Fleur Fenton Cowles (January 20, 1908 – June 5, 2009[ "Fleur Cowles, 101, Is Dead; Friend of the Elite and the Editor of a Magazine for Them" by Enid Nemy]) was an American writer, editor and artist[Penelope Green, "Mirror, Mirror: Making Life a Bed of Roses", The New York Times, October 10, 1999] best known as the creative force behind the short-lived Flair magazine.
Personal life
Fleur Fenton was born
Florence Freidman in New York City (although she often claimed to have been born in Montclair, New Jersey).
[ Fleur Cowles profile at Britannica.com] Her parents were Morris Freidman, a novelty salesman, and his wife, Lena.
Her siblings adopted the surname
Freeman later in life: Dr. Paul William Freeman, a dentist (1906–1966), and Mildred Freeman Goetze
[Paid obit for Dr. Paul W. Freeman, The New York Times, October 4, 1966]['"Dr. Paul W. Freeman", The New York Times, October 3, 1966]
Fleur Cowles' first husband was Bertram Klapper, a manufacturer of wood shoe heels. They later divorced.["News of the Advertising and Marketing Fields", The New York Times, March 16, 1952] They married prior to 1937 and divorced in 1946.["Mrs Fleur Cowles Remarried in West", The New York Times, November 23, 1955]
Her third husband was Gardner Cowles, Jr. (1903–1982), an heir to the Cowles Media Company, which for a long time owned the Des Moines Register and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Known as Mike, Cowles was the publisher of his family's Look magazine. They married in 1946 and divorced in 1955.["Gardner Cowles Jr. Is Dead at 82; Helped Build Publishing Empire", The New York Times, July 9, 1985] She kept his surname professionally.
In November 1955, she married her fourth and last husband, Tom Montague Meyer (CBE), a timber executive.
Career
In the early and mid 1930s, she wrote a weekly column for
The New York World-Telegram.
[Fleur Fenton, "New Trend in Furniture Explained", The New York World-Telegram, December 4, 1933] In 1937, she became co-founder and executive vice president of the advertising agency Pettingell & Fenton Inc, which later became known as Hartman & Pettingell Inc, then again as Pettingell & Fenton, and finally as Dorland International-Pettingell Fenton Inc.
["Advertising News and Notes", The New York Times, January 7, 1937]
She founded it with her second husband, Atherton Pettingell, a former executive vice president of Blacker Advertising.["Advertising News and Notes", The New York Times, November 30, 1938] She resigned from the firm in 1946.["Advertising News and Notes", The New York Times, September 6, 1946]
Describing herself as "rough, uncut, and vigorous" as her trademark Russian emerald ring, she told Time, "I've worked hard, and I've made a fortune, and I did it in a man's world, but always, ruthlessly, and with a kind of cruel insistence, I have tried to keep feminine".[S. J. Perelman, "The Hand That Cradles the Rock", The New Yorker, July 1, 1950]
In 1947, she became an associate editor at Look magazine, and a year later, an associate editor at Quick magazine. She resigned her position at Look in November 1955 upon her separation from Gardner Cowles and moved to Europe, where she served as the magazine's foreign editorial consultant.["Fleur Cowles to Quit", The New York Times, 19 October 1955] Before founding Flair, Cowles was a special consultant to the Famine Emergency Committee in Washington, D.C.
Flair
Cowles founded
Flair magazine in 1950, and it folded a year later. The magazine, which
Time described at its launch as "a fancy bouillabaisse of
Vogue, Town & Country, Holiday, etc.,"
was celebrated not only because of its design and editorial production by European art director Federico Pallavicini (né Federico von Berzeviczy-Pallavicini)
but also because of its lavish production. It was the resulting cost of production that killed the magazine, since the expensive special costs (for cover cut-outs for some issues, for example) could not be supported in the long run. This magazine is now sought after by collectors and sells for significant amounts on eBay.
Contributors included W. H. Auden, Simone de Beauvoir, Winston Churchill, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí ( The Gypsy Angels Of Spain), Lucian Freud, Clare Boothe Luce, Ogden Nash, Saul Steinberg, Rufino Tamayo, Tennessee Williams, and Angus Wilson.[ Essay by Quarles and 22 minute speech by Cowles]
In later decades, Cowles served on various government committees, such as writing speeches for the War Production Board,
Fleur Cowles' painting "Desert Journey" was reproduced as the cover of the 1968 Donovan album Donovan In Concert.
Artwork
As
Fleur Fenton Pettingell["Gleams on the Horizon", The New York Times, 27 August 1939] and
Fleur Cowles Meyer, she worked as a painter and illustrator. She also designed tapestries, accessories, and china for Denby Ltd.
["Fleur Cowles Today", The New York Times, by Enid Nemy, April 27, 1976]
Death
Fleur Fenton Cowles died on June 5, 2009, at a
nursing home in
Sussex,
England, aged 101.
Bibliography
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Cowles, Fleur. All Too True: Twenty-Nine True Stories That Might Have Been Invented. Quartet Books, Ltd.
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Cowles, Fleur. An Artist's Journey. HarperCollins.
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Cowles, Fleur. The Best of Flair. Scriptum Editions.
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Cowles, Fleur. The Best of Flair. RCS MediaGroup Intl Pubns.
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Cowles, Fleur. The Best of Flair. HarperCollins Canada, Ltd.
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Cowles, Fleur & De Campo, Brooke. Bright Young Things: London. Perseus Distribution Services.
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Cowles, Fleur & Conder, Susan. Flower Decorations: A New Approach to Flower Arranging. Octopus Publishing Group.
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Cowles, Fleur & Conder, Susan. Flower Decorations: A New Approach to Flower Arranging. Random House Publishing Group.
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Cowles, Fleur. The Flower Game. HarperCollins Publishers, Ltd.
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Cowles, Fleur. The Flower Game. W. Morrow.
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Cowles, Fleur. Friends & Memories. Random House.
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Cowles, Fleur. Friends & Memories. Reynal.
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Cowles, Fleur. The Case of Salvador Dali. Heinemann, 1959.
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Cowles, Fleur. If I Were an Animal. Morrow.
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Cowles, Fleur. The Life and Times of the Rose. Orion Books Ltd.
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Cowles, Fleur. The Life and Times of the Rose: An Essay on Its History With Many of the Author's Own Paintings. HarperCollins.
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Cowles, Fleur & Robert Vavra. Lion and Blue. Collins.
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Cowles, Fleur & Robert Vavra. Lion and Blue. HarperCollins.
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Cowles, Fleur & Robert Vavra. The Love of Tiger Flower. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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Cowles, Fleur & Conder, Susan. The New Guide to Flower Arranging. Octopus Publishing Group.
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Cowles, Fleur. People as Animals. R. Clark.
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Cowles, Fleur & Robert Vavra. Romany Free. Granite Impex Ltd.
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Cowles, Fleur & Robert Vavra. Romany Free. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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Cowles, Fleur & Carlos Fuentes. She Made Friends and Kept Them. HarperCollins Canada, Ltd.
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Cowles, Fleur & Carlos Fuentes. She Made Friends and Kept Them: An Anecdotal Memoir. HarperCollins Canada.
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Cowles, Fleur & Carlos Fuentes. She Made Friends and Kept Them: An Anecdotal Memoir. HarperCollins.
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Cowles, Fleur & Robert Vavra. To Be a Unicorn. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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Cowles, Fleur & Robert Vavra. To Be a Unicorn. HarperCollins Publishers.
[U.S. Library of Congress]
External links
