Editor’s Note: Anyone who has read a women’s magazine in the last 25 years has most likely read the work of Myrna Blyth, who weighs in at wowOwow with this provocative piece. Myrna is the founding editor of More magazine, was the longtime editor-in-chief of Ladies’ Home Journal, and was senior editor for Family Circle magazine. She is the chairman of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. She has received many awards including the Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications, Inc., the Woman of Achievement Award from the New York City Commission on the Status of Women, and was named Publishing Executive of the Year by Advertising Age. Currently she writes for The National Review Online and is the editor-in-chief of Betty Confidential.

Jim Brady, who died last week, was a big deal in the media world. He started Page Six, the gossip column in the New York Post, and was its first editor. For years he wrote a column for Advertising Age called “Brady’s Bunch.” Even at 80, he still turned out a weekly celebrity interview column for Parade, a column for Forbes.com and a slew of books. He wrote novels about the high life in the Hamptons and about the tough life of being a Marine in Korea. Both were based on personal experience.

Early in his career, Jim was sent by Women’s Wear Daily to report from Paris. He became great friends with Coco Chanel who called him mon petit indien. Jim claimed he was not sure why she became so fond of him. I once saw a picture of Jim in a tux aboard the Queen Mary on the way home from his Paris assignment. I know why Chanel liked him so much. Always tall, dark and handsome, in his prime Jim was simply gorgeous.

Along the way, he also started W, was publisher of Harper’s Bazaar, edited New York Magazine, even edited The National Star for Rupert Murdoch. That might seem full of journalistic contradictions but that was Jim. He did it all easily, cheerfully, always made his deadlines, always stayed friends with his employers and colleagues. Another seemingly Jim-like contradiction: He lived on the fanciest lane in East Hampton in the smallest and simplest of houses.  

It was important when you were an editor of a magazine and he was writing “Brady’s Bunch” to take Jim to lunch at Michael’s or the Four Seasons. Over the years, over those lunches, Jim and I became good friends. He always said nice things about me in his columns, wrote enthusiastic blurbs about the books I wrote. He told me he liked my writing style, if not always my politics.

At lunch we would talk a little about the media business but a lot more about his daughters, who he adored, and his four grandchildren who called him “Pop Pop.” We also talked about his years in Korea and about being a Marine. He had won the Bronze Star. He had written a marvelous memoir about his experiences called The Coldest War and two novels about life in the Marines. A couple of  years ago he had a stroke and he told me that Marines had come daily to visit him in the hospital to make sure he had everything he needed,  practically standing guard at his door. Semper fi.

When his column was replaced by a much snarkier one in Ad Age, I told the editor that I was sure many readers missed his good-natured commentary on media. Jim’s column, I said, was sort of like eating Danish for breakfast. The editor said eating Danish was not good for you. But don’t most people still really prefer it to vinegar?

The last time we talked was New Year’s Eve. I wanted to send him, by e-mail, something my husband, also a longtime friend of his, had written. “Don’t send it to my e-mail,” he said. “Every publicist in New York fills it with invites to places I don’t want to go. I never even look at it.” It was snowing and he said that he had planned to go to a bar down the road for a drink or two. But he wasn’t driving in such weather. He had been to plenty of New Year’s Eve parties and so he would stay home. Maybe go to bed early. He sounded content.