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By September 1976, Cher had dumped Geffen, had a Vegas wedding to Gregg Allman, whom
People
called a “coked-out cracker of a rock star,” had an on-air reunion with Sonny while she was pregnant with Allman’s baby, and encouraged Allman to testify against his friends in a very messy drug trial. “Our whole world as we knew it was shot to ratshit,” Cher complained. “I ought to write a soap opera.” Instead, she decided to tell all to
People.
“The Hollywood community was a little appalled that someone would talk so openly about her husband’s drug problems,” said a
People
editor, who decided that the drama would make a good cover story. A reporter visited Cher at the Beverly Hills house she had shared with Allman, who had swelled from reed-thin to two hundred pounds and bopped around the house during the interview wearing sandals. “Why do you feel so strongly about this drug issue?” the reporter asked Cher.

“Because,” Cher matter-of-factly told the reporter, “my father was a heroin addict.”

Back at the Time-Life building, top
People
editors had a meeting to discuss what to do with this explosive bit of information. They decided, first, to make sure it was accurate. They located Cher’s father, John Sarkisian, who was living in a retirement community. “The story was true and would have been very big news at the time,” said Stolley. “Everybody in this man’s retirement community knew that he was Cher’s dad, but nobody knew about his history with addiction. He most definitely did not want it made public.”

Stolley consulted with
People’s
lawyer. “He said we could go with it,” said Stolley. “We had it nailed. It wasn’t libel. The privacy issue was a close call, but we could probably get away with it.” Stolley had the information edited out of the story. “I
was not going to ruin that old man’s life,” he said, “just for the sake of gossip.”
*

Stolley said he has no regrets. “I think gossip can be the enemy of civilization,” Stolley declared. He actually banned the word
gossip
from the pages of
People
when he was the editor there. “I think the dissemination of cruel, mean-spirited information which is fundamentally disturbing to a human being, to his family, to his friends, is a blow to civilized society.” Such sentiments may sound surprisingly high-minded coming from the founding editor of
People
magazine—the publication that brought tabloid topics out of Tabloid Valley and into the mainstream—but Stolley wasn’t motivated solely by the moral issue at hand; there was also a strong element of pragmatism in his philosophy. At the time Cher told
People
about her father’s addiction, she was happy for the magazine to use it. But, Stolley knew, such spontaneous revelations often came back to haunt celebrities. In its early days,
People
protected its subjects from such self-destructive disclosures.

The Cher episode was not an isolated incident. There was the time that a then wildly popular country and western singer told
People
that the only reason he married his wife was because he got her pregnant. Or the time Truman Capote, fresh out of an alcohol rehab center, invited
People
to accompany him to a gym to do an article on his new healthy lifestyle. During the interview, Capote downed two glasses of vodka and kept falling over, but the
People
reporter helped prop the writer up on a Nautilus machine long enough to get pictures.

“Celebrities were very naive back then,” said Stolley. “We had to be very, very careful about what we would let them say. They would talk about their problems or their ex-husbands or ex-wives in the most scurrilous ways. They were venting. It was like they were talking to their psychiatrist. We constantly had to censor them to protect them from themselves.”

Stolley knew that if
People
magazine started to burn its subjects—even if it was with the star’s own words—celebrities would stop coming to the magazine with their stories. It would mean
the end of a cozy relationship that had made
People
magazine the publishing phenomenon of the decade.
“People
will never stoop to the cheap thrill,” Stolley vowed when the magazine was launched in 1974. “We will not pander to baser instincts.” Of course, he wasn’t about to fill
People
with articles about Vietnam or Watergate, either. He had already worked for a magazine that did that, and it all ended in one of the most traumatic experiences of his life.

