Before the venerable McCall’s Magazine, established in the 1880s, went under in 2000, they tried to save it by transmuting it into Rosie’s McCall’s (although it really became just Rosie), a hoped-for clone of the popular Oprah magazine ‘O‘. In this case, the central figure hired to be the face of that magazine was Rosie O’Donnell, who at that time had her own talk show. The attempted revamp was a disaster, and McCall’s / Rosie quickly ceased publication altogether.
Now Sally Koslow, a McCall’s editor before and during all this, has written a roman a clef about the situation called Little Pink Slips. I’m sure she hopes for another Devil Wears Prada, which was also a roman a clef by a woman who worked in the magazine industry. (O’Donnell’s behavior at the magazine was so incredibly rude and abusive–there was even accusations of physical violence–that it was considered beyond the pale even in the magazine industry, a field well-known for its petty and cruel tyrants. O’Donnell’s behavior resulted that a slew of lawsuits and counter-suits after the magazine ceased publication.)
In terms of trying to rip-off a successful work, pretty standard stuff, then. However, this part in the Kirkus review caught my eye: “Magnolia [the Koslow analog] is summarily demoted to a smaller office where she is called upon to execute Bebe’s [the Rosie O’Donnell analog] vision, even it that includes an NRA-friendly cover shot that alienates the readership.”
Huh, what? Now, O’Donnell is the sort of ‘liberal’ that even liberals are generally embarrassed by, and this isn’t exactly unknown. And O’Donnell did alienate a hunk of the readership with her strident politics, but they of course were left-wing politics. And to appreciate that fact, you have to take into account the fact that most women’s magazines tilt left-ward to begin with. (On political issues, anyway, if not on ‘consumerist’ issues.)
So what’s the point of making the O’Donnell analog an apparent ‘right-winger’? Is there even such an animal you can think of, a mainstream network talk show-type celebrity who’s conservative in the way the O’Donnell is left-wing? Or conservative by any standard, for that matter? And who imagines that if such a person existed, they’d get hired for a gig like that?
So what’s the motivation? Was Koslow afraid, in fact, to offend a percieved portion of her novel’s readership (who, assuming they are made up of those who read women’s magazines, would in many cases be pretty exaggeratedly left-wing), and thus changed the crazy Rosie-analog to a right-winger, even if that doesn’t make a lick of sense? Or could Koslow, or her editor and/or publisher, just not bear to write a book in which a ‘progressive’ person was crazy and abusive, since those are supposed to be traits only manifested by conservatives?
I don’t know, I just find the whole thing weird.
