About Show Magazine

Show Magazine

Show Magazine was a New York arts and entertainment magazine created by A&P heir Huntington Hartford. It was first published from 1961 to 1964 as a monthly magazine of the arts, and it was then revived at the end of the 1960s in a new form concentrated on motion pictures, merging with Entertainment World and appearing every two weeks. The revived Show continued into the early 1970s, with issues still appearing in 1972, before folding in 1973. Remembered both for its highbrow arts coverage and for publishing Gloria Steinem's 1963 undercover report A Bunny's Tale, Show was one of the most conspicuous of Hartford's many cultural ventures — ambitious, expensive and, in his own later judgment, flawed in its first incarnation by a scope he never quite defined.

Huntington Hartford and the Fortune Behind Show

George Huntington Hartford II was born in New York on April 18, 1911, named for his grandfather, who established the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, the supermarket giant A&P. He came into 10 percent of the company at age 11 after the death of his father, Edward, an inventor and manufacturer of automobile components who had made his own fortune. Hartford graduated from Harvard in 1934 and worked only briefly as a clerk before his uncles fired him, and later only briefly as a reporter: in 1940 he put up $100,000 to start the newspaper PM and hired himself as a reporter at $120 a month. He inherited an estimated $90 million and, the New York Times reported, went through some $80 million of it on ventures that included an artists' colony, a theater, a handwriting institute, a modeling agency and the Gallery of Modern Art, opened in 1964 at 2 Columbus Circle. Show belonged to that pattern: a rich man's attempt to shape American culture in print.

The First Run, 1961 to 1964

Hartford started Show in 1961 and ended its first run in 1964. Published in New York by Hartford Publications, it was a monthly devoted to the arts and entertainment, covering film, theater and the performing and visual arts in large-format, well-produced issues. Hartford later gave a blunt diagnosis of what went wrong. The thing he had done wrong, he said in a 1970 oral history interview for the Archives of American Art, was talking about the arts in general: he was constantly fluctuating back and forth between the performing arts and the arts, and if he himself did not know what the magazine's area encompassed, obviously the readers did not know either. Yet the same interview records why he had chosen a magazine at all. A magazine, he felt, offered a kind of permanent form of communication that appealed to him more than the more ephemeral mass media such as television, and unlike film production it let an individual keep a creative say.

A Bunny's Tale: Gloria Steinem in Show

The most famous article Show ever published appeared in 1963. Gloria Steinem, then a freelance journalist, was given an assignment by Hartford's Show to write an exposé of the Playboy Club. Using a false name, she applied for a job as a Playboy Bunny at Hugh Hefner's club in New York, was hired, and worked in the Bunny costume serving drinks and checking coats. Her article, published in Show in 1963 as A Bunny's Tale, featured a photograph of Steinem in the uniform and detailed how the women were treated at the clubs, including working conditions and sexual demands that, she reported, skirted the edge of the law. Steinem later said she was proud of the work she did publicizing the Bunnies' exploitative conditions, and Hugh Hefner responded with a letter stating he would remove requirements for Bunnies to undergo gynecological examinations and sexually transmitted disease testing. The article became the basis of the 1985 television movie A Bunny's Tale. For a brief period afterward Steinem found other assignments hard to land, saying it was because she had now become a Bunny; she joined the newly founded New York magazine in 1968.

Highbrow Ambition and the Girl of the Month

Show's character contained a contradiction that contemporary obituaries of Hartford still noted. He sank millions into the magazine, which was devoted to highbrow arts but also featured a girl-of-the-month picture spread that Hartford himself insisted on. That mixture — serious coverage of film, theater and the arts alongside a cheesecake feature demanded by the proprietor — captured the magazine's predicament throughout its life. It aspired to the standing of an intellectual arts review while remaining the personal instrument of an owner whose tastes and interventions shaped every issue. Surviving copies traded by booksellers show the range of the monthly in its last first-run year: a 1964 issue carried material on Spain and Poland, a ten-year decline of television, a fall television preview, the world of Henry James, Sunday in New York, Duke Ellington and more — arts journalism, criticism and entertainment reporting bound together under one title.

