A Prized Fighter : Ailing British Esquire Pins Its Hopes on a Macho Feminist Named Rosie Boycott

Not much has gone right for the British edition of Esquire magazine since its launch last year: Bursting onto the newsstands with all the hoopla that a big promo budget could muster--and a cover line that boasted “Special Collector’s Edition”--it failed to ignite.

Press critics and advertising executives complained that the men’s monthly was unfocused, uninspired and, for a magazine that promised to reflect its new surroundings, un-British.

The Spy-like satirical magazine Private Eye dented Esquire’s image with regular swipes at editor Lee Eisenberg, who had left his post as editor-in-chief of the Hearst-owned Esquire in New York to create the new model.

And, worst of all, Englishmen weren’t buying it. Those who did want to read a men’s mag--a new genre in British publishing--were turning in growing numbers to another newly arrived American import: Conde Nast’s GQ.

“You could teach a course on how not to start a magazine on what they did with Esquire,” snaps GQ Editor Michael VerMeulen.

“It is true: When we launched Esquire, we did not get it right,” admits Terry Mansfield, managing director of the National Magazine Co., Hearst’s British publishing arm.

The first issue was dated March, 1991. By October, Eisenberg was gone. Above an article about the Esquire chief’s ill-fated London stint, the weekly New York Observer ran the headline “Esquire U.K. Launch: The Titanic, but Smaller.”

Alex Finer, the British editor who had been second in command, took the rudder but proved no more successful. Considered gentlemanly and decent but lackluster, he lasted until January.

And so, at the start of 1992, Mansfield was faced with hiring Esquire’s third editor in a year.

GQ had announced that its circulation was up 28% over the previous year, to 80,000. Esquire withdrew from the most recent audit of sales but announced it was selling about 64,000 copies. There was widespread speculation that the actual figure was somewhat lower.

Faced with serious problems, Esquire desperately needed an editor who could restore staff morale, attract advertisers, court the best writers and, above all, put out a magazine that would epitomize young, upscale maleness.

Mansfield chose Rosie Boycott.

Rosie Boycott--pioneer feminist, recovering alcoholic, single mother, seeker, wanderer, lexicographer, novelist, autobiographer, editor and onetime heroin addict--seemed an odd choice to some. But not to her.

“I’m quite puzzled by how much people are interested in it,” she says of her appointment. “I think if you’re a professional and you have a nose for a story, you can be a man or a woman.”

At 40, the British woman has arrived in the top slot at Esquire with a remarkable background of adventure, despair and resurrection. Her literary and macho credentials appear solid.

She has edited magazines in Colorado, London and Kuwait and traversed Asia by motorcycle. She’s written a novel and a dictionary of eponyms called “Batty, Bloomers and Boycott.” After confronting and overcoming alcoholism, she wrote an intensely revealing autobiography and worked at a number of newspapers and magazines before landing as deputy and features editor at British Esquire. Divorced and raising an 8-year-old daughter, she is writing a sequel to her autobiography, which will focus on living without a man.

“I felt Rosie had the talent to edit Esquire,” says Mansfield. “It wasn’t a gender question. I though she was a very talented journalist who could get out a magazine men would find interesting.”

When the editorship came open, Boycott asked him to give her a try, Mansfield recalls. “I said, ‘I’m not going to bet my pension, but I will put a month’s salary on you.’ ”

That translated into naming her acting editor and not interviewing other candidates. Two months into Boycott’s acting editorship, Mansfield does not want to say publicly how long she has to prove herself. But he implies that the job will be fully hers in due course.

“I feel now I would put my own money on her,” he says. “I haven’t appointed an average woman.”

The daughter of an English army officer and businessman, Boycott dropped out of college and into the counterculture of the late 1960s, going to work on an underground newspaper called Frendz. She soon realized, though, that even in this enlightened environment, all the women working on the newspaper were in menial positions.

So in 1971, at age 20, she co-founded the London-based feminist magazine Spare Rib, which, by sheer coincidence, debuted the same month as Ms. in the United States. The magazine, which is still published, hit the cutting edge of the Zeitgeist.

Boycott says she was never “heavily into feminist politics” and fought to make the magazine more glossy and mainstream. But Spare Rib took an increasingly radical feminist stance, and Boycott left two years after she created it.

“I always felt very strongly that men had as equally a bad time as women,” she says. “The sex stereotyping was totally awful for everybody. . . . In the end, (Spare Rib) became much more left-wing and much more the anti-men side of the feminist movement. And I’ve never had a day of feeling anti-men.”

She fell in love with John Steinbeck Jr., son of the writer, and went off to India with him to join a cancer-stricken friend who was seeking a miracle cure from a spiritualist called Sai Baba.

“We were in this ashram in southern India with this crazy guru with Afro hair who produced holy ash out of the ends of his fingers,” she recalls.

The holy ash produced no miracles for their friend, however, and when he died, Boycott and Steinbeck embarked on a long motorcycle journey across India, through the Himalayas and into Nepal and Southeast Asia.

Boycott became addicted to heroin. But she kicked it while serving 18 days in a Thai jail for smuggling marijuana over the border.

She moved back to England and then spent time working in the United States, editing a Buddhist journal in Boulder, Colo., and writing for the Village Voice in New York. She also was drinking heavily.

