Cosmopolitan’s Bachelor of the Month . . . the Lust Hurrah

What do an archeologist, the owner of a vitamin pill company, a garage mechanic who services Mercedes-Benzes and a guy who can do 52,000 sit-ups, 30,000 jumping jacks and 13,000 leg lifts have in common?

At one time or another, all have put themselves forth to 13 million readers of Cosmopolitan, appearing as Bachelors of the Month.

Helen Gurley Brown, editorial empress-in-chief at Cosmo for lo these 23 years, describes the standing feature as “just sort of fun and games, really.” The bachelors, Brown said, must be “bona-fide single,” with varied and unusual careers. In addition, “we try not to have them gay,” she said.

For Brown, the squibs about “brief-toting lotharios” or wanderers in search of “indoor excitement” are absolutely in line with the etched-in-stone mandate of this magazine for working women between ages 18 and 34; women who like their careers but love men. The Bachelor of the Month, Brown said, reflects the Cosmo philosophy that “it’s all right to lust after men, not only lust after them but do something about it.”

At least 6,000 women followed that thinking when Chicago restaurateur Michael Foley, 35, showed up as Bachelor of the Month last July. In a telephone interview between restaurant sittings, Foley said he had been inundated with letters from women all over the world. Foley insisted the correspondence was all friendly and low key, “no cranks, no weirdos, no proposals of marriage or anything like that.”

But Mark Sarchet, a 34-year-old engineer in Fremont, Calif., whose mother submitted his picture as a possible Bachelor of the Month, said a number of women wrote to him to tell him “I am exactly the thing you are looking for, why don’t you get in your airplane and come see me?” after his face filled the Bachelor space in October, 1987. Another Californian, professional fitness consultant Steve Sokol, 32, of San Jose, said that after he appeared as the Bachelor of the Month in December, 1986, he was inundated with letters from women “proposing marriage, telling me they were put on earth specifically to please me and telling me I was the best-looking guy they had ever seen in their lives.” The letters came in such abundance, Sokol said, that “my guy friends and I would sit around on Friday nights and read the letters for entertainment.”

Hardly the male specimens who might be compelled to plead for female companionship in a national magazine, Sarchet, an aspiring actor and model, and Sokol, billed as “the world’s fittest man,” confessed that their motives for becoming Bachelors of the Month were as much professional as they were personal. Men, it would seem from these two samples, may well have gone retro, throwing out the lessons of the women’s movement to decide it’s OK to use one’s body to attain professional advancement.

“I thought it might be a professional boost. That’s it exactly, no question,” Sokol said.

Sarchet, too, was hoping he might line up some acting or modeling jobs. Unfortunately, appearing as a Bachelor of the Month “did not propel me down the road to Hollywood stardom,” Sarchet said. For that matter, Sokol got not one single new client after his bicycle and his body were displayed in Cosmo.

But Sokol did correspond with a handful of the women who besieged him with letters, photographs and phone calls after his picture ran in Cosmo. Next June, he will marry one of them, Leslie Ennis, the former owner of a dance studio in West Palm Beach, Fla.

“Maybe it was a feminist thing to do,” Sokol said of the letters from Ennis and scores of other eager young bachelorettes. “They were approaching me. I wasn’t approaching them.”

“If women want to look at men’s bodies in magazines, they have my full-hearted support,” Mark Sarchet concurred.

At Cosmo, Brown brushed off suggestions that the Bachelor of the Month might just be a little counterrevolutionary. “Perhaps the only regrettable thing” about the feature, she contended, is that “there’s only one bachelor for 13 million readers. It’s almost like the lottery.”

No Freebies at Trump’s

PLAZA SWEET: The December issue of HG (House and Garden, also known as Architectural-Digest-With-Recipes) reveals that Ivana Trump, Donald’s wife, is retraining the entire staff at the Plaza Hotel, the Trump family’s latest multimillion-dollar bagatelle. “They used to crawl, now they walk, next week they’ll be running,” she told HG. She also disclosed that guests at the hotel will pick up the tab for lavish “freebies” such as Chanel toiletries. “Nobody gets anything for free in this world,” she said, thus explaining why she and Donald are worth several billion dollars and the rest of us are not.

For West Coast Indians

Malcolm Margolin would love to say he decided to launch News From Native California, a Berkeley-based bimonthly, because “in a previous life I was a Yurok princess.”

Or, Margolin “could give you an intellectual answer about how much we have to learn from Indians, which we do.”

But the truth is, this author and publisher “tripped into” the magazine business. Over Chinese food, he and his friend Vera Mae Frederickson, an anthropologist, abruptly decided to expand what they had at first envisioned as a monthly calendar of events of interest to California Indians into a full-fledged magazine, focusing on the arts, education, the law, culture, language, botany--and featuring an advice columnist called Dr. Coyote. The theme, they decided, would be to “celebrate what is ongoing, as opposed to what is past tense.” Some articles would take a historical view, but most would examine “people who are still making boats, people who are still processing acorns, modern adaptations of older ways.”

“There’s so much going on, and so little communication between the various California tribes,” Margolin, in a telephone interview from his office at Heyday Books (“the Random House of University Avenue”), said. With “something on the order of 120 different Indian languages spoken in California, you still have this fragmented group of people,” he said. “But in some ways, time has brought them closer together.”

Modern life has brought “an immense” assault on California Indian culture, said Margolin. On the other hand, “though I am saddened by what has been lost, I am more utterly astounded by what has survived. This is probably the most exciting time for people interested in California Indians. There’s definitely a cultural revival of great magnitude going on.”

But the magazine crosses over to a non-Indian audience as well. Although it boasts just 2,000 subscribers, with another 1,500 copies shipped to newsstands, News From Native California, its publisher said, “probably has the widest literacy range of any periodical in the Western Hemisphere. We get letters from Ph.D.s, libraries, scholars; then along with it, from someplace like Markleeville, you get a letter that has been Scotch-taped together, a reused postage stamp glued to it, and some major piece of dyslexic scrawl. I am really proud of that.”

Census Bureau estimates put the Indian population at 200,000 in California, making it the largest in the country. Margolin, neither an Indian nor a born-in-the-state Californian, lauds the durability of the culture, as well as the lessons he says it has to offer non-Indians.

“Many of these tribes have lived in the same place for 2,000 years in relative peace,” he said. “I think there’s stuff we really have to know about the Indians, in terms of who still lives here, what needs to be saved. There’s such a huge body of sensibility about a way of being human, and we have so much to learn from it.”

News From Native California costs about $8,500 per issue to produce; “but that’s a lie,” Margolin admitted. “You keep it down to that only when you don’t include all the overhead and when you work for free. You keep lying to yourself so you don’t know how much money you’re losing.”

Subscriptions are $18 per year, or $3.50 per issue.