Table of Contents
Westsider Cleveland Amory Author, radio humorist, and president of the Fund for Animals
EASTSIDER MAXENE ANDREWS
An Andrews Sister finds stardom as a solo
WESTSIDER LUCIE ARNAZ
To star in Neil Simon’s new musical
EASTSIDER ADRIEN ARPEL
America’s best-selling beauty author
WESTSIDER ISAAC ASIMOV
Author of 188 books
WESTSIDER GEORGE BALANCHINE
Artistic director of the New York City Ballet
WESTSIDER CLIVE BARNES
Drama and dance critic
WESTSIDER FRANZ BECKENBAUER
North America’s most valuable soccer player
WESTSIDER HIMAN BROWN
Creator of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater
FERRIS BUTLER
Creator, writer and producer of Waste Meat News
EASTSIDER SAMMY CAHN
Oscar-winning lyricist
WESTSIDER HUGH CAREY
Governor of New York state
WESTSIDER CRAIG CLAIBORNE
Food editor of the New York Times
WESTSIDER MARC CONNELLY Actor, director, producer, novelist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist
EASTSIDER TONY CRAIG
Star of The Edge of Night
EASTSIDER RODNEY DANGERFIELD
The comedian and the man
WESTSIDER JAN DE RUTH
Partner of nudes and Time covers
WESTSIDER MIGNON DUNN
The Met’s super mezzo
EASTSIDER DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS JR.
A man for all seasons
WESTSIDER LEE FALK
Creator of The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician
WESTSIDER BARRY FARBER
Radio talkmaster and linguist
WESTSIDER SUZANNE FARRELL
Star of the New York City Ballet
WESTSIDER JULES FEIFFER
Screenwriter for Popeye the Sailor
EASTSIDER GERALDINE FITZGERALD
Actress, director and singer
EASTSIDER JOAN FONTAINE
Actress turns author with No Bed of Roses
WESTSIDER BETTY FRIEDAN
Founder of the women’s liberation movement
WESTSIDER ARTHUR FROMMER
Author of Europe on $10 a Day
EASTSIDER WILLIAM GAINES
Publisher and founder of Mad magazine
WESTSIDER RALPH GINZBURG
Publisher of Moneysworth
EASTSIDER LILLIAN GISH 78 years in show business
WESTSIDER MILTON GLASER
Design director of the new Esquire
WESTSIDER PAUL GOLDBERGER
Architecture critic for the New York Times
EASTSIDER MILTON GOLDMAN
Broadway’s super agent
EASTSIDER TAMMY GRIMES
Star of Father’s Day at the American Place Theatre
WESTSIDER DELORES HALL
Star of Your Arms Too Short to Box with God
WESTSIDER LIONEL HAMPTON
King of the Newport Jazz Festival
WESTSIDER DAVID HAWK
Executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A.
EASTSIDER WALTER HOVING
Chairman of Tiffany & Company
EASTSIDER JAY JACOBS
Restaurant critic for Gourmet magazine
WESTSIDER RAUL JULIA
Star of Dracula on Broadway
EASTSIDER BOB KANE
Creator of Batman and Robin
WESTSIDER LENORE KASDORF
Star of The Guiding Light
EASTSIDER BRIAN KEITH
Back on Broadway after 27 years
WESTSIDER HAROLD KENNEDY
Author of No Pickle, No Performance
WESTSIDER ANNA KISSELGOFF
Dance critic for the New York Times
WESTSIDER GEORGE LANG
Owner of the Cafe des Artistes
WESTSIDER RUTH LAREDO
Leading American pianist
EASTSIDER STAN LEE
Creator of Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk
EASTSIDER JOHN LEONARD
Book critic for the New York Times
WESTSIDER JOHN LINDSAY
International lawyer
WESTSIDER ALAN LOMAX
Sending songs into outer space
EASTSIDER PETER MAAS
Author of Serpico and Made in America
WESTSIDER LEONARD MALTIN
Film historian and critic
EASTSIDER JEAN MARSH
Creator and star of Upstairs, Downstairs
EASTSIDER JACKIE MASON