By the time she was 26, Boycott was living in Kuwait, editing an Arab women’s magazine. “We used to fight a lot with the Ministry of Information about what you wanted to publish,” says Boycott, who worked there from 1977 to 1979. “I remember having to fight very hard about publishing diagrams on how to check your breasts for lumps. It was considered pornographic.”

Although Boycott continued to drink heavily, she at least hadn’t lost a job because of it. But that changed when she left for Cyprus to help edit a start-up TV guide for the Middle East. On a bender from the moment she arrived in Nicosia, she was soon back in England, drying out in a clinic. She has been sober since.

She wrote about her life and her plunge into alcoholism in a book called “A Nice Girl Like Me.”

“I was not very happy,” says Boycott, reflecting on her drinking. “I felt I’d run around for a long time and was looking for--I don’t know--the endless hunt for whatever you think is the perfect life. I feel lucky in that it got me young and one dealt with it young.

“Part of the seduction of drink was, I thought, ‘I got through all these things, they were no big deal, I can deal with this one.’ And then, of course, I realized in the end, I couldn’t.”

She decided to write about the experience, not only for herself, but also because the problem of alcoholic women in Britain was not being addressed, and she believed it should be.

“I thought it was the right thing to talk about it,” she says. “This can happen to you, and you can come back kicking. You don’t have to wreck your life.”

“Why move GQ here? It was just a great idea. It was a market that was totally unserved,” says Michael VerMeulen, the 35-year-old American who was named editor of British GQ just after Boycott’s ascendancy at Esquire.

Until several years ago, there were no men’s magazines in Britain that packaged the traditional gamut of male interests: sports, sex, money, fashion, politics, fiction.

“The conventional wisdom was that men’s magazines were the Bermuda Triangle of British publishing,” says VerMeulen. “The stratification of interests (was) a problem. We’re talking about a class system here.”

There seemed to be no magazine format that could encompass the interests of men in the moneyed class with those in the workaday world. But, as VerMeulen sees it, the go-go business environment created during the heyday of the Margaret Thatcher years changed all that.

“You had a lot more movement up and down (the economic scale), which made it a much better market,” he says.

Conde Nast took GQ to Britain at the end of 1988 with a bimonthly edition that was editorially separate from its American parent. With circulation topping its first-year projections, according to VerMeulen, GQ went monthly in December, 1989. Then Esquire arrived.

“Hearst and Conde Nast compete globally,” says VerMeulen. “For Hearst not to have started up Esquire here would have been handing us the men’s magazine market on a platter.” (In the United States, Esquire’s circulation of 702,611 tops GQ’s 667,105).

The battle was joined. But while GQ grew--becoming a modest success--Esquire sputtered.

“GQ seems to have built a stronger brand image,” says Simon Mathews, media director of the advertising agency Young and Rubicam. Focus groups organized by the agency showed that British men found GQ “more relevant, more interesting and better designed,” the ad executive says. “Esquire is the one we feel has kind of fallen over. People do express concern about its longevity.”

Much of the credit for GQ’s rise is given to Alexandra Shulman, who edited the magazine for two years before taking over the editorship of British Vogue in January. For a brief period, as it happens, both men’s magazines were edited by women.

Now, while an English woman edits one, an American man edits the other.

VerMeulen, aggressive and competitive, misses no opportunity to tout GQ and belittle Esquire. He says he doesn’t know Boycott, although he met her and liked her. “She’s got her work cut out for, she really does,” he says. “I wish her the best of luck, I really do.” He pauses, and adds, “Just so long as they continue to be worse and less successful than us.”

Boycott sits behind her desk in the Soho offices of Esquire, smoking and reeling off her thoughts on what the magazine should be and how she’s going to do it.

From now on, she says, “I think you’ll see a much tighter, sharper, more together package--a very different layout, a very different presentation. By April, you’ll see a totally different looking baby.”

She doesn’t want to discuss what’s been wrong with Esquire but agrees with the complaints that it lacked topicality and had a “reliance on American things and American ways of doing stuff. It needs to become a much more rooted-in-England product.”

Part of her strategy is to employ some of the techniques used by women’s magazines to build loyal readership.

What she learned from women-targeted publications, she says, “is that magazines become your pal. You have an argument with them because you don’t like what they say, but you make it up very quickly. They go shopping with you. They tell you what to think. You talk over your problems with them. You have a political argument, you have a literary argument. They tell you news, they tell you gossip. You begin to get used to the sound of its voice. You know what you’re getting, but it’s always slightly surprising, which is the ingredient in why you keep a friend for years and years.”

Men’s magazines should connect with their readers in the same way, she believes. That doesn’t mean Esquire will be more like a women’s magazine, she emphasizes: “You want to mean the same sort of thing, but I’m not saying you are the same sort of thing.”

But lasting friendships take time to build, and the question remains how long the Hearst Corp. will continue this British venture if growth is slow.

Company director Mansfield has no answer. The recession and its harsh effects on publishing have made it difficult to assess what the future holds for Esquire and the entire men’s magazine market, he says: “We’ll know when we know.”

For Boycott, the pressure could not be greater. But with her fingers on the control buttons and the stakes enormous, she seems to relish her new position.

“It’s golden,” she says, before leaning forward and lowering her voice to a near-whisper. “Dead scary too. It’s always scary. It’s the high ideal one has, and one wants to carry it off.

“But I approve of being scared,” she concludes, leaning back and letting the gutsiness return to her voice. “I can’t stand people who aren’t scared.”