Dueling Attitudes : Is this town big enough for more than one glossy monthly? Let’s ask the editors of Los Angeles, Buzz

The 450 SL with the BUZZMAG vanity plates spirals up from the B-3 depths of the parking garage, freshly Armor-All’d tires chirping, upholstery redolent of leather, dark blue finish glistening from the detailer’s weekly house call.

“The car’s my one Los Angeles indulgence,” says Allan Mayer, driving with the sleeves of his beige linen suit rolled up Baby Mogul fashion, his gold Mercedes key chain and gray-flecked ponytail swinging as his cowboy boot nudges the accelerator.

When Mayer, Buzz’s editor-in-chief, arrived from the East Coast with two partners to launch the magazine in 1990, skeptics dismissed them as carpetbaggers.

Word was that the trio had waltzed into town with a view of Los Angeles as a realm of glitzy, ditzy rubes ripe for the pickin’. Savvy locals figured the interlopers’ dream of creating “a regional magazine of national quality” would burst faster than the bubbles in their first bottle of Tynant.

But now drivers see his plates and eagerly wave copies of Buzz, Mayer says as he wheels his convertible into the scruffy industrial and residential Westside neighborhood surrounding Buzz’s offices.

Such recognition is a great barometer of his magazine’s rapidly rising fortunes, he says, aiming the car toward a trendy Santa Monica trattoria .

Later, on the haughtier side of Thomas Bros. Maps’ Page 632, Lew Harris, editor of Los Angeles magazine, reacts to the word “Buzz” as if a barely audible insect were flicking against his window.

“Nothing would excite me more than to have a lot of magazines thriving in Los Angeles,” Harris says, magnanimously, leaning forward in his ninth-floor Century City office, which offers a view onto the rooftop of Beverly Hills High and out to the distant Hollywood sign.

Alas, though, Harris all but says: This new magazine with the annoying name will likely meet the fate of so many other local upstarts: the city will splatter it with a half-conscious swat.

But enough of that. Harris would really much rather talk about the one “vital--really very vital” magazine that has survived 33 years in this ruthlessly indifferent town.

With the almost bashful look of a proud preschooler revealing a particularly heartfelt finger painting, Harris holds up September’s issue, his magazine’s debut of a trumpeted make-over by one of the industry’s hottest designers.

The logo is “Endless Summer” orange; the black-and-white cover shot of Julia Louis-Dreyfus verges on erotica. And Harris (who drives a 1988 Mazda RX-7 convertible with an Alpine stereo that is, he says, his life ) seems almost embarrassed by the new look’s sexy edge.

The face lift, he quickly asserts, has been in the works for some time and has nothing to do with some imagined rivalry. Besides, he says, “We have a very strong lock on this franchise. . . . If you look at the circulation figures, for instance, there’s really no competition at all.”

And Buzz’s claim that its readers are even wealthier and younger than Los Angeles magazine’s--hence, even more desirable to upscale advertisers?

Replies Harris: “Their circulation figures have been so bloated and preposterous . . . that I don’t know how you could make any judgment on what they say their demographics are.”

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Los Angeles magazine was birthed in 1960, by investors with entrepreneurial drive and vision similar to the Buzz partners’.

The city was changing, they figured, becoming more cosmopolitan. It needed a voice.

For about $50,000, the group launched a New Yorker look-alike, “The Southern California Prompter--Guide to the Good Life in Los Angeles and Suburbia.”

At the time, regional magazines didn’t exist in their current form, says Geoff Miller, an associate editor at the Prompter and now Los Angeles magazine’s publisher.

The first Prompter offered previews, reviews and features, including an article on “surf-boarding in Malibu.”

An “Around Our Town” column included a glib guide for out-of-state visitors to the impending 33rd Democratic National Convention at the Sports Arena. It bemoaned the crowded freeways, offered advice on the fine dining and entertainment available here, and warned: “You may make our laws, send us to war . . . but don’t expect us to take you seriously. “

Early issues of the magazine--soon renamed Los Angeles--were short on ads, although pitches for jewelry, perfume and the “Relax-A-cizor” suggest readers’ needs haven’t changed much.

“This must be the most complex possible urban environment to put out a magazine in,” says Miller. “It really is a city that people carry around in their heads. . . . It took many years to get inside readers’ heads, but once we had that formula worked out, the magazine really took off.”

Los Angeles passed through several owners before landing with its current one, media conglomerate Capital Cities/ABC.

Harris joined Los Angeles in 1974, after a stint at Riverside’s Press-Enterprise and five years at the Chicago Tribune.

He became editor-in-chief in 1990, and continued looking for a mix, he says, between strong regional journalism and the “how to” and “10 best” service features that have made Los Angeles one of the country’s two or three most financially successful regionals.

