In Down Times, a Publication for Living Rich

Faith is easily shaken; hope fades; charity, sadly, is forever in short supply.

But Schadenfreude--that quiet glee in the misfortune of others--is always with us.

So, with stocks groping for a bottom, bonds wallowing and the dollar falling, it seems like the right moment to check in on the reading rich. And there probably isn’t a better place to do that than at the Malibu-based Robb Report, whose slightly more than 100,000 monthly readers have an average annual income of $1.2 million. Thick, glossy and pricey, the magazine is dedicated to the proposition that the good life, if not entirely about things, is mostly so.

How are the Robb Report and its acquisitive readers doing?

Never better and just fine, according to William J. Curtis, president and chief executive of CurtCo Robb Media, which in partnership with Toronto Dominion Capital, acquired the magazine “for the luxury lifestyle” a little more than a year ago.

“Cartier and Patek Philippe are not going out of business because of what’s happening in the market,” he said. “But what they and other manufacturers of luxury products and services are being forced to do is to focus their marketing on those people who can afford to pull the trigger on a purchase, even in this market. In this difficult climate, image advertising--the sort aimed at the wannabes making $100,000 a year--falls away a bit, and advertising that results in sales survives.”

Actually, the Robb Report--however rarified its readership--represents a return to form for a little-noticed publishing success story that Curtis, a onetime ad salesman for the Financial Times, planted in Malibu more than a decade ago. Over the succeeding years, he and a small group of associates launched or acquired 26 specialty publications focused on home theaters, computing and mobile computing, particularly in the business-to-business sector. “Sales Force Automation Magazine was one of our titles,” Curtis quipped. “There’s something you’d want to curl up with by the fire on a cold night.”

Those titles were all sold off by 1999 to become an e-commerce firm.

“At the time,” Curtis recalled, “it was everybody’s obligation to find a way to lose money. So, like everybody else, we started a business that wasn’t really a business. It was called Small Office.com, and I lost $10 million on it.

“We learned our lesson from the dotcom and, at the end of 2000, began the complicated process of acquiring this magazine, which I love and have read for the last decade. We paid $35 million, and I’m like a pig in heaven because I’m really into this stuff.”

Curtis describes the Robb Report, which since its purchase has undergone a redesign and major editorial expansion, as “nicely profitable.” Renewals have increased, and newsstand sales have increased by 25% to 47,000--”and this is a book with an $8 to $10 cover price. This is not a $2 magazine. Overall, we’re going to make a couple of million dollars more than we projected this year.” As a privately held company, CurtCo does not publish financial projections.

Now, though Curtis and his associates believe the current upheaval in the markets may last for another two years, they plan to use the magazine--which is filled with lavishly illustrated pieces on hotels, restaurants, cars, boats, jewelry, watches, cigars and wine--as the launching pad for an array of publications geared to high-end consumerism. “I would very much like to acquire a home design and furniture title,” he said, “because our readers’ second homes have an average value of $2.5 million.”

Cardinal Asserts ‘Anti-Catholic Bias’

With Pope John Paul II in Toronto for a world youth festival, the Holy See is reportedly still weeks away from any formal pronouncement on the guidelines recently adopted by the American bishops for dealing with pedophile clerics.

That silence has not halted some influential Vatican insiders from continuing to assert that the child-abuse crisis is the product of an anti-Catholic frenzy in the U.S. news media.

Last month, the Jesuit-run Roman journal Civilta Cattolica, whose articles are approved by the Vatican secretariat of state, accused American journalists of a “morbid and scandalous curiosity” in the issue and alleged the media’s “anti-Catholic bias” has subjected the church “to a cross-fire of suspicions, violent accusations, recriminations and demands for million-dollar settlements.”

In an interview with an influential Catholic magazine, 30 Giorni (30 Days), Cardinal Oscar Rodriquez Maradiaga--a Honduran sometimes mentioned as a papal candidate--singled out the New York Times, the Washington Post and Boston Globe as “protagonists of what I do not hesitate to define as a persecution against the church.” The U.S. press, Rodriquez Maradiaga said, has acted “with a fury which reminds me of the times of Diocletian and Nero and, more recently, Stalin and Hitler.” The Honduran prelate went on to hint that this persecution stems, in part, from the American media’s antipathy to the Vatican’s support for a Palestinian homeland.

According to a column last week in his paper’s online edition, John L. Allen Jr., the Rome bureau chief for the National Catholic Reporter, a lay newsweekly, wrote that some Vatican officials have begun to go further and, in a particularly sinister turn, are attributing the U.S. media’s alleged anti-Catholicism to the large number of Jewish reporters in the American press.

One Catholic analyst who is not buying any of this is the Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of leading Jesuit magazine America. “Actually, I think, the U.S. news coverage has been pretty fair and the bishops have received the coverage they deserve. I have not seen anti-Catholicism in the news stories nor even in the commentary--not in the traditional sense of the word. There’s anti-clericism in some quarters, but it’s not the nativism of the bad old days.”

The Vatican, he said, “is 15 to 20 years behind our bishops in understating child abuse as a crime, a sickness and an abdication that cannot be cured by prayer or penance. You have to understand where we were 30 years ago to understand where they are today. The tragedy is that the church outside the United States is not learning from our mistakes.”

Work in Progress:

‘Lady Madonna’

Brian Lysaght, a lawyer and writer, is author of four novels, most recently “Last Dance of the Viper.”

“I’m about halfway through my new novel, which has the working title ‘Lady Madonna.’ One of its major characters--the villain, who’s called David Cole--is loosely inspired by Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace’s killer. For a thriller writer, like me, Cunanan is the sort of real-life character who embodies chilling possibilities. He’s a shape-changer, sexually neutral and totally psychopathic. As a writer of thrillers, you take those possibilities, magnify them and then imagine in print what such a person might be like. Cole, who calls himself ‘Lady Madonna,’ not only has the ability to effortlessly shift sexual identities, but also is a Caltech-trained mathematical genius and an accomplished magician--an illusionist. He also has been a killer since boyhood. In other words, he is a nightmarish opponent.

“One of his victims is Jonathan Hardley, a partner in a major Century City tax and pension firm, who has been involved in embezzlement. Along the way, Hardley encounters the villain Cole and ends up with his throat slit. This puts our heroine, a deputy U.S. attorney, into the thick of things along with one of the murdered man’s partners, a lawyer named Michael Flynn. Together, they pursue the killer through the world of corrupt high finance and the sexual underground.

“Where they all come out remains to be seen.”