The publishing world is mourning the passing of British publishing maverick Felix Dennis, who spawned an upheaval in the men’s magazine market by introducing Maxim to the US market in 1997.
“It was super scrappy, but it was fun,” Carolyn Kremins, the publisher of Epicurious at Condé Nast, recalled Tuesday.
Kremins, who drew up the first business plan for the Maxim launch in 1996, said, “It wasn’t a job for us, it was a rebellion against the established institutions.”
She was employee No. 7 and she stayed for 13 years.
Maxim, she recalled, was one of the top five of the so-called laddie magazine movement that swept Britain in the early ’90s.
“But Felix always thought that coming to America would be a game-changer,” said Kremins. The first issue hit on April Fools’ Day.
As Dennis said when he looked back on the magazine’s meteoric success years later, “I was the first guy into the desert with a beer truck.”
It’s hard to imagine today, but putting women on the cover of men’s magazines was rare before Maxim.
Now, it’s standard operating procedure at GQ, Esquire, Details and others.
What’s more, Dennis hired a woman, Clare McHugh, as his first editor.
McHugh, now running two titles — All You and Health — as a group editor at Time Inc., remembers those days as “always a lot of fun — and there was always a lot of shouting.”
She lasted just a year before being replaced by Mark Golin in late 1997.
Golin was there as Maxim caught fire. “I think it was one of the fastest-growing magazines in history,” said Golin, who recently left Time Inc.
During Golin’s two years, circulation soared about tenfold — from 175,000 to 1.7 million.
GQ at Condé Nast watched the new upstart with disdain. “It’s for people who not only move their lips when they read, they drool,” the late Art Cooper, at GQ, once told The Post.
But he was soon placing women on his covers, too, and Condé Nast eventually hired Golin to try to save Details.
When Golin left Maxim, there was panic in the ranks at Dennis Publishing, because the editor had landed the magazine on the Adweek Hot List and snagged Ad Age’s Editor of the Year honor.
The staff was demoralized wondering how they would replace him, Cremins recalled.
Dennis, in rad comic form that helped to defuse the anxiety, issued a press release saying Golin’s successor would be Sammy the Office Hamster.
“The next day [the release] ran nearly verbatim on the front page of The Wall Street Journal Marketplace section,” recalled Dennis’ longtime publicist Drew Kerr.
Golin recalled that he was feted with a farewell party that included a transvestite stripper hired by Dennis.
There were reports flying by 2005 that the company, which had grown to four titles — Dennis had added music title Blender, plus Stuff and had brought The Week to the US — had an offer to sell for more than $400 million.
But Dennis turned it down, Kremins recalled, although she never learned the identity of the rumored suitor.
Finally in 2007, just before the financial crisis, Dennis sold three titles for $250 million to Quandrangle Capital, with financing from Cerberus.
It was not quite the top of the market but still a nice payday because there were already signs the lad mag craze had peaked and that the Internet was starting to encroach on its audience of young men.
Stuff was folded immediately with the sale and Blender would soon follow.
Dennis hung on to the one serious title, The Week, which he bought from its UK founder.
Former executives recall that they learned that Dennis also acknowledged he had a serious addiction to crack cocaine for much of the startup years, although the staffers said he hid the habit from them and they did not learn of it until he announced he had gone cold turkey.
“He is one of those people that you’d like to know was still around,” said Golin, who said he used to receive care packages every few months from his former boss.
Golin said the last one arrived about a month ago: the latest book about trees and a CD of a rock band that Dennis had played in during the ’60s.
Among the many Maxim alumni who have gone “respectable” is Justin Smith, who worked on The Week for 6¹/₂ years and now runs Bloomberg Media, which includes magazines, radio and TV holdings in the company founded by former Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
Smith recalls that the never-married Dennis would send teddy bears to any staffer with a new baby in the family.
“His moods and his appetites would propel the conversation in whatever direction he wanted it to head,” said Smith.
On his Facebook page on May 28 — less than a month before he died from throat cancer — he wrote, “Yesterday was my 67th birthday. Concepts of youth, middle age and old age have changed during my lifetime, mostly due, I guess, to people living longer and in relatively better health as they age. For me, though, 67 is my own choice for the onset of old age. It is incredible to me, after the life I have lived, that I have reached this milestone. I never expected to. Anyone else feel this way?”