BS: How did you and Bea get to be co-art directors?

RA: The story goes that in the midst of a heated argument Marvin told the editor to go fuck herself. Need I say more?

BS: What was it like working with Diana Vreeland?

RA: The power of Diana Vreeland was that at the time I worked with her she had the ability to go to any designer and have them make special things for Bazaar. Boots or sports clothes or caftans for evening. She would say things like, “The bikini is the biggest thing since the atom bomb.” She inspired a generation of designers and photographers to seek the new. The magazine was a guide to designers; now the designer is a guide to the magazine and the established magazines take no risks.

BS: You worked with Richard Avedon and many other amazing photographers at Bazaar and created incredible images. Can you talk about how you worked with them?

RA: The outstanding experience for me working with Avedon was when he guest edited Bazaar’s April 1965 issue. It was an issue devoted to youth culture—Pop, Rock, and the Sexual Revolution. This issue was our attempt to create a magazine on the highest level. It was our way of conceptualizing a magazine from cover to cover with Dick [Avedon] acting as both the editor and sole photographer. It flowed like a piece of music. It was to tell everything that was current and future in art, fashion, science, and music.

We got permission from NASA to put model Jean Shrimpton in a space suit and photograph her on our cover and inside our issue as the first woman astronaut. It caused a sensation. That was well before its time, nobody believed a woman would become an astronaut, and of course we know differently now. We felt the magazine should reflect the sense of the contemporary scene at the time, so we asked rising talents like the sculptor George Segal, the painters Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg to work with us. The issue was filled with the newest and most advanced young writers—Renata Adler, Bruce Jay Friedman, and so on. But the issue scared a lot of people at the top at Bazaar. They had started to become concerned with the economics of the market and turned their back on anything original or artistic. This signaled that the ship was beginning to sink. Shortly thereafter, Dick left for Vogue to follow Vreeland, and a creative door had clearly been shut forever.

Dick had a passionate eye for capturing the moment, which I recognized from the time I met him to the time he suddenly died last October. His was a restless energy, active, always on, endlessly full of curiosity. Together with that energy he had an uncanny ability to persuade anybody to do practically anything in front of his camera. He could and did charm everybody. More people shed their clothes for Dick than any other photographer I know. It made for some memorable shoots.

He also was never satisfied. He often sent me back to the drawing board and said, “Go back and go deeper, you can do better.” He could be devastating, but mostly he was right. The thing about working with him I treasure the most was that he refused to allow me to accept my own limitations. It was difficult, but often it was worth the pain. I miss him and his pursuit of perfection.

BS: Then you became art director of The New York Times Magazine [1974–1981]. How hard was the transition to such an entirely different environment?

RA: Not very because I never saw myself as someone exclusively belonging to fashion. Remember, it was a devastating time. They were shooting down our heroes. First President Kennedy was assassinated, then Martin Luther King, and finally Bobby Kennedy. They were my heroes. I needed to learn more about what was really going on in America … to become engaged and enter into the public conversation.

BS: How did you get that job?

RA: The incomparable Lou Silverstein, the art director responsible for changing all the graphics at The Times for the better, called me for an interview when he found out I was between jobs. I knew I wasn’t a good fit for the daily newspaper, but I thought maybe the magazine might be worth exploring. In truth I was scared about the whole proposition and secretly hoped he wouldn’t call. I was a notorious procrastinator. Deadlines drove me crazy, and a major newspaper is all about relentless deadlines. Eventually there was an opening and what followed was a most bizarre experience. I was invited to lunch for a final interview with Lou, Max Frankel, and Charlotte Curtis, and came totally unprepared. Max turned to me at one point and said, “Ruth, what are you going to bring to The New York Times?” Silence. I froze for what seemed like minutes.

BS: So what did you say?

RA: I finally said, “I would like to try to bring the magazine into the 20th century.” I thought that was it for me … yet I was miraculously hired. The payback was I didn’t get much sleep for the following seven years but I learned to meet impossible deadlines.

BS: The covers are so amazing and so memorable. I feel like I remember them all.

RA: I took some calculated risks. One had to do with deadline pressures. The editor would have three articles in the works as potential cover stories. I wouldn’t know until Thursday which one he would finally choose. It was a race to the finish every Friday. I had to choose where to put most of my energies—on the cover or inside the magazine. I chose the cover. The type design in those issues suffered—I wasn’t proud of that—and there were press problems. Keep in mind that in the late ’70s the only section in the newspaper that wasn’t printed in black and white was the magazine. I took full advantage of the situation by deliberately setting out to create poster images for each cover, which were intentionally different from week to week. The element of visual surprise was part of the fun and the challenge. It was also my good fortune to be able to introduce photographers such as Mary Ellen Mark, Gilles Peress, and Bill King, as well as artists and illustrators from all over the world that hadn’t been seen in the magazine before. Many of the emerging artists in New York were personal friends. Warhol, Lichtenstien, and Rosenquist had worked with me at Bazaar. What better place than The New York Times Magazine to show their brilliant work? It gave me great pleasure to know that these images were going to be seen from Idaho to Moscow.