The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine

6. Consolidation

172 Struggle “Cosmopolitan is a problem.”1 It was December 1932. A letter from the Manhattan office of the general manager of magazines bluntly stated the financial situation to William Randolph Hearst at his castle in San Simeon, California. Cosmopolitan, the flagship among nine magazines published by Hearst, was beset by common and uncommon circumstances: national economic conditions at the start of the Depression era had reduced advertising revenue severely for almost all magazines, and the outlook was bleak; the personal vanity of the publisher had sacrificed Cosmopolitan’s distinct identity as a premier fiction magazine by merging it with a lesser general periodical, Hearst’s International; money from Cosmopolitan and other Hearst magazines had subsidized the publisher’s lavish lifestyle to the detriment of their quality; the magazines also had covered expenses for several unprofitable Hearst newspapers; and a recent corporate power struggle had ousted the Cosmopolitan editor whose sense for popular fiction during a dozen years had attracted an affluent, steadfast readership. This adverse combination of a poor economy, ego, selfishness, fiscal mismanagement, and corporate intrigue had placed Cosmopolitan in a precarious position. “Going into the first six months of 1933 business does not look good,” the letter from general manager Richard Berlin warned Hearst. “We feel that further drastic economies are in order.” Among the cutbacks Berlin implemented specifically for Cosmopolitan were thinner paper (thirty-pound weight, down from forty-pound weight), which reduced paper tonnage consumption by 25 percent to save $200,000 annually, and fewer color illustrations, which lowered printing costs $50,000 annually.2 The stock market crash on Wall Street in October 1929 had triggered a general economic collapse in the United States fully evident two years later and seemingly irreversible by the end of 1932. Subsequent to the disastrous drop C o n s o l i d a t i o n 6 Consolidation 173 in stock prices, businesses and manufacturers had dismissed millions of employees and also had reduced salaries and wages for millions of others who remained on the payroll.Virtually no social safety net existed, so government aid did not replace lost income. Consumer spending withered.With fewer customers buying merchandise and products, American manufacturers and retailers slashed advertising expenditures. Magazines suffered enormously. Data from 1929 to 1932 reveal the extent of the financial disaster: • for 1930, the top sixty-five monthly magazines gained 0.3 percent aggregate adver‑ tising revenue from the prior year; • for 1931, the same magazines lost 14 percent aggregate ad revenue from the prior year; • for 1932, the same magazines lost another 31 percent aggregate ad revenue; • aggregate advertising revenue for these magazines decreased a horrendous 42 per‑ cent from 1929 through 1932.3 Cosmopolitan for the same period fit the industry pattern, except for a higher initial gain: • for 1930, the magazine gained 8 percent advertising revenue; • for 1931, the magazine lost 17 percent ad revenue from the prior year; • for 1932, the magazine lost another 32 percent ad revenue; • advertising revenue for the magazine decreased 39 percent from 1929 through 1932—from $4.611 million the year of the Wall Street crash to $2.82 million the year Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected.4 Total advertising pages shrank accordingly. Cosmopolitan carried an average of ninety-eight ad pages monthly in 1929 compared with fifty-nine pages monthly in 1932, while ad rates remained the same. Many magazines lowered ad rates to adjust to the economic crisis and to reflect an overall one-tenth decrease in readership resulting from numerous people not renewing subscriptions , but Hearst and his executives held rates steady. Unlike other magazines, Cosmopolitan had retained its readers because executives had anticipated the long-term effects of the Depression; in June 1930, the magazine cut its cover price from thirty-five cents to twenty-five cents and its subscription price from $4 to $2.50 a year. The price reduction was a bargain for readers, and a candid recognition by executives that Cosmopolitan had lesser value—the decrease in advertising had trimmed its average monthly page count from 226 in 1929 to a decidedly thinner 162 pages in 1931. Of course, Cosmopolitan was not the only magazine owned by Hearst adversely affected by the Depression. Good Housekeeping incurred a 19 percent decrease in advertising pages during 1932, Harper’s Bazaar dropped by 27 174 The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine percent, and the upscale Town & Country was...