NONFICTION - June 18, 1995

ESKY: The Early Years at Esquire by Hugh Merrill (Rutgers University Press: $24.95; 220 pp.). I’ve always felt a little guilty for hating Esquire, the one magazine I’ve thrown across the room in anger after reading some particularly disingenuous, obsequious article. I feel better now, however, for I’ve learned from this volume that Esquire wasn’t really intended to be good; born as a fashion magazine (the owners initially hoped to name it Trend, Stag, Beau or Trim), Esquire was supposed to earn profits more than respect. Founding editor Arnold Gingrich would later lead the magazine to glory, fostering what would become the New Journalism, but Esquire’s early years, at least as told by Hugh Merrill, are dreary and depressing; Gingrich rifling the short-story reject piles of better magazines, publisher David Smart signing illustrator Alberto Vargas (of Varga Girl fame) to indefensibly exploitive contracts, the magazine publishing in 1937 an apparently serious article on wife-beating (“Women Are Like Gongs”) in which the author claims it’s “regular, dispassionate, day-to-day lickings which produce results.” (Let’s not forget Esky, either, the magazine’s horrible, bug-eyed, mustachioed mascot.) There’s plenty of material here for a compelling narrative, but Merrill’s history is too sketchy and selective, his style insufficiently wicked, to make the lean years at Esquire come alive.