of a U.S. book called "La Cuisine des Provinces de France," and Time-Life Books, Inc., the publish-

Time-Life: Hubert le Campion

Courtine: He added aftertaste

ors, were determined to promote their effort to the skies.

Accordingly, the guests dined on an international variety of dishes that ranged from old-fashioned chicken pie to Ch'un-chuan (Pâté Imperial), scampi alla grilla, sauté de lapin and clam chowder. Not a few of the diners remarked that the book-written by such U.S. authorities as Mrs. M.P.K. Fisher, Michael Field and Julia Child—was clearly assured of success because the editors had had the rare good judgment to have a commentary and footnotes supplied by no one less than Robert J. Courtine, a mordant gastronomic critic whose nickname is "Le Grincheux" (The Surly One). Then they took their gift copies and went their various ways, correspondent Hess home to his French-speaking wife, Karen, who is perhaps the best American cook in Paris. She started reading—and then started laughing.

Not long thereafter, the account of what made Karen laugh appeared under Hess's by-line in the Times, and the headline over his deftly done story said straightforwardly enough: TIME-LIFE COOKBOOK: IT'S SELF-ROASTING.

So it was, and with a vengeance, for Courtine's footnotes turned out to be a witty and sometimes vitriolic running attack on what he deemed the book's more pretentious and egregious errors. Some samples:

* To a recipe for crêpes gratinées (pancakes stuffed with mushrooms, ham, diced chicken, artichokes). Courtine footnoted: "The typical dish supposed to surprise and charm a foreign woman, but it is fake grand cuisine and as anti-gastronomic as can be."

* One passage advises cooks not to roast game birds. "Except," says Courtine, "partridge, pheasant, quail, etc."

* And where the author dictates that a quiche Lorraine should be "followed by a cold bird," Courtine's quick-darting rejoinder is, "Why the devil should it be?"

The first reaction on both sides of the Atlantic was a number of red faces. In New York, Time-Life editors admitted that they had not had Courtine's footnotes translated until after the French edition was ready for publication, and suggested that the Paris office had been derelict in letting them slip through.

Then everyone concerned set about putting the best possible face on the affair. "I did not intend to be mean or make mischief," says Courtine, adding slyly, "I don't say that this book is good or bad. I say it's interesting because of its errors. It's fascinating."

Finally, the publishers inserted in each of the more than 10,000 copies of the book that are being distributed in France a letter from New York editor-in-chief Maitland A. Edey. "Although sometimes a little harsh, his (Courtine's) remarks are not any the less judicious," wrote Edey. "In addition, they have the advantage of adding a certain interest and of adding more value to a work which, in itself, is already fascinating."

88

Newsweek, April 28, 1969

Time Magazine April 25, 1969

THE PRESS

## PERIODICALS

### Rolling Stone's Rock World

Uncertainties abound in the publishing business, but one fact seems tantalizingly obvious: there are millions of potential readers for publications aimed at the 18-to-25 age bracket. But how to reach them? One method is to hire professionals to turn out smooth articles in hip lingo in a psychedelic or Art Nouveau layout ("Talking to kids in their own language," it's called). Cheetah and Eye magazines tried that—and folded. Another approach is to realize that today's youngsters tend to detect false notes and are not readily dazzled by packaging, so the publisher simply lets young writers have their say in blunt, unaffected prose on plain, tabloid-sized newsprint. Rolling Stone, the San Francisco-based rock-n-roll newspaper-magazine, is doing well by doing just that.

Free to Knock. Stone's 23-year-old editor, Jann (pronounced Yahn) Wenner, insists that he did not start the biweekly journal to grab a market, but simply to write about the things that interested him most. "We're not tied to anybody but ourselves—we're not promoting somebody else's trip," he says. What interests Stone's writers is the whole rock world. Their staple is music, but they increasingly offer news and views on the entire life-style that rock shapes.

