For some people, Alan’s storyline ended in 1980. He got whacked, sort of—an intra-Family turf war, where the turf was respect and principle. In a sense, he whacked himself. When publisher Herb Lipson crossed the territorial line by hiring a writer without consulting him, Alan walked out. He had quit several times before. But this time the capo refused to ask him to return.

Alan was now a Don without a Family. The Family begged him to swallow his pride. But the capo would not yield, and neither would the Don. The result: excommunication with extreme bitterness, at least on Alan’s side. In the years that followed, a tradition began: When an editor of Philadelphia magazine got fired, he would get a phone call from Alan, and they would have lunch. Nobody should be editor of that magazine, he would say, unless they always had their bags packed.

Incidentally, of the six editors who succeeded Alan, three were Penn alumni: Kaplan, Fried, and Feldman. Fried made sure he had a book contract the entire time he was editor, so that he would know exactly what he would be doing when the inevitable axe fell.

Yet Alan’s story did not end there. He was never Don of a magazine again, but he became a great consigliere, a consultant who helped create a broad mix of magazines. One was Manhattan, Inc., whose publisher was … Herb Lipson.

“It was the hot magazine of the moment in the mid-to-late ’80s,” notes Feldman, “and Alan’s fingerprints were all over it. He came up with the idea and he convinced Herb to hire Jane Amsterdam, then a young editor at The Washington Post Style section.” Manhattan, Inc. won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 1985 and in Fried’s view, “forever changed all business writing.” (Under a different editor, it soon folded.)

Alan left his mark on other magazines—including Avenue and PhillySport and Atlantic City—and some of his best ideas never saw the light of day. He also served as a mentor for scores of young writers and editors, giving advice, dispensing patronage, and standing up for them, right or wrong.

What inspired so much loyalty among the ink-stained wretches who worked for and with him or came to him for counsel or encouragement or understanding was his strange mix of wit, blunt honesty, wisdom, generosity, and practical advice. “He was a collector, not of art, but of people,” said Philadelphia mainstay Carol Saline. “And he had a way of making each of us feel like we were the prize piece in his collection.”

Furthermore, “Alan was a one-man employment service, and he was always sending me and others notice of interesting job openings,” recalls Feldman.

Though he genuinely liked writers, and appreciated what they were trying to do, Alan didn’t pull punches when he didn’t like what they were writing or saying.

Lisa DePaulo, who started her career at Atlantic City in the early 1980s simply because Alan was consulting there, recalled an email he sent her not too long before he died.

“Dear Lisa,” it read. “I saw you on TV. What crap.”

“Like a great many others, I owe my career to the man,” she wrote. “Because he never let me forget how good I was. Or how bad I was. That was Alan’s gift.”

When he liked a story, he’d scribble a Terrific! in the margin. Two Terrifics meant he liked it a lot. DePaulo admitted that she “lived for three terrifics from Alan Halpern.”

Her first assignment from him, which turned into a cover story, was to walk up and down the beach talking to the lifeguards.

“Alan saw a story in everything,” she wrote. “And, for better or worse, he made me look at life the same way.

“Alan used to say (long before anyone else did), ‘Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.’ The journalism police didn’t like that very much. But Alan was correct. In his brilliant, iconoclastic way, nothing was more important than the telling of the story.”

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