Jesse Kornbluth, whose sly chronicles of cultural excess, celebrity and author profiles, personal essays and investigative work enlivened the pages of a newsstand’s worth of magazines during the medium’s last golden age, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 79.
His brother, Richard Kornbluth, said the cause of his death, in an assisted living facility, was Lewy body dementia.
Mr. Kornbluth “rocketed out of Harvard,” as his fellow journalist Marie Brenner put it in an interview, as a published author in 1968. During his senior year, he had compiled “Notes From the New Underground,” an anthology of articles from the era’s counterculture newspapers. The book included samplings from the short-lived Boston broadsheet The Avatar, where he had worked for a time and for which he had spent a night in jail after being arrested for selling copies on the street. After graduation, he lived for a few months at a commune called the Farm in Montague, Vt., before realizing that commune life was not for him.
“He was not a manual labor type of person,” said Tom Fels, one of the commune’s members, recalling Mr. Kornbluth’s unhappy attempts to chop wood for the Farm’s stove.
“Jesse’s ultimate view of things was that we were all losers,” said Mr. Fels, whose 2008 memoir, “Farm Friends: From the Late Sixties to the West Seventies and Beyond,” included a chapter on Mr. Kornbluth, “and he wanted to go to New York and win.”
So he did, embarking on a warp-speed freelance career. He contributed to, among many other publications, The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest and New Times, an alternative biweekly newsmagazine published in the 1970s.
He also worked as a ghostwriter, wrote screenplays (still unproduced) and a play about Matisse, and wrote or co-wrote a number of nonfiction books, including “Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken” (1992), a fairly sympathetic biography of the fallen junk-bond king that grew out of a profile he had written for Vanity Fair, to which he contributed for nearly a decade.
“Jesse was the expert on everything,” Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair, said by email, “or could sound like one.”
Mr. Kornbluth’s “superpower,” Ms. Brenner said, “was the Rolodex of references from Bob Marley to Céline that might come in a turbocharged flow at any chance encounter.”
Griffin Dunne, the actor, filmmaker and author, recalled marveling at Mr. Kornbluth’s output and his multitasking skills: “He could hold a conversation with me while hunt-and-pecking out an article on deadline on his IBM Selectric with a huge joint in his mouth.”
For The Times Magazine, Mr. Kornbluth wrote about the Mexican government’s effort to eradicate the marijuana trade by spraying the herbicide paraquat on marijuana fields; about the disco industry, which was a big thing in 1979; and about the author Joe McGinnis, who was at work on “Fatal Vision,” his controversial book about the case of a Green Beret charged with the murder of his pregnant wife and daughters.
Mr. Kornbluth was a prolific profiler, the author of countless Vanity Fair cover articles on celebrities like Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner and Faye Dunaway. He did not gush, but he was not a takedown artist, either. Many of his subjects were part of his social circle. But in 1983, after he wrote about Nora Ephron in New York magazine on the eve of the publication of “Heartburn,” her roman à clef about her marriage to Carl Bernstein, she never spoke to him again.
The article of which he was most proud was “The Woman Who Beat the Klan,” published in The Times Magazine in 1987, about Beulah Mae Donald, who sued the Ku Klux Klan for the 1981 murder of her son — he was hanged from a tree, with his throat slit, and no one was charged with the crime — and won.
In 2023, he wrote about how he came to that story. The Southern Poverty Law Center had sent a postcard photo of 19-year-old Michael Donald, hanging from a tree, as a fund-raising request. It was a horrific image, yet for months Mr. Kornbluth displayed it on his fireplace mantel. He had no idea, at first, why he kept it there.
“Every time I looked at it,” he said, “I had to turn away. It took me months to realize that the postcard was actionable. I was supposed to do something about it.”
Jesse Lyle Kornbluth was born on Jan. 4, 1946, in Queens, the eldest of two sons. His father, Samuel Kornbluth, was a controller at Macy’s, and his mother, Pearl (Greenwald) Kornbluth, worked first for her husband and then as a coat-and-suit buyer in another department store. The family moved often for Samuel’s work, to Kansas City, Houston and elsewhere.
Pearl Kornbluth wanted her sons to go to the Groton School, a prep school, but, Mr. Kornbluth wrote at her death in 2020, the director of admissions told her, “There’s only one Jew at Groton” — a math teacher. Milton Academy, in Milton, Mass., accepted both boys, after which they both went to Harvard. Jesse graduated in 1968, with a degree in English.
In addition to his brother, Mr. Kornbluth is survived by his wife, Karen Collins; their daughter, Helen Kornbluth; his stepchildren, Georgia Tapert Howe and Nicholas Tapert; and four step-grandchildren. His marriages to Katherine Johnson and the author Annette Tapert ended in divorce.
Mr. Kornbluth was an early internet pioneer, jumping in in the mid-1990s, when AOL was ascendant and most people were still baffled by the new medium. In 1996, he and Carol Fitzgerald, a former Condé Nast executive, founded the website Bookreporter.com as an online community for book lovers. A year later, he was hired as AOL’s editorial director.
He enjoyed the luxuries of being an executive on staff — while it lasted. He was laid off in 2002, when the tech boom went bust. In 2004, he started his own website, Headbutler.com — a cultural concierge service, as he explained it — for which he wrote about movies, plays, books and ideas, at no charge. His last post was in April 2024, when his illness took over.
Mr. Kornbluth was the author or co-author of nine books, including two novels. The first, “Married Sex” (2015), was about a happily married couple who embark on a ménage à trois. The author Sarah Kokernot, writing about it in The Times Book Review, declared it a “skillfully written, lighthearted and clever story that manages to be steamy but never salacious.”
The novel’s narrator, David, was a proxy for Mr. Kornbluth: charming, self-deprecating and a lover of smart, opinionated women, including his wife. “More Leonard Cohen than Hugh Hefner,” Ms. Kokernot wrote, “David believes that ‘sex is, at the very least, the reward we get for surviving the day; at the very most, it’s the life force.’”
His second novel, published in 2020, was “JFK and Mary Meyer: A Love Story,” in which he imagined the diaries of Mary Pinchot Meyer, the ex-wife of a C.I.A. official and a paramour of John F. Kennedy’s, whose unsolved murder — she was gunned down on a Georgetown towpath — led to myriad conspiracy theories. It, too, was well reviewed.
Back in 1986, Mr. Kornbluth had mused on his decades as a freelancer.
“It’s like, ‘Gee, this has been fun, but isn’t it an apprenticeship for something else?’” he told The Times Magazine. “My mother only recently stopped saying, ‘It’s not too late to go to law school.’”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk. More about Penelope Green
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