The Unsinkable Ruth Ko

It’s no coincidence that Ruth Ko’s new $1.5-million headquarters is visible from the Corona del Mar Freeway where her readers--the wealthy and those who wish they were--can spot the Orange Coast Magazine sign as they hum along in their luxury cars.

Inside the block-long building in Newport Beach, Ko’s second-story office is clean and spare, still awaiting new furniture and tasteful touches expected from the publisher of Orange County’s thickest and slickest magazine.

Dressed in a black pantsuit and a white silk blouse, the thin, diminutive Ko looks much younger than 49. She laughs easily and is flattered, she says, when she overhears people whisper that she may have been altered by one of the many plastic surgeons who advertise in her magazine.

“I’m not opposed to it when I’m ready to go there,” she says. “I’m very lucky having Chinese blood because there’s something about the genes and the skin.”

But make no mistake. The soft features, easy chatter and friendly smile belie a woman who is determined, shrewd and obsessed with the bottom line.

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Ko engenders extreme emotions, as much reviled as she is respected. Her friends are staunchly loyal and praise her streetwise business sense, charitable contributions, honesty and trust.

Her critics accuse her of everything from mistreating employees to deceiving advertisers about the magazine’s circulation.

Indeed, some advertisers complained last month about paying for ads based on audited circulation that is half what Ko claims. Asked if she plans to make any refunds, she snaps, “Absolutely not,” and insists that advertisers get their money’s worth.

She also defends her well-known penchant for bartering--swapping ad space for such things as restaurant meals and flowers for the company and furnishings for her Irvine home. Though bartering is common in publishing, Ko resorts to it more than most magazine chiefs.

“We just have to pay the taxes on it,” she says. “It’s just about money. I own this company, and as long as we account for it, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Yet as driven as she may be by the dollar sign, she was roundly cheered for delaying distribution of the premier issue of sister publication Orange County Woman last spring so workers could remove a full-page ad for plastic surgeon W. Earle Matory Jr.

At the time, Matory, a longtime advertiser, had come under investigation after a patient died following liposuction. She lost $3,000 in revenue and paid $1,800 to truck the copies to Mexico, where cheaper labor hand-cut the ad pages from 50,000 copies.

Whatever else she may be, Ko is a survivor in the cutthroat world of regional magazine publishing, where the future is uncertain for the once-popular format.

Over the years, as she rose from advertising sales to the publisher’s office, Ko has kept Orange Coast’s often shaky finances in balance and guided it through the area’s worst recession in 60 years.

Even more impressive is the fact that in a county peopled with business school graduates and corporate climbers with long resumes, Ko is succeeding with a limited background: She’s a high school dropout, a former bit actress and a onetime hula dancer in traveling Hawaiian troupes.

“You gain a lot of respect for someone who has had to do it all on her own,” says Dick Braeger, owner of Gary’s & Co. apparel shops and an advertiser in Orange Coast.

Sitting behind her desk, Ko says she never formed a long-range plan to acquire the magazine, but rather reacted to events.

She acknowledges, though, that after garnering small stakes in the company, she carefully plotted the final strategy that gained her sole ownership five years ago of what she now calls Orange Coast Kommunications Inc.

“People say I’m lucky,” she says. “Luck is where opportunity and ability meet. I had the ability somewhat, because I was like a bulldog, but the opportunities kept arising, and I took my best shot.”

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Ko still sees herself as a skinny kid from Bakersfield, where she was born to a Chinese-American father and an American mother of French, Irish and Cherokee descent. Her parents soon moved the family to Los Angeles, then divorced when she was 5.

Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, Ko learned Tahitian and hula dancing at the White Oaks School of Dance. Her agility and looks earned her a spot on a concert tour with Hawaiian musician Johnny Ukelele.

Though she was only 16, she quit Polytechnic High School in North Hollywood to tour with Ukelele and, later, with Don Ho, where she was married to her first husband onstage during a Las Vegas show. She also earned small parts in such television shows at “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Charlie’s Angels.” She also did commercials.

She and her husband owned two Orange County shoe stores--Ko’s Footwear--when the couple divorced. Then in 1974 she took a “real job” at Hughes Adhouse in Newport Beach, which published tabloid advertising inserts for newspapers.

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Soon after she joined Hughes, the company bought a floundering publication that became Orange Coast. Ko, one of three ad salespeople, advanced easily as the magazine grew. Ownership changed hands three times, and she moved up each time. By 1989 she was the magazine’s publisher and had a 17.5% stake.

In 1991, majority owner J. Wayne Stewart, a Huntington Beach builder, filed for bankruptcy. He had plans to buy the magazine back, but Ko had decided it was time to take over.

For 14 months, Ko kept a low profile, plotting with a Chicago lawyer she had met at a seminar. She let word get back to Stewart that she had no more than $500,000 to pay for his stock. Her lawyer figured Stewart would offer only $75,000 more. Finally, in a mid-1992 sealed bid ordered by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Ko offered $650,000 and assumption of $350,000 in magazine debts. It beat Stewart’s offer of $575,000.

