Retailers Rebuff Cover Girl in the Buff

For the past 10 years, Rolling Stone’s annual “Hot Issue” has been getting hotter, as beautiful actresses such as Lisa Bonet, Uma Thurman, Winona Ryder and the women of “Melrose Place” have posed for the cover in various degrees of undress. But this year’s issue has generated such heat that some leading stores are finding it too hot to handle.

The cover features model Laetitia Casta in the nude atop an array of rose petals, looking like Marilyn Monroe or an illustrated Varga girl of old. Although she was photographed from the side, leaving more to the imagination than to the eye, the cover has prompted Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target, Stop & Shop and other chains to bar the issue from their shelves.

According to a source familiar with the magazine’s circulation, the ban could cause Rolling Stone to lose around 30% of its average single-copy sales, which were 189,203 copies per issue in the second half of last year.

However, the rock-and-roll magazine’s corporate spokeswoman Cathy O’Brien and managing editor Robert Love said Friday that the loss would be far less and would be offset by gains at newsstands that do carry the issue. Certainly the publicity won’t hurt.

“This was a strategic idea of pushing the envelope,” Love said.

*

He added that Rolling Stone expected some resistance from single-copy sellers and draped newsstand copies of the issue with a paper band that conceals most of Casta’s shapely form. “We also gave everybody fair warning and gave them the opportunity to skip the issue,” Love said.

Rolling Stone’s cover controversy (its covers featuring a naked John Lennon, a topless Janet Jackson and a suggestively posed Jennifer Aniston caused earlier stirs) comes as many popular magazines battle a continuing decline in lucrative single-copy sales. An industry survey late last year found that the 100 leading magazines are selling an average 48% of the copies they distribute to newsstands, compared with 62% a decade earlier. Rolling Stone’s single-copy sales were down 2.5% in the second half of last year, compared with the same period in 1996.

As a result of the single-copy falloff, and the crowding of newsstands with more and more new publications, magazines have been publishing increasingly provocative covers to grab attention.