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Should "Jerry Springer" be banished from the airwaves or just dismissed as silly? Discuss trashy talk shows in the Television area of Table Talk
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BY CATHERINE SEIPP | Buzz is dead, and at this point deservedly so. For over a year, the magazine had been, like those "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" pod people, superficially what it was before. But inside it had morphed into something deeply conformist and at the same time weird -- a reanimated "it's alive!" creature patched together from generic magazine body parts: fashion, celebrities, restaurant reviews, received-wisdom Hollywood stories and cute little lists. Suggest anything outside this formula at editorial meetings -- especially the idiosyncratic first-person essays the old Buzz had built its readership around -- and people would basically point at you and scream. I'm speaking figuratively, of course. Also personally. I was part of the Buzz ancien régime, which ended a year and a half ago when founding editor Allan Mayer quit after a falling out with his partner, Buzz Enterprises CEO Eden Collinsworth. Marilyn Bethany, who had been a subeditor in charge of the fashion, travel and restaurant sections, was promoted to editor in chief. As New Times Los Angeles put it in its coverage last week of the Buzz closing, listing the departure of yours truly and several other writers after Allan left, "talent slid off the masthead like pus from an eye infection." Now it's not every day I'm described as an excretion from a diseased orifice (or at least not every day that it's meant in a good way), so I hope you won't think my swelled head has affected my judgment. Still, I'm surprisingly sad at the death of Buzz, even though they fired me last year to put my salary to better use -- like maybe paying the printer occasionally. Allan, who was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying that the Buzz he knew was already dead, told me he is also surprised at how sad he is. It's just not happy news that once again the only glossy monthly we have in Los Angeles is Los Angeles magazine -- a publication whose generic mediocrity has for three decades inspired media magnates who thought they could do better. Sometimes they do, but so far never for more than a few years. Twenty years ago saw the birth of New West, which was lively and compelling until it petered out into the amazingly boring California magazine. Depressingly, California kept coming to the house (bundled, for some reason, into my zoo membership) for months after I canceled my subscription ... until it finally, mercifully died in 1991, a year after Buzz was born. Allan Mayer once told me that the first glimmer of an idea for a new L.A. magazine came to him in the late '80s when he was here on a trip from New York, visiting his then wife, actress Lise Hilboldt, who was in town for pilot season. Waiting for her to finish up something, he picked up a copy of Los Angeles magazine from the coffee table. It was so excruciatingly mediocre he actually threw it across the room. Buzz was conceived after Eden Collinsworth, who knew Allan because she'd been Lise's roommate at boarding school, came to him with news that a corporate headhunter had approached her with the notion of starting an L.A. Spy magazine. But Los Angeles magazine gets the last laugh. In Buzz's Chapter 11 shutdown last week, L.A. mag bought its rival's trademark and subscriber list for $5.3 million. Supposedly they acquired the debts too. One of the bankruptcy filings said creditors will not be paid; but the latest filing -- which, entertainingly for coworkers, lists all staff salaries -- indicates that at least some will be, at least up to a point. Those holding the bag range from the printer (owed some $200,000) to a freelance photographer so frustrated at several thousand dollars of unpaid fees that he recently used Buzz's Federal Express account number to overnight the magazine a bunch of concrete blocks. Los Angeles magazine went through several shake-ups after Buzz began giving it serious competition. (Buzz began in 1990, but really became a contender for advertising dollars when it bought and folded L.A. Style, another local monthly, a couple of years later.) First Los Angeles' longtime editor, corny, affable Lew Harris, left. Lew was replaced by screaming Robert Sam Anson, who in short order was replaced by starlet-chasing poseur Michael Caruso, who was quickly fired when Disney, the parent corporation, folded the magazine into its Fairchild group of fashion trade (Women's Wear Daily) and consumer (W) publications. Spencer Beck, the current Los Angeles magazine editor, seems to have the affectedly above-it-all Fairchild attitude down pat. "Oddly enough, I never thought of Buzz as a competitor, and even less so now," he said last week, in Variety's cover story on the Buzz closing. Even less so now ... that it's dead. Imagine that! Los Angeles magazine these days is basically a provincial version of W. But Buzz in its prime attracted a sizable, sophisticated demographic willing to read a magazine that was actually worth reading. Books that grew out of Buzz pieces include performance artist Sandra Tsing Loh's witty collection of essays, "Depth Takes a Holiday" (as well as her current one-woman stage show off-Broadway, "Bad Sex With Bud Kemp"); "Holy Land," D.J. Waldie's brilliant meditation on Southern California suburbia; "Supervixens' Dymaxion Lounge," Hillary Johnson's lurid, fascinating account of her sex life and money troubles; and "The Nightbird Cantata," a new work of Hollywood fabulism by the late Donald Rawley. All this was dependent on the munificence of Sondhi Limthongkul, the Thai billionaire who for most of the magazine's life was Buzz's major investor. Sondhi came to visit in the summer of 1996 and the whole staff went out with him to dinner. A place had been carefully reserved for him next to the top brass, but he sat instead at the table of nubile editorial assistants. His manner was one of grumpy bonhomie. Unperturbed by a rat that scampered back and forth across the pergola above his head, Sondhi informed us in a brief after-dinner speech that any sensible American businessman would have pulled the plug on this money-losing proposition years ago: "Lucky for all of you I am a crazy Asian!" Not crazy enough, evidently. Sondhi quit subsidizing Buzz a few months after that dinner and that's when all hell broke loose. I hung on at Buzz for a while after Allan's departure, which came in the wake of that financial crunch. But morale was not good. The day Allan quit I poked my head in the office of the magazine's notoriously irritable managing editor, Bob Hofler, to whisper that some of the editorial assistants were crying. "They're like a girl's basketball team!" he exploded unsympathetically. "They cry when they win, they cry when they lose, they cry when somebody gets engaged! I'm SICK of it!" Bob, however, was the only one with a sense of occasion when the magazine folded -- organizing a sign-up sheet for people wanting to keep in touch. Marilyn and Eden were apparently too overcome by the bad news to even make a proper announcement to the staff. After Sondhi withdrew his funding, Marilyn got a friend, a rich man's wife named Sharon Chadha, to become Buzz's new majority owner. But the fabulousness of a front seat at fashion shows eventually wears thin, and Mrs. Chadha tired of her money-losing new toy. She told top managers of her decision in a closed-door meeting with an armed guard posted outside. Even though the security-escort-out-the-door has become basically the '90s version of the gold watch and thanks-for-all-your-hard-work, I still think there's something a little ugly about this. Well, money troubles rarely bring out the best in people. Who
knows what the future holds for the world of Los Angeles magazines?
Buzz was born in the depths of the recession and died at the height
of a boom economy. As a friend of mine, a TV writer who sometimes
goes slumming in the low-paid world of belles lettres remarked
to me last week, leave it to journalists to finesse something like
that.
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