Richard E. Deems

Family-Placed Obituary

RICHARD E. DEEMS Trustee of The Hearst Family Trust and a member of the Board of Directors of Hearst Corporation and the two Hearst Foundations, as well as a former chairman and president of Hearst Magazines and a longtime force in the publishing industry, died May 4 at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 96. ìDick served Hearst Corporation faithfully for decades and was instrumental in building Hearst Magazines into the industry leader it is today,î said Frank A. Bennack, Jr., vice chairman and chief executive officer of Hearst Corporation. ìHe was one of the people who shaped the modern mainstream publishing industry and helped give it its vibrancy. We will all miss him greatly.î ìHe truly was a force in publishing,î said George R. Hearst, Jr., chairman of the board of Hearst Corporation and president of The Hearst Foundation, Inc. ìVery few executives have the ability to excel on both the publishing and editorial sides of the business, but Dick did. Our magazines are successful today in large measure because of his work. The Hearst family extends its condolences.î Most recently, Deems was a publishing consultant to the Corporation's Magazines Group beginning in 1978. He was appointed a trustee of The Hearst Family Trust in 1966, the same year he joined the Hearst Foundations as a director. Deems was elected to the Board of Directors of the Hearst Corporation in 1953, and subsequently to the Board of The National Magazine Company Limited, a wholly-owned Hearst subsidiary. He served on the Corporation's executive, finance, and retirement plan committees among other corporate and foundation assignments. Known throughout his long and accomplished career as an ìeditor's publisher,î Deems recruited some of the country's leading editors for Hearst Magazines when he was president of the Group from 1960 to 1976, including Helen Gurley Brown for Cosmopolitan, John Mack Carter for Good Housekeeping, and Frank Zachary for Town & Country. He was named chairman of Hearst Magazines in 1976, a position he held for two years. Deems joined Hearst in 1939 as an advertising representative for Harper's Bazaar. He was promoted to Bazaar advertising manager in 1947 and was named vice president in charge of advertising for all Hearst magazines in 1952. Deems rose to publishing's highest ranks in a career that began when he was still a teenager. Born in New York City on Jan. 19, 1913, the son of Walter A. Deems and Marie Neufeld, Deems graduated from Staten Island's Curtis High School in 1930 and went into business as the owner and editor of Interstate News Service. He then joined the circulation department of The New York Times and later The New Yorker magazine. In 1933, he became the first circulation manager of a new magazine, Esquire, and served in that job until he came to Hearst in 1939 (Hearst Corporation later acquired Esquire in 1986). It was Deems who was willing to take a chance on Helen Gurley Brown as a magazine editor after she and her husband, movie producer David Brown, approached publishing companies with the idea of starting a magazine based on Gurley Brown's 1962 best-selling book, Sex and the Single Girl. Deems hired Gurley Brown to reinvent Cosmopolitan with her vision—a magazine that celebrated the independent single woman's lifestyle. Though Gurley Brown, 43 at the time, had no magazine experience, Deems's pick for Cosmopolitan's new editor proved to be prescient. Today, the magazine remains the best-selling women's magazine in the world. Deems was active in many industry groups, at one time serving as a graduate director of the Advertising Council and the Magazine Publishers Association. In 1979, he was awarded the industry's highest honor, the MPA's Henry Johnson Fisher Award. Deems also served as a director of the Burnham Fund, ISS International Service System Inc., the Oriole Homes Corporation and a trustee of the Zweig Series Trust. He was a member of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco and the Everglades Club of Palm Beach, FL. Among Deems's many honors over the years, he was decorated with the Knight of the Order of St. Martin, and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree in 1972 from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, GA. Deems is survived by his wife, the former Jean Sweetland, his daughter, Mrs. Christopher von Keyserling, and three grandchildren. He was a resident of New York City and Palm Beach, FL. Final arrangements will be conducted in private. A memorial service will be held at Saint Thomas Church in Manhattan sometime in June. Rather than flowers, Deems' wish was that donations be made for leukemia research at Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center. Donations in Deems' memory can be made to MSKCC, Attn: Elise Cooke, 633 3rd Ave., 28th Floor, New York, NY, 10017 or (646) 227-2743. To express condolences and/or make donations Visit PalmBeachPost.com/obituaries