GARDNER BOTSFORD.(The Talk of the Town)

Every meeting with Gardner Botsford--down the hall; on a street corner, unexpectedly; at your doorway before dinner--began the same way, with your own "How are you, Gardner?" and his firm, upbeat "Never better!" You came to count on this and to laugh at it with other friends and colleagues of his--some of us even began to call him "Old Never Better"--and only with time did you sense how well the riposte served him, diverting attention from sadness or symptoms, encouraging the social or conversational pleasures just ahead, and also stepping off an elegant little distance away from intimacy. Botsford, who died last week at the age of eighty-seven, was an editor with this magazine for almost forty years and a continuing presence around the place in the two decades after he stepped down. His long and famously happy marriage to the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm--it was the second for both--had its roots in their editor-writer attachment, begun when she was a young contributor of shopping columns, and maintained (through her nine books and ninety-odd reportorial and critical pieces) until the end. Before that, he had edited A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, Janet Flanner, Mollie Panter-Downes, Richard Rovere, Geoffrey Hellman, and dozens more of the vivid, august figures of the magazine's postwar journalistic flowering.

Hired a couple of times as a young Talk of the Town reporter (the first time didn't take) by The New Yorker's founding editor, Harold Ross, and lured into editing by its brilliant and idolized second, William Shawn, he rose to an easy, semi-anonymous eminence that stood in contrast with the cloistered and convoluted relationships Shawn maintained with his writers and staff and with the world. Botsford was also connected to the magazine through his stepfather, Raoul Fleischmann, The New Yorker's first publisher, and, one could say, through New York itself, where he grew up in the twenties and thirties as a rich East Side, private-school kid, then a fabled charmer (he was a terrific dancer) and early devotee of the city's parties and pleasures.

There was an Astaire-like deftness and sense of style that went into the Botsford editings, which were applied swiftly with a fine-point mechanical pencil and left a galley of type looking leaner and ready to step out on its own. Often a writer--this writer, for one--couldn't quite remember what had disappeared from his text, or find where the scalpel had been slipped in. "Well, yes," Gardner would say, happy with the compliment. "A nice piece and let's enjoy it."

A long-term contributor, Mark Singer, recalls an early Talk piece of his that had grown miraculously stronger after a trip across Botsford's desk but had lost its significant, irreplaceable ending: "I went in ready to do battle, but he just gave me that smile and said, 'Too much is too much.' "

Tall and bald, with a straight back, Botsford wore his beautiful tweeds inconspicuously. Modesty and courtesy came naturally to him, but he was stuffed with surprises. He graduated from Yale but didn't return for reunions or honors; he mistrusted Old Elis and smiled happily whenever the Yale football team took a licking in a big game. Bores and self-important types were "sashweights" in his lexicon. A lifelong liberal and Democrat, he gave Ronald Reagan's name its ...