Harris’ office, like his attire of jeans, plain shirt and sneakers, lacks the expected snazz of a man whose magazine regularly features Arnold or Arsenio on its cover.

Although he and his entertainment attorney wife, Marcia, make the rounds of upscale restaurants of the sort the magazine’s annual guides catalogue, everything about Harris suggests he is most happy when he’s studying blues guitar at McCabe’s, on his autographed Les Paul.

His demeanor--casually cool, slightly nerdy--implies he long ago accepted that on L.A.’s status meter, those who work with printed words will always rank three rungs below an assistant at the sleaziest independent production company.

“People think my job is much more glamorous than it is,” he says, grinning. “I look at myself as just another journalist schnook.”

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Both Harris, 47, and Mayer, 43, project their take on the city from their editor’s columns.

Harris signs his often smart-alecky, sometimes provincial musings with a generic scrawl.

Mayer, on the other hand, signs his often smart, sometimes pompous column with a rush of lines that lack only a final flourish to transform them into . . . a star.

While the view from his office is less impressive than Harris’, Mayer’s photo collection--one shows the Cornell student clutching an anti-war banner with Father Daniel Berrigan; in another, the young reporter stands beside a 1980-vintage George Bush--offers a window into a career with an apparently high trajectory. To many observers, though, Buzz looked like a block wall waiting to abruptly interrupt Mayer’s rush to fame and fortune.

The mere fact that the Buzz partners have survived makes their riches-to-rags-to-possible riches story heart-wrenching--in an East Side-Westside way.

Buzz President and CEO Eden Collinsworth was editor of Arbor House books in New York in the mid-’80s when she noticed “profound changes” in Los Angeles.

She talked with Mayer, a book editor, award-winning Newsweek correspondent and unproduced screenwriter who’d spent some time commuting between New York and Los Angeles. Mayer said that he, too, had wondered, “Why does a world-class city not have a world-class magazine?”

Mayer wrote a prospectus. The buzz of Buzz, he said, would be “the buzz of a good dinner party--of a good Los Angeles dinner party--the kind where you find yourself surrounded by an exciting mix of distinctive voices and provocative sensibilities, where the conversation is filled with unexpected insights, new perspectives and priceless bon mots . . . .”

Together with Susan Gates, a magazine consultant with Northern California roots, the partners set out to raise the $4 million they figured it would take to get started.

Thin and red-haired, with a refined, slightly goofy charm, Collinsworth looks a bit like a model for those trademark New Yorker cartoons of perfectly put-together Upper East Siders--cartoons her husband, William Hamilton, happens to draw.

In fact, while she and her partners struggled to pull the magazine up by its kid-leather bootstraps, they often bartered Hamilton cartoons for services.

Money was so tight, recalls Collinsworth, the partners couldn’t afford to heat the pool at the Richard Neutra-designed estate on Mulholland Drive that they had transformed into home and office.

The first issues were generally well received by the industry, but with a recession deepening, the cash flow got grimmer and grimmer at the estate.

“It was nightmarish. Hellish,” she says.

They were down to three desks and chairs, and had just pooled $250 to see a bankruptcy attorney when Thai investor Sondhi Limthongkul got wind of their venture. (All three partners pronounce their savior’s name Santi , as if it should be followed by Claus.)

Limthongkul bought 60% of Buzz’s stock, while agreeing, Gates says, to keep his company’s nose out of the editorial process.

As Mayer reminisced in a recent column, when Buzz first launched in Oct./Nov. 1990, there were a half dozen magazines vying for a piece of Southern California’s upscale markets--including L.A. Style (which Buzz bought earlier this year), Angeles, Malcolm Forbes’ bicoastal experiment Egg, and California.

Only Buzz and Los Angeles survive.

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Magazine dean Clay Felker, who launched the now-defunct New West magazine in 1976 after successfully founding New York magazine, well knows the risks of the Southern California marketplace.

To survive, he says, Buzz has got to demonstrate “product differentiation” to advertisers and readers: “Something most people don’t understand about magazines is that they have to have not only demographic and geographic positioning, but a point of view, a distinct voice all their own. And that’s the hardest thing to achieve.”

Los Angeles magazine already speaks from the geographic and economic point of view of West Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and Bel Air, Felker says.

So, Buzz has to distinguish itself on a less tangible front. It is, he says, “making a very interesting attempt at something which we have yet to see work in the United States--at what we might call an attitudinal magazine. . . .”

Buzz asserts its attitude most clearly in its numerous columns. Depending on one’s viewpoint, they resemble either a subsidized vanity press for the partners’ contacts and friends or, as columnist Lise Hilboldt says, “a kind of literary Bloomsbury.”

Hilboldt, as it happens, had attended the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan with Collinsworth. Collinsworth met Mayer after he married Hilboldt.

