Spy Horns In With Devilish Cover Jab

This is today’s quiz: The June cover of Spy magazine features Elvis Costello as a horned, goateed, pointy-ear character with a pentagram lapel pin and a business card that reads “The Devil.” But on the card, that’s not Costello’s telephone number in tiny, barely legible type. Whose is it?

Regular Spy magazine readers are used to scrutinizing the magazine’s eye-traumatizing fine print, so it’s no surprise that several have already called the listed number to see what gives.

But anyone familiar with Spy should be able to figure out on his own whom the editors would pick to represent their vision of evil incarnate.

You’ve got three guesses. The (obvious) answer is provided at the end of the column.

Going Cover to Cover

Some of the slicks seem to be having an identity crisis of late. The June Esquire is star-struck, featuring almost cover-to-cover coverage of the “private lives” of Robin Williams, Tom Hayden, Muhammad Ali, James Woods and others. Self-reflective examinations of what fame and celebrity mean, the profiles are for the most part several cuts above the standard fanzine fare. If the articles were summer movie releases, though, only Michael J. Fox’s “Nuptials in Hell!” would be a must-see.

Written by Fox and his brother-in-law, Michael Pollan, managing editor of Harper’s magazine, the article describes a lunatic invasion of Vermont by a celebrity press ravenous for any piece of his wedding. As he describes it, People and the National Enquirer give new meaning to the term checkbook journalism-- not to mention sleaze.

(Clue to today’s quiz: In her introduction to the Esquire profiles, to whom is Nora Ephron referring when she writes: “Look how happy he is in his Trumphood; look how merrily he floats in his Trumpdom; look how brightly he wallows in his Trumpness”?)

Meanwhile, the summer issue of Fame, the magazine dedicated to just that, gets deadly serious with an analysis by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Zucchino of anti-apartheid activist Winnie Mandela’s peculiar behavior of late. Even the cover piece on Donald Trump is marginally meaty.

(Clue to today’s quiz: To which magazine does the profile allude with the quote “Queens born, short-fingered vulgarian”?)

And Cocaine Inc., while short on original reportage, offers a clear history of Columbia’s ruthless Medellin cartel, and some insight into the drug problem here in the United States. Author Paul Eddy suggests, for instance, that “in America’s much-vaunted ‘war on drugs’ the State Department is sometimes a conscientious objector.”

On a similar note, National Review’s new Washington editor, William McGurn, offers a cover profile of drug czar William Bennett in the magazine’s June 16 issue. Unfortunately, it offers little information about the man, and much rehashing of his still vague policies and views.

Sassy’s Yates Resigns

Sandra Yates, who about a year ago brought the trendy teen-zine Sassy to these shores from Australia, resigned last Friday as president and chief executive officer of the magazine’s parent company, Matilda Publications.

Yates’ parting memo stated that she was leaving the company--which acquired Ms. magazine last June--to “begin work on other publishing projects.”

Yates could not be reached for comment on what those projects are, nor on industry speculation that her resignation may be owing, in part, to fatigue over the yearlong battle Sassy fought against an advertising boycott instigated by fundamentalist Christian groups.

George Simpson, a spokesman for the publishing company, downplayed any connection between Yates’ leaving and possible sale of the publications. There has been discussion of selling the magazines, he said, but the board of directors is also considering two other plans--attracting new investors or “standing beside the publications as they continue to grow.”

Simpson also said that all the advertisers who left because of the boycott have now returned to Sassy’s fold, and the publication has recovered more than 90% of the newsstand losses caused by the boycott.

Carla Graubard, Matilda’s chief operating officer, will act as temporary CEO; Anne Summers, Ms. editor-in-chief, will assume editorial responsibility of Sassy, as well, Summers confirmed.

The Eco-Obsession

Sometime in the last few months, the nation’s magazine editors stopped lying awake at night worrying about global warfare and nuclear radiation. Now they lie awake worrying about global warming and solar radiation.

At least that’s the way it seems, judging from the proliferation of stories on the big environmental issues that have leaked from the environmental press and spread across the sea of mainstream magazines.

In the last several months, deforestation, ozone depletion and global warming trends have been addressed in slick women’s magazines, news weeklies, brainy political quarterlies and every sort of magazine in between, including Sports Illustrated, American Legion Magazine, Business Week, Lapidary Journal, Rolling Stone, Electrical World, the New Yorker, Management Today, Countryside and Small Stock Journal, Oceans and Fortune.

