Ballyhoo (About 1931)

1931 sucked and sucked hard.

It was not a good time to launch any new venture, much less an expensive to produce slick magazine with no potential for advertising. It was the 12th year of Prohibition and the second year of what would become the Great Depression. It was already being called a Depression. Thanks to Prohibition, organized mobsters had become commonplace in big cities, especially New York.



Above: a sepia tone full page cartoon entitled '1931 The Surrender of New York'. Depicted is the Mob accepting the surrender of the Police Department.



Above: A fictional World's Series Shoot Out between the two biggest Mob cities, New York and Chicago.



By 1931 Prohibition had become a running joke, both in Ballyhoo and real life. A lift on the sales of Beer and Wine had been proposed, as a way of raising tax revenue and somehow saving some vestige of the booze ban.



There was literally a Speakeasy on every corner, at least in New York. Prohibition had the effect of turning common citizens into common criminals. The caption on this cartoon reads "Naw, y'er grandmother ain't been in tonight!"



Caption: "Aw, that stuff o' Joe's is too weak. I know a better place 'round the corner."



With the big stock market crash of 1929 still fresh in everyone's mind, Ballyhoo was chock full of gags about the antics of the previously well to do. A typical bit featured men in a board room whispering to each other, with a caption along the lines of "My barber says business ought to pick up soon." The joke here being that no one had predicted the sudden downturn in the first place so any prognostication of it ending was suspect. To turn the idea entirely on its head, this meant that all sources of good news were equally valid. Above we have an absent minded stock broker jumping out a window with his secretary still in his lap.



Not everything was doing poorly. Vaudeville was still going strong. Football had increased exponentially in popularity with the 1920s and the Prohibition era--so much so that it was contesting Baseball as America's favorite sport. In Canada, where football was actually born, hockey remained king, but in the United States it was carving out a niche primarily at hockey's expense. The caption of this cartoon reads "This way, you fool--The movie cameras are over there!"



Caption of this full page cartoon: "Oh, so you're the guy that endorses Saloon's Liniment, eh?" As with the above, Ballyhoo took every chance it could to mock consumer culture in general and the advertising industry in particular.



Football and Vaudville weren't the only things booming. A second golden age had started in the core business of Ballyhoo's publisher, George Delacorte. Pulp magazines were thriving during this time of little advertising and poor economic activity. With all ventures doing poorly, any activity which offered even a minimal consistent return could flourish. This minimal but consistent ROI category was where the pulp magazines fit. Prior to this era, it was not uncommon for magazines to need a circulation at least in the 100s of thousands to be viable. Pulps in the 1930s, by contrast, peeked at 250K and were break even at 40K on a 100K run. This led to a proliferation of niche, genre oriented thrill fiction anthologies. This would be the last boom before the advent of radio, which essentially killed magazines as a mass medium. Pulps survived radio because from the 1930s onward, they were never broadly targeted. If you did enough niches, such as romance, western, detective or science fiction, you could make quite a bit of money. No one did more niches than George Delacorte's Dell Publications.

It was Delacorte's success in pulps which was bankrolling Ballyhoo. As for Ballyhoo, it peeked at 2 million copies--and did not make money. This was an accident. Delacorte hadn't done a slick before launching Ballyhoo. He didn't realize that, without advertising, Ballyhoo didn't have a break even point. Once the magazine hit 2 million paid circulation and still wasn't making money, it dawned on him big time.

The back story on George Delacorte was that he had started his career in pulp magazines as the advertising director for another pulp line. He didn't dislike advertising per se, but rather he was making his money another way. Dell Publications had a circulation method that would not hold up to much outside scrutiny.

The 1920s and 1930s saw a change in magazine distribution which would eventually lead to a mass die off in the pulp magazine field. With the rise of chain stores (supermarkets and chain drugs stores mostly) distributors were no longer returning magazines whole to their publishers. The modern method of tearing off the cover and sending it back for credit was becoming the norm. Pulp magazines, which didn't make most of their money off advertising, needed to be returned whole so that they could be recirculated to different venues. Most publishers accepted these new dynamics. Not George Delacorte.