Closure in 1964 and the Lessons Hartford Drew

Hartford ended Show in 1964. He did not disguise the failure in retrospect. There was, he said, no point in going into the reasons except that he got a lot of experience in the magazine field. From that experience he drew a practical conclusion: there must be a place for primarily a motion picture magazine, not just a magazine of the arts in general. The first Show had tried to cover everything artistic at once; its successor would narrow the field to film, keep a clearer promise to readers, and be built in part as a trade publication for the industry it covered. The timing of the closure was also the moment of Hartford's largest other cultural gamble, the opening of his Gallery of Modern Art in 1964, which later closed at a reported loss of $7.4 million — another instance of the pattern Playbill summarized when it called Show an arts and entertainment magazine that had a decade of fitful life before folding in 1973.

The Revival: Merging Show with Entertainment World

The revival was planned in detail by 1970. Hartford hired Jack Timmer, who had been an editor at The Hollywood Reporter. Timmer had left the Reporter and was starting a magazine of his own called Entertainment World, in which Hartford was involved, while Hartford went ahead with Show; the two then decided to merge them. The combined magazine would keep the name Show and some elements of Entertainment World, which was primarily a trade magazine, and it would have news in it. The format changed with the merger: instead of monthly like the old Show, or weekly like Entertainment World, it would come out every two weeks as a biweekly. It would sell for fifty cents instead of a dollar, look like Show on the outside, but be saddle-stitched rather than perfect-bound. Hartford reported about 15,000 subscribers directly connected with the motion picture industry, with only seven cancellations, and he considered schemes such as a free Filmbill handed to moviegoers, on the model of Playbill in the legitimate theater, as an advertising vehicle for Show.

The Revived Show in the Early 1970s

Issues of the revived magazine, published in New York by H&R Publications, show a magazine of films and the arts in name but of films in emphasis. The March 1972 issue, volume 2, number 1, ran 68 pages in stapled pictorial wraps and carried a cover story on the passing of Maurice Chevalier, Fred Robbins on Liza Minnelli as the definitive Sally Bowles in Cabaret, coverage of Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and a profile of director Sam Peckinpah, with John Wayne and Joel Grey among the figures covered. That contents page is a fair portrait of the second Show: star profiles, film criticism and industry personalities, aimed jointly at the trade audience Hartford had bought with Entertainment World and at general readers interested in motion pictures.

Why Hartford Believed in Magazines

Hartford's 1970 interview remains the fullest explanation of Show's existence. Everyone, he argued, wants to express themselves and implement their ideas, and a magazine is a way to do it: television was ephemeral, a show might go off the air, and its maker was dependent on the audience, whereas a successful magazine was a going concern that stayed around for a long time and could carry editorials and subtle argument. He connected that belief to his wider career as a patron who believed artists should be leaders of society and that art carried a moral element — views he had set out in his book Art or Anarchy and in articles such as Has God Been Insulted Here? and The Public Be Damned. Show, in both its incarnations, was the periodical expression of that philosophy, funded to say what its owner thought American culture needed to hear.

End in 1973 and Legacy

Show folded for the final time in 1973, ending what Playbill called a decade of fitful life. It had never found the stable identity Hartford himself admitted the first run lacked, and the second run's narrower film focus still rested on one man's subsidy at a time when his fortune had dwindled: by 1973, Hartford told the Wall Street Journal, he wanted to be measured by achievements instead of profit, remarking that not everything can be judged by its dollar value. Show's legacy rests on three things: its place in the history of arts magazines as a lavish, owner-driven monthly of the early 1960s; its reinvention as an early attempt at a combined consumer and trade film biweekly; and above all A Bunny's Tale, the 1963 Steinem report that outlived the magazine, entered feminist history and was still being dramatized on television two decades after Show itself had closed.

Profile at a Glance

Show Magazine was founded in New York in 1961 by Huntington Hartford, the A&P heir, and published monthly by Hartford Publications until 1964. It covered film, theater and the arts, included a girl-of-the-month spread at its owner's insistence, and published Gloria Steinem's A Bunny's Tale in 1963. Revived around 1970 by merging with Jack Timmer's Entertainment World, it reappeared as a fifty-cent biweekly focused primarily on motion pictures, with about 15,000 industry subscribers reported by Hartford, and with issues appearing under H&R Publications into 1972. It folded in 1973.