Wayne Lawson, the longtime executive literary editor of Vanity Fair, whose graceful and punctilious editing shaped the magazine’s reporting on wealth, class and culture during its heyday — a 40-year run that began with the wretched excesses of the 1980s — producing a potent mix of Hollywood and Manhattan gloss, corporate and dynastic malfeasance, mayhem and murder, died on Sept. 23 in Manhattan. He was 94.
His death, at a hospital, was announced by Ellen Kiell, a friend and former colleague.
Mr. Lawson, as Tina Brown often observed, was the magazine’s secret weapon.
