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This week ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY loses one of its earliest mentors and most astute readers, Time Inc. corporate editor James R. Gaines. In the late 1980s as managing editor of PEOPLE, EW's parent magazine, Gaines helped nurture EW's earliest stirrings, and as corporate editor for most of the past year he has monitored its rambunctious, successful adolescence. But now Gaines, 49, is leaving the company, and EW and I will miss him.
I first met Jim nearly 20 years ago when he was just beginning to make his mark at the nascent PEOPLE, and we quickly became friends. A forceful, lucid writer and a journalist of prodigious stamina, Gaines played no small part in making that magazine the American institution it has become. He rose quickly on PEOPLE's masthead, reaching its top job in 1987. As its third managing editor, he turbocharged the editorial staff, bringing to the magazine a dynamism and excitement that no one who worked there in those years is ever likely to forget. He was, and is, a brilliant editor with an aggressive, natural instinct for a story that time and again scooped the competition, beat impossible deadlines, and always delighted readers.
But that was prologue. Gaines went on to forge one of the most extraordinary careers in the 75-year history of Time Inc., a company never short of color or drama. He is the only person to have edited three of its major magazines -- PEOPLE (1987-89), LIFE (1989-92), and TIME (1992-95) -- and the only person to have served simultaneously as editor and publisher (LIFE). He also found time to publish two books, Wit's End, a look at the habitues of the old Algonquin Roundtable, and The Lives of the Piano, a paean to the instrument Gaines plays almost as well as he thinks he does. (He assays Bach and -- to my personal knowledge -- occasionally masters ''Ol' Man River.'')
Now that he, his wife, Karen, and three of their children are moving to Boulder, Colo. (his older daughter, Allison, is a teacher in New York City), a third book is promised. An enthusiastic student pilot, Gaines is calling his work in progress Flying Lessons, and if it contains the lift and verve of the man himself, you should make sure you don't miss it. Those of his friends he leaves behind wish him a world of safe landings, with thanks for the chance he gave us to fly for a while with an ace.
