Susan LaTempa and the late Bob LaBrasca were editors at L.A. Style magazine, an innovative city magazine published from 1985 to 1993. Like most editors in pre-digital days, they kept issues of the magazine handy at work and home for reference. Bob and his wife Tara Fass stashed his in the ceiling of his study, and Susan, unlike most Angelenos, had an attic. Thirty-three years later, Susan and Tara have donated their 85 issues to Central Library.
Susan talks to Ani Boyadjian, Research & Special Collections Manager, about her apprenticeship at L.A. Style, the significance of the publication, and the larger publishing scene in Los Angeles.
Ani Boyadjian: Hi, Susan, tell us a little bit about your background and how you fell into the world of publishing or editing.
Susan LaTempa: I'd say for me, editing was rising, not falling, because I had worked in my twenties as a freelance writer at the edge of the economy. I was an aspiring playwright and had part-time day jobs. In the 70s, I wrote theater reviews for the Herald Examiner and book reviews for the L.A. Free Press. In the early to mid-1980s, Herbert Glass, editor of Performing Arts magazine, assigned me a monthly book review column on theater and film books. He also assigned me freelance features, and I learned how to pitch and tailor articles to specific magazines. I saw that being an editor was a more stable position in journalism, like a producer or director in the performing arts. It was also similar to the role of dramaturg in theater, which I did just before working at L.A. Style.
Ani Boyadjian: You were working in theater?
Susan LaTempa: Yes. I was dramaturg at L.A. Stage Company, a LORT-B theater with two theaters, each the size of a regional theater (under 500 seats). Susan Dietz was the artistic director. As a dramaturg, I'd read the mostly unsolicited plays submitted for consideration and report on them. I was not experienced enough to be involved with selecting plays for production but a job reading plays in the attic at the Canon Theater in Beverly Hills, or writing a newsletter in a corner backstage at the former Las Palmas Theater on Cahuenga Boulevard—where Penn and Teller were in their world-premiere run—was pure fun. Susan Dietz recommended me when Joie Davidow, the founder and chief editor of L.A. Style was looking for someone to handle an arts listing section called Datebook. I was already familiar with much of L.A.'s performing and visual arts and culture, and was able to enlist other writers as needed.
Ani: What's your educational background, Susan?
Susan: I am a college dropout—a proud college dropout. I don't claim to be self-taught. I think the novelist Lisa See described herself as an autodidact. I was community educated. I think the arts can be a community. You can go to theater school or apprentice in small theaters where people are paying to see the shows, and don't hesitate to give you thumbs up or thumbs down.
Ani: Yeah. When I started here as a catalog librarian, we had studied cataloging and description, subject access, and all that kind of stuff, but you didn't really know how to do it until you learned on the job. And you basically did it for a year, and you were revised for a year: Somebody literally revised your work for an entire year until you were let out into the world. I mean, everybody took it that seriously.
Susan: That's like having other doctors standing by when you're a surgeon and you're doing your first operation.
Ani: I don't think a lot of people think about that. They don't look at the subject headings in a catalog and think, oh, somebody really put a lot of time into this and was revised for a year to do this, you know!
Susan: No, exactly. But it is technical, you know, writing, copy editing, cataloging, and all this stuff is very technical. I don't have a copy editor's soul. But I understand how it can become the foremost thing of importance to somebody when they're reading if they see copy editing mistakes. All the little details are important in making something work.
Ani: What led you into editing?
Susan: I was very interested in other people's work, and I was accustomed to working in playwrights' workshops where actors would read scripts aloud and there'd be discussions after. Then, in the late 70s, I was given an opportunity by Alta, the pioneering feminist publisher in Berkeley (Shameless Hussy Press, founded in 1969). She asked me to select feminist plays from around the country for an anthology of new plays by women. She published it under that title in 1980, and that was my first "Edited By." That in turn led to me being Southern California editor of California Theater Council's quarterly new-play anthology, West Coast Plays, in the early and mid-80s. I scouted plays that premiered in Southern California for publication—it was about selection for the books, not editing of text.
