Si Newhouse had a magazine with performance difficulties. He told Alexandra Penney to have her way with it. Self will never be the same
IT IS EIGHT O’CLOCK AT LE BERNARDIN, NEW YORK’S ELEGANT FOUR-STAR French restaurant. The spacious teak-paneled room is dimly lit; long-stemmed candles flicker on each table as tuxedo-clad waiters dart quietly back and forth pouring champagne, straightening linen cloths, casting obsequious half smiles at their well-heeled diners.
In one corner sits Alexandra Penney, the editor of Self magazine and author of How to Make Love to a Man, How to Make Love to Each Other, Great Sex, and How to Keep Your Man Monogamous, wearing a purple silk blouse under a snug black-and-white-checked jacket, its collar surrounded by pink silk. She is talking with great intensity to a dashing Dutch photographer whose work she admires.
“What are your fantasy projects, your passions, your dreams?” she whispers with the rapt insistence of a swooning teenager. He reveals he was an Olympic rower—she says she adores sports. He shows pictures of his daughters—she insists they are “to die for.” Penney’s seductive cooing reaches a fever pitch, and she confesses that she “absolutely worships photographers.” His tight, rakish smile breaks into a huge grin. He is charmed.
It seems the photographer will do more work for Self, a magazine whose flamboyant new design, exploding with cutout type and fluorescent color blocks, screams a message of salvation to women of the nineties. Penney lavishly compliments the photographer’s work in the May issue, where models wearing nipple-popping Danskin bodysuits against a desert landscape peek out from behind brightly colored boxes of text. He is clearly miffed that Self’s design intruded on his art, but Penney, unfazed, is on a roll.
“When I got the pictures you took, we had a slide show for the entire office, and they were in shock!” she shrieks gleefully. “Shock?!?” replies the bewildered photographer, unsure whether this is a compliment. After a few seconds he understands what Penney means to say, that “shock” in Self-speak is something quite fabulous. “When I saw the spread,” he says quietly with old-world European graciousness, “I too was quite shocked.”
Alexandra Penney has based her career on the premise that a little shock goes a long way. After writing a series of sex books, Penney replaced Self editor Anthea Disney last September, with a mandate to transform its health-and-fitness focus and appeal to a broader range of women.
The result has been a raw, antidesign look with fractured type and brilliant Mondrian-like color cutouts. Penney has also put couples on the cover-because relationships are important to the Self woman. And with relationships comes seduction, which-along with shock—is Alexandra Penney’s forte.
Twenty-five years ago Helen Gurley Brown changed women and women’s magazines forever with a shocking message. Good girls do, she wrote in her best-selling Sex and the Single Girl, and the theme has been shamelessly regurgitated in Cosmopolitan ever since. But there is a difference between doing it and doing it well—truly shocking news that made Alexandra Penney the doyenne of pop sex psychology. Doing it well, as her books illustrate, is a complicated combination of advanced technique and psychological insight that could be summed up as, “Please him and you’ll please yourself; fail to please him, and he’ll leave.”
At Self Penney translates this message into the nineties vocabulary of “self.” She eschews the word’s greedy eighties connotations in favor of those that promote self-esteem. But for Penney a woman’s self is always in relation to a man’s, and sometimes men have to be coaxed a little. “Self-esteem: how to build it, protect it,” promises the cover of April’s issue; “How he wants to be seduced,” adds May. “Self.” Alexandra Penney constantly reminds you, “is the most important word in the English language.”
IT IS A RAINY AFTERNOON AT JONATHAN EDWARDS College at Yale University, and Alexandra Penney is taking an afternoon off from bolstering women’s self-esteem to address a group of younger readers. Sitting on an overstuffed leather chair in the master’s cozy oriental rug-lined living room, Penney is surrounded by eager women whose black flats, short skirts, and brightly colored blouses would make a Condé Nast personnel director smile with grim anticipation. A cup of tea balanced delicately in one hand, Penney gestures wildly with the other.
“You don’t have to go in a straight line to get where you want to go,” she announces perkily. Penney spent her childhood in Bronxville, where she attended public schools on “an intellectually gifted track. ” Her parents are of Greek descent (her maiden name is Dracos). Penney’s father is a Harvard-educated lawyer, and her mother translates modern Greek poetry.In elementary school Penney was a radio quiz kid who lost a tournament when she didn’t know that the Davis Cup involves tennis and not hockey. In high school she dated the captain of the football team.
