Wayne Lawson, Vanity Fair’s ‘Secret Weapon,’ Has Died

Working with Mr. Lawson, reporters said, was like taking a master class in writing: “He was a throwback to the old style of editing.”

Wayne Lawson, the longtime executive literary editor of Vanity Fair, whose graceful and punctilious editing shaped the magazine’s reporting on wealth, class and culture during its heyday — a 40-year run that began with the wretched excesses of the 1980s — producing a potent mix of Hollywood and Manhattan gloss, corporate and dynastic malfeasance, mayhem and murder, died on Sept. 23 in Manhattan. He was 94.

His death, at a hospital, was announced by Ellen Kiell, a friend and former colleague.

Mr. Lawson, as Tina Brown often observed, was the magazine’s secret weapon.

In 1984, when Ms. Brown took over the recently revived publication, a frothy pre-Depression-era title that had been shuttered since 1936, and recast it as an irresistible chronicle of the mechanics of power, she was just 30.

Mr. Lawson, a former playwright and skilled freelance book editor — he had molded the manuscripts of Gloria Swanson and Jerzy Kosinski — was 51. A dapper, Wisconsin-born child of the Depression, he was a Princeton graduate and Catholic convert with a wicked sense of humor, a steely mind and a taste for dry martinis (Beefeater with a twist), which he gave up only for Lent.

“That laid-back Midwestern style,” Ms. Brown noted, “hid his rapier editing gifts. He was able to take the wild foamings of innumerable writers and dig out the gold.”

Indeed, he edited many of the magazine’s stars, shaping their most impactful work.

Those stars included Marie Brenner, who wrote about the whistle-blower who brought down the tobacco industry (her piece was adapted into the 1999 thriller “The Insider,” starring Russell Crowe); the fall of Enron; and the dissolution of Donald Trump’s marriage to his first wife, Ivana. (After the article came out, the future president poured a drink down Ms. Brenner’s back at a Manhattan gala.)

There was also Maureen Orth, who relentlessly covered the dark side of Michael Jackson and Woody Allen, and was the first to detail the sexual abuse allegations against Mohamed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods (and the father of Dodi, Princess Diana’s paramour).

And, famously, Dominick Dunne, whom Ms. Brown had met at Ms. Brenner’s apartment a few months before the murder trial of the man who had strangled Mr. Dunne’s daughter, Dominique. Ms. Brenner suggested that he keep a diary of the trial as a way to process the pain.

If he did, Ms. Brown said, she’d like to publish it.

Mr. Dunne informed her that he had never practiced journalism. She told him not to worry, and handed him over to Mr. Lawson.

“I don’t think there’s a more intensely personal piece that a writer could entrust to an editor,” Mr. Dunne’s son Griffin said in an interview.

His first article, published in March 1984, was titled simply, “Justice: A Father’s Account of the Trial of His Daughter’s Killer.”

“Wayne got what the piece was about, and the man who wrote it,” Griffin Dunne said. “His was a revered name in our household. I think Dad always felt that it was luck, that it was his good fortune, to be paired with Wayne. If it had been somebody else, who knows?”

Their work together became a kind of redemption for Mr. Dunne, recently sober and suffering from the end of both his marriage and his career as a Hollywood producer, as well as his sorrow and rage at the death of his daughter. Mr. Lawson taught him the craft of journalism, and over the next few decades, with Mr. Lawson’s exacting help, Mr. Dunne covered the most explosive trials of the era, including those of the Menendez brothers and O.J. Simpson.

“I see them knee to knee at Wayne’s cubicle,” Ms. Brown wrote in her 2017 memoir, “The Vanity Fair Diaries,” “and I know all will be right with the world.”

Mr. Lawson edited, as one writer put it, not by the word but by the letter.

“He was a throwback to the old style of editing,” said the writer and filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer, who saved the manuscripts that Mr. Lawson had edited (on paper!), their margins embellished with comments delivered in perfectly formed cursive written with his signature red pencil. Mr. Lawson’s proofreading marks, Mr. Tyrnauer said, were works of art.

