The Mouth That Roars : Angela Janklow Harrington has a super lineage and talks with the speed of a bullet train. Is it any wonder the teen magazine she founded is as hyper and in your face as she is?

Angela Janklow Harrington arrives for lunch wearing dangerously high platforms, clutching her magazine like a baby she’s afraid will be snatched away. She’s 15 minutes late.

“I hope I’m not late,” she said.

Her sense of timing is better than her sense of time. Harrington, 29, is the editor and creator of Mouth2Mouth, a new magazine aimed at male and female teens that celebrates the power of pop culture. Based in Beverly Hills, it is published by Time Inc. Ventures, a division of Time Warner that also puts out the hip-hop culture magazine Vibe.

Its launch comes as the teen and Generation X markets are in the spotlight via film (“Reality Bites,” “Threesome”), television (“Blossom” and “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and MTV) and music (pick a band, any band).

Mouth2Mouth is a supercharged mag that takes rap, grunge bands, fashion, celebrities and real-life stories and slams them down on every page, with cyberpunk-style graphics as busy as a New York City rush hour.

The premiere issue, which arrived last month, reports from the set of Ice Cube’s new video and travels with U2. From prison, Amy Fisher gives advice to the love-obsessed (“There is nothing to be gained from being in a rush to grow up, yet I know only too well how very much there is to lose”). There’s “How to Spot Fake Breasts Without Squeezing,” Leon Bing reporting on teens shipped off to psychiatric hospitals, a profile of actress Olivia d’Abo, and ratings of tooth-rottingly sweet breakfast cereals.

Cindy Crawford and Shaquille O’Neal pose in a clinch on the cover. Inside they go one-on-one for a Q&A; (Cindy: “How do you chill when you need to get away from it all?” Shaq: “I ride around in my truck.”).

“My feeling was that there was no magazine that was remotely like this,” Harrington said at bullet-train speed. “In England, which is a tiny little island, there’s a score of great, graphically explosive, wild, visual magazines that . . . take the kids seriously and there’s good writing.

“My feeling was, what’s out there for American teen-agers? Why are these smart kids, who are making choices and living their own lives, who know so much about the world, only being told they can twist their bun in 52 ways? It’s just crazy.”

Harrington sees this generation as more than dull-eyed Beavis and Butt-head almost-bes. She believes in the uniqueness of her product, wanting to pull in elements of Vanity Fair, National Lampoon and the late Spy--that one “without the bile.”

She has a commitment from Time Inc. Ventures for a second issue, due in the fall, but faces fierce competition for newsstand rack space, ad dollars and readers with the market-dominating Seventeen, plus Sassy, YM, Teen, and newcomers Quake and Tell.

“None of the other magazines are not good,” Harrington said. “They’re just different. They’re clearly gender-specific. Smiling sirens running in the surf. That’s the concept. Sassy is very, very good, but it targets a certain kind of girl. It’s very self-obsessed. I wanted to do an extroverted magazine.”

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It’s at least as extroverted as Harrington herself, whose raucous laughter used to pierce the otherwise calm halls of Conde Nast. Mouth2Mouth’s pumped-up, in-your-face style is part frenetically paced youth culture, part MTV, part Harrington herself.

“I was a bit wild for the office,” she recalled with a grin. “I used to get in trouble a lot for fostering amusement. I’d never had a job except in the summers . . . and I want to have fun if I’m doing something.. . . I was told, ‘You’re talking too loudly, you’re running up and down the halls all the time. This is an office and you’ve got to calm down.”

Maybe it’s that hint of adolescence that keeps Harrington in touch with a generation 10 years her junior.

“I went to Lollapalooza, I saw ‘Wayne’s World,’ ” she said.

But did she really want to go to Lollapalooza?

“Yeah! I was dying to go! What do I want to go see, Styx? I felt that kinship with this audience.”

Other research included visiting schools, video arcades, batting cages and miniature golf courses--anyplace teen-agers might congregate. This came during the three years she devoted to planning and executing the magazine.

“I also try to remember what it was like (when I was that age) because the soul of teen-agers doesn’t change, really. . . . I think they want to be treated like adults, but you have to talk to them on their own terms.

