Gift idea for boss birthday

Byline: Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

In 1989, Andy Warhol's estate put Interview magazine up for sale. Malcolm Forbes decided that he wanted to add the hip downtown nightlife magazine to his portfolio. He had become a fan of writer Hal Rubinstein, who was restaurant critic for Details and a contributor to other publications, including Interview. Forbes called Rubinstein out of the blue and asked him to lunch to discuss a cover story he had written for New York magazine on Rudolf, a nightclub impresario. "Malcolm's gift was an extraordinary curiosity in the ways of life that weren't his, whether it was a boat captain or a movie star," recalls Rubinstein, who is now fashion director of InStyle. "He used his influence to make people feel impressed with themselves and find out more."

Over lunch at the Forbes' townhouse with his son, Tim, Malcolm worked his charm on Rubinstein. He told him about his bid for Interview and that he wanted to hire him to edit it. "You sure know how to screw up lunch," Rubinstein remembers responding. Forbes lost his bid for Interview, but he didn't give up the idea of a nightlife magazine.

Rubinstein agreed to help Forbes create what would become known as Egg. Contrary to popular belief, the name had nothing to do with Malcolm's famous collection of Faberge eggs (recently sold to a Russian businessman). "My sister thought of the name," recalls Rubinstein. "I wanted a word that was recognizable and graphically distinct. 'Egg' is all loops and circles and there is nothing fresher than an egg. The word also made me laugh."

Egg became Malcolm Forbes' pet project and his entre to the downtown scene (yes, there was a time when clubbing was cool and drag queens didn't appear on network TV). It was not deep - and that was the point. "It was one of the first magazines that made superficiality, purposeful superficiality, a good, guilt-free thing or a stylish thing," says Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff.

Many people at the Forbes organization were baffled by this new downtown hipster image the boss was trying to promote. "When Malcolm announced the publication at his 70th birthday in Morocco, he caught the press and his organization by surprise, and not a lot of them were happy about it," Rubinstein recalls. "They're rich conservatives, and I was this New York, gay Jew talking about people living out of suitcases in Hollywood."

Egg launched in 1990 running 496 ad pages for the year, 20 percent over its target, according to Sharon Phair, its ad director. The first cover featured TV personality Mary Hart, and was headlined "On Golden Calves: Whose legs are worth $2 million?" a tongue-in-cheek interview about why America was obsessed with Hart's legs. The magazine was square, about the size of a record album and art directed by a newcomer, Douglas Riccardi, who had worked as a graphic designer for Tibor Kalman's M and Co. "He was a short man," remembers Rubinstein. "For his interview, he was wearing the most perfect black wool three-button Paul Smith suit. My feeling was that any man that could take his flaws and present himself so beautifully would make a great art director."

Egg's editorial budget was small, so the editors were forced to be creative, for example, giving a designer $100 to go on a shopping spree. They sent Michael Kors to Orchard Street and Gordon Henderson to an army-navy store. There was also a feature called "Drive" in which a reporter would go on a road trip with a well-known personality and tape their conversation. Egg featured entertainment tidbits such as "The List," which was simply names of people who came into the editor's consciousness each month, pop-culture journalist Jim Mullen's Entertainment Weekly "Hot Sheet," the snarky list of the things that people in America are talking about, also originated in Egg.

Pretty soon "Page Six" was running rumors that Rubinstein was being paid a half-million dollars and sleeping with Malcolm Forbes. "It was scrambled egg, I'll tell you that," remembers Mullen. But Egg's moment in the spotlight was brief. Malcolm Forbes died in 1990, just two weeks before the magazine was published. His son Tim took over, but nobody at the company was interested in carrying on the idiosyncratic founder's costly downtown diversion during an ad recession, says Rubinstein. The company folded Egg after the 11th issue in March, 1991.

In 1998, the editors of the now defunct POV magazine resurrected Egg after buying the name from Forbes Inc. for a dollar. The editors published four issues. Hal Rubinstein wrote a column called "Hal's Sixth Sense," offering advice about such topics as how to become a regular at a restaurant, or to get to know yourself by standing in front of the mirror naked. "Egg was all about having fun, and it was fun," says Tim Forbes.