Brady, who died Monday in his Manhattan home, clearly found the job a cinch after working as Rupert Murdoch's lieutenant and heading up several other publications.

Brady was editor of Murdoch's Star supermarket tabloid; before that, he was editor and publisher of both Women's Wear Daily and Harper's Bazaar. He would go on to succeed Clay Felker atop New York. "Notoriously stubborn, he couldn't avoid the feuds and squabbles that went with ambition," People wrote Brady's period as a publishing executive.

Switching back into writing, the Korean War veteran started and wrote New York Post's Page Six. He would later write for a weekly column for Advertising Age and Crain's New York Business, contribute to Forbes.com and, for many years, write the "In Step With" column for Sunday newspaper supplement Parade.

Brady earned Emmy nominations for his TV adventures, which included live celebrity interviews on behalf of WCBS and CNBC. He also wrote five novels.

Brady's marriage to Florence Kelly Brady "fell apart gradually over the years," according to People, and Brady lived alone as a bachelor.

The cause of his death was not included in a press release issued by Parade.

Brady is survived by Florence, to whom he remained married at the time of his death; two daughters; four grandchildren and the modern celebrity-industrial complex he was instrumental in creating. The next time you are entertained (or shocked, annoyed or bored) by a celebrity tidbit, take a moment to give thanks in his memory.

(Picture via Ad Age)

He's a lover:

...and then to Paris, where the most famous woman in the world, Coco Chanel, developed a sort of crush on me—or perhaps on my beautiful, young American wife.

A persistent success:

I will now officially be "older than dirt," one of the oldest journalists still working a beat, interviewing movie stars for Parade magazine and its weekly audience of 70 million, and writing this media column each Thursday for Forbes.com, largest business news Web site anywhere.

An editing phenom:

Late in '64 I came home to succeed John Fairchild as publisher of WWD, a post I held for the next seven years, turning the little trade paper a Time magazine cover story had called, "plain as gingham and just as reliable," into a publishing phenomenon, a must-read for the rich and fashionable.

An author extraordinaire:

And I wrote a dozen more books, some serious work about Marines at war, including a memoir, The Coldest War, and a novel, The Marines of Autumn, which I can't read today without sobbing.

An active literary titan:

I'm finishing a serious non-fiction book for Steve Power of Wiley and will then embark on an amusing yarn for Tom Dunne at St. Martin's Press, When the Name-Dropping Was Fun.

And kind of a pompous bastard. [Forbes]

See, Brady really wanted this book to be a recitation by Carr of media inside-baseball stuff. "What a glorious read that would be, and what a column or two I could get out of it," he writes. But no—it's full of drug shit!

Set against Carr, Dostoevsky was a bundle of laughs, The Lost Weekend a riot, Nelson Algren's fictional "Frankie Machine" a hail fellow well met...

Fine, the man's a writer, and I want books to sell and be read. Just not this one, not by me.

But will you look at that: Brady still managed to get an entire column out of how he won't read this book! The man is a pro. Don't worry Jim, you can read this instead.

[Forbes]

Maureen's Review [Forbes]

A friend tells me The New Yorker's recent Howard Rubenstein profile had alluded to the PR man's utterances on behalf of a fading Steinbrenner, but I must have missed the deeper significance. Steinbrenner's "dementia" truly came as a shocker.

A Steinbrenner Dilemma [Forbes]

Diana Vreeland, Nancy White, Helene Gordon Lazareff, Francoise de Langlade, Oscar de la Renta, Eugenia Sheppard, Bernadine Morris, Ermina Stimson, June Weir, Grace Mirabella, China Machado, Coco Chanel, Balenciaga, Norman Norell, Pierre Cardin, Gerry Dryansky, Pierre Balmain, Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Berge, Hubert de Givenchy, Hardy Amies, and John Cavanagh.

What do most of these people have in common? They're dead, Jim. Just sayin'.