Co-starring with Steve Martin in The Jerk
WESTSIDER MALACHY McCOURT
Actor and social critic
WESTSIDER MEAT LOAF
Hottest rock act in town
WESTSIDER ANN MILLER
Co-star of Sugar Babies
WESTSIDER SHERRILL MILNES
Opera superstar
WESTSIDER CARLOS MONTOYA
Master of the flamenco guitar
WESTSIDER MELBA MOORE
Broadway star releases ninth album
WESTSIDER MICHAEL MORIARTY
Star of Holocaust returns to Broadway in G.R. Point
WESTSIDER LeROY NEIMAN
America’s greatest popular artist
WESTSIDER ARNOLD NEWMAN
Great portrait photographer
EASTSIDER EDWIN NEWMAN
Journalist and first-time novelist
EASTSIDER LARRY O’BRIEN
Commissioner of the National Basketball Association
WESTSIDER MAUREEN O’SULLIVAN
Great lady of the movie screen
WESTSIDER BETSY PALMER
Star of Same Time, Next Year
WESTSIDER JAN PEERCE
The man with the golden voice
EASTSIDER GEORGE PLIMPTON
Author, editor and adventurer
EASTSIDER OTTO PREMINGER
Rebel filmmaker returns with The Human Factor
WESTSIDER CHARLES RANGEL
Congressman of the 19th District
WESTSIDER JOE RAPOSO
Golden boy of American composers
WESTSIDER MASON REESE
Not just another kid
WESTSIDER MARTY REISMAN
America’s best-loved ping-pong player
WESTSIDER RUGGIERO RICCI
World’s most-recorded violinist
WESTSIDER BUDDY RICH
Monarch of the drums
WESTSIDER GERALDO RIVERA
Broadcaster, author and humanitarian
WESTSIDER NED ROREM
Author and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer
WESTSIDER JULIUS RUDEL
Director of the New York City Opera
EASTSIDER DR. LEE SALK
America’s foremost child psychologist
EASTSIDER FRANCESCO SCAVULLO
Photographer of the world’s most beautiful women
WESTSIDER ROGER SESSIONS
Composer of the future
EASTSIDER DICK SHAWN
Veteran comic talks about Love at First Bite
EASTSIDER GEORGE SHEARING
Famed jazz pianist returns to New York
WESTSIDER REID SHELTON
The big-hearted billionaire of Annie
WESTSIDER BOBBY SHORT
Mr. New York to perform in Newport Jazz Festival
WESTSIDER BEVERLY SILLS
Opera superstar
GEORGE SINGER 46 years a doorman on the West Side
WESTSIDER GREGG SMITH
Founder and conductor of the Gregg Smith Singers
EASTSIDER LIZ SMITH
Queen of gossip
EASTSIDERS TOM & DICK SMOTHERS
Stars of I Love My Wife on Broadway
WESTSIDER VICTOR TEMKIN
Publisher of Berkley and Jove Books
WESTSIDER JOHN TESH
Anchorman for WCBS Channel 2 News
WESTSIDER RICHARD THOMAS
John-Boy teams up with Henry Fonda in Roots II
EASTSIDER ANDY WARHOL
Pop artist and publisher of Interview magazine
EASTSIDER ARNOLD WEISSBERGER
Theatrical attorney for superstars
EASTSIDER TOM WICKER
Author and columnist for the New York Times
EASTSIDER TOM WOLFE
Avant-garde author talks about The Right Stuff
WESTSIDER PINCHAS ZUKERMAN
Violinist and conductor
Westsider Cleveland Amory Author, radio humorist, and president of the Fund for Animals
It’s impossible to mistake the voice if you’ve heard it once — the tone of mock annoyance, the twangy, almost whiny drawl that rings musically in the ear. It could easily belong to a cartoon character or a top TV pitchman, but it doesn’t. It belongs to Cleveland Amory, an affable and rugged individualist who has been a celebrated writer for more than half of his 61 years. Amory is also a highly regarded lecturer and radio essayist: his one-minute humor spot, Curmudgeon at Large, is heard daily from Maine to California. His latest novel, nearing completion, is due to be published next fall.