That December morning in 1972 was still vivid in Stolley’s mind. He was an assistant managing editor of
Life
magazine, and had been summoned with three hundred other journalists to the eighth floor auditorium of the Time-Life Building that cold, overcast Friday to listen as a succession of men in gray suits struggled to justify the inevitable. The crowd was filled with some of the most world-weary photographers and editors in the country, but sometimes even they succumbed. Faces were streaked with tears, and occasionally a body here or there would heave with stifled sobs. Even the men at the podium, the bean counters and the top corporate editors who made the decision, were so distraught that their voices cracked in midsentence:

“… I deeply regret to tell you that after this issue,
Life
magazine will be no more….”

“… the emotional agony behind this move …”

“… we did everything possible …”

“… this painful decision …”

It was a wake for what many believed to be the absolute best that the world of journalism had to offer.
Life
was only thirty-six years old, but it had the aura of an immortal. One by one, the other great picture magazines had died: the esteemed
Saturday Evening Post
succumbed in 1969, and
Look
fell in 1971. For months rumors had swirled that
Life
magazine was next, but no one believed them. Then, on that Friday, December 8, 1972, came the official word that those terrible rumors were true.

Life
was still a great magazine. It ran intelligent articles and important photographs on the issues of the times: shocking picture essays of Vietnam and the My Lai massacre, revealing photos
of Woodstock, horrifying shots of race riots in Birmingham.
Life
was an expensive operation, with a huge staff and bureaus around the world. Circulation was still very high: 5.5 million, but the figure was misleading; Time Inc. was so eager to keep the number up that it was charging readers less than it cost to publish
Life.
Almost all the magazine’s sales came from subscriptions, and Time Inc. offered deals so that many people were getting
Life
for about ten cents an issue; it cost twenty-six cents an issue to produce and mail. The difference was supposed to be made up in ad revenue, but by 1971, a one-page color ad in
Life
cost $50,000— more than a one-minute commercial on prime time television. Advertisers had been deserting the magazine for television, and if
Life
tried to increase revenue by hiking its ad rates, it would lose even more advertisers.
Life
magazine had lost more than $47 million over the previous three years.

Not everyone mourned the death. “It’s no great loss,” said an ad executive from Ted Bates & Co.
“Life
didn’t die of a sudden heart attack, but rather of hardening of the arteries.” Wall Street applauded the move: The day of the announcement, Time-Life’s stock went up $6.50. The next day it was up again, a total of ten points for the two days, to $59.

The hardest thing, some thought, would be breaking the news to Clare Booth Luce, the feisty widow of Time-Life founder Henry Luce. She was a big champion of
Life
in its early years and continued to be a brilliant cultural arbiter. Reached at her home in Honolulu, Luce said, “I was wondering when you fellows would get around to it.”

The still-shaken
Life
staff headed back to their offices to put together a farewell issue. “We have this last issue to cling to,” said Stolley, “and suspend belief that it’s all over.” Then, a reporter from a local television station came in and started nosing around with his camera crew, trying to interview people. Most turned their backs or left the area to avoid the intruder, but famed photojournalist Co Rentmeester feared no one. When the TV reporter approached the photographer, and asked a question or two, Rentmeester hauled off and belted the television man squarely in the jaw. Some
Life
staffers cheered him on, others tried to hold him back. Everyone, however, knew that no matter
who won the fight,
Life
had lost the battle. “I have that same terrible feeling you have when you hear a declaration of war,” said Jozefa Stuart, editor of
Life’s
entertainment department. “It’s that feeling you get when you know that there’s going to be a terrible change in your life.”

By 1973, the world was changing, and Time Inc wasn’t. The company had faltered in several attempts to break into the television industry, and efforts to come up with new print titles weren’t faring much better. Time Inc. hadn’t successfully launched a weekly magazine in twenty years. Executives there put together a team of experts—dubbed the Magazine Development Group—whose sole purpose was to come up with a magazine that the public wanted to read. They analyzed spending patterns, devised flow charts, contemplated social trends, and quizzed demographic groups without success. They proposed a magazine for liberated women, a fitness and health magazine, an upscale photography magazine, but none of their ideas tested well in the marketplace. At the time, the two best-selling weeklies in the country were the
National Enquirer
and
TV Guide,
but Time Inc. was considered a reputable publisher that didn’t traffic in that sort of fare.