Delacorte bypassed the chain stores altogether. He stuck to newsstand sales via newspaper distributors, which still returned the magazines whole. Delacorte's pulps started their circulation life on the eastern seaboard and then went down the Atlantic coast south. From the south, they were shipped to the west coast, and then onto the mid-west. From the mid-west, they were shipped into Canada where their covers were removed and replaced with ones specific for the Canadian market. Delacorte augmented this system by having his pulps published with fairly deep margins. During various different points on the trip, magazines returned from one market would have their yellowed edges trimmed off before being shipped out to the next. (Delacorte had a nice sideline in providing this service to other pulp and digest publishers and had effectively become a distributor to the entire newsstand retail segment.) Thanks to this method, he didn't have too many returns.

To facilitate this system, most of the Dell Publications had cover dates sometimes years in advance of their actual date of publication. This trick was a carry over from the dime novel era. Although it was an excellent method of preserving product, it didn't hold up to the scrutiny of the various circulation ratings agencies most advertisers relied on. Also, like most pulp magazine publishers, Delacorte had absolutely no idea as to the demographics of the pulp audience. As a former ad man, Delacorte wanted to play it straight. Since he couldn't play it straight, he opted not to play at all.

The success and non-profitability of Ballyhoo had caught the Dell group flat footed. Not only was it their only slick, it was the only magazine they published with a current cover date. For the most part Ballyhoo was a New Yorker's magazine, spoke distributed throughout the north east coast. Delacorte did make an attempt to preserve his returns, even with Ballyhoo. Since it wasn't pulp, it didn't need to be trimmed, but it could still be prone to return abuse. To combat this Delacorte had Ballyhoo shipped to newsstands wrapped in a cellophane baggie. He was the first publisher to use this idea--and was, in fact, one of the first people to have found a use outside of food storage for this relatively new material.



Caption: "Bullet-proof cellophane! There ought to be a law!"



Without ads Ballyhoo was never going to make any money. Putting ads in (which despite what the wiki entry says, never did happen) would have broken the magazine's format. For reasons which I will go into in our last installment, Delacorte chose to let the magazine contiue for a while longer. There was some prestige in it for the Dell group. It was a 2 million circulation magazine. And it was beholding to none.

Sort of.



It was a nice soap box for Norman Anthony and George Delacorte. Anthony was a generic anti-establishment type and Delacorte, like all pulp publishers except Harry Steeger, was a rock ribbed Conservative (and a feminist). The Conservative movement wasn't like it is today and there was plenty of room on the box for both. In a lot of ways Ballyhoo has much more in common with the Underground Comix of the 1960s than it does Mad Magazine. Mad has never been quite as overblown subversive as Ballyhoo could be.

On the other hand, Mad has never been used as a weapon of personal attack. Sadly, Ballyhoo was.

During the time that Ballyhoo was being produced, there were three large players in the pulp magazine market: Dell Publications, Fawcett Publications and Bernarr MacFadden Publications. Between the three, they had most of the market. Dime Novel house Street & Smith wouldn't become a factor until radio's rise and the previous market leader Munsey Group was in a shambles. Like all pulp publishers, George Delacorte claimed to have invented the pulp magazine, Even the later Harry Steeger claimed to have started his line without previous inspiration or knowledge of the industry--despite the fact that he worked for the Munsey Group before founding his line. Delacorte's claim was also bogus and for the same reason--people who get their starts in an industry working for someone else cannot claim to have invented the industry. Delacorte did create several genres of pulp magazines, the ill fated serial villain magazine and the highly successful crossword puzzle books. Captain Billy Fawcett may have started his publishing ventures in total ignorance of the pulp magazine industry, but he really didn't invent anything. Bernarr Macfadden, who had absolutely no tangible claim to have invented anything, was the most emphatic that the entirety of the industry was his idea.

