Ellen Levine, Good Housekeeping’s first feminine prime editor, whose eager sense of what American girls needed from {a magazine} additionally led her to success as Hearst Magazines’ editorial director and Oprah Winfrey’s accomplice in creating an prompt newsstand hit, died on Nov. 6 at her residence in Manhattan. She was 79.
The trigger was issues of dementia, her son Peter Levine mentioned.
Ms. Levine’s curiosity in journalism started early, as did her understanding of the trade-offs she may need to make to additional that curiosity.
By the point she was within the tenth grade, engaged on the highschool paper was the spotlight of her day. Operating issues, nonetheless, was not an choice.
“Life was completely different then,” Ms. Levine wrote in a letter to her Hearst colleagues when she retired as editorial director in 2016. “Having a feminine editor in chief was not permissible, so I partnered with a really good boy from my class.”
Her curiosity in journalism accompanied her to Wellesley School, the place she once more joined the college paper, working with an older scholar whom she known as a “knockout editor” and who went on to a celebrated profession as a author and filmmaker: Nora Ephron.
“These have been individuals who requested questions,” Ms. Levine mentioned of her fellow scholar journalists, talking in a 2016 video interview produced by the school. “I like to ask questions. I drive individuals loopy asking questions.”
After graduating from Wellesley as a political science main in 1964, Ms. Levine was employed as a reporter by The Report of suburban Hackensack, N.J., to cowl what was then known as girls’s information. She finally oversaw meals and adorning protection for the paper.
She obtained a serious skilled raise in 1976 when, after marrying and beginning a household, she was employed by Helen Gurley Brown, the groundbreaking editor of the Hearst journal Cosmopolitan, on the advice of the pinnacle of the adorning division at Bloomingdale’s.
“Working for Helen modified every little thing,” Ms. Levine wrote in her 2016 letter. “She mentored me on dozens of points, from find out how to compose a Cosmo caption to find out how to transfer up in our trade.”
Ms. Brown gave Ms. Levine her first shot at operating a publication, a short-lived Cosmo offshoot. Then, in 1982, Ms. Brown helped her get employed as editor in chief of Girl’s Day, one of many so-called Seven Sisters magazines ubiquitous at grocery store checkout counters. Eight years later, Hearst named her editor in chief of Redbook, one other of the Seven Sisters.
“One of many cowl strains I pitched was ‘Why I Date Your Husband,’” Ms. Levine wrote of her strategies for reinvigorating Redbook. “My years working for Helen Gurley Brown had taught me to draft catchy covers. It bought effectively.”
Hearst elevated her to supervise Good Housekeeping, a 3rd Seven Sister, in 1994. Till then, as a 110-year-old handbook for the American housewife, its prime editor had all the time been a person.
Ms. Levine massaged the journal’s mixture of weight loss plan, entertaining and relationship recommendation, broadening its enchantment to working moms with consumer-oriented reporting; articles about social and political points; and protection of profession issues like pay fairness. However she balked at including the sort of sexually frank articles she had used to boost Redbook.
“You do various things at completely different magazines,” she informed The New York Instances on getting the job. “It by no means does you any good to offer readers one thing they don’t need.”
Ms. Levine’s Good Housekeeping emphasised well being subjects like smoking, coronary heart illness, psychological sickness and prostate most cancers. (Males’s medical issues have been logical topics, she mentioned, as a result of girls have been the “gatekeepers” of their households’ well being.)
She was cleareyed about who her mass-market readers have been, and about who she was.
“I’m not enhancing for the individual hooked on high-fashion magazines,” Ms. Levine informed The Instances in 2003. ‘’I grew up within the suburbs, went to a public highschool, obtained married at 21 and was a Little League mother.”
Associates and colleagues variously described her in interviews as beneficiant, assured, demanding, shrewd, good, provocative, aggressive and humorous. Betsy Carter, a novelist and former journal editor, mentioned that Ms. Levine’s nonstop curiosity had been “a present” to her buddies and that she had been “a kind of people who find themselves connectors” of others.
One fruitful connection concerned O, the Oprah Journal, a three way partnership between Hearst and Ms. Winfrey’s Harpo Inc. Debuting in 2000, the journal bought so effectively on the outset that it was broadly deemed essentially the most profitable new title in a long time. (It ceased print publication in 2020 amid a broader trade downturn.)
Ms. Winfrey described by e mail how she had challenged Ms. Levine and Cathleen P. Black, the president of Hearst Magazines on the time, once they first approached her with the concept.
“I requested what can be my ‘why’?” Ms. Winfrey recalled. Ms. Levine’s response was simple: “She mentioned, ‘You like sharing written phrases.’ And so did she. She reveled in each web page telling its personal story.”
Ms. Winfrey known as her “Queen Levine.”
Ellen Rose Jacobson was born on Feb. 19, 1943, in Queens. Her father, Eugene Robert Jacobson, was an entrepreneur and later an govt with the Solar Chemical Company. Her mom, Jean (Zuckman) Jacobson, was a homemaker.
The household settled in Englewood, N.J., when Ellen was a lady. She graduated from Dwight Morrow Excessive Faculty there in 1960 earlier than getting into Wellesley.
Six months after graduating from school, she married Richard U. Levine, a medical scholar on his technique to turning into an obstetrician and gynecologist. He died in a bicycle accident in 2020. Along with her son Peter, Ms. Levine is survived by one other son, Daniel; her sister, Karen Jacobson; and 5 grandchildren.
Ms. Levine’s most public episode might have are available in 1985 when she was appointed to the Fee on Pornography organized below the aegis of Lawyer Basic Edwin Meese III. On the time, she was editor in chief of Girl’s Day and vice chairman of CBS Magazines, which then owned it.
President Ronald Reagan had directed that the panel revisit an earlier fee’s discovering that pornography was not a social downside requiring authorities regulation.
After practically a yr of research, the Meese fee successfully reached the other conclusion, issuing a report that known as for a nationwide marketing campaign towards sexually specific materials and extra vigorous prosecution of its dissemination, particularly little one pornography.
In a separate assertion, Ms. Levine and two different feminine panel members — Judith Becker, a psychologist, and Deanne Tilton Durfee, the chief of the California Consortium of Baby Abuse Councils — objected strongly to the exploitation of girls and depictions of them as prepared victims of males’s abuse, however additionally they warned towards making an attempt to limit individuals’s rights to interact in authorized actions.
Ms. Levine and Dr. Becker filed a proper dissent to the report as effectively. In it, they argued that the analysis introduced to the fee didn’t help the panel’s discovering of a hyperlink between pornography and crime.
“The info gathered,” they wrote, “just isn’t effectively balanced,” including that “no self-respecting investigator would settle for conclusions primarily based on such a research.”
In an interview, Ms. Durfee recalled Ms. Levine as “elegant and eloquent and completely undaunted” all through the panel’s contentious proceedings, including that she had been dedicated to rebuffing any fee proposal that may encroach on freedom of the press.
That stance prompted an affiliation of impartial journal, guide and newspaper distributors to acknowledge Ms. Levine with an award for “distinguished service defending the First Modification,” citing “the energy of her conviction in taking a brave and outspoken stand.”
The honour, the group mentioned, had been “particularly developed for an individual like Ellen Levine.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed analysis.
Supply: NY Times