IF YOU WERE GOOD at writing cover lines, it was like a gift. Some of the best editors I worked with were lousy at it, in the way some people can’t tell a joke. The connection is obvious because the best cover language is almost always funny, and writing good headlines on deadline can make you feel like a Looney Toon producing an anvil or stick of dynamite from behind your back. If you could do that you earned a special status among other editors and word got around. Jann was good and so was David “the Stonecutter” Felton, who slapped “The Quitter” on the Rolling Stone cover when Nixon resigned—a particular favorite of mine.
Not long after I got to Rolling Stone, we had a big success with a Jim Morrison cover, which was surprising at first because he had died ten years earlier in his bathtub in Paris. We had no new information except the sense that the Doors were having a revival among teenagers. My deputy editor, David Rosenthal, spotted it early and assigned Rosemary Breslin (Jimmy’s daughter) to talk to some kids, get the recent sales numbers and bang out a piece. We found a head shot with Jim’s blue eyes piercing out at you, but what made the cover was the headline:
He’s hot,
He’s sexy
and He’s dead
The cover, especially the headline, got a lot of pickup and we celebrated with some drinks in the office. I thought I had written the line but David corrected me, pointing out that he had said it in my office when we’d first started fooling around. Then Jann took credit for it, saying that David and I had come up with something like “still sexy” and he had fixed it with “he’s dead.”
It was a brilliant cover whoever wrote the lines, a meld of idea, execution and timing that pulled huge newsstand sales. For any cover to work it has to be surprising, smart in some way that throws attitude and handsome. Check, check and check.
ALL THE CLICHÉS ABOUT COVERS are true and I revisited them often. The cover is the face of your magazine; it should be a poster for what’s inside; it should stop people for a second look; it should make them want to buy it. Some editors thought a bad cover that sold well was better than a good cover that didn’t, but that was only true in terms of their job security. You could humiliate yourself with a bad cover, the way desperate editors still do all the time.
Some editors talked about “building” covers, and that’s the right verb to use. The idea comes first, even if it’s just “beautiful famous person looking beautiful and famous.” Once the art director and I had two or three photos we liked (or were resigned to using the best of what we had), we would sit at a huge screen and start trying different crops, headlines, type sizes and styles. For a while I was prone to adding borders, and I went through two sticker phases—first real stick-ons (Esquire) and then fake photoshopped replicas (Men’s Journal). Some editors were superstitious. Not me, except for no green logos, ever. Covers usually took a day or two because you wanted to reflect and tinker, but I’ve done them in ten minutes.
When I was first thinking about covers, I looked at a lot of album jackets and the best of them were wordless—the Beatles’ Abbey Road and White Album, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin. It’s a very long list. The strongest magazine covers don’t need language, either. Annie Leibovitz’s image of John and Yoko, and later images of 9/11 on Time and some other titles, proved that. The devastating torque of the story made any language beyond the date banal. The popularity surge of a dead rock star was, of course, a very different story. And so too was Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair thirty-four years later.
EDITORS KEPT SCORE WITH NEWSSTAND sales. Many had bonuses based on the percentage of sell-through and total copies sold built into their contracts. Richard Stolley, the preeminent Time Inc. editor who bought the Abraham Zapruder footage of the JFK assassination for Life and was later the founding managing editor of People, had a kind of mantra for what sorts of covers sold best.
Young is better than old.
Pretty is better than ugly.
Rich is better than poor.
Movies are better than music.
Music is better than television.
Television is better than sports.
…and anything is better than politics.
He wrote it for his editors to follow, and it was key to People’s success as the most profitable magazine of all time. But he amended it in 1980, following John Lennon’s murder, which for many magazines was the best-selling cover until Princess Diana died.
…and nothing beats celebrity death.
Coverage of Diana both before and after she was killed was like an open cash register for the print media. “Lady Di launched at least a thousand covers,” wrote Newsweek media critic Jonathan Alter, “and hundreds of millions of newspaper and magazine sales.” The most uncomfortable irony was that she was being chased by motorcycle paparazzi in Paris when her Mercedes swerved head-on into a pillar in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel at sixty-five miles per hour.
All the newsweeklies scrambled to put her on the cover, and then Time, Newsweek, People and TV Guide followed up with commemorative editions as well. On newsstands, Time’s first issue about Diana’s death sold about 850,000—which was 650,000 more than usual. The commemorative edition sold 1.2 million copies. Time’s managing editor at the time, Walter Isaacson, announced that they were the two largest sellers in the history of the magazine. People’s commemorative issue ran without a headline and sold over 3.1 million, which makes it the second-highest People cover of all time, behind 9/11.
IF I’D HAD A NEWSSTAND MANTRA, it would have been that there are no rules. And smart wasn’t necessarily better than dumb. By the 1990s celebrity weight loss and TV reality shows sold the best, except, of course, for dead celebrities. Now nothing sells like it used to.
Page views are the new measure, and cute puppies and cheap-trick penis headlines rule the click-bait newsstand. But before you feel too sorry for the old newsstand stars (both the subjects and the editors who put them on their covers), note that in an ever-fractionating media universe of aggregation and crypto-plagiarism it’s both easier and more fun to manipulate traffic than it ever was to game the old newsstands. I leave it to someone else to say which turns editors more cynical.
The Big Get is always obvious in retrospect. When Vanity Fair put Caitlyn Jenner on the cover in July 2015, its website scored its largest ever single-day audience, with over nine million unique users, and according to a company-wide memo at Condé Nast, more than 46 million people consumed Jenner’s cover story–related content on digital outlets like VanityFair.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter in the first twenty-four hours. But the print newsstand came in at less than 500,000. Gone are the days of a decade ago, when Jennifer Aniston gave Vanity Fair a newsstand record with 738,929. What is also obvious is that the newsstand as the anchor of any magazine business model is long dead.
DAVID ROSENTHAL AND JANN each still insist that the Jim Morrison headline was theirs. I’m the only one who can settle that argument. I think of it as mine.
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