In the In Times Past column, David W. Dunlap explores New York Times history through artifacts housed in the Museum at The Times.
The Oscar-winning director David Frankel knows a lot about movies and television. (“The Devil Wears Prada,” “Marley and Me,” “Sex and the City” and “Entourage” are among his credits.)
Magazines? Maybe not so much.
In the mid-90s, Mr. Frankel dreamed up Obit, a People-style magazine about the dead, covering worthy figures whose passing had gone unrecorded or insufficiently noted in the newspapers. His father thought it was a nifty idea. His father was Max Frankel (1930-2025), then the executive editor of The New York Times, who often turned first to the obituary pages when he picked up his morning paper.
“Dad encouraged me to share Obit with a few publishers I knew, and they thought it was the dumbest idea they’d ever heard,” David recounted at his father’s memorial service on June 18. “Because magazines depend on advertising, and who would want their product advertised in the pages of Obit?”
Max urged David to make one last pitch to Jack Rosenthal (1935-2017), then the editor of The Times Magazine. As there was traditionally little advertising in the first issue after Christmas, Mr. Rosenthal offered to publish a version of Obit then. “Only he wouldn’t call it Obit — sigh — he’d call it Lives Well Lived,” David said.
A copy of the first issue, Jan. 1, 1995, is in the Museum at The Times. In an introduction, the editors explained they had chosen “well-known people about whom there is nonetheless more to say,” “half-forgotten people about whom there is much to say,” and “people for whom we found a special witness.”
Forty lives were chronicled in Lives Well Lived. Among them were Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; Kurt Cobain; Ralph Ellison; Richard Nixon; the Olympic medalist Wilma Rudolph; and the inventors or creators of “Meet the Press,” decorative shower curtains, Teflon and Levittown.
The experiment was such a success that it was made a permanent year-end feature in 1995, under the name The Lives They Lived. It has long been overseen by Ilena Silverman, the deputy editor of The Magazine, who said the section may be more popular today than ever.
“With news flying at us day and night, it’s a respite to immerse yourself in a piece of writing that’s not about this very moment but about a full, complex life,” Ms. Silverman wrote in an email last week. “And writers love it too, delighting in the challenge of trying to create compelling character studies in miniature.”
And yes, she said in response to my question, the editors do hope to publish something about David’s father in the next issue.
David W. Dunlap, a retired Times reporter and columnist, is the curator of the Museum at The Times, which houses Times artifacts and historical documents.
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