The young Alexandra rebelled against her parents’ wish that she attend Radcliffe and instead went to Smith, which she hated. There she studied philosophy, writing a thesis called “Epistemological Problems in Proust and Beckett.” “Smith at the time was a very depressing place, and all I did was read. … I was a magazine junkie and used to read Seventeen and wish that I could be published in their fiction contest like Sylvia Plath.”
The budding writer got little encouragement and was told by the poet in residence not even to try. “I was so devastated that to this day I’ve blocked his name,” she says. “Nobody told you, ‘You have to get a job.’ They just said, ‘You’ll get married, so why get an education?’ Two girls from my class hanged themselves,” she deadpans.
Choosing marriage over suicide, the headstrong career girl came to New York and got a job through the New York Times as a copywriter for Simplicity Patterns, using her philosophical erudition to compose such lines as “Plaids for today’s woman.” Unfulfilled, she eventually landed a position as an assistant promotions editor at Vogue.
These were the final days of Diana Vreeland’s Vogue, when Condé Nast’s S.I. Newhouse Jr. was looking for magazines oriented to lifestyle. A search for new talent was on.
“I was twenty-three and constantly delivering papers to Si’s office. One day I handed him a memo I had written telling him what to do with Vogue. It was three pages, single spaced, full of ‘Do this! Try this!’ with lots of exclamation points. I told him he should have Buckminster Fuller in the magazine, that he ought to give two pages to an artist or photographer to do anything they want with. I guess I thought the magazine needed help.
Newhouse was impressed, and when she came in again he asked whether she had more suggestions. She did, and a month later became health and beauty editor of Glamour.
Ruth Whitney, who was then, as now, Glamour‘s editor, remembers Penney as “the livest wire I ever hired. She was always coming up with these wild, wonderful schemes. Alexandra was very innovative, and one of her ideas was to bind records with exercise routines into the magazine, something that wouldn’t be done for another ten years.
Penney spent five years at Glamour, where she first learned the virtue of thinking demographically, a skill that made her books best-sellers. “Ruth Whitney gave me the sense of what it is like to understand cities beyond New York and L..A. America is numbers. The more people you get to, the more influence you have, ” Penney lectures. During those years she also began assembling a numerically insignificant but influential group of designers and Glamour advertisers who were to become her close friends and sometime employers—Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Estée Lauder.
Disenchanted, Penney left Glamour to become a roving editor at Vogue and began to contemplate a career as an artist. When she heard that the art critic Harold Rosenberg was at Hunter College, she asked Condé Nast’s legendary editorial director, Alexander Liberman, for a recommendation. At Hunter she painted and wrote a paper on Harold Rosenberg and feminist art critic Lucy Lippard called Critical Positions-perhaps a hint if her later literary efforts.
At Hunter, Penney supported herself by writing for Vogue and working at the Rosedale Fishmarket. By this time she was married to industrial designer Richard Penney, lived on Park Avenue, and had a son, John. Her husband was puzzled by her new interest in art. “I could not fathom why there was a need for this turn,” Richard Penney says. “It seemed as if she had chose something with the least realistic opportunity to support herself.”
Alexandra says she had begun to tire of life in “a gilded cage.” Richard and she divorced, and she moved to SoHo “before it was SoHo.” Penney enjoyed the people at the fish market and wrote articles about it. Robert Neuman, Rosedale’s owner, remembers Penney as one of the most charming people he ever met. “The potential for greatness was there,” he says.
Penney was leading a double life, keeping up with her tony set by night and alternately selling fish and studying aesthetic theory by day. She remembers once being invited to a dinner party at Estée Lauder’s—“In the morning the butler came by Rosedale to pick up the fish, and I was the cashier. That night, when he was serving, he kept looking at me but couldn’t figure out where he recognized me from.”
WEARING A SILK FUCHSIA CAMISOLE AND A short purple skirt that keeps creeping up her crossed leg to reveal a bright red slip, Alexandra Penney is busily signing responses to the fax letters she invites readers to send, approving stories, and explaining how she came to write sex books. Her corner office at the top of the Condé Nast building is decorated with bright red chairs around a copper-topped round desk. Two large, swirling charcoal line drawings by Alex Liberman hang on the walls along with a few of his collages.
“The word ‘sex’ had never even been used in my family, so I had to do a tremendous amount of research,” she explains. The book began as a Self article about women who didn’t know how to make love to their husbands. But Penney was worried that she wouldn’t be able to write for the New York Times if she wrote a sex book, and confessed her fears to Ralph Lauren.
