Capitalizing on Stars in White House

Major news events, like the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the first landing on the moon, tend to trigger “instant” books and periodicals, but rarely has a publisher moved in the face of a fast-breaking story as quickly as Diamandis Communications. In just 10 days--and despite the distraction of the recent sale of the company to the Paris-based publishing conglomerate Hachette--the New York publisher of Woman’s Day and Popular Photography has rushed to the stands the extremely timely Astrology and the White House.

Edited by the staff of Diamandis’ 250,000 copies-a-month Astrology Your Daily Horoscope, the 82-page magazine contains all new material, not pieces recycled from the monthly. Four-hundred thousand copies of Astrology and the White House ($1.95) hit the newsstands today.

Pedestrian Layout

The special edition won’t win any design awards. Printed on newsprint and sporting a bright red cover, the pedestrian layout features photographs of famous people, from Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler to John Lennon and Sylvester Stallone, said to be followers of the “psychic art.”

Articles cover the history and mechanics of astrology (Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, for example, “insisted that the Declaration of Independence be ratified July 4, 1776, because they knew that the combination of planets was excellent for the winning of the American Revolution”), examine astrology’s influence on Hollywood (an astrologer and numerologist warned Carole Lombard’s mother that she and her daughter shouldn’t fly in 1942--they died in a plane crash near Las Vegas), the stock market (“It’s common knowledge that a large percentage of Wall Street brokers use astrology”--Donald Regan), and the Reagan White House (astrologers knew “for years!” that “his office had issued no fewer than seven ‘official’ birth-times to throw us would-be astro-sleuths off the track of his true chart,” and a good thing, too, when you consider that “for years the KGB has been using astrology and various types of psychic and occult arts to study American leaders”).

“The Summit: What Are Its Chances?” strikes a cautious “nothing substantive” note: five planets are retrograde this month, a situation so inauspicious it makes you wonder if the Reagans believe in astrology after all. “Predicting the 21st Century” daringly forecasts that in the year 2000 “Americans will be working hard to improve food production, stabilize banks and financial resources and increase the standard of living.” Democrats will rest easier after reading “Election Year ‘88: The Candidates and the U.S. Chart,” which predicts that “Scorpio”--oh, oh--”Michael Dukakis may never win a popularity contest, but if past astro-history and current transits run true to form, he will be the next president after a close election.” You read it here first.

Entrepreneur Martin Stone, who heads up Monogram Industries in Commerce, makers of industrial fasteners and what are known euphemistically as airplane sanitation units, has finally found a buyer for money-losing California Business magazine.

The buyer is media maven Barry Silverstein, owner of a Columbus, Ohio, cable television company and of Adirondack Life, a regional magazine in Upstate New York.

Actually Silverstein, Stone’s New York neighbor, has been trying to buy California Business for years. Stone finally said yes, exchanging 50% of the company for $1. In addition, Silverstein agreed to assume the costs of launching the company’s recent spinoff, the monthly L.A. Business, and to pay California Business’ bills in the future. Stone has reportedly sunk close to $8 million dollars into the monthly since the early ‘70s. The only year the magazine turned a profit was 1984.

President and publisher Jim Gressinger, who was brought in last year to turn the company around, has been replaced, at least temporarily, by Howard Fish, who will continue as publisher of Adirondack Life. Observers say that California Business may evolve into an occasional publication focusing on special topics, while the company concentrates on building L.A. Business into a trendy feature-laden life-styles-of-the-rich-and-famous glossy like Manhattan Inc.

Whether Los Angeles readers are as interested in the peccadilloes of the powerful as New Yorkers seem to be is open to question. But, interestingly, the last few issues of California Business have stood on more solid editorial ground than the first few of its new sibling (both controlled-circulation magazines are edited by the same staff).

As was predicted here, L.A. Style, the oversized fashion and life-style monthly, has been sold by the L.A. Weekly to American Express Publishing, reportedly for $4 million, not bad since the expensive-to-produce periodical has a circulation of only 50,000. Like Details, the field’s New York-based trend-setter, which was recently bought by the S. I. Newhouse subsidiary Advance Publications (for $2 million--with Details already at over 100,000 circulation, Newhouse seemingly made a more shrewd buy), the Los Angeles magazine was purchased to balance out the publisher’s roster. American Express already puts out such upscale life-style books as Travel & Leisure and Food & Wine.

As in the case of Details’ founder/editor Annie Flanders, L.A. Style’s co-publisher/editor Joie Davidow, who has guided the magazine since its founding, will continue to run the show. In fact, there are no anticipated shifts in staff or management, according to co-publisher and advertising director Karen Fund. “All the changes are in the area of efforts by American Express toward circulation growth,” she reports. “We expect to reach 100,000 within a year.” The promotion campaign begins with a half-million piece mailing to potential subscribers in the next few weeks. According to Fund, there will no changes in format or content beyond “natural growth.”

Magazines like these and Chicago’s Metro and San Francisco’s Equator, offering avant-garde design coupled with high-quality production values, are attractive to advertisers because of the upscale audience they supposedly deliver. L.A. Style, for example, projects a reader who is 35-years-old living in a house worth $391,000 with an annual household income of $111,000. About 85% of the journal’s circulation is in Los Angeles, with the rest scattered from New York to New Delhi. The magazine appeared in June 1985 and last year carried 850 pages of advertising. This year, according to Fund, it expects to carry 1,200 pages of ads.

The third anniversary issue (June, $3), out this week, finds the magazine considerably improved. While no less stylish than previously, the issue’s focus on the cultural outlook of this metropolis, “The Future Comes of Age,” gives the magazine a new seriousness. Looking to the past for some answers for the future, Eric Mankin reports on the destruction of the old Red Car Trolley system and explains how a light-rail system could ameliorate Los Angeles’ transportation problems, Michael Webb revives past planned-but-never-completed projects in the city to see what they still have to offer, and Ron McCrae takes a nostalgic look at what Frank Lloyd Wright would have done to us if he could. Other articles, more problematical, look into the future.

You will want Gnossis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, edited by former underground cartoonist Jay Kinney (Justin Green, who created the classic comic book, “Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary,” is a contributor). Esoteric and scholarly but unpretentious, the metaphysical quarterly looks at anything bearing upon Gnosticism, from the ascetic monasticism of the Essenes in ancient Palestine to the subtle satire of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, trying to distinguish between authentic knowledge of salvation (gnosis) vouchsafed to initiates and everyday Oral Roberts-type conversations with God.

The current issue ($7, Spring ‘88) on Esoteric Spirituality includes articles on traditionalist Rene Guenon, Egyptologist R. A. Schwaller de Lubizz, the apocalyptic teachings of Rudolph Steiner, the work of Sufis in the modern world, inner symbols in the Bible, and a recent attempt to crack the mysterious Boynich Manuscript, puzzling drawings and script first discovered in 16th-Century Bavaria and never successfully deciphered. The Summer issue will explore alchemy. Gnossis is $4 on very hip newsstands and $15 for a year’s subscription; a sample copy can be had for $5 (the extra dollar to cover postage and handling) from Gnossis, The Lumen Foundation, P.O.B. 14217, San Francisco, Calif. 94114.