Magnify

Imagine you’ve been hired to edit a B-list fitness magazine. The kind where the models wear leg-warmers and do tummy-trimmers. You are young and inexperienced, so this beats your last job fetching cappuccino for a gaunt editor at Vogue.

On your first day, the receptionist leads you to a grey metal desk with a telephone. Left alone, you drum your fingers on the desk and stare at the phone. Desk. Phone. Desk. Phone. Like rubbing two sticks together to make fire, you know they can make a magazine. You just don’t know how.

On your third day, your boss, the balding publisher of 101 Easy Low-Fat Chicken Recipes and Celebrity Hairdo passes you in the hallway and waves you along to follow. You grab a notebook and trot behind him through the lobby and into the elevator. As the doors close on 32, you pray he’ll offer instructions before they re-open on L.

Instead, he keeps walking. Outside, a black Mercedes idles at the curb. He ushers you into the backseat, gets in beside you, and leans forward telling his driver, “The apartment.” Somewhere around Columbus Circle you remember that, in addition to 101 Cross Stitch Crafts and Country Decorating, the man sitting beside you also publishes the x-rated Swank and Blondes in Heat. You finger the car door as it dawns on you: You are going home. With a pornographer.

Office etiquette question: Given this situation, do you: A) Open the car door and roll onto the pavement? Or: B) Turn to your boss and inquire politely about his children.

If you are a Southern woman and you are “from a nice family” you choose B. Had I picked A, I might have missed the French antiques, the Pierre-Deux toiles, and the sweeping view of Central Park from the most beautiful living room I’d ever laid eyes on. We settled into overstuffed chairs as the pornographer pushed a stack of art books aside and opened his fitness magazine on the coffee table. A uniformed maid served Perrier and tea sandwiches while my boss and I spent the afternoon mapping out my first issue.

Before I accepted the job, I grilled a friend-of-a-friend who’d worked for the pornographer. “Is it, um … safe? I asked. “I mean, the people? Are they okay?” I was 23 and thrilled at the prospect of editing my own magazine. I just hadn’t figured on Swank.

“It’s an office,” she snapped (like I’m the pervert.) “I mean, there’s porn, but you’ll hardly notice it.” A month into the job, and I realized she was right! When you hang around photos of naked people for ten hours a day, five days a week; after a while you hardly notice them at all.

In the pre-digital Eighties, editors bent over lightboxes viewing photo-transparencies through a shotglass-sized magnifying lens called a loupe. I would dole out photos for an exercise page, then peer through the loupe to put them in order: 1. Left leg stretch, 2. Right leg stretch, then … Naked Person! 3. Right leg lunge, 4. Left leg lunge, 5. Right knee up, Naked Person! I quickly learned to clear stray slides off the light box before viewing my own.

The art department hummed with designers working at drafting tables. When Joe, a young Springsteen-type from New Jersey, wasn’t pasting up the oxymoronically-titled Girls over Forty, he put together my fitness magazine. A budding musician, he viewed the endless female nudity with the detached eye of a seasoned obstetrician. Like Joe, the guys at work went home to girlfriends, rock bands, wives, children, foreign film libraries. A woman wearing stilettos and nothing else? Just another day at the office. Put her in flannel pajamas and I suspected she’d drive them all wild.

Porn, it’s been said, is the unpleasant byproduct of free speech. But money, not the First Amendment, motivated my boss. He sold porn for the simplest reason. It sells. If that market dried up, he’d move to the next profit niche. He published magazines tracking the hairstyles of Connie Selleca and Faith Ford. He published yarn craft booklets. He’d slap a cover on a sheaf of recipes from the California Avocado Bureau or the Pillsbury Bake-Off. I don’t know why, but people bought them.

Except for the cover, the pornographer left my fitness magazine alone, allowing me to learn the editorial ropes. Each month, we’d mull over cover photos and he’d argue for models with breasts the size of cantaloupes. Each month, I’d suggest that women aren’t especially interested in cleavage. “They’d rather see a flat stomach,” I’d explain. At this, the pornographer would take off his glasses, close his eyes, and pinch the bridge of his nose as if he, personally, were decoding the human genome.

“You can work towards a flat stomach,” I’d say, more patiently. “But you can’t try harder to have big breasts.” He’d sigh, shake his head, and surrender.

Once the models started looking like athletes, my B-list fitness magazine got noticed. Makeup artist, Bobbi Brown wrote a column. Jane Fonda invited me to lunch (okay twelve of us, but still.) Go-Go lead-singer Belinda Carlysle gave me the skinny on her diet. Still, I longed to work for a company that didn’t consider phone-sex an alternate revenue source. I mailed resumes and, in time, got a writing job at an A-list fitness magazine.

The day I resigned, the pornographer halfheartedly asked me to reconsider. But we both knew the jig was up. In me, he’d found a bargain, an enthusiastic newcomer willing to work hard for entry-level pay. From him, I got the crashcourse of a lifetime. Where else could a 23-year-old edit a national magazine? In the end, it was hard to tell exactly who had exploited whom.

After a farewell tour through the art department, I stepped into the elevator—the one I’d shared with Melanie Griffith on a hot day last July. As the doors closed, I leaned against the wall and pictured my boss, alone in his office. Thanks. It was fun. I thought to myself. I’ll call you sometime. Promise.

Constance Costas is the editor of skirt! Richmond. She recently found the pornographer’s 1996 obituary in the New York Times. In it, he was described as ‘a philanthropist and publisher of magazines about fitness, decorating, and other topics’.