In Her Own Image : Sneers, Jeers and Cheers Mark Start-up of Frances Lear’s Magazine : ‘I am the Lear’s woman. I know what she is looking for, seeking in a magazine.’ --Frances Lear

On Halloween Day, 1985, Frances Lear arrived in New York with a vision. She would create a magazine for women over 40. She would start a publication for “returning” women, those re-entering the work force after ending marriages or raising families. She would invent a periodical for women who had some money and were comfortable spending it. She would publish a journal for women who were tired of looking at pictures of wrinkleless teen-agers, or slender-thighed 30-year-olds.

She would devise a magazine for herself.

“Because I am the Lear’s woman,” she said, using the name of the bimonthly periodical that will make its debut Tuesday. “I know what she is looking for, seeking in a magazine.”

But, she added, “I knew nothing about the magazine business.”

At that start, Lear admitted in a pair of interviews conducted at different phases of the publication’s development, she did not even have a word processor, much less a staff or an office.

What she did have was a bankroll estimated at between $100 million and $125 million, the product of her divorce after almost 30 years of marriage to television producer Norman Lear.

Unretouched Laugh Lines

Lear’s prototype came out Nov. 10, 1986, barely a year after she first set out to create a magazine that would reflect her “mind-set.” On the cover was a smiling woman of at least 40 years old, her laugh lines proudly unretouched.

The cover also trumpeted the phrase that has become the Lear’s slogan: “For the woman who wasn’t born yesterday.”

Kevin Buckley, a former Newsweek bureau chief in Saigon who signed on as the first editor of Lear’s but was subsequently fired by Frances Lear, the editor in chief, claims credit for the slogan. Lear, who grows almost as frosty at the mention of former staffers as she does if the subject of her ex-husband is raised, embraces the catch phrase happily, but says simply, “Someone else thought of it.”

The slogan, and the magazine, have clearly captured the interest of many top advertisers and what Lear’s executive vice president Marc Liu says is a guaranteed initial subscription base of 175,000 as well. The magazine, which will be formally unveiled Monday at a splashy party atop Rockefeller Center at the Rainbow Room, where Frances Lear liked to go dancing as a young woman in the retail business, is the product of voluminous demographic research, including a series of focus groups Lear conducted around the country. Hefty in ads and editorial content, it is the work of a staff that changed several times in the course of the magazine’s development.

Though the for-women-over-40 philosophy of Lear’s remained constant, the content went through many changes, too. Staffers and ex-staffers attribute this in large part to Lear’s inexperience in publishing. Lear herself concedes the staff shakedown took its toll.

“The most difficult part of starting a new magazine is finding people to do it with you,” she said.

But Lear was fueled by a firm confidence that her idea for the magazine would work, and she was convinced she could overcome her lack of publishing experience. As Lear likes to point out, she was no stranger to the workplace.

“I had been working all my life, since the age of 14,” she said. At 17, as Frances Loeb from Larchmont, N.Y., she began working as a salesgirl at B. Altman & Co., later becoming a buyer at Lord & Taylor. She was 33 years old, divorced twice, and still working in the retail business when she met, and soon married, a television writer named Norman Lear.

They resettled in Los Angeles, and had two daughters, Kate and Maggie. By the time the girls were teen-agers, Frances Lear felt the itch to return to work.

“My children were growing up, my husband’s career was very much on its way, and I also felt a great need to express myself creatively,” she said. “I felt a need to work again.”

She became a founder of Lear Purvis Walker & Co., an executive search firm specializing in career placement for women. She did career counseling and taught at USC. She wrote articles for newspaper opinion pages.

In Los Angeles, Lear was known as a strong supporter of feminist and liberal political causes, often lending the Lears’ big house in Brentwood for fund-raising functions. She and her husband rose to prominence in the Hollywood political circuit.

Today, Lear will not talk about what went wrong between her and the producer of “All in the Family,” “Maude,” “One Day at a Time,” “The Jeffersons” and other wildly successful television series.

“I cannot answer any questions about my marriage,” she said, her lips tight. In a more relaxed moment, however, she will acknowledge that “I did go through a difficult period” as a result of the divorce.

In any event, after 28 years together, the marriage crumbled. At 62, Lear was ready for a new challenge, one entirely of her own making.

“I didn’t get a job, I became an entrepreneur,” she said of her decision to launch her magazine.

Lear’s life step was immediately applauded by friends who saw merit in a publication for women over 40. “She’s a bright, feisty lady,” said Betty Friedan, a longtime friend who is herself at work on a book to be called “The Fountain of Age.” “She was very supportive of the women’s movement and took a very active role in it.”