“Ralph said the best thing he had ever done was Polo T-shirts, because the whole world became aware of him,” she says. “He convinced me that if I could help more people with a bigger book that had a glitzy title, I should do it.”
Penney leapt in with the gusto of a dedicated researcher. “I was writing a story about boxing at the time and working out in a men’s gym full of boxers,” she says, “so I just started asking them what they thought of sex. I did hundreds of interviews and never used a tape recorder because I couldn’t bear to look them in the face, so I buried my head in a notebook.”
How to Make Love to a Man topped the best-seller list for nearly all of 1981. Self called it “the sexiest book of the year!” It is an alluring combination of practical information (try sipping hot tea or cider before you take his penis into your mouth”) and timeless wisdom (“Monique, a Parisian, claims that there’s much truth in the old French saying “There are no impotent men; there are only unskilled women.’ “).
The candle industry was the book’s secondary beneficiary—lighting is particularly important, and Penney often suggests candles be used to set the scene (“Even if you are running toward bed dropping your clothes as fast as you can unzip or unsnap them, take the time to light two or three candles to create a seductive atmosphere”).
But success was bittersweet for Penney, who worried that her talents as a thinker would be overshadowed. “I have a commercial talent, and I know it, and yet I have an intellectual background, which very few people know about,” she confides. “I struggle with the question of whether people will think I am a serious person if writer—can you imagine?—sex books!”
Like many women better known for their sexual than intellectual sophistication, Penney wanted to be taken seriously, and what better way to establish your seriousness than to write a novel? In fact she had written a novel before How to Make Love to a Man, composed over eight weeks in an intense burst of creativity. Penney started it as a long letter to a friend when the David McKee gallery offered her a show. One publisher offered her a high-six-figure sum. “I needed the money, but I knew it wasn’t the great American novel, not up to Henry James, one of my mother’s gods,” Penney says, her voice rising through clenched teeth. “So I wrote How to Make Love to Each Other.”
After a cursory second marriage, Penney began splitting her time between magazine articles, editing books at Bantam, and writing How to Keep Your Man Monogamous. The book was inspired by her own boyfriend’s infidelity. Ever the diligent scholar, Penney set out to understand why men stray and to discover a solution. Not surprisingly, she found the best way to keep a man monogamous is to give him all the sex he can stand. Her less than novel solution was criticized by many as antifeminist. “Yes, in feeding his ego, you are managing skillfully and doing something for your own purposes,”she wrote. “But is it to a man’s disadvantage? Isn’t it to your advantage-and his—to feed his ego?”
In a stratum of society infamous for combining business and pleasure, Alexandra Penney’s social skills managed to stand out. When asked to specify the quality that distinguishes her, Penney’s friends invariably point to her ability to make them feel good. Her friend Maggie Scarf envies Penney’s ability to draw out one’s most intimate thoughts. “It is the most delicious feeling to be seduced by Alexandra, because she makes you feel so good about yourself,” Scarf says. Steve Rubin, president of Doubleday and Penney’s former boss, compares being with her to “having a wonderful, cotton-candy cyclone around. She makes you feel good about yourself all the time,” he adds. “She uses people well,” says ex-husband Richard, without a trace of malice. “She has managed to surround herself with people who could help her in her career.”
NEWHOUSE HAD BEEN TRYING TO WOO PENNEY BACK TO Condé Nast for years before she came to Self, and she says he offered her a number of jobs, including editorships of three other magazines (she declines to name them so as not to “make everybody paranoid”). It was rumored that Newhouse was unhappy with Anthea Disney as she tried to transform Self into a GQ for women. Disney also made the mistake of tangling with Alexander Liberman, the man who for five decades has shaped the destiny of each magazine in the company. Circulation hovered at around 1.2 million, slightly over its 1981 level, and it seemed Newhouse wanted a magazine with Cosmopolitan‘s numbers (2.5 million circulation) and a Condé Nast look.
But what could Alexandra Penney do for Self? “You have to understand that Si gets entranced by individuals, and if he is won over by a personality, he goes with it, ” says one Condé Nast editor. “There is no logic beyond that.” A popular theory is that Newhouse was impressed by the marketing acumen Penney had shown in her books and decided it was more important to have an editor who could sell Self than one who knew how it was put together. Like Helen Gurley Brown circa 1965, Penney was a savvy marketer, with a smash-hit sex book to her name, who knew nothing about running a magazine—a Mouseburger for the nineties.
In August 1989 Penney returned from her book tour and was asked to an intimate lunch with Liberman and Newhouse at the latter’s town house. They offered her Self. “Si is a very persuasive man,” she says, “and it was truly thrilling to be able to work with Alex creatively.”