Ani: Tell us a little bit about how L.A. Style started and maybe a little about its champions along the way because every great project has its champions.
Susan: L.A. Style was started by Joie Davidow, who was, in my mind, the heart of the magazine and the founder/publisher who had conceived it and gathered the backers. She was the founding editor as well. The magazine was sold to American Express at the end of 1991 and went on for maybe a year or so after Joie was no longer there. Still, it went on under completely different management, and as far as many people were concerned, it was not the same magazine. Joie put together a terrific staff, including editorial, art, and production departments, as well as business staff and advertising sales staff. She had a group of backers who were involved with the L.A. Weekly and some staff migrated from the Weekly to L.A. Style.
Ani: You'll be happy to know that we just got a donation of a run of the L.A. Weekly from one of its editors, Tom Christie.
Susan: Oh, that’s fabulous. Joie was one of the L.A. Weekly founders in 1978. She was instrumental in developing the Calendar section there, and then she also started a Style section. She would go with photographers out into Los Angeles. The column wasn't a people-on-the-street thing; it covered different subjects, not necessarily clothes, each time. She would also send photographers out as needed, some of them recent graduates from art school—new, talented photographers. But the reproduction quality of the photos was not great.
Ani: Because it's a free weekly paper on newsprint, not a magazine.
Susan: Right. But on the plus side, as an editor with an alternative publication, you can take care of your whole section. You could be the author and the art director. Joie made connections with quite a few very talented people—writers, editors, photographers—who were not yet rich and famous, and they became the core of a real set of collaborators at L.A. Style. With the funding she has obtained, she could get the quality she wanted in paper, printing, and other key elements.
Ani: What was L.A. Style’s focus?
Susan: Joie had seen when she moved here from the East Coast that L.A. was in an interesting cultural shift that was not apparent in other cities. She felt that Angelenos had a lot of style, and they did whatever they wanted with their style. She said she first noticed it in bank lines (this was before ATMs), where there'd be all these people, and they would look fabulous and be interesting and seem to have completely different ideas and attitudes about what was interesting. She also marveled at the huge differences in the looks of people's houses, inside and out. She began to understand that Los Angeles was racially and ethnically diverse, with a wide range of income levels and occupations. Multicultural was the watchword, and we meant not only diversity but also a focus on the Pacific Rim cultural influence that was very different from the European influence in the East. Joie translated all of that into a unique area of coverage. Optimism and interest in this shift was a point of view that was not being represented in other media. She made the case, got some backing, and started a magazine.
Ani: What year was this, Susan?
Susan: The first issue of L.A. Style came out in 1985, June of 1985.
Ani: What was the circulation like in the beginning? I mean, because, you know, publishing has changed so much. Newspapers and periodicals are folded left and right, moving into digital formats. But in those days, print was king. What was the readership like?
Susan: I don't have early years numbers, but when I worked there, it was around 90,000. From that point, the goal was to get the circulation above 100,000. That was one of the reasons that Joie and her backers sold L.A. Style to American Express was because there was not enough money to invest in increasing the circulation to above 100,000. I guess that number was, at the time, a marker for advertising rates. I don't know what the circulation eventually was; American Express hadn't owned it for long before they closed their entire magazine business.
Susan: For both magazines and newspapers, there was paid circulation and there was unpaid circulation. The financial success is determined by achieving a successful combination of revenue from advertising, revenue from subscribers, newsstand sales, and selling/renting address and phone lists. In the 80s, you may have received a magazine as a member of a group—a fraternity, say, or an occupation. That's controlled circulation, often of trade publications. And then there was free circulation, and publications such as the L.A. Weekly, distributed to everybody for free. It survived by having paid advertising in the publication. But in order for the L.A. Weekly to have become a success, it had to have something that readers wanted, so the events calendar was the core coverage, the reason people would pick up the free magazine.
Ani: I remember walking from my parking lot to the Central Library in anticipation of the Thursday the L.A. Weekly Thursday drop. You'd open the box and pick one up on your way into work. It was a big part of our week, and one of the most important ways we knew what was going on in our local music and theater scenes.
