TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051589/05158900.002

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.3 KB | 224 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 70

A Maturing Woman Unleashed


FRANCES LEAR, publisher with a messianic commitment to women
over 40, has broken the wrinkle barrier by reaching for a
neglected market

By Martha Smilgis


    Flawlessly attired in a black Chanel suit, Frances Lear
gazes for a moment out her office window at the Madison Avenue
traffic below. Then, whippet-like, she whirls to confront the
semicircle of editors at her morning story conference. "What's
the word we want?" she asks. Through owlish goggles she
scrutinizes their faces, as if seeing them for the first time.
Before anyone can answer, she darts to her chair and
provocatively settles her slender black-stockinged legs on a
cluttered coffee table. She sits stiffly, ladylike. Her
expressive hands, with their buffed, not polished nails, beat
the air. "Older women of our generation have been described as
depressed, sad, menopausal, decrepit, unproductive," she blurts.
"God, I feel I'm running through a maze of negative perceptions
like a tractor."

    Quietly, Lear recedes as the band of vocal editors suggests
fresh definitions: "sensual," "off the nest," "reborn,"
"glamourized," "well maintained." "Too much like automobiles,"
trills Lear, shooting across the room like a small comet. At
65, she's delicately handsome: 5 ft. 6 in., 115 lbs., with a
taut dancer's body, sandblasted jawline, thick uncolored
platinum hair and barely a trace of makeup except for one
"expensive cosmetic," the face-lifting, her first done in her
late 40s. Her fastidiously tailored look is accented by
understated braided-gold Cartier jewelry and a black-band
Tiffany watch. But behind the reserved, nearly studied exterior,
her agile mind freewheels playfully. She conducts the meeting
by digression, challenging and revising every assumption
presented and switching subjects to alight on a new idea before
circling around to finish the last. The method is collaborative:
a free-form Scrabble game that reflects her scanning, multitrack
way of thinking. Gradually, eventually, problems are solved:
story ideas jell, stereotypes are smashed, cliches dissolved and
media-worn phrases reconstituted into acceptable headlines.

    Frances Lear is on a roll. Her high-risk venture of
creating a magazine for mature women is a splashy success. Just
four years ago, with $30 million from her $112 million divorce
settlement from television producer Norman Lear, she conceived
Lear's, a bimonthly publication catering to "The Woman Who
Wasn't Born Yesterday." This past March, with a photograph of
Lear gracing the anniversary issue, Lear's went monthly, with
a circulation of 350,000. The average age of her readers is 51,
the average yearly household income a startling $95,600. New
issues are fat with glossy ads aimed at this blue-chip audience.
Lear, a lifetime liberal committed to democratic causes, had
qualms about going so far upmarket but did so "to sell the idea
to advertisers, which would ensure success." Failure was not in
the cards.

    Like the rhythm of her editorial meetings, Lear's office is
comfy random clutter. Most kindly described, the impromptu
decor is Beverly Hills garage sale. Three roughhewn country
kitchen tables, each with computer terminals, serve as desks for
Lear and two secretaries. Chinese porcelain lamps keep
incongruous company with industrial carpeting and overloaded
bulletin boards. From her secretary's desk, Lear unearths a
stash of Milky Ways. She gingerly peels the wrapper, nibbles,
carbo-loaded for re-entry. "Let's explore the French mystique,"
she interjects. "Why do French women remain sexy until they are
very old?" Her editors bubble with cultural reasons and names:
Simone Signoret, Catherine Deneuve. Lear postulates a theme: "So
it is genetic; they like sex, celebrate sexuality, while
American women have a puritanical streak that restricts them."
Protest comes when one editor reminds Frances that their survey
found the Lear's woman likes men, specifically older men. "Sure,
they don't have to explain the Korean War to them," quips
executive editor Audreen Ballard. Laughter erupts. For summer
fashion Lear endorses slinky-skirted bathing suits: "Remember,
need and taste are the keys to this market."

    The editors exit as the art director enters with layouts
and galleys to be approved. First, the horoscope page. Lear
reads Cancer, her sign. "This makes no sense. What does it mean?
We need a story on what exactly constitutes a good horoscope."
Lear's restive eyes skid to a stop as she views a transparency
of a creamy-faced 50-year-old beauty. "This one bothers me. The
beauty is too static, too beige, one cast. She looks like she's
been laid out. We want depth of character in the face." Gone.
Next, the blowup of a near naked Tarzan accompanying the article
"My Son the Body Builder." "Where's my magnifying glass?" asks
Lear as she hunches over the light table to study the ripply
pecs. "Wheeee, this is fun! It sprights up the book." Her
secretary interrupts. A chauffeured car is waiting to deliver
Lear to a television taping. "Where's the script?" Lear chirps
as she loops the strap of her Fendi bag, schoolgirl-style, over
her glistening sable coat. "Will I have cue cards or a monitor?
Now, where's my Milky Way? My, it's fun being the new girl in
town."

    The birthing of her brainchild has nonetheless come with
pain and angst. Hungry for success, Lear plunged straight into
the cutthroat magazine enclaves of Manhattan. Reports of this
berserk Beverly Hills housewife with bags of cash, attended by
cook, butler, masseuse, personal trainer and psychologist, who
held meetings in her opulent duplex at the Ritz Tower wearing
a satin bathrobe, crackled along the editorial phone lines that
feed Manhattan's extensive magazine gossip vine. Up against this
hostile environment, a cornered Lear unleashed her blowtorch
anger. She scorched some hefty professional egos and earned
herself a "loose cannon" label. She hired editors, picked their
brains and jilted them at whim. Consultants came and went like
midtown buses.

