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Details goes bust | page 1, 2
Details was always beholden to fashion advertisers, says Leland (now a senior editor at Newsweek), and the irony, according to another former editor I spoke to, was that fashion did not play that well. In focus groups, fashion was the least popular feature, according to him. To reinvent Details as a pure fashion trade journal strikes him as delicious irony. "It would be like starting '60 Minutes II' and making it all Andy Rooney." Under Leland's successor, Joe Dolce, the magazine regained some of its downtown-club cred. (A former club doorman and fellow Vogue alumnus, Dolce is openly gay, though the magazine he produced was generally hetero in its sex coverage.) But Condé Nast seemed to lurch from idea to idea with Details, always looking for a new identity. For a few minutes it was going to be a financial magazine of sorts ("Money is the sex of the '90s," Truman was supposedly telling people -- though, as I recall, sex was the sex of the '90s), but before Dolce could transform it, he was fired. (Actually, he quit before he could be fired after hearing through the rumor mill his number was up. He, too, had recently been assured that all was well.) According to Faludi (and at least one writer I spoke to who worked on the next incarnation of Details), Michael Caruso was brought in to "heterosexualize" the magazine. Caruso, a veteran of Vanity Fair and Los Angeles magazine, was a guy kind of guy, into girls and sports. (He is launching Maximum Golf for News Corp. this May.) "You call to get sports people in the magazine and the reaction you get is, 'Oh, isn't that a gay magazine?'" he told Faludi. He, too, was reassured of his success -- before he was sacked in favor of Golin. Standing on the graves of so many editors (he coyly signed his first editor's note "#5"), Golin always figured he could be whacked at any time. "I wasn't worried about the pension plan kicking in," he says simply. Like everyone else, he has been given until Friday to clear out of the magazine's swank offices in the new CN building in Times Square. (The good news: He won't have to look at the blimp-size reproduction of Tom Hanks' head that has covered the building opposite since December.) He is looking forward to playing the violin (seriously) and spending time with his kids. Condé Nast has not asked him to edit another magazine, "and they won't once they see what I've done to my office," he adds. That the world did not need Details (or did not need many more than 500,000 copies of it) must now be obvious. But also obvious is the lack of faith and direction that now plagues the storied magazine company. And at least one disgruntled former editor lays the blame on Truman. "Think of it," he says: "His specialty is music and fashion. The only thing constant about music and fashion is that they change. The guy doesn't have any core beliefs." And it's not just Truman (who became editorial director after the retirement of the late, legendary Alexander Liberman); it's the people running the company. "They don't believe in their properties," he insists. "Look at GQ; instead of believing in what GQ had become, they said 'Let's put a bunch of babes on the cover.' "When you're not rooted in some way," he concludes, "you're subject to any change in fashion."
- - - - - - - - - - - - Sound off Related Salon stories Bright lights, big titties As the lad mags in the U.K. wither, their American counterparts try to give the formula one more squeeze.
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