“Every generation assumes that teen-agers are (stupid) because they don’t seem to have any responsibilities. This generation has more than the others--they do the family shopping because the parents are both working or divorced. But this is not a magazine that’s going to be oriented toward their problems. You can slalom from serious to funny, but not tip over. They’re thinking, ‘Why would I want to be bummed out? I’m already bummed out. I want to be amused.’ ”

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Launching a magazine is a pretty bold move for anyone, given the dismal prognosis for almost any new publication. Her prior magazine experience consisted of five years at Vanity Fair (1985 to 1990) and a quick temping stint at Rolling Stone.

But Harrington’s gene pool foreshadowed bigger and better things.

Her father is Morton Janklow, the heavyweight New York literary agent whose clients include Sidney Sheldon, Barbara Taylor Bradford and Danielle Steel. Her mother, Linda Janklow, chairman of New York’s Lincoln Center Theater, is the daughter of famed director/producer Mervyn LeRoy (“The Wizard of Oz” “Quo Vadis?” “No Time for Sergeants,” “Gypsy,” “Little Women”). His father-in-law--Angela’s great-grandfather--was no slouch, either. He was Harry Warner, one of the founders of Warner Bros.

She married Gerry Harrington, a personal manager, in 1991, in a wedding whose star-studded guest list included Barbara Walters, Michael Ovitz, Si Newhouse, Norman Mailer and Bob Dylan’s son, Jesse.

Princeton educated, she’s an accomplished equestrian, was Vanity Fair’s youngest columnist and worked in development for producer Ray Stark.

She’s aware that some might take her for a dilettante breezing through life on a stellar bloodline and a fat trust fund.

But she credits her parents with instilling in her a 300-horsepower drive.

“My family is a family of immigrants,” she said. “You must succeed. That’s part of your DNA if you’re from an immigrant family. Everyone else did, and if you don’t, you’re, like, derailing the progress of an entire family. My family expected and wanted me to be successful and not in a way that was crushing. My father wanted us to be successful because he liked being successful. He thought it was better, I guess.”

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There are two Angela Janklow Harringtons: the graduate of Princeton, and the graduate of bar-tending school.

The champion equestrian, and the veteran nightclubber who once kept only vampire’s hours.

The supremely confident publishing entrepreneur, and the effervescent blonde who freaks out when a magazine photo reveals more thigh than she’d like (“Is that the worst picture in the history of the world? Is that what I look like?”).

She wrote her college thesis on “The Victory of Civilization in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ and the Fiction of Joseph Conrad,” yet scrawls in red ink on her left hand the names of people she has to call back.

She’s keenly aware of these contrasts.

“Because of my kind of, ah, noise and lunacy or whatever, people can be misled into thinking that I’m (like that),” she said. “I like it because it’s disarming. It’s an alias. Mata Hari is one of my idols. But it’s very easy to break. I can present that side, and through one word I can change it, so it also amuses me. I can change it with one flick of the brush.”

Said one associate: “Underestimate Angela at your own risk.”

To Princeton pal Paul Price, “She was Auntie Mame. She would always drag me along to parties and clubs because she always had the better invitation. I’d go and stare at the lights at the Palladium and she would just laugh at me. She was always very interested in who was behind the club, why they have influence over the people who are wrapped up in it, who the photographers were, the organizers.”

Price recalled that Harrington revealed her family connections only after they had been friends for a couple of years. “It just came out that her grandfather was involved with the ‘Wizard of Oz.’ I said, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me that!’ ”

Vanity Fair contributing editor Bob Colacello plucked Harrington from relative obscurity at Princeton and brought her to the attention of then-editor Tina Brown.

“She was basically very mature and wise for her age, but she has a real childish, bubble gum side to her,” he recalled.

Harrington was featured in Colacello’s “Voices of Princeton” story in 1985.

“Tina said, ‘You’ve got to eliminate the quotes from your agent’s daughter.’ (Janklow has been Colacello’s agent since 1982.) But she said, ‘I want to meet her, I want to hire her. She sounds so intelligent and funny, just right for Vanity Fair.’