Susan: So, L.A. Style was different from L.A. Weekly. The strategy of L.A. Style was to have extremely good reproduction of photography, extremely good writing, and so on. It would compete with national glossy magazines, which are expensive to produce, but of course have many different avenues for making money. The plan for L.A. Style was that the income would be partly advertising driven, and it would be partly through paid subscriptions. There would also be newsstand sales and boutique magazine stands located in local advertisers' places of business. The city at that time had actual newsstands, and Joie talks about stopping at the newsstands and turning L.A. Style magazines so that the spines were visible to the world because the vendors had just plopped down a big old stack of issue,s and you couldn't tell what they were.
Ani: So L.A. Style did some of its own circulation.
Susan: Yes, first Robert Block and then later Hugh-John Fleming were the drivers who took the magazine to stores and also took the boards to the typesetter and the final product to the printer, and so on. Hands-on fulfillment. And later on, when I was in charge of the recipes-from-chefs column, Hugh-John was our recipe tester, too.
Ani: So, who do you think was the quintessential L.A. Style reader then?
Susan: There was no one personality type. Our readers were a crowd of people with disparate interests. There was a lot of information in every issue, and it was often very specific—profiles of independent filmmakers, interviews with politicians, themed issues with packages of stories on the music industry, say, or the restaurant scene, on education, art, or sports, on local and foreign travel—humor pieces. There were also different voices and different approaches to reporting. L.A. Style was like Joie's mythical example of the bank line, and it was also a coffee table publication. I saw a focus group once for L.A. Style—circa 1990, about five years after the magazine launched. Readers were using the information in different ways, but they were all very focused on information. It wasn't necessarily that each person read everything, but after watching the focus group, I felt challenged, seeing that my job was to keep a step ahead of the reader, who might already know more about L.A. than I did. These were Angelenos, interested in their city and in possession of lots of first-hand information already. One woman in the focus group pointed to an architectural story in the current issue and said she'd gotten into her car and driven to see the new building right after she read the story.
Ani: Tell us about some of the photographers who worked for L.A. Style or who did a lot of work with L.A. Style who might have been up and coming, who are probably quite famous now.
Susan: There are a lot. Many have published books and exhibited in museums. One special relationship was with the late Herb Ritts, a famous photographer of celebrities and fashion. He had been working with Joie from early on, and after a certain point, she was able to give him a year's contract. That year, he did every single L.A. Style cover, and it was a showcase for him, too. He selected the models; he had complete creative control. Philip Dixon, who was a young L.A. photographer, had a very edgy style and became very well known. The prominent fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville created beautiful scenarios. Victoria Pearson is a distinctive natural-light virtuoso. One of my favorite stories that appeared in L.A. Style was sort of a counter-programming to the issue's fashion stories. It was titled "The Most Beautiful Women in L.A.," and was a ten-page photo essay with interview quotes featuring women social justice activists of all ages around a variety of issues. The photographer for that was Sylvia Plachy, a fine art photographer who has published many books. L.A. Style worked with photographers specializing in fashion, still life, street, portrait, travel photography, and so on. There was an L.A. Photography Special Issue that featured an extensive portfolio of local fine art photographers' works.
Also, food photography in the mid 80s and into the early 90s was transformed. I remember working with John Reed Forsman, a young food/still life photographer. He would do things like take a prepared styled plate of food out into the parking lot in order to shoot it under natural light. And that was innovative. It was a departure from the preceding years ' static, often garish-looking food photographs.
Ani: Tell us a little bit about what the Central Library and the library in general have meant for you and why you decided to donate this collection to the library.
