Launching a magazine is always daunting, even for the world's biggest publisher. In a worldly and wise new memoir that reveals much about the inner politics of a large corporation, Andrew Heiskell, chairman of Time Inc. from 1960 to 1980, relates how he helped start People. Today it is the most commercially successful magazine in the history of publishing, with operating profits of some $300 million a year. But then as now it was highly criticized, and the early going was not easy. Excerpts:

Most successful ideas in publishing are not leaps of genius. But someone does have to think of an idea and then be in a position to do something about it. For the latter, it helps to be the chairman.

After the death of Life in 1972, I kept reaching and scratching for a good, big idea that would restore the company's health. Over the years I had been aware that the "People" page of Time was the most popular department in the magazine, the one many readers turned to first. And Iknew that the "People" columns and the gossip columns of the newspapers were also popular. It didn't take an enormous leap of genius to go from there to the thought that we should create an entire magazine about people.

The person to whom I told my new magazine idea was Otto Fuerbringer, the head of Magazine Development. I said to him, "Hey, Otto, why don't we do a magazine about people? We'll call it People.

"Here's how I see it," I said. "Instead of starting with last week's news, we start with last week's people and see if we can't tell the reader quite a lot about what's going on."

I wanted the magazine to be lighthearted and gossipy. It would be fast, breezy, irreverent, and never, never solemn. Lots of pictures, but they would not have to be the size of Life, because Life's page size was one of the things that bankrupted it. People would be standard size. It would be all black-and-white because there are very few occasions when you need to photograph people in color.

Hedley Donovan, the Time Inc. editor in chief, was not enthusiastic. Hedley was always careful about anything new. Years earlier I had suggested to him that we do a column in Life called "The Presidency," and that Hugh Sidey in our Washington bureau would be perfect to write it. Hedley rather liked the idea, but he wanted to make sure it would hold up on a weekly basis. He made Sidey write ten columns, week after week, none of them published, before he finally agreed it would work.

During the period when we were noodling People, I called Clare Luce [author, ambassador, and widow of Time Inc. founder Henry Luce] and told her about it. "It has to be very chattery, very gossipy," she said. "Then women will love it. Tell us whether Liz Taylor is gaining weight or losing weight this month, and how much. I'll love it -- and so will my maid and my hairdresser."

A magazine needs a structure, a framework, something that makes readers say to themselves, "Oh yes, I'm comfortable with this. I know what this is." You can surprise the hell out of the reader with this story or that picture, but you have to keep inside the familiar framework.

When I first thought of this magazine, I said to myself it has to be called People, it can't be called anything else. That would almost certainly cause legal problems -- somebody was sure to own that title -- but I remember thinking that if we could not get that title, we should not publish the magazine. With any other name we would lose half the value of the idea.

Sure enough, we learned there was a legal problem with the title. A local newspaper in the Midwest owned the name People and refused to sell out to us. We finally had to call our magazine People Weekly. That distinction was enough to clear us legally, and the word Weekly has always been quite tiny on the cover. Try to find it.

Heiskell goes on to relate how a skeleton staff published a dummy issue under editor Phil Kunhardt, a Life veteran:

Returning to the office after several days off, Kunhardt was in for a shock. As he wrote in a memo, "I got in Monday morning only to hear that our office has had nothing but abuse for the past week -- people inside Time Inc. either calling or appearing to say how dreadful the thing is. Hugh Sidey thinks it's a cross between Women's Wear Daily and Silver Screen. Tim Foote [former Life senior editor] says, ‘It violates everything Luce stood for. It has no redeeming social or educational qualities whatsoever.'"

This kind of attack on a new magazine always happens at Time Inc. When Life was first published in 1936, it was decried by Time and Fortune people as cheap, trashy, and a disgrace to the company. When Sports Illustrated was first published in 1954, it was decried by Time, Fortune, and Life people as a shallow, inconsequential, unworthy magazine and a disgrace to the company. It was known around the building as Muscles or Jock or Sweat. When Money was first published in 1972, Time, Fortune, Life, and Sports Illustrated people said it should be called Greed and decried it as a disgrace to the company. Now it was People's turn out be the new kid on the block and therefore beneath contempt.

We had to do a pro forma analysis of how much money we would have to invest in People before we could break even. How much were we going to gamble? These exercises are always optimistic. For instance, nobody ever estimated that Sports Illustrated would lose $32 million (which is more like $100 million today) over nine years. If we had had the benefit of that estimate, even Harry Luce would have decided against it. Nobody estimated how much Money would really lose before breakeven six or seven years after launch.

The pro forma on People came up with a possible loss of $25 million before breakeven, which would take place after three years. (In the end, we invested only $17 million and reached breakeven in eighteen months. By the time you read this page, People will have made a total profit of more than $1 billion, a very splendid return on a $17 million dollar investment.)

The early issues of People sold like crazy -- 80 percent to 90 percent sales on newsstand, which is considered a technical sellout in this quirky business. But it was a resounding flop critically. Everybody said how awful it was. The criticism came not just from inside Time Inc. and from the press but from the ad agencies. Their position was, "Oh, we would never recommend that magazine to our clients." Advertisers are slow to come around until they can place a magazine in what they think is its proper niche. Since People was a brand new creature, it had no niche. The response in the academic community was especially frightful. The magazine was denounced in faculty lounges across the country -- although a lot of professors seemed to have read a fair number of the stories.

Dick Stolley is the editor who really implemented and shaped the magazine. He deserves most of the credit for making it a non-schlocky magazine of reasonably high quality. I would have made it schlockier. He never ran a nude or near nude or a bare breast, which everybody would have assumed we would do. In fact, he ordered the elimination of nipples from show-through blouses with an airbrush.

After some years of experience in choosing People covers and paying close attention to the resulting newsstand sales, Stolley learned a lot about what works for People and what doesn't. He arrived at the following formula: "Young is better than old, pretty is better than ugly, television is better than music, music is better than movies, movies are better than sports -- and anything is better than politics."

Stolley kept his edit staff thin, not just to save money but to make everybody feel needed and important. He was determined not to have a big staff because he thought totally dedicated people would do a better job. Nobody should have any spare time. This is known as the theory of being "optimally undermanned." The theory says that you want just enough people to get the job done without total exhaustion, but you want so few people that everyone thinks, "If I don't come to work today, the whole place will fall apart."

People's huge success and the severe criticism it continued to attract was terribly embarrassing for Hedley Donovan, the editor in chief. The product embarrassed him, even though it was a hell of a lot better magazine than everybody was saying. Hedley never really liked it and made that clear to me in private. But at least he never said so in public.

Intellectual criticism of People never bothered me. One day at lunch during the magazine's early weeks, Otto Fuerbringer was giving me a gloomy report about the attitude of his former colleagues at Time. I interrupted him. "Otto," I said, "if the editors of Time like it, then we have failed."

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