Defending Fashion [Forbes]

Is squeaky-clean what kids want? Maybe they do. Teen Vogue's circulation figures seem to say so. As do their ad sales. I'm anxiously awaiting my granddaughter's definitive take. So far, she thinks Sanders' magazine is "cool." And when I interviewed 16-year-old actress Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts' niece, who's on the cover of Teen Vogue and plays the title role in a new flick, Nancy Drew, young Emma said the mag is her fave.

Bimbos Or Sweet 16? [Forbes]

• Can Don Imus maintain his moneymaking capabilities? 'Cause otherwise he's just some loudmouth hick in a hat. [NYT]
  
• More schmucks who bought Times stock with full understanding of stock's structure complaining about stock. [NYO]
  

• Block That Metaphor: "In this polite but sometimes strained community, Mr. Imus is the cranky, aging neighbor who can be relied upon to shovel snow off the sidewalk but occasionally blurts out words so offensive and insensitive that it makes everyone regret inviting him to the block party." [NYT]
  
• Former Seventeen editor Atoosa Rubenstein in feud with senile Forbes columnist James Brady. We are so conflicted on this one. [NYP]
  
• Joanne Lipman is telling everybody that she's not telling anyone anything about Portfolio. [Toronto Star]
  
• Magazine ad pages: slow growth. [AdAge]
  

Arnold Scaasi, Liz Smith, Cathie Black, Barry Diller, Diane von Furstenberg, Jack and Suzy Welch, Harvey Weinstein, Sir Howard Stringer, "celebrity photographer" Patrick McMullan, Nan and Gay Talese, Robert Caro, Dominick Dunne, Howard Rubenstein and "son," Helen Gurley and David Brown, Shirley Lord [widow of Abe Rosenthal], Sharon Hoge, Michael McCarthy [of Michael's restaurant], Roseanne Barr, Holly Hunter. —balk

Literate Media [Forbes]

[H]er family name rhymes with "Miss America Pie's Chevy to the levee"

Glamourpuss [Forbes]

Earlier: Gawker Explainer: Even More Names in the News

I attempted to scribble a few notes while balancing a glass of very decent wine and exchanging trade chat and gossip with editors, publishers, writers and more or less famous Manhattan folk (Tom and Meredith Brokaw are among the neighbors usually invited). And there was the tall, striking Atoosa Rubenstein of Seventeen magazine, who had just been sacked, but who was being enthusiastically kissed by (soon to be former) boss Cathie. "Atoosa!" I cried in my best Jesuit-tutored Latin, "quo vadis?" No, she didn't yet know what she'd be doing next but seemed to be less upset by her own fate than over the shuttering of East Hampton's The Blue Parrot, where on occasion we've enjoyed a margarita. I wished her well and went off to greet Helen Gurley Brown [rambles on endlessly]...

The Boss Entertains [Forbes]

On the day several years back when Art Cooper died, he and Dave lunched at the Four Seasons. "I was telling him about Best Life, and I said, 'Is there anything you could do to help us?' There was no non-compete clause with Conde Nast, and Art said we ought to talk more. But he felt ill and went to the bar to lie down. Next thing, Julian (the co-owner) was calling an ambulance. It was a massive stroke."

See? It wasn't exercise that killed Art Cooper at all; it was the thought of working for Rodale.

Somehow, we sort of suspected that all along.

Living The Good Life [Forbes]

I left [Couric] with her pals and roamed the room taking names: Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas, Ms. Walters, Harvey Weinstein, Evelyn (Mrs. Leonard) Lauder, writer Jurate Kazickas, whose husband is one of the backers of America Media, Soledad O'Brien, Andy Lack, John Sykes. Sarah Ellison of The Wall Street Journal was there as well, but someone assured me, "She doesn't cover parties." Good, I do.

And cover parties he will! He does it so well, in fact, that he even got Couric to give him the money quote: she starts at CBS "the Monday after Labor Day." Stunning, no? It almost rivals that time he broke the news that "everybody loves Raymond."

