The plot so far: Southern magazine, a winsome fresh-faced newcomer from Little Rock (played by Debbie Reynolds) falls heavily in debt. Her notes are picked up by Southern Living, an immensely wealthy Alabamian (Larry Hagman), who carries her off to Atlanta, where he soon abandons her for Southpoint, a wicked city girl (Joan Collins). Got that?

If not, don’t worry about it. I’ve been writing about the folks who created the remarkably successful house and-garden magazine, Southern Living, and their belief that a slick, urban, business-oriented magazine called Southpoint will do better than Southern, the quirky, down-home monthly that it replaced. I’m betting that it won’t.

Let’s consider the reasons for Southern Living‘s success. Back in the early 1960’s some genius at the Southern Progress Corporation, publishers of Progressive Farmer, noticed that formers, progressive or otherwise, had be come an endangered species in the South. The South’s economic development was making it hard to find Southerners who were worse off than their parents had been; migrants to the South had just begun to outnumber migrants from it; and the 1960 census had just shown that, for the first time, most Southerners were city folk. Wasn’t there a place, this genius asked, for a magazine that would tell all these newcomers to Southern middlc-class life how to spend their money appropriately? Something like the West Coast’s Sunset, but for the South?

SL (as the magazine sometimes calls itself) got off to a shaky start: one early article was on helping your daughter choose her first bra. It soon hit its stride, though, and its four sections travel, gardens, food, and home improvement-began to offer middle class Southerners what Playboy used to offer adolescent males: a vision of the good life, tied to consumption of the goods advertised nearby.

To be sure, SL hasn’t been all recipes, garden tips, and advertising tie-ins. Over the years its “Books About the South” has given respectful treatment to a great many books, some of which deserved it. A section called “Southerners” has profiled a number of admirable folk doing admirable things. Lately the magazine has lobbied quietly for downtown revitalization and historic preservation. But, as a “lifestyle” magazine, SL has, of course, never gone in for social commentary or muckraking reporting. Its occasional references to Southern tradition have generally mentioned black eyed peas on the table or azaleas in the yard, not, say, getting rowdy on Saturday night, or going to church on Sun day morning—and certainly not any of the really problematic Southern traditions.

In fact, in its search for the largest possible (Southern) audience, SL has not only avoided controversy, but prided itself on doing so. When Southern Progress took over Southern magazine, its business people came to Little Rock to look over Southern‘s books. I hear that one asked Southern‘s accountant whether the magazine got many angry letters.

“Sure,” the man said. “We’ve had a lot of them.”

Well, he was told proudly, Southern Living doesn’t get angry letters.

“Kind of hard to disagree with pecan pie, ain’t it?” the accountant replied.

Obviously the growth of the South’s middle class gave SL’s founders a demographic wave that they caught and rode for all it was worth. But they also had some help from current events. In SL’s first years, after all, images of the South in the national media ran to stuff like mobs abusing little schoolchildren and fat tobacco-chewing deputy sheriffs on trial for murdering civil rights workers. I suspect that many early subscribers were folks just glad to see a glossy magazine that didn’t paint their home-region as the moral mudsill of the nation.

Of course Southern Living has never been explicitly defensive (that would certainly stir up some angry letters). For 25 years, though, it has unceasingly portrayed Southerners as normal middle-class Americans who play golf at the country club, live in nice houses, vacation at the shore, entertain graciously, eat well, and don’t have those old backwoods hangups about liquor. If we, ah, deconstruct this portrait, we find a defensive subtext whispering that, really, the South is just as good as the North. (And notice that this com parison is in the North’s own terms. When Southerners get suckered into playing this game, the results are some times pretty sorry, along the lines of what Calvin Trillin calls “La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine”—”You want gourmet food, by God we’ve got gourmet food.”)

Anyway, to say that SL’s formula has been successful is grotesque under statement. The magazine’s Silver Anniversary this year will find it on roughly three million Southern coffee tables, and its advertising revenues put it in the top dozen or so magazines in the country—not bad for a little old regional magazine. In fact by 1985 SL had become so successful that it attracted the ravenous attention of Time, Inc., which bought Southern Progress for a cool half-billion dollars. (Time, of course, just got itself bought by Warner Communications, and at this rate Southern magazine journalism will soon be controlled by someone like Mitsubishi.)