    Wiser today, and equipped with a settled, trusted staff,
Lear ruefully recalls the chaotic gestation: "In the beginning,
I knew nothing about the magazine business. I knew I had a good
idea. Everyone told me so, but they all bet against my doing
it." In addition to exasperated editors, she was confronted by
battalions of advertising and research "pros." She recalls them
as gnomish little men who denigrated an audience of older women
and told her that old "broads" and "gals" didn't want to see
pictures of themselves. They smugly reiterated the Madison
Avenue maxim: Youth is beauty. "The reason some men fear older
women is they fear their own mortality," explains Lear, who
despite the tumult plowed ahead and chose to remain a solo
financial player to ensure her control of the enterprise. Kevin
Buckley, the first editor during the bruising start-up,
nonetheless credits Lear "as the first to see that most
magazines neglected or talked down to millions of Americans. The
success was inevitable and a pleasure to behold from a
distance." The rapid growth of Lear's magazine has encouraged
competitors. This month a new entry, Mirabella, aimed at
30-to-50-year-old women, may nibble at the younger readers in
Lear's audience.

    If Frances Lear has a serious enemy, it is the youth
culture, which she blames for confining some women to birdcage
existences. "Many older women are inhibited and afraid to act.
It is such a waste of human potential," she laments. "We must
look into the mirror and smile." She caustically castigates the
youth culture for denying sexuality to mature women and
instilling in them a sense of inferiority. Her frequent fantasy
is to annihilate the Playboy magazine mentality that she blames
for psychologically crippling women by attaching a Playmate's
age and dimensions to female sexuality. "Someday we will have
porn films with 55-year-old women in them," predicts Lear.
"Already, we know there is plenty of action in Sun City."

    An orphan, Frances was adopted at 14 months and reared in
Larchmont, N.Y. When she was eleven, her father committed
suicide after losing all his money in the Depression. Frances
felt that her mother, a beauty of German Jewish origin with a
keen sense of high fashion, betrayed her by "marrying a bad
husband for economic security." A competitive child, she
captained the basketball team and edited her high school
yearbook. Her mother died when she was 18. To support herself,
she went to work as a stock girl, eventually graduating to
fashion buyer at Lord & Taylor. When Lear learned that her
manic-depressive episodes, which she now controls with lithium,
could have a genetic component, she began a search for her
biological parents. She returned to the small Jewish orphanage,
with its stacks of cribs and bunk beds ("My competitiveness
comes from having had to scream the loudest for attention"), and
managed one night to get drunk the lawyer who had arranged her
adoption. Much as she pleaded, he never revealed the identity
of the parents.

    There were two short marriages ("In those days, it was the
only way you could go to bed with a man") before she met and
married Norman Lear, then a TV writer. In 1957 they moved from
New York City to Los Angeles, where she stayed at home and
reared their daughters. Although Frances was the inspiration for
Norman's acerbic TV character Maude ("All of Norman's work is
autobiographical -- Archie Bunker was based on his father"),
the show-business community was a peculiar culture that reduced
Frances, who did not want to be either a starlet or a producer,
to an atrophying, bitterly depressed Hollywood wife. After much
therapy, she chose to end her 28-year marriage. (Norman Lear,
66, has since married a psychotherapist, with whom he has had
a son.)

    Lear discreetly sidesteps rumors of a boyfriend, but she
says, "For older women, like older men, money is a plus when it
comes to attracting the opposite sex." Except for weekly dinners
with her two daughters, entertainment means magazine business.
Parties are held at her Southampton beachfront mansion or
cavernous Fifth Avenue apartment with its giant de Koonings,
vast Persian rugs and a paralyzing view of Central Park. The
service is formal but the tone relaxed. At a recent dinner for
potential advertisers, Georgette Mosbacher, flame-haired CEO of
La Prairie skin-care company and wife of the Secretary of
Commerce, griped acidly about "the hatchet job" the Washington
Post magazine had done on her. "What did they call you?" Lear
asked. "`Glamorous,'" drawled Mosbacher. "Take it, honey,"
barked Lear. "They call me `eccentric.'" Under the gleam of
crystal refracted by lemony candlelight, Lear presided over
dinner for twelve served by a squadron of waiters. Playing
impresario, she deftly focused scattershot conversations into
one group topic, spawning debates over the reasons matte
eye-shadow sales are soaring (one theory: softens the wrinkles)
and whether there will be a woman President -- "Not in my
lifetime," insists Lear. Quick and sharp-witted, she suffers
fools not at all and snubs sycophants with an icy glance. But
when she is surrounded by sympathetic friends, her conversation
expands. She defends her obvious vanity: "This quality
continues into old age and drives the desire to remain sexual,
slender and fashionable." A self-styled vegetarian with a diet
of fish, vegetables and pasta, Lear says, "People think older
women who are thin don't work at it. They work harder at it."
Each season she buys a new wardrobe of Chanel clothes and
cruises about Manhattan on 65 pairs of black flats. "At every
age a woman should feel she is dressed her best," advises Lear.
"Often intelligent women feel embarrassed about concentrating
on fashion. They shouldn't. It isn't trivial." Though a
feminist, she readily exalts the sexual power of feminine
beauty. Blissfully she recalls lounging about a country-club
pool in her 20s. "I was wearing a fuchsia top and bottom, brief
for those times. My body was just right. Well, the men just kept
on coming over to me. At that moment, beauty was power." As the
priestess of age preaches her formula for mature beauty to
Madison Avenue, once again heads are snapping.