Diverse Author Profiled Celebrities in Parade Magazine

James Brady, 80, a former editor of fashion and gossip publications who became the celebrity interviewer for Parade magazine and wrote more than a dozen books on topics such as war and high society, died Jan. 26 at his home in Manhattan, N.Y. No cause of death was reported.

After returning from Korean War combat, Mr. Brady used his skills as an administrator and raconteur to propel himself up the masthead of Fairchild Publications, whose flagship was the fashion bible Women's Wear Daily. He became publisher of Women's Wear Daily in the 1960s and helped launch its spinoff lifestyle magazine W.

After a brief tenure as publisher of Harper's Bazaar for Hearst -- he said he was fired for updating the magazine too rapidly -- Mr. Brady began a long affiliation in 1974 with Rupert Murdoch, an Australian publisher then making inroads into the United States with his tabloid the Star.

In addition to having an executive role with Murdoch's News Corp., Mr. Brady edited the Star and went on to develop the snarky "Page Six" gossip column for the New York Post in the mid-1970s. He also briefly edited another Murdoch acquisition, New York magazine.

In subsequent decades, Mr. Brady was a news commentator on New York TV stations and a contributing writer to publications such as Advertising Age and Forbes.com. For the past 25 years, he was best known as the author of Parade's "In Step With" celebrity profile.

The column appeared in the back of the magazine, which has a circulation of more than 70 million, and was known for its flattering summations of entertainers' lives. Mr. Brady once said he needed just "three sound bites" to make a Parade column work.

A People magazine interviewer watched Mr. Brady tick off the sound bites as he spoke with talk show host Kathie Lee Gifford. First, Gifford said she considered "God a gentleman"; second, that she wouldn't cut her nails to help her golf game; and third, that her husband, football Hall of Famer Frank Gifford, once had fat extracted from his eyelids.

"In Step With" paid the bills, Mr. Brady said, as he pursued book projects. For years he wrote novels about the fashion and media worlds ("Designs," "The Press Baron") that bore the aura of an insider.

His second home, a five-bedroom Dutch colonial in East Hampton, N.Y., allowed him an up-close view of a wealthy enclave that was the setting for several romance novels. His characters included a WASP-y narrator named Beecher Stowe, who happened to write for Parade, and a London book editor named Alix Dunraven. Critics politely called the novels page turners.

He explained his interest in writing books about the Hamptons: "I know the names, and I read the local papers out there. The old story about the little boy with his nose pressed against the glass, looking in at the party or the ball, there's still a lot of that in me, because I know somewhere down the line I'm going to get a novel out of it. Everything is grist."

He surprised many reviewers with "The Coldest War," his gripping 1990 autobiography about being a rifle company executive officer in Korea. Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times praised its "clarity and modesty" and said it avoided "heroic flag-waving." In People, Ken Gross wrote that "The Coldest War" "not only limns some hidden corners of combat, it also illuminates a side of Brady that few have seen."

Mr. Brady fictionalized combat in several other books, including "The Marines of Autumn" (2000), about the Korean War, and he wrote the nonfiction account "The Scariest Place in the World: A Marine Returns to North Korea" (2005), based on an article first published in Parade.