Susan: My freelance writing took me to the Central Library pretty often. I did stories on children's book illustrations, Broadway playwriting teams of the mid-20th century, and Chinese gardens—pieces with very different backgrounds. And so, I would go to the Central Library. I was also often in the basement looking at old magazines. Later, I discovered that you could request books to be sent to the library closest to you. In the 80s, I got interested in reading Leonard Woolf's autobiography and discovered that the Central Library had copies of it. They sent them to me in Culver City. And they were Hogarth Press volumes! The Central Library interested me especially because of the rare book room. I've researched materials there, such as early issues of The Advocate and some 1920s women's clubs publications. It's great knowing that any one of us could go into the Central Library and ask for a magazine published in 1921 that has something on page four that we're interested in. I mean, I just think that it's still an amazing privilege and an amazing possibility, you know?
Ani: That's wonderful. We're happy to provide that service. That's one of the things that we're most proud of, that we're being accessible to everybody.
Susan: And I have to mention the children's section. The Children's Department is a place to visit just because it is so beautiful and adorable. Just to be in those rooms! The Central Library is such a marvelous landmark.
Ani: Tell us about your connection with the Photo Friends. Photo friends are still a very active friends group that supports our Photo Collection.
Susan: I was working at L.A. Style, and I saw a notice that there was going to be a photo gathering for a project called Shades of LA. I assigned the writer Lynell George to cover the event. Carolyn Kozo Cole was the manager of the photo collection, which was in the history department of the library. We met, and she invited me to be on the Photo Friends board. As the librarian supervising the Herald Examiner and the Security Pacific collections, Carolyn had recently assessed what the library had and realized the sum of the photo holdings was not representative of Los Angeles. The way she put it at the time was that the only pictures of African American Angelenos were in police photos in the Herald Examiner collection. So she set up events to duplicate photos owned by the general public. The events were held in local communities. On hand would be a couple of photographers with large-format stand cameras. Participants would go through their albums with a librarian, and selections would be made for duplication. Some photo donors would be interviewed for an oral history to go with their images. That first gathering turned up rare documentation of Central Avenue nightlife, as well as weddings, family life, club meetings, business, recreation—just an incredible variety.
Ani: The library continued to gather photos from all parts of the city. It was a six-year project overall. The Photo Friends continue to hold exhibits and publications.
Susan: When I was with Photo Friends, we were just beginning to try to figure out how to digitize. It was a long, laborious, expensive process. At some point, after I was gone, it accelerated. It's wonderful to see that the library has been able to make this resource available in such an open way. You can order pictures. You can do all sorts of things. I was there when the movie Devil with the Blue Dress On with Denzel Washington, based on the Walter Mosley book, was in production. The movie's art department was highly dependent on the library's collection for the period details. Photo Friends was invited to do a little fundraiser with a screening of the film on the historic MGM lot. Then, a year or two later, I was editor in chief of Westways and was working downtown, so I spent more time in the library with the Photo Friends board. We had some evening opportunities for our members to browse the photo collection. Diane Keaton created two books during this time from the Herald Examiner collection—one of lurid crime photos. The Security Pacific National Bank Collection, which may seem at first like a very weird collection for the general public, is a completely useful collection of pictures of houses and buildings and their addresses, one after another.
Ani: That's great. I mean, a lot of people don't realize that in order to recreate a specific place and time, either visually or a setting in a work of fiction, you really do need to do a lot of research. And the library is such a great place to tap into that stuff. The Casey Fashion Plate collection is also used for period costumes. And I imagine a lot of people would love to look at L.A. Style to see how people were dressing in the 80s and 90s. So it's a historic object itself now, right?
Susan: Right. Exactly, exactly.
Ani: I want to thank you for donating L.A. Style to the people of Los Angeles, because I think that that's who it belongs to now. And, what would make you happy to know how it's being used?
Susan: Well, L.A. Style is one of those things that has been reflexively pigeon-holed by many people. Personally, I see it through the lens of a person who is much more into reading and writing than I am into fashion. (I mean, I'm the kind of person that when I told someone I worked at L.A. Style, they would often give me a look that said, "Like, really?" I don't shop.) I think a lot of good, unique reporting and writing in L.A. Style is under-appreciated—but now with a patina of history, it might be even more rewarding to explore.
Ani: Thank you for this insight into this slice of L.A. publishing history, Susan.
Susan: Thank you!
