Byron Dobell, 89, noted magazine editor . By William Grimes New York
Times . NEW YORK - Byron Dobell, an editor at Time-Life, Esquire, and
New York magazine who played a pivotal role in the careers of Tom
Wolfe, Mario Puzo, and other writers, died Jan. 21 at his home in New
York. He was 89. The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease,
his daughter, Elizabeth, said. In the early 1960s, Mr. Dobell was a
managing editor at Esquire, under Harold Hayes, when Tom Wolfe
approached the magazine offering to write about Southern California's
subculture of car customizers. Exhaustive reporting led to a severe
case of writer's block. With the deadline fast approaching, Wolfe
called Mr. Dobell to say that he could not produce the article. "OK, he
tells me, just type out my notes and send them over and he will get
somebody else to write it," Wolfe wrote in the preface to his first
book, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Under the
salutation "Dear Byron," Wolfe began typing out his notes overnight, in
a mounting frenzy as inspiration grabbed hold. "I wrapped up the
memorandum about 6:15 a.m., and by this time it was 49 pages long," he
wrote. "I took it over to Esquire as soon as they opened up, about 9:30
a.m. About 4 p.m. I got a call from Byron Dobell. He told me they were
striking out the 'Dear Byron' at the top of the memorandum and running
the rest of it in the magazine. The essay, published in November 1963,
is now considered a milestone in the evolution of the New Journalism.
Mr. Dobell also worked with Gay Talese and David Halberstam at Esquire
as they made the transition from newspaper work to long-form
journalism. "Byron was really the sensitive person at Esquire when it
came to prose writing," Talese said in an interview. "In my case, he
had ideas for stories that I didn't think were worthy, but when I did
them - they were so successful. He was the center of that magazine.
Byron Maxwell Dobell was born on May 30, 1927, in the Bronx. His
father, Jacob, an immigrant from Lithuania, was a floor manager in a
garment factory. His mother, the former Marie Schaeffer, was a
homemaker. He began making charcoal sketches from casts at the
Heckscher Foundation as a teen and assembled a portfolio that earned
him admission to the High School of Music and Art. He went on to attend
Columbia University, where he studied humanities and earned a
bachelor's degree in 1947. After serving two years in the Army, he
spent time in Paris on the GI Bill, nominally to study at the Sorbonne.
Early in his career, he was a picture editor at US Camera, an associate
editor at Popular Photography, and a features editor at Pageant, a
small-format general-interest monthly, and at This Week, a supplement
for Sunday newspapers. He began his first stint at Time-Life in 1960,
as a senior editor at Time-Life Books. He would return to the company
in the early 1970s as the associate director of editorial planning at
Time-Life Books and later in the decade as senior editor of Life. He
left Esquire in 1967 to become the editor of Book World, a literary
weekly started by The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune. He took
an irreverent approach. He gave Puzo, who had yet to achieve fame as
the author of "The Godfather," free rein as a reviewer, putting his
takedown of Paris Review's celebrated author interviews on the
journal's front page. In 1969, Mr. Dobell was named editor-in-chief of
the newly formed book division of McCall's Publishing, a subsidiary of
Norton Simon. It was an ill-fated venture that lasted only a year, but
he landed on his feet, joining Clay Felker, whom he had replaced at
Esquire, as managing editor at New York magazine in 1972. After Rupert
Murdoch bought New York magazine, Mr. Dobell returned for two tours of
duty at Esquire, serving as editor-in-chief in 1977 and as a top-level
editor under succeeding changes of ownership. At American Heritage,
which he edited from 1982 to 1990, Mr. Dobell shifted its emphasis to
20th-century history, with stories on the Watergate scandal and the
rise of suburbia. He was inducted into the Magazine Editors' Hall of
Fame in 1998. Mr. Dobell was married four times. His first and fourth
marriages ended in divorce. His second and third marriages ended with
his wives' deaths. In addition to his daughter, he leaves a grandson.
For many years, Mr. Dobell met weekly to paint from a model with the
caricaturist David Levine, the designer Walter Bernard, and the
portraitist Aaron Shikler. In his spare time, he painted portraits of
friends. "Eventually, I was getting so many commissions that I said to
my late wife, 'You know, I think I can make a living painting
portraits, and other things,' " he told The Observer. He had 11 solo
shows in New York, and his portraits of Betty Friedan, Edward M.
Kennedy, and Felker are in the collection of the Smithsonian's National
Portrait Gallery. His success as an artist, he told The Observer, was
"not only astonishing to my friends, but totally astonishing to me.