Part of Harrington’s job there included keeping tabs on night life and pop culture, scouting profile candidates and keeping the writers and editors plugged in to life on the outside.

But after two years, restlessness settled in and she planned a trip re-creating writer Conrad’s travels through Malaysia.

“I went to bar-tending school so that if I needed to work I wouldn’t have to rely on the world’s oldest profession or anything,” Harrington said. “But it was really difficult because I don’t drink and I couldn’t define the drinks by taste.”

But Brown wasn’t too hot on the Asia trip and persuaded her to move to Los Angeles instead.

“She told me to go for a couple of weeks and see what I could dig up.”

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She eventually dug up a new life for herself, enamored of L.A.’s schizo mix of glitz and grit.

After two years of Vanity Fairing in Los Angeles, she went to work in development for veteran producer Stark (she knew his daughter Wendy Stark Morrissey, Vanity Fair’s Los Angeles editor). But the slow pace wasn’t for Harrington.

“I was around movie people at Vanity Fair, and I thought I should try (the business). I thought my strengths would funnel happily into that medium. But there was no movie in production while I was there, and I found it not as stimulating as I would have hoped. Even if a movie’s in hyper-drive it’s not going to match the momentum of a magazine.”

That’s when she decided to work on her magazine concept full time.

“The magazines in L.A. weren’t what I wanted to do,” she said. “If I was going to (work on one), I had to make it mine.”

Three years later she started shopping it to various publishers. A consultant she’d hired, John Klingel, also worked in new magazine development for Time Inc. and suggested they take a look at her mock-ups.

Would nepotism rear its ugly head now?

“She made the decision that this was something she wanted to do on her own,” Morton Janklow said. “I pointed out that I could call somebody at the top who as a courtesy would call downstairs, and that would be counterproductive. And that was her instinct as well.”

He recalled that her precociousness was evident early on.

“She was always full of ideas,” he said. “When she was about 15 she wrote an outline for a book she wanted to write called ‘Split Ends,’ which was the story of a 15-year-old sophisticated girl, kind of an Eloise in New York, and it was hilariously funny and there was a publisher who was (interested in it).”

Time Inc. Ventures liked the idea and has spent $1 million launching Mouth2Mouth, which has earned mixed reactions within the industry.

YM publisher Vicci Lasdon said she admires Harrington “for taking the chance. In terms of the marketplace today, it’s very difficult.”

But she’s also not sure whether one magazine can appeal to both young men and young women and found the premiere issue of Mouth2Mouth heavily skewed to males.

“It’s so much so that there are so many pieces in the magazine that are challenging to women,” Lasdon said, “and there are some elements that do degrade young women. Like the one on how to tell if fake breasts are real. I think that most young women wouldn’t be so totally engaged by that. The fashion (a swimsuit layout done over computer-game graphics) seemed to come from a male perspective. I think showing a woman in a black patent leather bikini and fishnet stockings is not going to appeal to young women. . . . (The teen years are) a period of great exploration, and I don’t know that young men and women have the same questions or the same perspective.”

But Jon Katz, media critic for New York magazine, finds Mouth2Mouth more geared toward hunk-struck young women.

“I think they’ll have a lot more luck with girls than with boys,” he said. “Young men don’t read that much about stars, pop culture and fashion. They’re really into music, and this still feels to me like a magazine for young women. But it’s very appealing in a lot of ways. It’s a little goofier than Sassy and more celebrity-driven. It’s also funny and inventive and has a lot of attitude about it, too, like the story by Amy Fisher. The pop culture stuff is very cutting edge.”

In Mouth2Mouth’s offices Harrington is plotting her next issue. For issue two she hired two new top editors, a move that “was not unusual” according to Gilbert Rogin, editor-at-large for Time Inc. Ventures, since the first test issue had a temporary staff.

Her chocolate Labrador, Bosco, wanders the halls and occasionally saunters back in her office to slop up some water.

Harrington is happy that some celebrities have already expressed interest in being in the next issue. But she still has to fill out her staff and generate stories.

“Honestly, I didn’t realize (how tough the first issue) would be. I went into it blind. I didn’t realize it was going to be as difficult as it was. But now at least I have a light at the end of the tunnel.”