Some 7th Ave eyebrows were raised today at the news that Conde Nast executive Richard "Mad Dog" Beckman has been named President and CEO of the company's subsidiary Fairchild Fashion Group.

The "Mad Dog" nickname relates not just to his aggressive reputation securing ad dollars, but also to a rather regrettable incident with two female colleagues that left many in the industry wondering how he still had a job at all.

While not a household name to magazine readers, Beckman is familiar to fashion insiders as a former publisher of GQ (1996-98), and vice-president and publisher of Vogue (1998-2002). Afterward he was promoted to head the Conde Nast Media Group, which handles major media buys across different magazine titles and brings in 80% of the company's revenue. The move from there to the Conde Nast's Fairchild unit looks like a demotion to a lot of people, including the Manhattan media blog Gawker.

But Beckman was almost fired altogether in 1999, when during a June evening's get-together he decided he would like to see two of his female colleagues kissing. According to published reports at the time, he mashed together the faces of Vogue's international fashion director Emily Jahncke Davis and its west coast ad director, Carol Matthews. Matthews suffered injuries variously described as a broken cheekbone or injured nose, reportedly requiring plastic surgery, and left the company soon after with a seven-figure payout.

You'd think Beckman might have been fired for that, right? After all, we're talking about senior employees of Vogue, a magazine famous for acting like its perfume samples don't stink.

But, nope. In the end all he had to do was apologize to a staff meeting and agree to attend counseling.

Let's hope the Fairchild staff have face-guards.