Katie & Co. [Forbes.com]

[B]ook publisher John Dodds, an affable, fat-thighed San Franciscan married to I Love Lucy's Vivian Vance, asked if I'd consider writing the "autobiography" of William Randolph Hearst Jr.

"Affable, fat-thighed San Franciscan"? Love it! It's lines like this that make Brady's oblivious dodderings worthwhile, and we've decided it'll be our new term of endearment. Oh, Jim, you affable, fat-thighed San Franciscan, you! What would we do without you?

New Hearst Versus Old [Forbes.com]

He was at the powerful Sunday Times when he met and fell for Tina Brown. A literary-agent friend handed him some clippings, saying, "You should look at these. She's at Oxford." Evans continues, "I thought they were fantastic, so I called, asking for Tina Brown. The woman [who answered the phone] said, 'Yes, but I'm busy making my husband's lunch. I think it's my daughter you want.'"

Which may very well be true. But let's also consider this passage from Judy Bachrach's Tina and Harry Come to America:

When [20-year-old] Tina took up with Harold Matthew Evans — forty-six at the time and married, with three children — she was selecting for herself one of the most remarkable, successful, and attractive men in all of Britain, and very likely one of the most vulnerable as well.

Cute, indeed, no?

Sir Harry Never Rests [Forbes]

Today brings a great example of the form. As we ramp up to the Oscars, Brady checks in with Variety's wise, charming, accomplished, avuncular editor-in-chief, Peter Bart. And while it's true that Bart is brilliant and accomplished and all that, Brady — who recaps the man's whole life — somehow manages to avoid any mention of the famous Amy Wallace Los Angeles magazine profile of Bart from 2001, in which he's revealed to be not so much wise and avuncular as a fabricator and a bigot.

Brady even writes admiringly that in addition to his Variety duties Bart has also "written and published seven books, including a couple of novels and several bestsellers, with a new one called Boffo due out in early June" — without mentioning the screenplay he wrote pseudonymously in 1996 and sold to Paramount Pictures, a clear violation of Variety's conflict-of-interest guidelines against people who cover movie studios shopping scripts to one of them.

All this got Bart suspended from his job. Which you think might merit mentioning. But, then, we also think there's a difference between "snubbing" and "getting fired by." So what do we know?

Peter Bart: Hooray for Hollywood [Forbes]
Related: 'Variety' Honcho Suspended [E! Online]
Earlier: Out of Step With... Bonnie Fuller

But we couldn't get that far into the piece, waylaid as we were by the lede. To wit:

The new chairman of the Magazine Publishers of America, Jack Kliger — born in Italy to a couple of young Holocaust survivors rescued by the Jewish Brigade — could be the stuff of magazine cover stories.

The stuff merely of cover stories? No way. This is the stuff of a John Hughes opening scene: Oh, those wild-and-crazy young Holocaust survivors, footloose and fancy-free, traipsing around Europe, having kids (and, presumably, trying to find their incinerated relatives). Transfixed by such a happy daydream — one imagines Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson as the young survivors — we were never were able to get back to the article.

(Well, except to notice this: It's Le Bernardin, guys.)

Jack Kliger Loves Magazines [Forbes.com]

But, then, we'd also recently learned that Brady is a hell of a lot more accomplished and experienced that we'd ever realized, so we thought that maybe he was right and we were wrong.

Then we got to this bit:

Bonnie gave Cosmo a much needed shot in the arm, then promptly deserted to the enemy, Cosmo's rival, Glamour, at Cond Nast. There were rumors she was using Glamour to get the job at Bazaar. Instead, she snubbed Cond Nast for irascible Jann Wenner's Us.

Here's the thing: Even though we're not Yale-certified journalists, we're quite confident that "snubbed" is not, technically speaking, a synonym for "got fired by."

Bonnie Fuller: Queen of the Tabloids [Forbes]