Allow James Brady To Tell You About His Illustrious Career
Name-dropping old man James Brady is just about the oldest old man in all the working media. He's turning 80 on Saturday, so he decided to dedicate his Forbes column to that most interesting of topics: his own career. This is a slight departure from his usual practice of reciting as many names as he can in 800 words and being shocked about this modern age. Brady's learned a mess of things in his long, long media career; but "modesty" was not one of them: 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.
