This is a 10-and-a-half minute segment from the 60 Minutes show from September of '87…a piece on Mad Magazine. The main point of interest is the chance for those who never met him to get a look at William M. Gaines, the colorful publisher of that publication.
Gaines died in 1992 and this was one of the last interviews he did. The three men you'll see with him in his office are Nick Meglin and John Ficarra, who were then the magazine's editors (Ficarra still holds that job) and its editorial consultant, Dick DeBartolo. You also get to see a bit of the old Mad offices over at 485 MADison Avenue. There's no mention of the magazine's first editor and founder, Harvey Kurtzman, or of Al Feldstein who took over from Kurtzman and ran the mag for 29 years during which it became the best-selling humor publication in the history of mankind.
The piece dwells a lot on the fact that Mad did not merchandize much or sell advertising at all — two policies that have changed since Gaines passed away. In the interest of accuracy, it should be noted that while Bill's stated reasons for declining those dollars were true, there was also probably another, unstated reason. Gaines was a compulsive who had a dread fear of his magazine getting any larger. He liked keeping it small and simple so he could manage it by himself. He didn't like dealing with new people and ran in fear from any suggestion — and there were many — that might have meant increasing the size of the operation, its staff, its financial complexity, etc. When the subject of selling ads in Mad came up, Gaines had what you might call his "principled" reasons for refusing, and perhaps they were reason enough. But he also was horrified at the idea of just dealing with advertisers and of upgrading Mad's printing and adding more color, which is what those advertisers would have wanted.
And there was another thing: Mad had been pretty successful in the late sixties and early seventies. He'd gotten very wealthy off a magazine without ads so he didn't want to tamper with the package. By '87, sales were in serious decline but it was still profitable enough, and Mad remained a sacred untouchable within the Time-Warner company that owned it. Sales were nosediving at the time of his death and that trend continued. Some members of the Mad crew believe that if Bill had lived, he would have gone to the better-printed format — including paid ads — that is the current Mad package. (I'm of two minds on this. I sure wish Mad had had that kind of printing in the days when Wally Wood and Jack Davis were drawing for them and Mort Drucker was in every issue instead of every fourth or fifth issue. If it had meant paging through some ads to get to that, I'm not sure I wouldn't have made the trade-off.)
Gaines was an interesting man. He ran Mad in a way that was consistent with his personal quirks even when it cost him a lot of money. It was a generally-benevolent dictatorship and some of his people tolerated certain business practices that they would not have accepted elsewhere…because they loved Bill. Here are a few minutes with the man and his magazine…