Started 18 months ago, with just $8,000 and a staff made up largely of part-time volunteers, Rolling Stone has already moved comfortably into the black, employs twelve people full-time, and claims a circulation of about 60,000. It will begin printing in London this month to serve its 7,000 British readers more promptly. In the rock-music world,

CAREY WINFREY

WENNER OF "STONE"
Even work can be fun.

its influence is immense: recent praise of an unknown Texas blues guitarist named Johnny Winter impressed Columbia Records, which, after hearing him, gave him a $600,000 contract. Most of Stone's ad revenue ($70,000 last year, and rapidly rising) comes from record companies, but its reviewers have felt free to knock such hot-selling performers as Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin and The Doors.

While Editor Wenner considers his paper part of the "youth revolution," he does not automatically accept every part of the youth scene. When young people and police clashed in Palm Springs, Calif., during an Easter vacation pop festival, Stone largely ignored the music in favor of first-rate reporting of the violence. It even had kind words for the cops, who "exercised amazing restraint, ignoring the blatant sexual activities, drinking and doping," until, finally, "the youthful vacationers asked for much of the trouble they got." Stone does not condone the kind of activity that got Singer Jim Morrison charged with indecent exposure during a Miami concert, although the paper ran a typically wry headline: MORRISON'S PENIS IS INDECENT. The paper startled its readers by attacking the yippies just before the 1968 Democratic Convention for proposing "methods and means as corrupt as the political machine they hope to disrupt."

Energy Core. Stone was the first publication to probe the misuse of funds for the Monterey Pop Festival and to explore the obsessions of "the groupies," girls who chase rock performers into bed (TIME, Feb. 28). This month, the paper devoted 20 pages to an examination of the "American Revolution in 1969." A summary article by Ralph J. Gleason, 52, a veteran rock specialist and Stone's only elder contributor, accused many radicals of harboring "a death wish" and warned: "You better figure out how to make a revolution without killing people, or it won't work." He suggested poetry and music as courses. "The Beatles aren't just more popular than Jesus, they are also more potent than the S.D.S."

The notion that life, and even work, can be fun, pervades Rolling Stone's airy offices. "We've reversed the priorities," says Wenner. "We have a good time first and a viable business second." Wenner was a student at Berkeley when the Free Speech Movement disrupted the campus, and he helped report it for NBC. He wrote a rock column for the campus *Daily Californian*, later for *Ramparts*, before starting *Stone*. While both he and his paper freely use four-letter words, and he wears his hair long and shaggy, he is not a stereotype rebel. "Rock and roll is how the energy core of change in American life," he argues. "But capitalism is what allows us the incredible indulgence of this music."

DON DORRAN

SHANA ALEXANDER
Just good magazines, period.

## The Feminine Eye

No preliminary soundings, no roundabout hints; the telephone just rang one day early this year in Shana Alexander's Santa Monica, Calif. home. It was Edward Fitzgerald of McCall's calling, the resonant male voice said. "How would you like to be editor of McCall's?" The petite, blonde divorcee said she'd think it over. Although McCall's is the nation's largest women's magazine, with a circulation of 8,500,000, it has not had a female editor in 48 years, and Shana, 43, had not had any experience as an editor.

As a writer, though, Shana is a surpassing pro. After graduating from Vasar, she worked on the Sunday magazine of the old PM, later freelance and wrote radio scripts (among them: *Mr. District Attorney*). Then, in 1951, she took a job as a Life reporter and in 1964 began "The Feminine Eye" column. Sometimes gentle, sometimes sharp, and always quick, Shana draws meaning—for men as well as women—out of seemingly ordinary personal feelings. She rebelled against presidential polls, for instance, because "I fiercely resent being told what I am going to do. It makes me suspect I may be being programmed. 'There is only one of Me,' I want to shout out."

Shana is not quite sure what McCall's needs. After a succession of male editors and a dip in advertising pages, McCall's management was apparently in agreement when she told them: "I thought the trouble with women's magazines is that they have been underestimating women all these years, and I wasn't even sure that I believed in the idea of a women's magazine. I said I thought there should just be good magazines, period. Maybe I'm kind of a latter-day feminist, but I think that women can take much more grown-up material."

TIME, APRIL 25, 1969

[1C]

shana
alexander

the
feminine
eye

Perhaps you have noticed that this issue of McCALL's carries on and on and on about a single subject: the good life here on earth—what it is, what it looks like, how it tastes, how you find it, how to spend it, where we lost it. If our preoccupation with one theme this month reminds you of a woman who can't stop talking, in a way you're right.

