On my subway ride back from my plane ride back from Cleveland tonight, I read an engrossing article in Vanity Fair about Esquire in the ’60s, when its editorial and design departments kicked ass (“The Esquire Decade” by Frank DiGiacomo.)
To gain heavyweight champ Sonny Liston’s trust for this now-classic cover photo, the salty and savvy adman/designer George Lois invited a cherubic, white eight-year-old girl to the shoot so Liston wouldn’t be as much his surly self and drop as many F-bombs. An outtake photo shows the boxer forcing a smile in the Santa hat as the smiling girl cuddles up to him, probably an infinitely more discomfiting cover image to the cracker Esquire-buying public in December 1963 than the shot that was used.
Sports Illustrated later noted that Liston looked like “the last man on earth America wanted to see coming down its chimney.” And Esquire’s ad director, who suggested at the time that Lois “refrain from putting a black Santa on its cover until Saks Fifth Avenue put one in its stores,” later estimated the magazine lost $750,000 in revenue from advertisers who pulled out of the issue. But that year, Esquire would hit an all-time high circulation of just under 900,000 and was on its way to becoming perhaps “the great American magazine of the 1960s.”