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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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Session:         Page of 824

up a lot of my time.

Q:

So you were not in New York a lot.

Heiskell:

In the first year, I was not in New York a lot, which also had certain virtues in that it allowed people to sort of report to Linen. Then I came back, and spent a lot--a lot of my energies went into LIFE, because it was clearly a problem even though it picked up in the 1960s. But I could see that television was there, and I got involved in that. Then gradually I got involved in a whole lot of more new enterprises, while Jim spent a lot more time on customers. But, well, we did some--even in those positions, we did some strange things. I'm not sure that they would be done in other companies. Oh, I went down and published Time for a month, once. SI was still having its problems. So I would spend a concentrated bit of time, maybe three months or something like that, heavily involved in SI, in trying to get it out of the mire that it seemed to stay in forever. And finally, finally we did turn it around, thank God, and it's now immensely successful. But it was ten years in the making. And that was sort of a bit characteristic of the company then.

[end of side one of tape one; beginning of side two]

There was no clear division of labor between Linen and myself. Nobody ever wrote down on a piece of paper: “Well, Linen does this and Heiskell does this.” After those early conversations in 1960, when we were named, we really played it by ear, for good and for bad.

Q:

There was no C.E.O. designation, in other words.





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