Others at Condé Nast, however, were less thrilled and felt that her inexperience might be a problem. “Frankly,” confides one ex-Condé Nast editor, “most people thought it was a bad joke.” A dozen staffers left Self almost immediately, and rumors circulated that she was there because Liberman wanted an editor who would defer completely to his judgment. Penney hardly says a word about Self without invoking Liberman’s name and consults him regarding its every detail. On any given afternoon he is at Self, pasting down brightly colored pieces of paper to fashion its new look. Penney has forbidden anyone from altering Liberman’s work and is having each layout framed as a shrine to his genius. “She saw what happened to Anthea when Alex was cut out of the loop and is certainly not going to make that mistake,” observed one ex-staffer.”
“Alex and I are in complete harmony about what we are thinking. … It may have to do with the fact that we are both artists,” Penney offers. Penney recalls how her collaboration with Liberman, who even designed Self’s stationery, extended to the offices.
“One day my phone rang, and after a long pause I knew it was Alex on the other end. ‘Mirrors,’ he said. “Light,’ I replied. ‘Space,’ he added. “Self-image . . . positive self-image . . . and twice the space, too!” I said. “The halls and elevator doors of Self’s offices are now crammed with mirrors. “It’s a little scary,” says on current staffer. “It’s like they have a secret language that only they know.”
At a company legendary for its perks, Penney made the most of them. She made her trainer a contributing editor and put her son on the masthead as “communications consultant” for installing a fax machine. A January article featured the interior designer who decorated her apartment, and an interview with “a skilled lover” was a conversation with an ex-beau.
The June issue sports a profile of actor Ron Silver and his wife, who in addition to being a contributing editor is one of Penney’s best friends. Last April, when Newhouse announced the launching of a new women’s magazine called Allure—which will cover much the same territory as Selfrumors abounded that it was hardly a vote of confidence.
Despite the controversy, Penney’s “postfeminist” vision seems to have caught on. “Alexandra knows what women want, and American women are just not burning their bras anymore,” says Ellen Sulzberger Straus, Self’s editorial consultant. If Ms. magazine’s demise indicates that a less strident brand of feminism is in vogue, perhaps women want a magazine that encourages competing for rather than against men. “The revolution is now in its second phase, and I believe that gender differences should be celebrated, not abolished,” Penney declares.
It is too early to tell whether this will pay off. Self‘s circulation is roughly the same as under Penney’s predecessors, and although ad pages for the May issue set a record, it is unclear how many advertisers are new.
Penney claims that newsstand sales have picked up in the wake of the magazine’s new cover, something designer Peter Arnell attributes to its “soft, palatable look, which grabs the reader by virtue of the collage.” Recently dismissed art director Véronique Vienne compares Self‘s new look to a “ransom note.” “The graphics communicate the urgency of the message, that it is too important to even set neatly in type, “she explains.” That is why the magazine is so ugly and unreadable,” offers one Condé Nast editor, “and why everybody is hoping Alexandra fails.”
But Alexandra the Great is undaunted by the backbiting and gossip from the dark side of the Condé Nast empire. After all, Si Newhouse is her friend, Alex Liberman her mentor, and, most importantly, she has finally reconciled her commercial and artistic sides, forging a Teflon sense of self-esteem. And she is pursuing a number of other projects. In the fall Penney becomes a CBS correspondent for Men Are Talking—interviews with men about their intimate concerns. She is also writing a book about men and their mothers, whose title is not, she promises, How to Make Love to Your Mother.
AFTER A ROUND OF AIR KISSING and good-nights outside of Le Bernardin, Alexandra Penney is swept down Fifth Avenue by her always-waiting Condé Nast limo. As the blocks pass swiftly by, conversation turns to her pet topic—ambition. Are there three kinds? How much is enough? Was T.S. Eliot ambitious when he wrote The Waste Land? Here is her “more serious side,” the side that ponders for its own sake, the naturally curious, insatiable side that is always on the verge of convening a mini seminar. But even now sh uses the searching glance, asking her guest to tell her what he really thinks, conveying the sense that his opinion is truly important. I suddenly feel my self-esteem soar. The Alexandra technique in action.
As she urges her way through the double glass doors of One Fifth, I think of the scene from Tea and Sympathy in which Deborah Kerr seduces a younger man. But before I can finish my thought, Alexandra Penney pauses, half imploring, half instructing, perhaps reading my mind, and says, “When you write about me, be kind.”