Becoming editor of McCALL's is an overwhelming experience, rather like drowsily awakening, slowly remembering that today is your birthday, and then discovering that for a present someone has given you Niagara Falls.

When one is deluged by so many problems, ideas, options—what, after all, are the possible permutations and combinations of 100 pages, 12 issues, 400 writers, 16 million readers, an ocean of inks, an infinity of ideas?—the need to focus, to concentrate one's thoughts, to narrow one's horizons, to engrave a prayer on a rice grain becomes irresistible.

Plots are easy to think up, but themes are hard to come by. As Doctor Johnson said of *Gulliver's Travels*: Once you get the idea of big men and little men, the rest is easy. A theme is really an informing idea. It allows exploration at least in variation, if not in depth.

I found my rice grain just before 11:00 o'clock the evening of July 20, 1969, when, like everyone else, I watched Neil Armstrong climb down his ladder of aluminum alloy and stolidly, bravely, inexorably step out of space and onto the surface of the moon. Lying full length and prone on the carpet in front of our television set, I felt my toes curl and my fingers contract, less with exaltation than with dread. On the screen: crunch, crunch of boot on bleakest lunar lava. On our living-room floor: a woman afraid and, I later realized, involuntarily trying to hug the floor, embrace the earth. For me the most important message that never-forgettable day was that the moon is utterly dead;

probably Mars and every other place, too. We are alone in the universe.

The moon voyages define our parameters; they do not expand them. What is more terrible by far to me than the googliest-eyed green monster from outer space is nothing from outer space. Apollo 11 and 12 tell us that earth, and man, is all there is. The rest is lava. Copernicus was wrong. Man is the center of the universe, after all.

"I don't see God up here," a Russian moon man once radioed across the trackless void.

"Look back over your shoulder!" I wanted to shout from my observatory on the living-room rug.

We have put our entire issue together around this one theme of the good life on earth because once this idea got into our heads, none of us could shake it loose. Will all our issues have "themes"? Perhaps. If we can find other rice grains. A theme sets writers and editors thinking, as well as readers.

I think the variety of contributions to this issue has been quite extraordinary. It suggests to me that an unconscious need to redefine the good life is a feeling we all share. As we were putting the issue together, many of us felt the necessity to set down for ourselves what the good life was all about. Most often we chose to express ourselves in the negative—an occupational disease of editors, perhaps.

"It isn't having a lot of money. It isn't power. It isn't what 'Playboy' says it is. It isn't the property of any sort of social-elite, jet-set, film-star world," begins a lengthy memo from Managing Editor Don McKinney.

Bruce Colen, our West Coast Editor, thinks first of an Egyptian proverb quoted by Scott Fitzgerald, and says his own good life is the opposite of these Three Worst Things:

To be in bed and sleep not.

To want for one who comes not.

To try to please and please not.

My own list, scribbled on a telephone pad one September dawn, begins bravely enough: "The Good Life is active, not passive. It is

doing, not watching. It is feeling love. It is both to be busy and to rest. It is contrast, not sameness. Leisure is no fun without work.

"But it is damn difficult to lead the good life in America in 1970," my list then trails off limply. "Before you buy a maxi-coat, you have to buy a mini-skirt."

That each person's individual vision of the good life is unique is the very heat and heart of our theme, as we think these pages show. You may remark that not much is said anywhere about the bad life. That is deliberate. When we asked our contributors to define only the good, we were not being Pollyannaish; we merely wished to avoid repeating the obvious. All of us know about the bad life. We live with it. It is at our throat, under the bed, on page one. A catalogue of earthly horrors was always easy to compile. "Nay, this is hell nor are we out of it," Mephistopheles told Faust, and it is still true today.

What sets this January, 1970, apart from all the New Years that have ever gone before is the new knowledge that we are alone on the planet, and the planet is all we've got. There's no place else to live, and nobody here but us. In the contemplation of that new truth, both terror and hope arise, but it is hope that flies highest. Earth, it seems to me, has never been more beautiful than it is this very morning. ■

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