Patricia Ryan, 75, an Editor at Time Inc., Dies

The cause was lung cancer, said her husband, Ray Cave.

Ms. Ryan became the second managing editor of People, the immensely popular weekly devoted to personalities in the news, in 1982. She was  the first woman to be appointed to the top editorial job at a Time Inc. publication in 27 years.

Known at the time as People Weekly, the magazine had made its appearance in 1974 and under its founding managing editor, Richard B. Stolley, became known for its celebrity covers and snappy prose. When Mr. Stolley moved to Life magazine, Ms. Ryan, who had been an editor at People for four years, was named to succeed him.

In her five-year tenure, she allowed articles to run longer and expanded the magazine’s coverage of more serious news, exploring topics like sexual harassment on college campuses, the spreading AIDS epidemic and children orphaned by civil war in Nicaragua, even devoting an entire issue to life in the Soviet Union, then still the Cold War foe of the United States. Ms. Ryan also inaugurated one of People’s glitziest traditions, its annual anointing of “the sexiest man alive,” with the first honoree, Mel Gibson, in 1985.

Under her leadership, People won a national magazine award for general excellence in 1987, the only such honor in the magazine’s history.

“Pat was good at story ideas, and she was a writer’s editor,” James Seymore, who worked for both Mr. Stolley and Ms. Ryan at People and was later the top editor of Entertainment Weekly, said in an interview Monday. “That is, she was more comfortable with well-written material than not. Before her, like Time, People had been an editor’s magazine, but she made the articles longer, and generally under Pat we favored writers more.”

Ms. Ryan was born on June 18, 1938, in Unionville, Pa., west of Philadelphia. Her father, James, was a horse trainer, and the knowledge she gleaned from him would later serve her professionally when, as a secretary at Sports Illustrated, she gave betting tips to Andre Laguerre, the managing editor.

According to family lore, one day in the early 1960s, when Mr. Laguerre was short of reporters, he sent her to the Belmont Park racetrack to investigate a strike by the grooms. She was promoted rapidly, from reporter to writer to editor — she was the magazine’s first female senior editor — and, until moving to People in 1978, worked with many of the magazine’s more literary contributors, including Frank Deford and George Plimpton.

“Pat Ryan edited more of my stories than anyone else,” Mr. Deford wrote in his 2012 memoir, “Over Time.” “She understood me, as both a writer and a person, better than any male editor.”

In addition to Mr. Cave, himself a former managing editor of Time and Sports Illustrated, Ms. Ryan is survived by a brother, Owen; a sister, Oonah; two stepchildren, John and Catherine Cave; and a stepgranddaughter.

From 1987 to 1989, Ms. Ryan was editor of Life, the general-interest magazine known for its photographic storytelling, originally published weekly but by then a monthly. Her cover subjects were both serious and lighthearted, including an airplane crash, Elvis Presley’s ex-wife and daughter, the legacy of Robert F. Kennedy and a history of the brassiere at age 100.

Her 28-year career at the company, then known as Time Warner, came to an end in August 1989, when she was fired without explanation by Jason McManus, the company’s editor in chief. Mr. McManus had been a longtime professional rival of Mr. Cave, with whom Ms. Ryan was living, and he had dismissed Mr. Cave several months earlier.

In the 1960s, while she was working at Sports Illustrated, Ms. Ryan, whose only post-secondary education until then had been secretarial school, earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Columbia. It was an achievement acknowledged in a letter written by the magazine’s publisher, Garry Valk, and published there in 1969. Vaguely condescending as it praised her, it was a document equal parts pat on the back and pat on the head.

“So our fondest congratulations, Pat,” Mr. Valk concluded, after boasting like a proud papa of Ms. Ryan’s record both in the academy and at the magazine. “You are a lady and a scholar. And a writer.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/business/media/patricia-ryan-75-an-editor-at-time-inc-dies.html?partner=rss&emc=rss