TV Guide perhaps brought Amory his widest fame. He was the magazine’s star columnist from 1963 to 1976, when he gave it up in order to devote his time to other projects, especially the Fund for Animals, a non-profit humane organization that he founded in 1967. He has served as the group’s president since the beginning; now it has 150,000 members across the United States. Amory receives no pay for his involvement with the organization.
The national headquarters of the Fund for Animals is a suite of rooms in an apartment building near Carnegie Hall. The central room is lined with bookshelves, and everywhere on the 25-foot walls are pictures and statues of animals. Amory enters the room looking utterly exhausted. He is a tall, powerful-looking man with a shock of greyish brown hair that springs from his head like sparks from an electrode. As we sit back to talk and his two pet cats walk about the office, his energy seems to recharge itself.
Amory’s quest to protect animals from needless cruelty began several decades ago when, as a young reporter in Arizona, he wandered across the border into Mexico and witnessed a bullfight. Shocked that people could applaud the death agony of “a fellow creature of this earth,” he began to join various humane societies. Today he is probably the best known animal expert in America. His 1974 best-seller, Man Kind? Our Incredible War On Wildlife, was one of only three books in recent years to be the subject of an editorial in the New York Times — the others being Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed.
“A lot of people ask me, ‘Why not do something about children, or old people, or minorities?’” he begins, lighting a cigarette and propping one foot on the desk. “My feeling is that there’s enough misery out there for anybody to work at whatever he wants to. I think the mark of a civilized person is how you treat what’s beneath you. Most people do care about animals. But you have to translate their feelings into action. … We’re fighting a lot of things — the clubbing of the baby seals, the killing of dolphins by the tuna fishermen, the poisoning of animals. The leghold trap is illegal in 14 countries of the world, but only in five states in the U.S.
“The reason this fight is so hard is that man has an incredible ability to rationalize his cruelty. When they kill the seals, they say it’s a humane way of doing it. But I don’t see anything humane about clubbing a baby seal to death while his mother is watching, helpless.
“One of our biggest fights right now is to make the wolf our national mammal. There’s only about 400 of them left in the continental United States. The wolf is a very brave animal. It’s monogamous, and it has great sensitivity.”
One of his chief reasons for dropping his TV Guide column, says Amory, was because “after 15 years of trying to decide whether the Fonz is a threat to Shakespeare, I wanted to write about things that are more important than that.” His latest novel, a satirical work that he considers the finest piece of writing he has ever done, “is basically a satire of club life in America. … I sent it down to a typist here, and it came back with a note from the typist saying, ‘I love it!’ In all my years of writing, I don’t think I’ve ever had a compliment like that. So I sent the note to my editor along with the manuscript.”
An expert chess player, he was long ranked number one at Manhattan’s Harvard Club until his recent dethronement at the hands of a young woman. “I play Russians whenever I get a chance,” he confides. “I always love to beat Russians. I want to beat them all.” Once he played against Viktor Korchnoi, the defected Soviet who narrowly lost to world champion Anatoly Karpov this fall.
“I think he threw that final game,” says Amory of Korchnoi’s loss. “He didn’t make a single threatening move. I think he was offered a deal to get the kid and wife out. It was all set up from the beginning. I hate facts, so I don’t want any facts to interfere with my thesis.”
Born outside of Boston, he showed his writing talent early, becoming the youngest editor ever at the Saturday Evening Post. His first book, The Proper Bostonians, was published in 1947. “Then I moved to New York,” he muses, “because whenever I write about a place, I have to leave it.” Nineteen years ago, he took on as his assistant a remarkable woman named Marian Probst, who has worked with him ever since. Says Amory: “She knows more about every project I’ve been involved with than I know myself.”
A longtime Westsider, he enjoys dining at the Russian Tea Room (150 W. 57th St.).
There are so many facets to Cleveland Amory’s career and character that he defies classification. In large doses, he can be extremely persuasive. In smaller doses, he comes across as a sort of boon companion for everyman, who provides an escape from the woes of modern society through his devastating humor. For example, his off-the-cuff remark about President Carter:
“Here we have a fellow who doesn’t know any more than you or I about how to run the country. I’m surprised he did so well in the peanut business.”