Given this success, perhaps it’s not surprising that when SL’s founders set out to devise a general-interest regional magazine, one that would give advertisers an audience younger and more male than Southern Living delivers, they came up with—more of the same. Southpoint, the “metropolitan monthly,” portrays hip young urban fast-trackers who just happen to be doing their hip young urban thing in Southern cities, and the message implicit in everything from content to graphics is: just being in Charlotte (or Nashville, or Atlanta) doesn’t mean we’re out of it.

Now there’s a better response to real or imagined outside criticism, more effective and I think more accurate, too. Instead of “We’re no different,” it goes: “You bet we’re different, and we like it that way, and if you don’t like it, that’s your problem.” As Hank Williams Jr. puts it: “We say grace and we say “ma’am.” / If you ain’t into that, we don’t give a damn.” (The only drawback with this approach is that you can get carried away, like Brother Dave Gardner—”I love everything about the South; I even love hate“—or Roy Blount Jr. when someone at a Manhattan dinner party mentioned a New York Times article about Southern dirt eating-“Hell yes, we eat dirt! And if you haven’t ever tried blackened red dirt you don’t know what’s good!”)

Southern magazine took this line, more or less, by simply assuming what Southern Living had been denying for 25 years: that the South—is different, that in its soul it is down-home, funky, country. I suspect (as a matter of fact, I know) that some people at Southern Progress were puzzled and annoyed by Southern. When they killed it and replaced it with Southpoint they weren’t just reinforcing their monopoly of ownership: they were also pushing a competing myth of the South.

Maybe Southpoint‘s variation on the Southern Living theme will work for it, but I think Southern had the right idea. I think the guys who invented Southern Living are looking at a new generation of Southerners that they don’t understand. If they’re not careful, they may wind up peddling a myth as irrelevant and dated as Hugh Hefner’s pipe-smoking dream of jazz and sports cars and Playboy bunnies.

What’s the problem? Well, for starters, many of the acquisitive yuppies that Southpoint is targeting barely think of themselves as Southerners. Whether they’re homegrown or drawn here by our flourishing metropolitan economy, these folks are ready to move to Minneapolis if it will help their careers. Why would they want a regional magazine? A city magazine, maybe, to keep up with the social theme, but I bet they’ll take their business news and career advice straight from Savvy or Inc., GQ or Forbes.

And Southpoint is likely to have a different problem when it comes to the majority of young middle-class Southerners, to whom the South still means something. For a decade now I’ve been teaching undergraduates who have no personal recollection of the civil rights era, to whom it’s news that the South was ever the nation’s number one economic problem (FDR’s phrase), to whom it has never occurred that the South could have trouble with its image. Unlike their parents’ generation—that is, unlike Southern Living readers—they’ re not going to care about Southpoint‘s lists of the South’s best hotels, bookstores, and Oriental restaurants. These lists are only superficially consumer’s guides; at least half the point is: look here, the South has decent hotels and bookstores and Oriental restaurants. But my students have never known a South that didn’t.

Moreover, unlike their parents, who often found all that old trashy Southern food and music and speech an embarrassment, some of these kids enjoy that stuff, even value it as a badge of regional identity, at least once in a while. When Southern Living‘s publisher almost killed an article on barbecue because the subject was too low class, how could he have guessed that someday there’d be a two-hour wait to get into a blues and ribs joint in Alexandria owned by the chairman of the Republican National Committee?

We’ve got an example here to support what’s known in ethnic studies as the “third generation hypothesis”: ethnic revival occurs when the confident, acculturated grandchild remembers what the anxious, acculturating child forgot. Here’s a case in point (from the pages of Southpoint, actually): Ted Turner’s son, Robert Edward Turner IV, has left his cosmopolitan, globe trotting dad’s shop for a job with Nashville’s Country Music Network, where the motto is “We don’t just play country . . . we live it.”

Young Turner isn’t alone; lots of young Southerners like to “live country” now and again, to dress down and raise hell to the music of Emmy Lou Harris, the Allman Brothers, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, or Howlin’ Wolf. Even more interesting: some of them don’t know who Howlin’ Wolf is (their mommas and daddies didn’t play that sort of music around the house) and they’re willing to pay to find out.

Southpoint ought to tell them. After all, these are the people who’ve made a surprise best-seller, at $50 a copy, of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Two hundred thousand of them sub scribed to Southern when that magazine expired. But Southpoint devotes its music coverage to the likes of REM, an Athens mega-band that is now as much a commercial as a musical phenomenon.

After all, the Wolf’s not a “cool player.” Southpoint saves that accolade for Atlanta desk-jockeys in pin-striped suits, and that’s its real problem.