William Gaines - Business Methods

Business Methods

Gaines ran his business in an eclectic and sometimes counterintuitive fashion. When agreeing to contracts, he insisted on striking the standard clause prescribing that both parties must settle disputes in a reasonable manner, saying that he could never promise to be reasonable. On the other hand, Gaines rejected a lucrative incentive package from Warner Brothers that would have been based on increased sales of Mad; Gaines explained that the act of accepting the incentive would have falsely suggested that he was not already doing everything within his abilities to maximize the magazine's circulation.

He valued reader Larry Stark's letters of critical commentary to such a degree that he gave a lifetime subscription to Stark, who later became a well-known Boston theater critic. The original EC comic books ran paid ads, but Mad magazine quickly dropped all advertising and never accepted it again during Gaines' lifetime. Kurtzman and Feldstein urged Gaines to accept advertising, without result. Merchandising was also scarce and heavily overseen by Gaines, who apparently preferred to forego profit rather than risk disappointing Mad's fans with substandard ancillary products. In 1980, following the colossal success of National Lampoon's Animal House, Gaines lent the name of his magazine to the bawdy spoof Up the Academy. When the movie proved to be a disjointed botch, Gaines paid the film company to remove all references to the magazine from all future prints and even issued private refunds to fans who wrote complaint letters.

Gaines was devoted to his staff, and fostered an environment of humor and loyalty. This he accomplished through various means, notably the "Mad trips." Each year, Gaines would pay for the magazine's staff and its steadiest contributors to fly to an international locale. The first vacation, to Haiti, set the tone. Discovering that Mad had a grand total of one Haitian subscriber, Gaines arranged to have the group driven to the person's house. There, surrounded by the magazine's editors, artists and writers, Gaines formally presented the bewildered subscriber with a renewal card. When the man's neighbor also bought a subscription, Gaines declared the trip to be a financial success because the magazine had doubled its Haitian circulation. The trips became a more elaborate annual event, and the staff would eventually visit six of the world's continents.

Despite his largesse, Gaines had a penny-pinching side. He would frequently stop meetings to find out who had called a particular long-distance phone number. Longtime Mad editor Nick Meglin called Gaines a "living contradiction" in 2011, saying, "He was singularly the cheapest man in the world, and the most generous." Meglin described his experience of asking Gaines for a raise of $3 a week; after rejecting the request, the publisher then treated Meglin to an expensive dinner at one of New York's best restaurants. Recalled Meglin: "The check came, and I said, 'That's the whole raise!' "And Bill said, 'I like good conversation and good food. I don't enjoy giving raises.'"

In 1960, Gaines had arranged to move the magazine's offices to the 69th floor of the Empire State Building, but switched to a different location in the East 50s because one of the women in Mad's subscription department would have been terrified of the length of the elevator ride. His passions for gourmet food and wine prompted him to build a wine cellar in the middle of his Manhattan apartment. He managed to go from his apartment to his favorite restaurant by mapping out a route so he could get there by walking downhill only.

Mad writer Dick DeBartolo's memoir, Good Days and Mad, provides an image of Gaines as a fun-loving and sometimes eccentric mogul. DeBartolo recounts Gaines' generosity to contributors (e.g., the Mad trips), his insistence on Mad's "cheap" image (at one point paying double the amount to keep Mad on low-quality paper although it was in short supply) and his offbeat methods for running a magazine.

DeBartolo's book, filled with anecdotes and forewords from Mad contributors, shows Gaines loved elaborate practical jokes (both played by him and on him) and verbal abuse from his staffers. These eccentric behavior patterns are also described in Gaines' biography The Mad World of William M. Gaines, written by Mad writer Frank Jacobs and published in 1972 by Lyle Stuart, a longtime friend. A film biopic, Ghoulishly Yours, William M. Gaines, has long been in pre-production; director John Landis and screenwriter Joel Eisenberg have been attached to the project since 2008, with Feldstein as a creative consultant.

According to the Jacobs biography, Gaines professed himself an atheist since age 12 and once told a reporter that his was probably the only home in America in which the children were brought up to believe in Santa Claus but not in God. Toward the end of his life, Gaines' name on Mad's masthead grew more and more elaborate, ending as "William Mildred Farnsworth Higgenbottom Pius Gaines IX Esq." When asked about the magazine's philosophy, he said, "Mad's philosophy is, we must never stop reminding the reader of how little value they get for their money!"