EASTSIDER MAXENE ANDREWS
An Andrews Sister finds stardom as a solo
Maxene Andrews, riding high on the wave of her triumphant solo act that opened at the Reno Sweeney cabaret last November, is sitting in her dimly lit, antique-lined Eastside living room, talking about the foibles of show business. As one of the Andrews Sisters, America’s most popular vocal trio of the 1940s, she made 19 gold records in the space of 20 years. But as a solo performer, she more or less failed in two previous attempts — first in the early 1950s, when her younger sister Patty temporarily left the group, and again in 1975, after her hit Broadway show Over Here closed amid controversy. Not until 1979 did Miss Andrews bring together all the elements of success — good choice of songs, interesting patter between numbers, and a first-rate accompanist. The result is an act that is nostalgic, moving, and musically powerful.
“For years, our career was so different than so many, because our fans never forgot us,” she recalls, beaming with matronly delight. “I could walk in anyplace in the years I wasn’t working, and they’d say, ‘Maxene Andrews — the Andrews Sisters?’ Everybody was sort of in awe. So I was always treated like a star of some kind. But it’s nice to work; it’s a wonderful feeling to be in demand.”
She is a bubbly, husky, larger-than-life character of 61 with ruddy cheeks and a firm handshake. Deeply religious, sincere, and outspoken as always, she remains first and foremost an entertainer.
“I stick to the older, standard songs by great composers,” says Maxene of her act. “You know — Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin. … My partner is Phil Campanella, an extremely talented young man who plays the piano and sings harmony. … All the talking I do between the songs is ad libbing. I have never been successful at trying to do material that was written for me.”
She’s returning to Reno Sweeney on February 6 for a two-week engagement, then filming a TV show titled G.I. Jive before taking her act to Miami and Key West. Nightclub work, she says in her high, bell clear voice, “is not my future. I would like to get into concerts and I think that’s a possibility — probably a year from now.”
LaVerne, the eldest of the sisters, died in 1967. Patty stopped speaking to Maxene five years ago because of salary disagreements for Over Here. The contracts were negotiated separately, and when Maxene balked at accepting $1000 a week less than her sister, the national tour was abruptly canceled.
“I never in my wildest dreams thought that we would separate, because we’ve always been very close,” says Maxene sadly. “When people say, ‘You’re feuding with your sister,’ I say that’s not the truth. Because it takes two people to fight, and I’m not fighting anyone. She’s just not talking to me.
“It took me a long time to be able to handle the separation. I used to wake up every morning and say, ‘What have I done?’ But now I just throw it up to Jesus, and I leave it there. I hope and pray that one of these days we can bring everything out in the open, and clear it up. I love Patty very much, and I’m very surprised that she’s not out doing her act, because she’s very very talented. She’s been doing the Gong Show, which I — it’s none of my business, but I would highly disapprove of. I think it’s such a terrible show.”
Maxene owns a house outside of Los Angeles, and was “born again” a couple of years ago at the Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California. When she’s on Manhattan’s East Side, which is often, she shares the apartment of Dr. Louis Parrish, an M.D. and psychiatrist whom she describes as “a true Southern gentleman.”
The Andrews Sisters, who recorded such hits as “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” “Rum and Coca Cola,” “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” “Apple Blossom Time,” and “Hold Tight,” arrived in New York from Minneapolis in 1937 and took the city by storm with their wholesome, sugar-sweet harmonies and innovative arrangements. Soon they were making movies as well. Buck Privates (1940, which featured Abbott and Costello and the song “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” was Universal’s biggest moneymaker until Jaws came along in 1975. “I didn’t particularly care for making movies,” comments Maxene. “I found it very boring and very repetitious, and certainly not very creative. But working with Bud and Lou was a lot of fun.”
Now divorced, Maxene has a 33-year-old daughter named Aleda and a 31 year-old son, Peter, who live in Utah. She has written her autobiography, but it hasn’t been sold to a publisher “because I refuse to write the kind of books that they want written today. Ever since the Christina Crawford book came out, that’s all the publishers want. … I think the trend will pass, because we’re really getting saturated in cruelty and lust and whatever else you want to call it.”
Asked about the changes in her life since her religious reawakening, Maxene says, “Darling, everything has improved. My disposition has improved. I used to be impossible for anybody to work with. … I’m now reconciled to the feeling that I am never alone, and that in Him I have a partner, and that if I run into a problem that I can’t solve, then I’m not supposed to solve it — because we’re just mere mortals.”