An actress with an Obie award and a number of television miniseries and film roles, Hilboldt also has always kept copious journals. “Allan,” she says, “used to tell me what an outstanding writer I was.”

Now they’re amicably divorced. And Daily Variety recently ran an ad (reportedly paid for by a friend of the actress) revealing that Hilboldt writes the column “Chloe’s Diary,” which has long carried a fictitious byline.

Other Buzz columnists include Holly Palance, (actor Jack’s daughter, and Mayer and Hilboldt’s maid of honor), Mary Gwynn, who attended Cornell with Mayer, and Collinsworth’s husband.

Lately the magazine has been holding columnists’ lunches at hip eateries. When the women gather, says Hilboldt, “We’re outrageous! It’s like, we’re the funniest, smartest women in this town. I wish someone would tape us.”

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Los Angeles magazine, say those work for it, is more like an amiable mom-and-pop shop. A handful of contributors have been around for decades, but even they tend not to hang out much together, nor attach their egos to the magazine.

Tom Nolan, who writes the “Mr. Los Angeles” column, says the annual Christmas party is about the only time he sees most colleagues: “I pretty much stay at home and work. I’m kind of a drudge.”

In March, Buzz’ efforts at product differentiation agitated the snarling relationship between the two magazines, when a column written by the pseudonymous Margo Magee took a rabid little nip at Harris.

Last fall, Harris used his editor’s column to do some product differentiation of his own, by writing an open letter in which he told Editor Shelby Coffey III how little he likes the Los Angeles Times.

Buzz’s Magee usually writes about happenings (real and imagined) within the fashion and features corners of The Times. Now she took Harris’ comments as an opportunity not only to bash The Times, but to discuss the “icky rush of squirmy embarrassment that only Los Angeles magazine can provide. . . .”

Harris still bristles at the attack: “I would never in a million years allow that sort of column to be done anonymously. It’s unethical and a cheap shot not to put a name on it. It’s gutless. . . .”

Besides, he says, for a magazine that presumes to be so literary, Buzz has been quick to run the sort of articles that are Los Angeles’ stock in trade, such as “The 8 Worst Politicians in L.A.”

“They have started to infringe on things that we are trademark for,” says Harris. “Which may not be wise--L.A. Style infringed on our territory and lasted another six months.”

Retorts Mayer: “From a journalistic viewpoint, L.A. magazine has been mired in the ‘70s for a long time. I think they’re making a mistake in trying to compete with us. It’s a game they can’t win.”

Buzz, he believes, will triumph by filling a void left by magazines that underestimate the intelligence of the city.

It will provide a catalyst for the “smart, ironic, articulate, funny, concerned sensibilities of Southern California,” he says, by “helping to set an intellectual agenda.”

Mayer points to the “distinctive voices” of its columns and to thought-provoking articles, such as Sandra Tsing Loh’s critique of multicultural nuttiness in the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.

“I believe Los Angeles is the best place in the country to be practicing journalism now,” he says. “What magazines do is help a community find its voice. They can help that by being part of the community. “

To Harris’ thinking, that’s exactly what Buzz, in its fulminations on Los Angeles, hasn’t done.

“To the outsider, Los Angeles may be a difficult city to define. But people who live here don’t need for someone to come in and say, ‘I will define the city for you.’ They live the definition every day.

” . . . Buzz really is oriented to New Yorkers. It does not have a Los Angeles sensibility.”

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While Mayer and Harris spar in their own respective styles, industry insiders, both in and out of Southern California, wonder why neither monthly has managed to appeal to more than a narrow range of upscale readers.

(Los Angeles magazine’s audited circulation of just over 155,000 monthly for the first half of 1993--down 10,000 from last year--is about twice that of Buzz’s unverified sales. L.A. magazine also leads in critical advertising-page count, again by about 2-1.)

Terry McDonell, former editor of Esquire, asks why neither has gained the sort of must-read credibility that New York and the New Yorker have on the other coast. One reason, he surmises: “Both magazines seem a little bit more eccentric than one would expect from regional magazines.”

A great regional magazine, he says, must fill a void newspapers invariably leave in their more hurried coverage. Readers must eagerly await a magazine’s thoughtful, fresh, personal take on the big stories of the day.

Harris argues that Los Angeles magazine does just that. He cites his magazine’s story that led the pack in saying that the McMartin preschool defendants would be acquitted, and one about Hollywood’s high-powered publicists that was imitated, he says, by 80 other publications.

Despite such efforts, Harris concedes the “media community” has never held his publication in high journalistic regard.

Still, he says, “I don’t think Buzz gets any more respect than we do. I think you’ll find most people are as perplexed by Buzz as I am.”

With a wan smile, he adds: “So maybe we are in competition: Who can be looked at more askew by the media community?”