Employees expected big changes, but not the kind that came. With annual advertising falling 20%, from $4 million to $3.2 million, during the deepest part of the recession, Ko cut three employees from the 11-member staff and slashed the budget, lowering already meager salaries and freelance pay.

Penny-pinching ways sometimes die hard. Martin J. Smith, who is stepping down this month after three years as editor, says Ko was elated to get a top-notch photographer recently at Orange Coast’s low freelance rates. But when the photographer turned in an expense report, Ko scrutinized the costs and questioned whether she could have gotten the items from advertisers.

“She looks at the expenses and sees $4 each for two rolls of film [and] rental of an electric generator he’s charging $200 for,” Smith says, “and she’s muttering, ‘I could have had trade [with advertisers] on that.”

Ko has gone well beyond finances to appease advertisers, protect friends and settle old scores.

“We tried to do a ‘best and worst’ feature, and left it up to contributors to provide selections,” says Erik Himmelsbach, editor from 1989 to 1993. “She pulled one gym we had selected as the best because it had advertised but had not paid its bill. It was replaced by another advertiser that had paid its bill.”

Himmelsbach says he also tried to do a critical news feature on Harriet Wieder, then an Orange County supervisor. But Wieder was a Ko friend, and Ko killed the idea, he says.

“It didn’t feel like journalism to me,” he says of his tenure. “It felt more like I was flacking for all of Ko’s friends.”

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Ko says she doesn’t recall the ‘best and worst’ incident, though she acknowledges telling editors to consider advertisers on such lists. She killed the idea for the Wieder story, she says, because it was “mean-spirited” and added nothing to criticism already swirling in the daily press.

But the liberal-leaning Himmelsbach, who went on to work at Spin magazine and now contributes to L.A. Weekly, acknowledges that Orange Coast “had its value” and that he wasn’t the right person to work with the conservative Ko.

Ko was just as happy to see him go. She is typically blunt in her opinions of others and often is as revealing about herself. She was the main source of a 1992 trade publication story that featured details of her two marriages and string of boyfriends in embarrassing detail.

Yet she takes criticism personally and portrays herself as “a really private person,” though “being private is very hard,” she says.

People who “wag their tongues” when they see her at a charity function with former Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates, for instance, are “kind of silly,” she says. Gates is simply a friend who accompanies her to social events.

She broke up with her most recent boyfriend last spring but isn’t above playing on a reputation even she finds fanciful. “I don’t have a current boyfriend,” she jokes. “I’m interviewing.”

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Her life, though, has been her magazine. She lives it, breathes it and works endlessly on it.

She entrusted the editorial side three years ago to Smith, the first experienced journalist in the post. He not only brought credibility to the magazine, he also persuaded ad sellers to pitch the magazine without promising stories on advertisers.

With a commitment from Ko to double freelance pay to rates ranging from $400 to $800, Smith slowly brought in veteran writers and revamped the content, eliminating advertiser-friendly columns in favor of features and profiles.

Though he managed to get William Popejoy, the former county chief executive, on the magazine’s front, he ultimately lost his bid to kill the celebrity covers with photos of Hollywood notables who have nothing to do with Orange County. “We’ve got 20 years of fluff to overcome,” he says.

Ko, explaining her adamant stand on the covers, says simply: “That is what we’re known for. . . . It sets us apart.”

The two express admiration for each other, but Smith, who has written two mystery books, is leaving to write more novels, teach journalism and spend more time with his family. Freelance writer Patrick Mott is replacing him.

The change in editors comes as a rejuvenated economy is bringing advertisers back to magazines. But although industry analysts expect record ad revenues this year, most of it is going to big national publications.

Magazines like Orange Coast, called city magazines because of their regional focus, have declined in popularity. Readers’ tastes are changing and other media--from radio and television to newspapers and specialty magazines--are chipping away at the formula that once helped Los Angeles magazine grow so fat.

West Coast magazines have been particularly hard-hit because they are catering to a population base that’s visually oriented, says magazine critic Jack Feuer, who has written about city magazines and the industry for 20 years. “We’re just not a reading kind of town,” he says.

Former Los Angeles magazine owner Seth Baker, who now operates magazines called 213 and 714, calls the city magazine market “much, much more difficult” than it was in the 1970s and ‘80s.

But the main problem with city magazines, Feuer says, is that “a lot of them simply lost touch.”

“Orange Coast is a virtual carbon copy of Los Angeles magazine in the 1960s and ‘70s,” he says. “Orange Coast doesn’t seem to have changed much.”

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Ko is banking on her editorial content, as well as a planned stream of specialty publications that started with Orange County Woman, to build her company. Orange County Kids could appear as early as next year, and Orange County Man may follow.

For now, she says, her hands are full. But still, she’s restless.

“Have I made it? I don’t know,” Ko says, pondering her state of affairs. “I bought a big building, but I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve finished yet.”