But Lear, a woman of an indisputably strong personality, was known also for a powerful temper and mood swings attributable to the manic-depressive condition she has discussed openly on many occasions. In a 1986 article in New York magazine, for example, she told an interviewer, “I certainly never hide the fact that I am a manic-depressive or that I have a manic-depressive illness.” She said at the time that the condition was controlled by lithium, an antidepressant medication.

Lear’s volatility, her penchant for bluntness and her inexperience in publishing are what many early staffers of the magazine--all of whom no longer work for Lear and agreed to speak only on conditions of anonymity--say caused a gestation process as long as the average pachyderm’s, and considerably more arduous.

Lear said she drew on the advice of an armada of consultants. Associates, past and present, praise her unflagging curiosity, and the fact that she never hesitated to ask questions of those around her. Often, she called her staffers or advisers at home late at night, bursting with a new idea or eager to pose a new question. She spent money comfortably, they said, but not necessarily consistently, overpaying for some articles, underpaying for others.

“I always thought it was like ‘Hollywood Wives’ meets ‘I’ll Take Manhattan,’ ” one editor who worked on the prototype remembers.

‘Get Me Another Writer’

Another ex-staffer, recalling what he said was editor-in-chief Lear’s habit of assigning writers to projects, then sometimes summarily dismissing them, suggested Lear had spent so much time in and around the television industry that she assumed that magazines operated the same way. “Everything went well until the copy came in,” he said. Then, this former staffer said, “It was Hollywood, ‘get me another writer.’ ”

Another veteran of the magazine’s start-up said, “It was very unpleasant because it was impossible to operate professionally without constant unnecessary frustration. Frances changed her mind constantly. Decisions were like snowflakes on a sultry day. They vanished.”

Former editor Buckley firmly endorsed the concept of Lear’s magazine, and expressed confidence that the idea of an elegant magazine for women over 40 was both important and viable. “I think the magazine will succeed because it is such a good idea. The time is right, and there is a talented staff,” he said.

His own problems, Buckley said, were not with the publication, but with the editor in chief.

Specifically, Buckley charged Lear with altering quotes, a practice considered anathema in the news business. “That was where our trouble began,” he said. “It’s history,” is all Lear, who carefully avoids discussing anything involving her former staff, will say about the incident.

Early in the magazine’s development, an ex-editor said, Lear called a staff meeting at her huge, African-art-filled duplex on Park Avenue. Normally attired in Size-8 Chanel clothes, generally in hues of black, white or gray, Lear wore a terry-cloth robe while the meeting was in progress and was having a massage.

“That was the real Judith Krantz moment,” said the editor, now working at another magazine. “That’s the way you take a meeting in Hollywood, I guess.”

Nearly all the staffers who worked on the prototype have since left. Many talked about a kind of giddy excitement that pervaded the office in the early days, since so many shared such optimism about the idea of the magazine. But while the excitement remained, the giddiness, several ex-staffers said, sent them into psychotherapy. “At least it was on the house insurance plan,” one said.

Lear’s face grows taut when she is asked about the turnover that plagued her magazine in its early days. She remains firm in her refusal to discuss particular incidents involving ex-staffers, saying only, “One must remember that I never had experience before as an editor in chief or the owner of a magazine. I had a lot to learn, and it took time.”

Lear is a slender woman with a mane of shoulder-length white hair. On someone else, her heavy black eyeglasses, owlish and round, might seem whimsical and amusing. On Lear they seem perfectly serious.

She decided to attach her own name to the magazine, she said, after many months of experimenting with women’s first names, including her own, and with such generic titles as Sequel. For a time during its development, the magazine was to be called Babe. In the end Lear decided a last name had more credibility and would show that women could have the same force of ownership as men--as, say, in Forbes or McCall’s.

Outgrown Office Space

Now numbering close to 40, Lear’s staff has outgrown its present Park Avenue office space, exploding into hallways and crannies. The “labor pains” of initial growth have eased, executive editor Audreen Buffalo Ballard said, and anticipation is among the reigning emotions within the staff.

Executive vice president Marc Liu said he was relieved that the first copies of the magazine would soon be in circulation. “I feel like I’ve been pregnant for two years,” Liu said.

Ballard, a former top editor at Essence magazine who worked also at Redbook and in various editorial capacities at Time Inc., joined Lear’s almost a year ago. “What interested me was that I like the idea of this audience,” said Ballard, 47. In addition, she said she was attracted to the position because “Frances’ ideas were non-traditional.”

Ballard said Lear has exercised “tremendous editorial control” over the new publication. “This is her magazine,” she said. Lear carefully reads and edits every article, she said, and has decided to write an occasional editorial piece for the magazine that will run in different locations in each issue.

“Frances will do that as she does everything, as the spirit moves her,” Ballard said.

