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Keith J. Kelly

Keith J. Kelly

 Media

A fond farewell to longtime editor Peter Kaplan

By
Keith J. Kelly
Published Dec. 4, 2013, 12:19 a.m. ET

Friends, family and colleagues of veteran editor Peter Kaplan gathered at a memorial service at Larchmont Temple in Larchmont, NY, Tuesday morning to bid farewell to him.

Kaplan died on Nov. 27 at age 59 after battling cancer for more than a year. At the time, he was editorial director of the Fairchild Fashion Media Group, which includes Women’s Wear Daily. But he left his mark on the New York media world as the longtime editor of The New York Observer from 1994 to 2009.

There was plenty of laughter amid the tears as his brother James recalled his younger brother’s career. He said that early on they had collaborated to write screenplays for Warner Bros. and one of the scripts was actually picked up, with the director Peter Bogdanovich assigned to it. The movie never got made, “but for three months in Hollywood we were hot, hot, hot,” he said.

James recalled that their first exposure to Hollywood came when then-Harper’s Magazine Editor-in-Chief Lewis Lapham agreed to send them out there and gave them $500 expense money.

At another time, he said his brother managed to scam press passes to get into the New York Yankees locker room after Game 6 of the 1977 World Series.

Kaplan worked at the New York Times; Esquire as the No. 2 in charge; and at Smart magazine, where he was the editor.

He was remembered as a great mentor to younger writers. His most enduring claim to glory was that he assigned freelancer Candice Bushnell at the Observer to write her weekly “Sex and the City” column in the mid-1990s, which eventually inspired the HBO hit of the same name and several movies.

As the Observer’s influence grew under his watch, he was interviewed as a potential editor of The New Yorker when Tina Brown left but ultimately pulled out because he felt leaving the salmon-colored weekly for the high-powered Condé Nast world would have intruded too much on his family life.

Kaplan was father to three children from his first marriage to Audrey Walker — Caroline, Charles and Peter — and a third son, David, from his marriage to Lisa Chase.

One of the most moving parts of the ceremony came when Caroline sang, “What Will I Do?” a song that was originally sung from a father’s perspective about what he would do as a daughter left home.

“We both agreed it was the best song in the world,” she said.