WESTSIDER LUCIE ARNAZ
To star in Neil Simon’s new musical
Bad timing. That’s what had plagued me ever since I had tried to get an interview with Lucie Arnaz last June. Back then, I was supposed to get together with her downtown, but our meeting was canceled at the last minute. My second appointment, set for August 31 in her dressing room just before a performance of Annie Get Your Gun at the Jones Beach Theatre in Wantagh, Long Island, now seemed in jeopardy as well. I was kept waiting nervously outside while the house manager insisted that Lucie was engaged in “a very important telephone call.”
But when the young star finally emerged, her face beaming with delight, I found that my timing could not have been better. Lucie had just received official word that a major new Broadway role was hers. As we sat down to talk, Lucie was in one of those radiant moods that come only in times of triumph. She had been chosen for the female lead in a new musical, They’re Playing My Song, which is scheduled to open in Los Angeles in December and on Broadway in February. The show has music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager. The book is written by Neil Simon.
“I’m a lousy auditioner — at least, I thought I was,” grinned Lucie. “This new musical will be probably the pinnacle of what I’ve been aiming for. … It’s about a fairly successful lyricist who’s not nearly as successful as the composer she’s going to work with. Neil Simon has always wanted to do a play about songwriters. It’s a very hip, pop musical. It doesn’t have regular Broadway-type tunes.”
She flopped back on the sofa touching my arm from time to time for emphasis, and chatted on in her mildly raspy voice. Finally she moved to a seat in front of the mirror and invited me to keep talking while she put on her makeup. There is a quality about her that suggests toughness, but this impression melts away under her girlish charm. At 27, Lucie is already an 11-year veteran of professional acting and singing. When she performed at Jones Beach this summer, up to 8,000 people per night came to see her.
Lucie first transplanted herself from the West Coast to the West Side on a full-time basis last winter, although, she admitted, “I had a New York apartment for four years which I would visit every couple of months. For some sick reason, I really like New York. There’s a lot of crazy people doing strange things on the streets, but there’s also a lot of creative forces here.
“I went to do an interview this morning for my radio show and it started raining. By the time I had walked six blocks I was looking terrible, and it suddenly occurred to me that I would never present myself like that in California. In New York, who gives a damn if you’ve got water on you when you come to work? On the West Coast, the things that aren’t important they seem to put on pedestals.” Her radio show, which she started this year, is a nationally syndicated five-minute interview spot called Tune In With Lucie.
>From 1967 to 1972 she was a regular on her mother’s TV show, Here’s Lucy. She has made countless guest appearances on other shows, and performed lead roles in numerous musicals. Her parents, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz Sr., were divorced more than a decade ago and have both remarried.
“My mother was here for opening night, then she stayed a couple of days in New York. But she gets too lonely when my brother Desi and I go away for too long. He was here for most of the summer. He was doing a movie called How To Pick Up Girls. He played the guy who supposedly knew all about it — one of the two stars. He said, “It’s funny, I meet girls on the street, and New York has the most beautiful girls in the world, and when they ask me what I’m doing here and I tell them the name of the movie, they walk away and say, ‘You dirty toad!’” Desi also plays the groom in the new Robert Altman film, A Wedding.
“My father is now putting an album together of the music that was recorded for the old Lucy Show. Salsa music is coming back now, so he’s been asked to make an album of those tapes.”
Speaking of her hobbies, Lucie noted that “recently I started to build a darkroom in my house. The key word is started. It’s hard to get the time. … And I have been writing songs for the last couple of years. I’m a lyricist. I’ve sung them on things like Mike Douglas and Dinah.”
She enjoys all of New York, though at one time “the East Side gave me the ooga boogas. Then I found a couple of places there that were nice.” On the West Side, she likes to dine at La Cantina, Victor’s Cafe, and Ying, all on Columbus Avenue near 71st and 72nd Streets.
