Kennedy Out To Launch Magazine Using Usual Flair

You are sitting in a Manhattan office with three men in dark blue suits. One of the men is John Kennedy, which, to be entirely honest, means you are sitting in an office with John Kennedy and two indistinct blurs who occasionally attempt to speak.

“I have to shift into gear,” Kennedy said earlier, while he was ambling down a hallway, all six feet of him, along with his big brown hair and his hesitancy. “I’ve been in denial for months now that I could quietly start a magazine, without attention, too much hype, and without having to do this” - meaning an interview - “and now it’s here.”

Yes, it’s here. His first interview in years.

The man to his immediate right on a black leather sofa is David Pecker, the president of Hachette Filipacchi Magazines. He has a mustache, and Kennedy’s magazine idea is costing him $20 million. That might be all we will say about him.

The man to his far right is Michael Berman, the executive publisher of George, as the monthly is called. Berman talks more than Pecker. Talks and talks. He used to have a PR company. He is perfectly nice full of useful information - and until today, he was the only one available to the media.

How mythmaking and mysterious. How elusive, and Jackie-like.

Not blabbing in public has done for Kennedy what all that exhaustive blabbing has done for Roseanne.

He is a tabloid staple, without having a TV show. And he has appeared on the covers of Newsweek, Esquire and New York magazines in the past month without having to utter a word.

Hype.

Hype. Hype.

Hype. Hype. Hype.

And how it mushrooms.

“I expected some attention,” Kennedy says with a shrug, with a voice that’s laid-back, more California than New England, what Kevin Costner would sound like if he’d gone to Andover.

“But the degree of it has surprised me. …it’s not like we’ve invented a new form of transportation or a cure for a major disease. We’re only doing a magazine.”

George debuted Thursday. As its editor in chief, Kennedy promises he will produce a lively nonpartisan journal about politics and popular culture. The “Rolling Stone” of Government or the “People” of Process. “And it will look like Elle or Mirabella,” Kennedy says, “and it will be written the way people write about entertainment or sports.”

An observation is offered: Isn’t it ironic that John Kennedy - he has dropped the Jr. - finds himself a member of the media now, after all those years of fleeing it?

“I think anyone who knows John Kennedy,” says one of the blurs, Berman, “knows that he always does the unexpected.”

Kennedy fidgets.

At 34, John Kennedy finds himself with a job that combines both his parents’ professions: high-end New York publishing, where his mother worked, and politics-as-movie-stardom, which his father invented. Since 1992, with Berman, he’s tried to get this crazy magazine idea off the ground. Marketing surveys, focus groups, practice covers. He talked to editors and ad guys, publishers and designers.

His mother helped set up meetings for him, and he met with everybody who was anybody in the business. But they were all shaking their heads.

But, by Sept. 26, there will be 500,000 issues flooding newsstands - each one fat and greasy with ads. Its debut edition breaks a record for the number of ad pages in a magazine, set previously by Vanity Fair’s 1983 relaunch at 166. George arrives with 175.

Kennedy is aware of the lousy things people are saying.

That he sold out his name, that he’s a hood ornament, not an editor.

That he’s a hunk, a dummy. And he’s been handed this magazine on a sterling platter.

“I can’t pretend that my last name didn’t help sell this magazine,” he says.

The walls behind him are lined with magazines. Fat and glossy, colorful. All beckoning, all promising.

The magazines - from the Nation to National Review - explode with opinions but not many ads.

Kennedy and Berman offer a solution: no opinions, and get celebrity photographer Herb Ritts to shoot the covers.

There will be stories of gurus, consultants, journalists, speechwriters - not just politicians.

To test their idea, Berman and Kennedy did a direct mailing.

They sent out two kinds of mailers about George. One with Kennedy’s name - for which they received a 5.7 percent response.

Without his name, it was 5.1 percent.

“That’s twice the average,” says one of the blurs.

“Anything over three,” says Kennedy, “is considered a hit.”

Which is a nice way of indicating that maybe all this George stuff isn’t just hype, another see-the-world sinecure for Kennedy, or even, as Esquire describes it, “the riskiest venture of a pampered life indelibly marked by tragedy.”

Maybe, just maybe, it’s a good idea.