Lear, Ballard said, “is not easy, but no one who has innovative ideas and puts them into effect is easy.” However, Ballard went on, Lear “is not, in my experience, the ogre that people have made her out to be.

“Frances,” she said, “is one of the smartest people I have ever met in my life.”

On the eve of her magazine’s publication, Lear described the experience as “like riding on a star. It’s an extraordinarily exciting process, and I can’t think of anything that I would rather do.”

The magazine, she said, reflects a general feeling among adult women that “we are tired of looking at very young, very perfect teen-agers. We want to see our world and read about issues that concern us.

“This magazine feels to me like a haven for women,” Lear said, “a place where they can go and talk to an intimate friend.”

Eager to elaborate on the philosophy of her magazine, Lear is less comfortable honing in on specific details of the publication. When asked about the giant bulletin board on the wall behind her, with names like “Elizabeth Dole” or “Rose Bird” written on big pieces of paper, Lear all but froze. “Don’t look at that,” she commanded.

The magazine’s content, she said, “is a sum of our philosophy, which is very simply that life after 40 can be joyous.”

Translating Philosophy

Asked how that philosophy will translate into editorial material, she replied, “Certainly the basic premise is that there is perhaps more after 40 than before 40. Many women are happier after 40 than before.

“What we see around us, the photographs of women that are everywhere, convinces us that being over 40 is almost outside the realm of reality,” she went on. “It’s changing, and Lear’s is part of that change.

“Women are finding the second half of their lives to be the most exciting and fulfilling,” she said, describing this phenomenon as “something called rebirth.” Rebirth, Lear said, “is me. I’m starting a whole new life at 60-what am I?” She puzzled for a moment. “At 64. I’m starting a whole new life at 64.”

“Never,” she said, not for one moment during the development of Lear’s was she scared. “It’s probably the entrepreneur in me that wasn’t scared,” she said.

Nor was she intimidated by the prospect of spending an enormous amount of money in developing her magazine. “To me, to put my money to use toward my work and creating something that is truly useful, that is my happiness.”

Initial estimates for bringing the magazine into existence ranged from $7 million to $65 million, she said. But Marc Liu, her executive vice president, said a realistic figure to launch the new publication would be $25-$30 million of total capital required over a five-year period. So far, Liu said, Lear’s has spent “under $10 million.”

But even that figure, Liu said, amounts to less than the annual interest editor-in-chief Lear could receive if she banked her divorce settlement in a safe, 10%-return investment.

“If you invest 120 million at 10% it yields $12 1/2 million a year,” Liu said. On that theory, the total capital for the magazine could come from “interest from the principal for two years.”

He said the first issue is guaranteeing advertisers a circulation of 175,000. Lear’s has a “real aggressive” goal of 500,000 subscribers in five years, he added.

An Enormous Market

Lear’s publisher, Michele S. Magazine, a former executive with Gannett Newspapers, touts U.S. Census Dept. statistics that project that “in 1990, there will be more adult women over 40 than under 40, for the first time in history.” With enthusiasm befitting a cheerleader, Magazine also cites data showing that “for every two 40-year-olds in 1986, there were three in 1987” as proof of “an enormous” market for a publication that appeals not only to aging baby-boomers, but also to their mothers.

At least 12 1/2 million women in the United States, Magazine said, boast household incomes above $40,000. If measured as a country, that figure would give that population a group income equivalent to the fourth largest gross national product, she said, “after the United States, Russia and Japan--bigger even than France.”

Acknowledging at least four major takeover offers before Lear’s magazine has even seen the light of publication, Lear and Liu talk eagerly about future development for Lear Publishing, including television and additional publications. But as Liu observed in talking about long-range planning at Lear’s, “ ‘Long-range’ for Frances is the day after tomorrow.”

Lear’s first-run issue contains an impressive 76.34 pages of advertising, as well as a 16-page original short story, “The Pit,” by Doris Lessing. Its fashion models are women in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. There is a monthly article on wine, presented “more as a life-style piece,” publisher Magazine said. The first issue will include commentary by editor-in-chief Lear, and one section of the magazine, to be titled “Lunch,” will feature conversations with prominent women.

Lear’s next issue, to be published in March, will include articles by Diane Johnson, Germaine Greer, Calvin Trillin and Elizabeth Janeway, executive editor Ballard said, vowing “you will never see a diet article in this magazine, or a story on ‘How to Raise Your Grown Children.’ ”

As for home decor or recipes, traditionally the province of even the most sophisticated women’s magazines, “we feel that by the time you are over 40, you don’t want to know from the kitchen,” Ballard said.

Lear, for her part, discounts the notion that her magazine reflects any kind of entrepreneurial prescience.

“I was not that wise. I just knew that I had an idea whose time I felt had come,” she said.