The phenomenon of this shifting interest, not just in the media but throughout society, is discussed clearly and compellingly in the current (spring) issue of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions’ New Perspectives Quarterly.

“As the Cold War winds down and the atmosphere heats up, the environment is rising to the top of the global agenda,” editor Nathan Gardels writes in his introduction to the issue, titled “The Shadow Our Future Throws.”

“The most urgent mission of the U-2 spy plane is no longer detecting ICBMs on the ground in Russia, but ozone-depleting CFCs above the Arctic. Already terms like ‘industrial disarmament’ and ‘ecological security’ are seeping into the mainstream political discourse. . . . Our main enemy is not some bushy-browed Russian tank commander poised for invasion at the Fulda Gap; it is the Los Angeles commuter driving to work.”

Diverse thinkers address the issues in 10 articles. Philosopher Ivan Illich, for example, proposes a “virtue of enoughness”; the head of the World Bank puts the environmental crisis in economic perspective; French sociologist Alain Touraine describes a “new naturalism” sweeping through Western culture; and Rudolf Bahro, a founder of the West German Green movement, lists what he sees as problems with technological solutions that aren’t anchored to spiritual change.

Bahro writes that our increasingly anxious society must not be overeager to embrace leaders touting ecological solutions: “If someone comes to the German people and says, ‘I am the man who will make the pine needles green again,’ he will be given a chance.”

But, he cautions: “Empty men full of fear, as we Germans know, are the raw material of authoritarianism.”

If the media’s sudden fixation on the environmental crisis seem excessive, consider the alternative, as illustrated by Paul Ehrlich and Robert Ornstein in an excerpt from their book “New World, New Mind.”

“Frogs placed in a pan of water that is slowly heated will be unable to detect the gradual but deadly trend; they will sit still until they die. Like frogs, many people seem unable to detect he gradual but lethal trend in which population and economic growth threaten to boil civilization. The keep working to turn up the heat, because they can’t detect its rise.”

And, as editor Gardels explains, “the striking thing about our capacity for eco-cide is that it does not issue from some dark and demonic force; it resides in the way we live and in the ordinary habits we keep.”

Unmasking the Devil

Getting back to Spy.

The premise of the cover story is that these are the best of times for old Lucifer. The 1980s have been boom years for the recruitment of latter-day Dr. Faustuses, author Ned Zeman writes, referring to the character who, through several incarnations over the course of literary history, has sold his soul to the devil in exchange for fame, youth or other more tangible rewards.

Now, otherwise talented, credible, soulful people are lining up “to cash in their decency chips, to say to themselves, to hell with soulful: gimme that Schlitz commercial. Or that National Rifle Assn. endorsement.”

Few of us have made it through life without selling at least a sliver of our souls, Zeman contends.

“Ours is a whole generation of Fausts, after all: The transformation from impoverished anti-war bohemian to $3,000-a-week corporate flack has the distinct odor of brimstone. Eating a Hostess Sno Ball is a Faustian deal writ very small: The price you pay for all that pink, marshmallowy deliciousness is the future need for heart surgery, or anti-fatigue treatments, or liposuction.”

But mere self-indulgence is not enough to earn a listing in Spy’s catalogue of Fausts. There has to be meaningful quid pro quo, and a certain celebrity quotient as well.

“When you sell your soul, you trade away a sizable measure of human dignity; what you get in return is something a little more glamorous, a little more tangible--an invitation to Swifty’s Oscar party, younger and better looking dates, your own TV show, regular coverage in the New York Times, and, that most popular of Faustian payoffs, a truly interesting amount of money.”

Among the many, many people Spy accuses of agreeing to such Faustian pacts are: Barbara Walters, Jacqueline Kennedy, Gloria Steinem, David Stockman, Hunter S. Thompson, Ed Koch, Ronald Reagan, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, literary agent Lynn Nesbit and any aging rock star who has made a Michelob beer commercial.

But only one man has haunted the collective psyche of the magazine’s editorial staff so consistently as to earn a telephone listing as the Devil himself. As Spy regulars worth their salt have guessed by now, the phone number listed is for the Trump Organization, the centerpiece of the empire owned by Spy’s ubiquitous “short-fingered vulgarian, Queens-born casino profiteer” Donald Trump.

Confirming that curious Spy readers were, indeed, calling, a spokeswoman for Trump said of Spy’s seeming obsession with her boss, “It seems obvious that they need Donald Trump to maintain their circulation.”