When the five-minute warning sounded in her dressing room, Lucie had to turn me out, but not before she divulged her philosophy about show business. “Am I ambitious?” she echoed. “I don’t know. There are people who are willing to really knock the doors down and do just about anything to get there. I’m not like that. Even now, when I go to the market, people come up to me and say, ‘Aren’t you. …?’ So I can imagine what it would be like to be a superstar. No, I’m not really looking forward to that.”
EASTSIDER ADRIEN ARPEL
America’s best-selling beauty author
As a young girl in Englewood, New Jersey, Adrien Arpel was determined that one day she would transform herself into a beautiful woman. After having her nose bobbed, she began to pester the ladies behind every cosmetic counter she could reach, and by the time she graduated from high school at 17, she knew more than they did. That same year she opened a small cosmetics shop in her hometown with $400 earned from baby-sitting. Today, at 38, she is the president of a $12 million-a-year company selling more than 100 beauty products throughout the U.S. and Europe.
Not content with mere business success, she recently turned her talent to writing her first book, Adrien Arpel’s Three-Week Crash Makeover/Shapeover Beauty Program (1977). It was on the New York Times’ best-seller list for six months, and is still selling briskly in paperback. Miss Arpel received $275,000 from Pocket Books for the reprint rights — the most ever for a beauty book.
“I have always been a rebel,” she proclaims regally, dressed in a stylish Edwardian outfit with padded shoulders at her midtown office. Quite heavily made up, with hot pink lipstick and a Cleopatra hairdo, she looks considerably younger than her age. The strident quality of her voice is reminiscent of a Broadway chorus girl’s, yet is delivered in a crisp, businesslike manner. During the interview she rarely smiles or strays from the question being asked. For some reason, she declines to say much about her new book, How to Look 10 Years Younger, which is scheduled for publication in April. Instead, she stresses the simple, common-sense rules about beauty that have guided her career from the beginning.
Probably her two most important innovations are her exclusive use of nature-based, chemical-free products (chosen from leading European health spas) and her policy of try-before-you-buy makeup. Complimentary makeup is offered every time a customer gets a facial at one of the hundreds of Adrien Arpel salons, such as those on the first floor of Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue.
Whenever she opens a new salon, Adrien spends the entire day on her feet, doing upwards of 35 facials with her own pale, delicate hands.
Upon being complimented for her attire, Miss Arpel gasps, “Thank you!” with schoolgirlish delight. There is something almost surreal in her creamy white complexion. “I think sunbathing is absolutely deadly, and that there is no reason in the world for a woman to sunbathe,” she says. Moments later, she admits that “high heel shoes are not very good for you,” but that she wears them anyway, “because they’re very fashionable. They are something that really can be a problem — if they’re pitched wrong. If you have a good shoe and it’s pitched well, you shouldn’t have a problem”
Does she think it would be a good idea for women to give up high heels altogether? “No, no. I don’t think you’ll ever get women to give up fashion. So we can tell what’s problems, what’s really hazardous, what’s going to be injurious to your health, and what’s going to just hurt a little bit.”
She never thought of writing a book until about four years ago, says Arpel, because “every second when I was away from my business, I spent with my daughter. Now my daughter’s 16 and a half, and has a boyfriend, and goes out, and doesn’t want to spend every minute with me. This all started when she was about 13.” Adrien and her husband, manufacturer Ronald Newman, moved to the New York metropolitan area right after they were married in 1961, and acquired an Upper East Side apartment last summer.
For her own health and beauty regimen, Adrien begins her typical day with jumping rope. She thinks weight training for women is “terrific,” but considers jogging the best all-around exercise. “Now, jogging has its negatives. I get up very early in the morning, and if you jog while it’s still dark out, it can be dangerous. I also have long hair, and you have to wash your hair after you jog. So for someone that works, I find that I can only do it three days a week.”
She has a facial twice weekly. “Facials are not luxuries. They are necessities to peel off dead surface skin. … Air pollution is the reason. If it wears away stone on buildings, think what it can do to the skin.” A facial, she explains, consists of “all different sorts of hand massages to deep-cleanse the skin with coconut-like milk, or some sort of sea kelp cleanser. Then there’s a skin vacuum which takes blackheads out — electric brushes with honey and almond scrubs which clean out the pores. And at the end, a mask. Nature-based again — orange jelly, sea mud, or spearmint.”
