Word: lear
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...Frances Lear is on a roll. Her high-risk venture of creating a magazine for mature women is a splashy success. Just four years ago, with $30 million from her $112 million divorce settlement from television producer Norman Lear, she conceived Lear's, a bimonthly publication catering to "The Woman Who Wasn't Born Yesterday." This past March, with a photograph of Lear gracing the anniversary issue, Lear's went monthly, with a circulation of 350,000. The average age of her readers is 51, the average yearly household income a startling $95,600. New issues are fat with glossy...
Wiser today, and equipped with a settled, trusted staff, Lear ruefully recalls the chaotic gestation: "In the beginning, I knew nothing about the magazine business. I knew I had a good idea. Everyone told me so, but they all bet against my doing it." In addition to exasperated editors, she was confronted by battalions of advertising and research "pros." She recalls them as gnomish little men who denigrated an audience of older women and told her that old "broads" and "gals" didn't want to see pictures of themselves. They smugly reiterated the Madison Avenue maxim: Youth is beauty...
...Frances Lear has a serious enemy, it is the youth culture, which she blames for confining some women to birdcage existences. "Many older women are inhibited and afraid to act. It is such a waste of human potential," she laments. "We must look into the mirror and smile." She caustically castigates the youth culture for denying sexuality to mature women and instilling in them a sense of inferiority. Her frequent fantasy is to annihilate the Playboy magazine mentality that she blames for psychologically crippling women by attaching a Playmate's age and dimensions to female sexuality. "Someday we will have...
...marrying a bad husband for economic security." A competitive child, she captained the basketball team and edited her high school yearbook. Her mother died when she was 18. To support herself, she went to work as a stock girl, eventually graduating to fashion buyer at Lord & Taylor. When Lear learned that her manic-depressive episodes, which she now controls with lithium, could have a genetic component, she began a search for her biological parents. She returned to the small Jewish orphanage, with its stacks of cribs and bunk beds ("My competitiveness comes from having had to scream the loudest...
There were two short marriages ("In those days, it was the only way you could go to bed with a man") before she met and married Norman Lear, then a TV writer. In 1957 they moved from New York City to Los Angeles, where she stayed at home and reared their daughters. Although Frances was the inspiration for Norman's acerbic TV character Maude ("All of Norman's work is autobiographical -- Archie Bunker was based on his father"), the show- business community was a peculiar culture that reduced Frances, who did not want to be either a starlet...