“I studied what he deleted and where he moved paragraphs around. It was like getting a master class in the structure of language. He was like a walking ‘Elements of Style,’” Mr. Tyrnauer said, referring to the classic primer on good writing.

“Some writers came in with copy and it needed work, but it had a beginning, a middle and an end,” he continued. “Others came in with a shoe box full of notes, and Vanity Fair indulged that. Some of the superstars had the greatest reporting skills and access, but when it came time to turn in their copy, there was no copy. Wayne was the great organizer of these epic stories, and he never panicked, and he made it fun. Fun is not a word you associate with being edited, but he made it a joy.”

As Ms. Brenner recalled, “If I was about to get a working-over, he’d say, ‘Darling, put on the Manolos and get in here. We have a day to deal with all the questions.’”

Graydon Carter, who took over the magazine in 1992 after Ms. Brown decamped for The New Yorker, remembered: “He had all the big writers. He was both their muse and their docent in wending their way through these narrative tales.”

Mr. Carter added, “He’d be closing a piece with Marie, and at the last minute she’d get a scoop and in it would go. He didn’t break a sweat. My tie would be askew, my hair was on end, the wheels always seemed to be falling off the bus, but with Wayne you always had a sure extra hand on the wheel.”

Wayne Albert Lawson was born on Feb. 9, 1932, in Ripon, Wis., the youngest child of Albert Lawson and Lucille (Tucker) Lawson.

His father ran a grocery store in Princeton, Wis., but lost it during the Great Depression, whereupon the family of five — Wayne had two older sisters — moved to Ripon. There, his father worked as a produce manager for a grocery store and his mother was employed by the Knitting Works factory, which made leather gloves, footwear and mittens.

Wayne excelled in school and received a scholarship to Princeton, where he won the university’s one-act play contest three years in a row, graduating in 1954. After earning an M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1958, he spent two years in Paris and then returned to Princeton to begin work on a Ph.D. in English.

A few weeks later, fed up with being a student — and encouraged by a classmate to keep writing plays — he moved to New York, where he lived for a time in a third-floor walk-up apartment on East 14th Street. His roommates included the actors Peter Falk, James Carruthers and Wayne Rogers.

Mr. Lawson never wrote the plays he had left Princeton to write; he decided that he didn’t have the talent or the drive. But the theater was his first love and throughout his life he remained steeped in it, reserving aisle seats most nights at the theater, the ballet or the opera, and often taking young Vanity Fair staffers along to give them their first taste of high culture.

Before moving to the magazine, Mr. Lawson worked for a time as an editor at Grolier, the publisher of encyclopedias, as a copy editor at The New York Times Book Review and as a freelance book doctor, notably for Mr. Kosinski and Ms. Swanson. In her admiring review of “Swanson on Swanson,” which appeared in 1980, when the actress was 81, Janet Maslin noted in The Times that Ms. Swanson “has led a longer and more interesting life than most, but it isn’t her story that makes her book so sparkling: It’s the way that story is told.”

A few days earlier, at her book party, the actress pulled Mr. Lawson aside, telling him, “Only you and I know who wrote this book. Thank you.”

Mr. Lawson grew up Lutheran, but converted to Catholicism after college. The mystery of the Roman Catholic Church appealed to him. As he told one friend, there was no mystery in the religion of his youth. He was a regular at mass and volunteered at homeless shelters and soup kitchens.

He found comfort in his faith, but was not exactly solemn in his devotions. One Easter he called a friend to say, “Have you heard? He is risen. We’re hitting every bar in town to celebrate.”

On deadline, Mr. Carter said, “He didn’t break a sweat. My tie would be askew, my hair was on end, the wheels always seemed to be falling off the bus, but with Wayne you always had a sure extra hand on the wheel.”Credit...Gasper Tringale

Mr. Lawson retired from Vanity Fair in 2014. He has no immediate survivors.

Ms. Brenner recalled that during a dark period in both of their lives, she once asked him, as she put it, “how he always dressed himself in such merriment.”

He replied: “Darling, I reread Shakespeare and go to the Met to look at the masterpieces created during the Inquisition. It works every time!”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5912424&forum_id=2#50187431)