TO OUR READERS

By WALTER ISAACSON/MANAGING EDITOR

I am saddened to report that Martha Duffy, one of the most talented and beloved members of our professional family, died last week at 61. She had worked at TIME for 37 years, half the life of the magazine, as a researcher, writer, critic and one of our first women senior editors.

During her remarkable tenure, her clear thinking, confident critical judgments and passion for the arts, high and low, helped define TIME at its very best. Her interests ranged from ballet to baseball, horse racing, fashion and literature. In whatever field, her sharp but unpretentious sense of taste not only added to the sureness of this magazine but also set a high standard for the whole world of culture and the arts.

For a cover story in 1969, she interviewed Vladimir Nabokov in the Swiss hotel where he lived. Her description of the Winter Dining Room there was an early example of her keen eye: "a smallish chamber in the hotel basement, which, despite lavish importation of daffodils and red tulips, is a frightful miniature of desolation." That was one of many reports that caught the eye of managing editor Henry Grunwald, who promoted her to senior editor. "She dazzled us with her sheer intelligence and her gentle, ironic smile. We knew that we had a treasure in Martha and that we had to set her on her course and get out of her way."

As the arts editor of TIME magazine from 1974 to 1989 and subsequently as a senior writer and critic, she was always gentle and generous but never one to mince words when she felt a piece of writing fell short of her standards. Her praise for sharp thinking was warm and inspiring, and her critiques of fuzzy stories were softened by wry humor and kindness. When movie critic Richard Corliss, new to the magazine in 1980, submitted the beginning draft of his first cover story to Martha, she responded, "The first three paragraphs are O.K. The fourth one had better sing."

She was a dedicated mentor to scores of young writers at this magazine. She took them under her care and helped infuse them with the joy that comes from well-crafted sentences and judgments. One of them, Nancy Gibbs, pointed out in her eulogy that Martha had two great talents as a teacher: "She always knew more than you did. She never pointed that out."

Nancy noted Martha's magic for being discriminating but not snobbish. "She hated geraniums, which she called the rats of the garden, and she adored daffodils. She loved Wagner and Merle Haggard, Proust and Trollope and Dick Francis, but she described lunch with Erich Segal as like having "a hot fan blowing in my face." Her interest in the British royals was complex. She loved Princess Di for her instincts but described Charles as "having the survival smarts of a baby seal."

Martha was diminutive in stature and notoriously soft-spoken. But as our book critic Paul Gray says, "Her voice in print was firm and unmistakably her own. She never raised her voice when annoyed, but her colleagues would have rather endured tongue-lashings from other editors than face her silent disapproval." She spoke and wrote in a style that was flinty and spare; she was allergic to rhetoric. "Oh dear," she would gently say, lips pursed but eyes slightly smiling, as she crossed out a writer's phrase that was more ornate than enlightening. As a result, her words had an authority and credibility that we all tried to emulate.

Above all, she was a good person: caring, loyal, entertaining, at times wonderfully exasperating, a lover of good conversation and friendships. Her elegance, exacting standards and generosity will live on, I hope, in our own careers and pages.