Arpel believes that a woman’s makeup should be largely determined by her profession. She reveals a humorous side when asked whether a woman stockbroker, for example, should always dress conservatively. “Well, if she was wearing a see-through blouse and no bra in her office, I’d certainly think she had poor taste,” she laughs.
A nonsmoker who consumes little alcohol, she confesses to at least one vice: “I drink two cups of coffee in the morning, sometimes more. Also not wonderfully good for you — but I never said I was a hundred percent good.”
WESTSIDER ISAAC ASIMOV
Author of 188 books
In 1965, when the Science Fiction Writers of America held a national convention to vote on the best science fiction ever published in this country, they sifted through hundreds of nominations dating back to the 1920s before coming up with the winners. Nightfall (1941) received the most votes for a short story and the Foundation trilogy won for the best series of novels. The author of both works: Westsider Isaac Asimov.
Had Asimov died 25 years ago, his fame would still be secure. But he remains more active than ever. He is, among other things, one of the most prolific authors in the world, publishing an average of one book and three or four magazine articles per month.
He is sitting at an electric typewriter in his West 66th Street penthouse when the doorman informs him that two visitors have arrived. Asimov is expecting a single reporter; but he says OK, so my roommate John Cimino and I get on the elevator. We stop at the 33rd floor. Asimov, clad in his undershirt, meets us at the door, hangs up our coats, and takes us into the living room adjacent to his working area. Along one wall is a glass-enclosed bookcase containing the 188 books Asimov has written in his 40-year literary career.
“This is my section of the apartment,” he says. “The blinds are down because I always work by artificial light.” I tell him that John has come along to ask questions about science — Asimov is an expert in more than 20 scientific disciplines — while I will be asking about science fiction Asimov complies, and after about 10 minutes, he opens us completely and gives each answer with enthusiasm.
He has lost a little weight recently, and in fact had a mild heart attack earlier this year, but Dr. Asimov is as creative as ever — perhaps more so. One of his latest projects is Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It first appeared on the newsstands early in 1977 and has since built up a broad readership throughout the U.S., Canada and Great Britain.
“It was the idea of Joel Davis of Davis Publications,” says Asimov. “He publishes Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and many others. He decided that science fiction was doing well and that he wanted a science fiction magazine — something with the name of someone, like Ellery Queen. … He asked me if I was interested. … I wasn’t really, because I had neither the time nor the inclination to edit the magazine.”
Asimov found the time. He and Davis worked out a formula for the author to lend his name and picture to the magazine cover and to become the editorial director. Asimov writes the editorials and some of the fiction, answers readers’ letters and helps with the story selection. George Scithers, the editor, has a major role in deciding the magazine’s contents.
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine began as a quarterly and if all goes well, will soon become a monthly. Some of its contributors are writers in their 20s who are publishing their first stories. Containing many illustrations and almost no advertising, the 200-page magazine is available at numerous Westside newsstands for $1.
Born in Russia and raised in Brooklyn, Asimov graduated from college and published his first short story while in his teens. For many years, he taught biochemistry at Boston University. In 1970, he returned to New York and settled on the West Side. He is married to a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who practices under her maiden name of Dr. Janet Jeppson; her office is on the opposite end of the apartment. She too is a writer, having published a science fiction novel and some stories.
“The West Side, as far as I’m concerned, has more good restaurants than any other place on earth, though I have not been to Paris,” says Asimov, who hates flying. He made a trip to Europe last year on the Queen Elizabeth II — and came back on the return voyage. “It wasn’t a vacation,” he says. “I gave two talks each way and I wrote a book.”
The IRS, he says, cannot believe that he doesn’t take vacations. “In the last seven years,” he testifies, there has been only one time — two days in June of 1975 — that I went on a trip and didn’t do a talk. And even then, I took some paper with me and worked on a murder mystery. You see, a vacation is doing what you want to do and to stop doing what you have to do... But I like what I, so I’m on vacation 365 days a year.”
Asimov’s biggest writing project these days is his massive autobiography, which he expects to finish by the end of the year. “It will probably be in two volumes,” says Asimov, grinning, “which is unreasonable, considering that I have led a very quiet life and not much has happened to me.”