A couple of months before he died, I had lunch with him at a Thai place near campus. That night I got an email.

“It was great having lunch with you at Singha,” he wrote. “On the way home I passed the Ritz East where A History of Violence was playing. I stopped in and watched the film—three stars. An altogether most satisfactory afternoon for this geezer.”

A few days later, Alan had another, more dramatic lunch with someone he had known for a much longer time: Herb Lipson.

Did you ever know that you’re my hero?
You’re everything I wish I could be.
I could fly higher than an eagle,
For you are the wind beneath my wings …

It was a weirdly hilarious performance—a middle-age bald guy lip-synching that schmaltzy Bette Midler number while making eyes at a big blown-up photo of Alan, who had been dead for just over a month. And yet somehow it seemed right.

The scene was a banquet room at the Society Hill Sheraton, and the crooner was a gifted writer and longtime fan of Alan’s named Bruce Buschel, who contributed some remarkable pieces to Philadelphia in the 1970s. He and another Alan protégé, Philadelphia Weekly editor Tim Whitaker, had organized the memorial service, and more than 200 people showed up, including the six editors who succeeded Alan at Philadelphia magazine.

They sat and listened and laughed and got lumps in their throats as, one by one, a couple of dozen of Alan’s old friends and protégés and colleagues—from old-timers like Fonzi and Rottenberg to relative newcomers like me—covered his virtual casket with verbal roses. For a crowd like that, the sheer quantity of the roses and the sweet fragrance they emitted were uncharacteristic—but genuine.

“Clearly,” says Loren Feldman, “there is no other person who could have brought that group of people together.”

 

Herb Lipson stood motionless at the podium. The restless, irreverent audience, sensing a moment of high drama, suddenly hushed. It was like a scene out of an updated Citizen Kane. The publisher once reviled in some quarters as the Man Who Whacked Alan was about to speak.

He confirmed the rumor: he and Alan had lunched together at the Palm, and had finally made up.

“At that lunch, Alan said, ‘So it’s taken 30 years to bury the hatchet,’” the impeccably dressed capo related. “I said, ‘There was no hatchet to bury.’

“I think he was the only editor I never fired,” he added. “And underneath it all, we loved each other.”

Many in the audience, including several he had fired, swear they saw tears in his eyes.

“The memorial service was one of the most psychologically challenging days of my professional life,” says Stephen Fried. “You could see all these generations of Phillymag people, whose lives were passing before their eyes and everyone else’s eyes. I felt honored to be part of it—to see Gaeton Fonzi up there, who I idolized—and at the same time saddened to see that the ugly breakup between Alan and Herb had been symbolically replayed so many times since, and that the professional family which had helped create so many great magazine people was so deeply and painfully dysfunctional.”

Fried compares the history of Philadelphia with that of Texas Monthly, which was started by Michael Levy W’68—who, after selling advertising for Philadelphia, decided to try the idea of a regional magazine in the Lone Star State [“Profiles,” March/April 2000].

“When I look at the history of Texas Monthly, I see what Phillymag could have been if it had more respect for its past and its accomplishments,” Fried notes. “Texas Monthly is a place where anyone who has made a contribution is forever considered part of the magazine. Phillymag is a place that has routinely ejected its best and brightest, so it has little institutional memory or appreciation of its legacy, except for Herb’s. And that’s sad, because I don’t know a publisher who is more keen on editorial excellence, more impressed by it and pleased to be part of it.

“Yet by constantly replaying the ouster of Alan, he assured exactly what has taken place: a huge diaspora of talented people who were bred to be a certain kind of journalist, good reporters and good writers and good colleagues, at Phillymag, but no longer have a relationship with the magazine. When you see how close Alan remained with his original, epic writers, and survey the wreckage of all the professional relationships since, it breaks your heart. So yes, when Herb got up on the podium and cried, it was Citizen Kane-ish indeed.”

Afterwards, the graying editors and writers and wise guys and cronies schmoozed and drank and laughed and mourned, remembering a distant time when nothing seemed so important as an amazing story from the latest issue of Philadelphia magazine.

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