A People Cover Story Draws Heat

The Feb. 22 People cover story on Robin Williams has stirred a whirlwind of controversy.

And, as a result, according to writers for the magazine in Los Angeles and New York, potential subjects are refusing to talk to the periodical. “You walk up to them looking for an item,” one free-lancer reports, “and they turn on you: ‘How could you do that to Robin?’ ”

According to sources close to the actor-comedian, Williams cooperated with People on the story with the assurance that emphasis would be placed on his career rather than his personal life. He particularly wanted to avoid references to his young son.

‘Entangled in a Love Affair’

Free-lancer Brad Darrach’s article, however, began in large type on the magazine’s cover, and included the following:

“Having beaten alcohol and drugs, he’s now entangled in a love affair with his son’s nanny that has left his wife embittered--and Zachary, 4, in the middle. It’s the emotional challenge of his life. ‘I’ll do anything,’ he says, ‘to keep my son from harm.’ ”

The cover seemed to invite the reader to a sleazy tale of adultery, but the article inside revealed that Williams’ apparently deep and loving relationship with his son’s former nanny, Marsha Garces, began after the breakup of his nine-year marriage to Valerie Velardi Williams.

Although Williams’ management and press agents are making “absolutely no comment,” friends say that Williams is hurt and angered by the experience. And according to People insiders, Williams’ reaction is leading to soul-searching at the magazine.

In fact managing editor Jim Gaines, who has been in place since last May, admits, “The boldness of headlines is sometimes unfair, and the shortness misleading.”

But he denies that it was People’s intention to hurt Williams. Celebrities don’t usually like what is written about them, he says, although the editors were surprised by the intensity of Williams’ reaction. “We thought the article showed Robin Williams is a great guy,” Gaines said. “If we had tried to make it smarmy, we would have done a much better job.”

“It’s a tough business to deal with the fragile merchandise of the facts of another person’s life,” Gaines added. “The approach to this story was exactly right. The cover treatment bears looking into.”

The Oscar-nominee is not the first celebrity to complain of his treatment by People. Cybill Shepherd told David Letterman on the air of her surprise when personal remarks about co-workers on “Moonlighting” she thought she had made off the record appeared in print.

‘Likely to Repeated’

“Whatever you say in a People interview is likely to be repeated regardless of your provisos for attribution,” warns one seasoned reporter for the magazine.

“The facts must fit the concept, not the other way around,” adds another. “Stories have been dropped when they did not fit the editors’ preconceptions.”

People often seems like two different magazines. The sensational cover story frequently contrasts with some of the carefully researched articles that surround it. The cover has to fight the tabloids for the buyers’ attention, while the rest of the magazine, as an editor put it, is “timely, interesting and humane.”

In the past, complaints about People articles have resulted from a system that required writers in New York to compose articles from long and formless research filed by reporters in the field.

According to Gaines, this problem has largely been overcome by encouraging correspondents to establish an article’s point of view in the research files.

Alaska Men

Women in New York and Los Angeles may have a hard time conceiving of towns where the ratio of men to women is 35 to 1, but that’s the case in some of the outlying communities in the 49th state. Even Anchorage, whose population of almost 200,000 places it on the list of the 100 largest U.S. cities, has eight men for every woman.

“I’m a matchmaker at heart,” said Susie Carter, the ebullient 45-year-old editor of Alaska Men, a magazine devoted to “the major topic for at least 50% of the population,” namely the men.

“I’ve always tried getting people together,” explained Carter, the mother of nine children from 7 to 27 years old. For years, she would invite over for casual dinners the single parents of the children at the day-care center she operates. “They’d be so embarrassed to meet each other,” she said. “I kept thinking there must be a better way.”

The way suggested itself one evening on the Phil Donahue Show. As Carter and her husband, David, watched, the studio audience went crazy over Donahue’s guests, a group of men from Hope, Alaska. “We saw how the audience’s dream men were rugged individuals and thought it would be fun to put something together and present it to people outside,” she said.

Now in its third issue, the Anchorage-based quarterly features profiles and black-and-white photographs of five dozen single men of all shapes, sizes and ages living in the frozen north. Each profile includes a street address or post office box number. A four-color center spread singles out one “gorgeous hunk of Alaska man” for special attention.

In addition to the “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” focus of most of the magazine, Alaska Men includes such features as a look at the Anchorage 1988 March of Dimes Bachelor Auction, a profile of Alaska’s entrant in the first “Man of the Year” show to be hosted by Bert Parks in Atlantic City next December, and a gallery of 24 members of the University of Alaska Anchorage Seawolves hockey team. Each issue has included a profile of an Alaska woman.

With alarming naivete, David Carter sank his retirement savings as an oil-rig welder into establishing the magazine. Now the bookkeeper for both the day-care center and the publishing company, he delivered pizzas during the magazine’s difficult first days. The premiere issue was primitive and, though each succeeding volume has grown more sophisticated, Alaska Men will never be confused with GQ.

The lack of advertising in the first issue reflected the Carters’ innocence. “We just never thought of it,” Susie Carter said. Ads have since come in over the transom, and the magazine just appointed its first ad sales manager.

Possible Franchising

Alaska Men distributes 5,000 copies to newsstands throughout Alaska at $5.25 each. In the rest of the U.S., another 5,000 readers subscribe at $20 per year (Alaska Men, 1013 E. Diamond Blvd., Suite 601, Anchorage, Alaska, 99515). The Carters have received “a large number” of requests for franchising information and are hoping to start a state-by-state chain of Susie Carter Men Magazines to “turn around this man shortage” nationwide.

Has the magazine achieved its goal of bringing people together?

“You bet,” Susie Carter replied. “We’ve had one lady who moved from Chicago to Talkeetna,” a two-street town in the shadow of Mt. McKinley, from which she now runs her Chicago ad agency.

But Carter’s proudest success is the engagement of her father, 67-year-old Fred Rash. The artist and art restorer, a part-time Alaska resident, operates art galleries in Anchorage and in Newport Beach. Profiled in the second issue of Alaska Men, he is going to be married to a woman who was introduced to him after a call to the magazine.