Esquire

Esquire magazine has been sold to Hearst Corp., and its 4-month-old sister publication, New York Woman, has been purchased by American Express Publishing Corp., the companies said Wednesday. The two magazines' parent firm will sell another unit, an advertising service called Esquire Health & Fitness Clinic, to Whittle Communications, which is owned by former Esquire co-owner Christopher Whittle.

It takes all types, including the type who thinks people can be divided into two types. For them, a well-executed bisection of humanity can leave a lasting impact. The cover story in the May Esquire contains a walloping example of such classification. "At times," Barbara Kruger begins her cover story on radio-TV wild man Howard Stern, "it seems possible to divide the world into two types of people: creeps and assholes."

Esquire, America's oldest men's magazine, was the big winner at the National Magazine Awards, picking up four of the prestigious annual prizes. The New Yorker, the winningest magazine in the 39-year history of the awards, collected three more prizes. For the second time in three years, Newsweek, owned by the Washington Post Co., won the coveted prize for general excellence for magazines with a circulation of more than 2 million.

'Tis the season to count our follies. The Dubious Achievement Awards of 1989 are out, courtesy of January's Esquire magazine. "Fright of the Year" goes to fallen hotel queen Leona Helmsley, "Blight of the Year" to the Batman logo, "Flight of the Year" to author-on-the-lam Salman Rushdie and banned baseball biggie Pete Rose wins "Troglodyte of the Year."

Eugene Karlin, 84, illustrator for such magazines as Fortune and Esquire and fine artist whose work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, died Thursday of unstated causes in Laguna Woods. Born Dec. 15, 1918, in Kenosha, Wis., and reared in Chicago where he studied art at Hull House, Karlin began his career as a staff illustrator at Fortune in the 1940s.

Author: Introduction by Woody Hochswender; edited by Kim Johnson Gross. Info: Rizzoli New York, 1993. $18.95 hardcover. 111 pages. With black-and-white and color illustrations by Laurence Fellows, Leslie Saalburg and Robert Goodman. Esquire was the first true fashion (not trade) magazine for men, and for its first years--from 1933 through the '40s--it became as much trendsetter as recorder.

Mainstream men's magazines have long lived in a state of uneasy ambivalence. Their core content has leaned to hard-drinkin', lady-killin', dog-lovin', bon mot -babbling, gentlemanly hetero-masculinity. But then there are those ads and fashion spreads, with male models who sometimes seem just a bit too handsome, too tasteful in their accessories, too, well . . . It was probably enough to send some men scrambling to the sanctuary of Guns & Ammo. Times, however, have changed.

Bruce Springsteen fans who don't mind getting their hackles up should check out the current issue of Esquire, wherein cover boy Bruce gets utterly trashed in one of the most mean-spirited assaults this side of Albert Goldman. Writer John Lombardi's core argument is that Springsteen is a phony for singing about hard-pressed people living on society's fringes when he never has been there himself.

Junior Johnson, a Hall of Fame stock car driver and successful car owner, has been granted a presidential pardon for a moonshining conviction in 1956. Johnson, 54, a lifelong resident of nearby Wilkes County in the Brushy Mountains, was convicted of manufacturing non-tax-paid whiskey after being arrested at his father's still. He served 11 months, until October, 1957, in the federal penitentiary in Chillicothe, Ohio. "I filed a request for a pardon just over five years ago," Johnson said.