HEARST’S HEAVE-HO GALA

HEARST top brass swung the ax last week, firing as many as 50 people, according to sources – then convened for rooftop margaritas at the Manhattan home of Hearst Magazines President Cathleen Black.

There were cutbacks across the Hearst magazine empire. Seven people were whacked at Good Housekeeping and at least five were axed at Country Living, the company’s No. 3 title, Media Ink sources said. Scattered cutbacks were also said to have taken place across the company in recent weeks, including Esquire.

“It sounds as if they are doing it magazine-by-magazine, asking each title for a certain number,” said one insider. A Hearst spokesman said, “Your information is incorrect.”

The bash at Black’s place on Wednesday evening was apparently something of a last-minute morale booster for publishers and the chief editors.

Of course, none of those whacked in the cutbacks were at the bash. But it pulled an elite turnout. Black’s boss, the stern and publicity-shy Frank Bennack, the president and CEO of Hearst Corp., was on hand and even gave a speech. He’s a key executive in charge of keeping the money flowing into the trust fund established by founder William Randolph Hearst for his heirs.

Hearst Magazines, as with everyone else, is experiencing an ad-page falloff, but it is apparently not as steep there as it is at other companies. That means Hearst is gaining market share from its rivals, even as pages drop for everyone. But profits are still falling.

Who was at the bash? Apparently, anyone who was in town. The party had a theme of Caribbean food and margaritas. Helen Gurley Brown, the former editor of Cosmopolitan, was there, as was the current Cosmo editor-in-chief, Kate White.

Ellen Kunes, the incoming editor of Redbook, also made it – she had yet to start officially.

In a big surprise, Black invited the two top executives from Talk Media, President Ron Galotti and Chairwoman and Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown. Both attended. Brown hurried back from Hollywood.

Black had pointedly ignored the money-losing Talk, a joint venture between Hearst and Miramax Films, in several public pronouncements. She also skipped Tina’s mogul-fest in Santa Barbara last March to go to Paris for a Marie Claire board meeting. But the invite – and Tina’s effort to make it back in time – could indicate a moderately closer bond.

There was little fallout at the gathering on the Black terrace from Talk’s Bush twins fashion spoof – which had drawn the ire of the White House.

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Meanwhile back at Talk, Maer Roshan and Phoebe Eaton are together again.

Eaton and Talk Editorial Director Roshan had worked together in top jobs at Caroline Miller’s New York. But in April 2000, Eaton split for the new Details and promptly began raiding her old stomping ground for talent, including Kevin Gray and Carl Swanson.

It was war for a while as Maer and Miller fought tooth and nail to keep some other writers from leaving New York.

The relations between Maer and Eaton were said to be decidedly frosty.

But everything is beautiful between the one-time bitter rivals. “I guess they buried the hatchet,” said one knowledgeable source.

“I never felt that way,” said Roshan of the rivalry, now that he’s taken up with Talk and Tina. “It was all in good fun. Now we’ll all be one big happy family.”

Eaton says, “We thought the world would be a safer place if we were both on the same team.”

And Eaton says she is not discouraged by the 90 percent turnover rate that afflicted Talk in its first two years. That doesn’t even factor in people such as Executive Editor Vicky Ward, who joined in April 2000, months after the launch and left the job recently to accept a contributing editor gig at Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair.

Eaton, who will be taking Ward’s old spot on the masthead, said she isn’t worried about the editorial turmoil: “When you hire for a launch, you have to hire an entire masthead of people in a hurry, and sometimes it just doesn’t work out.”

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The big just keep on getting bigger. Random House Inc., the company that has agreed to pay former president Bill Clinton close to $12 million for his memoir, is nearly twice as large in sales as its nearest competitor.

The top three publishers in the U.S. now control more than half of the entire market, according to the industry newsletter Subtext, which releases its annual rankings this week.

No. 1 is Random House Inc., headed by Chairman Peter Olson, which had sales of $1.995 billion for fiscal 2001 ending in June, up 3.9 percent for a year earlier. That’s nearly double the $1.1 billion of No. 2 (plus 25.5 percent) or No. 3 HarperCollins – owned by News Corp., which also owns The Post. HarperCollins had sales of $1.06 billion (up 1.9 percent).

There’s a big dropoff to No. 4 Simon & Schuster, which had sales of $596 million, down 2.5 percent. Scholastic, fueled by Harry Potter sales, had the largest jump, up 44 percent to $325 million – good for fourth place.

Rounding out the list were the AOL Time Warner publishing properties, Little Brown and Warner Books, at $300 million (down 6.3 percent); the von Holtzbrinck’s U.S. imprints, including St. Martin’s Press, Henry Holt and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, at $280 million (down 6.7 percent); International Data Group’s Hunger Minds, at $230 million for the year ended Sept. 30 it was up 33.7 percent but it has slumped dramatically since then and was put on the auction block.

No. 9 is Thomas Nelson at $202 million for ninth place and Houghton Mifflin, the “Curious George” publisher, recently sold to Paris-based Vivendi Universal, in 10th place at $103 million, up 13.2 percent.

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