Scene Smothering

Want a share of that swinging, spendthrift teen-age market? Start a magazine. In the first issue, smother the scene. Top off a piece on skydiving with one on motorcycling. Spend an afternoon with Warren Beatty, an evening with Timothy Leary. Run the confessions of a college dropout, along with a few essentials about "the good, grey rebel," Eugene McCarthy. Sprinkle in some pictures of electric dresses. And right in the middle of it all, plant one of those psychedelic fold-out posters. Crazy.

Too much of a cliche to be true? Not quite. It is exactly what the first issue of Eye, a new Hearst magazine, has to offer. The latest in a line of Hearst magazines (Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Harper's Bazaar), Eye is the first to peer exclusively at youth. It boasts a stripling management, sort of: Editor Susan Edmiston, who used to write a teen column, is 27; Executive Editor Howard Smith, who writes for the Village Voice, is 31. Its staff is also young and intrepid, sort of. A writer-photographer team jumped with the skydivers; another photographer dangled from a crane to shoot the cover picture of sky divers; still another lay down by the road to get a wheel's-eye view of the cycles whizzing by.

Imperfect Nude. Like other publications of more pretension, Eye felt called upon to run at least one put-on, a bit of misogynic whimsy by Freelancer Pete Hamill urging the drafting of women. Hamill arrived at this conclusion after noting the behavior of a group of women who gathered in front of a police station after a rape suspect was brought in. They screamed: "Give him cancer." Writes Hamill: "It is at those moments that you understand that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is, after all, a play about counter-insurgency."

Another monthly magazine, Student, also launched itself with a skydiving article. Otherwise, it is more down to earth than Eye. Put out by some recent college graduates in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who want to reach "all students, on all campuses, everywhere," it takes a leaf from Playboy: a nude centerfold that is somehow more appealing because the girl is not so slick and a rhyming comic strip about a bosomy heroine's scrapes with sex. The best article is by Edward Bastian, a graduate in political science from the University of Iowa, who spent a month in Viet Nam and captures the grime of the war. "You're always soaked, always miserable," he writes, describing the infantryman's lot, plodding through mud and swamps. "Your boots stink and your socks rot--and your feet rot if you aren't careful." Which goes to prove that there's more to say about one rotten sock in Viet Nam than a whole discotheque full of electric dresses.

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