But this was the least of Bernarr Macfadden's many sins. Macfadden founded his own religion. He ran for President (of the United States) on a physical fitness platform. Beyond physical fitness, Macfadden claimed to be an expert at just about everything--an ad hoc philospher and verbose commentator. Macfadden claimed to have a better circulation that Hearst did. (This was true, by almost a 2 to 1 ratio. Circulation and readership are two different things, though. Hearst, primarily a newspaper publisher, had twice Macfadden's readership. Macfadden was selling half the number of people four times the number of magazines.) Unlike Dell, Macfadden's magazines were all slick and crammed with advertisements. Of course secretly Macfadden was his own biggest advertiser: most of the diet aids and gym devices offered in Macfaddden's magazines were produced by Macfadden himself--including Charles Atlas. Macfadden ginned up his circulation figures and invented demographics out of whole cloth. He was rock star famous and the face of the pulp magazine industry.

(Macfadden is said to have been the model for Doc Savage and, by abstraction, the villain in the comic book series The Watchmen.)

George Delacorte used Ballyhoo to go after Bernarr Macfadden hammer and tong. He landed some pretty low blows, including insinuating that Macfadden was a homosexual. Gay-bashing, sadly, was one of Delacorte's vices.



The fact that Macfadden had appeared onstage in the nude several times did sort of make him a target of various accusations and innuendos.



In all probability Bernarr Macfadden wasn't a closet anything. Rather, he was full time 360 batshit. Imagine a combination of Jack Lalanne, Carl Sagan, President Clinton and Lady Gaga and you have a fair approximation of Macfadden's character. (Jack Lalanne is an actual direct disciple of Macfadden's.)The man was a functional lunatic with a knack for shlock that sells in bushels.

Just as Delacorte had his money losing Ballyhoo, Macfadden had a money losing newspaper called the New York Classic. The Classic is the model for what the National Enquirer became, only with much less class. Ballyhoo's maxim slam at Macfadden was its parody of the Classic, which was printed on newsprint and inserted into the magazine.



In truth, this would have been tasteful by Classic standards. The Classic seldom used photographs, unless they were doctored by airbrush. The Classic was also famous for posing photos and then sticking the heads of famous people on their actors.



The interior layout shown here was typical of many tabloids, not just the Classic. The Classic seldom used squared off photographs, preferring instead to isolate figures floating splashed amidst text. Although Delacorte is mocking it, many of his own True Crime pulps used a similar lay out.



Other than the embedded swiped at Macfadden, I'm not quite sure that this is such a good parody of the Classic in specific. Issues of Ballyhoo often struggled with maintaining continued themes. Putting together a magazine made of artwork and artwork with text is tricky business and Ballyhoo often falls short in a way Mad never does. You have to remember, not only did Dell not produce comic books at this point, but there were no comic books for Dell to pattern Ballyhoo after. The comic book form had not been invented as yet.



This is an example of how off track a parody idea can get. Above is the type of comics strip the Classic or a Scandal Newspaper would run, if the Classic or Scandal Newspapers ran comic strips. But they didn't run comic strips. Comic strips and syndicated features are expensive. Which brings us full circle. The reason Ballyhoo doesn't carry comic strips people have heard of is because it would be too expensive. The reason publishers turned to the scandal format was to compete against chain newspapers with lavish features such as slick weekend magazines and full color comic strips.



Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Classic didn't stray far from New York. It did have sister publications, all owned by Macfadden, but none of them made money. For some reason pulp publishers either waste money on newspaper ventures or fashion magazine launches. Even in New York, the Classic was probably the least read of any of the city's dailies. No advertiser would touch it and it had frequent distribution problems. As for the other national scandal magazines, such as the Police Gazette, they were being pushed into oblivion by True Crime pulp magazines--like the ones George Delacorte published. Slamming tabloids in general and Bernarr Macfadden in specific was more than just a little self-serving.

The idea of building a magazine around loosely themed gag cartoons was unique, if not always well executed. In the end, Ballyhoo became more known for its parodies than its cartoons. It is these parodies and other features--as well as the eventual fate of George Delacorte and Ballyhoo--that we will handle in our final installment.



Fine Print: "We might have"