Then, Andrew Heiskell, the chairman of the board at Time Inc., came up with a proposal for a magazine devoted exclusively to covering people. No events, no issues, just people. The idea was not warmly received. The MBAs who were consulting to the Magazine Development Board called it “one of the stupidest publishing ideas we’d ever heard of.” Members of the group ridiculed the idea and dragged their feet, but because the idea came from Heiskell, it was pushed through. The Time chairman would periodically pop by, asking “How you doing with my
People
idea?” When a test issue was put together, it was widely held in contempt at Time Inc. “The consensus [on
People]
was powerfully negative,” recalled one member of the Committee. “The words most often used were ‘sleazy’ and ‘cheap.’ ”

A copy was sent to Henry Luce’s unsentimental widow. She liked it. More important, she showed the magazine to her manicurist, secretary, maids, cook, and hairdresser. They loved
People
—and they were the potential readers. “Please let me know
how you make out with the advertisers,” Clare Booth Luce wrote. “If you make out well, nothing can stop
People.”

In 1973, Dick Stolley was considering getting out of the journalism business. “The death of
Life
was a terrible experience,” he said. “When one magazine has broken your heart,” he said, “why give another one the same chance?” Stolley had fallen in love with journalism at a very early age; he became the sports editor of his hometown paper in Pekin, Illinois, when he was fifteen years old; he would rise at 5
A.M
. and head to the newspaper office before going to high school. After attending Northwestern’s journalism school, he had a few newspaper jobs before he ended up at
Life,
where he spent nineteen years. Stolley was one of
Life’s
brightest stars. He ran the magazine’s biggest bureaus, including those in Los Angeles, Washington, and Paris. It was Dick Stolley who negotiated the famous, if somewhat controversial, deal to pay $150,000 for the exclusive rights to the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination. When
Life
folded, Time executives were eager to keep Stolley and parked him on the Magazine Development Committee. Stolley wasn’t sure he’d stay. He was considering quitting the business altogether, going back to Illinois and running for political office, or possibly becoming a professor or getting a degree in law. Anything but journalism, which seemed to be a dying industry.

Then Stolley saw the test issue for
People
magazine. The cover featured a grinning Liz Taylor, decked out in a denim cap and an embroidered denim jacket. Inside were grainy photographs of Taylor and Burton, who had just been through one of their many very public battles, attempting a reconciliation at Sophia Loren’s villa. The pictures looked as if they’d been shot with a paparazzo’s telephoto lens; the short, jagged text seemed to have been hammered out on an ancient typewriter in somebody’s basement. Other articles in the issue peeked at Ali McGraw’s romance with Steve McQueen and at Faye Dunaway’s various escapades. There was even a shot of Barbara Carrera, then the Chiquita Banana Girl, topless. The entire package was appallingly cheap and obvious. “It looked,” Stolley recalled, “like a whore house magazine.”

As Stolley thumbed through the tawdry, vulgar magazine that
was so unlike his beloved
Life
or anything that the distinguished Time Inc. had ever published, his spirits lifted and the bounce returned to his step, because he realized that maybe there was a future for print journalism after all.

In August 1973, Time Inc. tested its Liz Taylor issue in eleven cities; the results were startling. In some areas, it sold 38.4 percent of issues on newsstands, which is quite respectable, but in cities where
People
was promoted on television, it sold an almost unheard of 85.2 percent. The message was clear:
People
was aiming for the television audience.

“I said, ‘I want to run this magazine,’ ” Stolley said. “I liked it, but I really wanted to redesign it, because it looked like a piece of shit … In that form it seemed sleazy, shocking. To make it work, you had to encase it in a comfortable, conventional format.” The first thing to go was the topless motif; several distributors refused to carry the test issue of
People
because of the risqué Chiquita Banana photo. “Boy, I learned my lesson on that one,” Stolley said. “You could print hair-raising information about people’s relationships, sex lives, and finances … but no breasts.”