Remembering Frank Lalli
He was the award winning top editor of Money when it was hauling in over $250 million a year. He valiantly tried to keep George magazine alive in the days after JFK Jr. died. And he turned his own health struggles into a book for Simon & Schuster and a column for Parade. A veteran writer recalls the editor and the man.
| 28 Apr 2026 | 06:09
The veteran editor had a knack for reinventing himself. In his storied career he served as editor of Money magazine, editor of George magazine in the 18 months after JFK Jr. perished and a health care detective as he himself battled health issues. (
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Frank Lalli, who passed away this week, impacted so many journalists’ lives. Including my own. When he moved from the East to the West coast for awhile, he was a top editor at New West Magazine and then the L.A. Herald Examiner. (And his wife, Carole, became an important food critic) I freelanced for him at both places. He pushed me, but in a good way, and sure enough, that work had impact. Then, when I moved to New York, he insisted I come work for him at Money Magazine. I said, “Frank, the only Bond I know anything about is James.” He said, “that’s why we want you. You write in a way readers can relate to.”
One of my colleagues was Gretchen Morgenson who went on to a big career as a financial reporter. Her memories? “ His enthusiasm for a story was childlike and charming and his smile was incandescent,” she says. “Unlike so many editors, Frank owned up to his mistakes: when I departed Money in 1986 for Forbes, Frank’s former stomping grounds, he warned me not to go. The place would “chew you up and spit you out,” he proclaimed. It didn’t quite turn out that way and whenever I’d run into Frank in later years, he’d invariably stride up to me with his huge grin, arms out, saying “I was so wrong!”
Mary Murphy, a longtime entertainment journalist and now a journalism professor at USC, wrote for Lalli numerous places: Including at Readers Digest (one of his last gigs) when he sent her to faraway places around the world. ‘He changed my life,’ says Murphy, “and taught me how to be a national magazine reporter. And when we were in Los Angeles together, he taught me how to be brave about covering Hollywood.”
Longtime journalist and sportswriter Peter Bonventre enjoyed many dinners and bottles of wine with Frank. “Few people I know appreciated an Italian meal more than Frank,” Bonventre told me, “and the Italian food he loved most was prepared by Carole. He always emailed me his family’s Christmas Eve menu, proud as hell of the magnificent feast that Carole had lovingly created for him and his daughters and grandchildren! Ever the Italophile, Frank’s pre-dinner cocktail of choice was a Negroni. Wish he were still here for more of them.”
In his later years, Lalli became a regular reporter for Robinhoodradio: the small but necessary station in Sharon, Connecticut. (Where his family has a home) He was known on his reports as the “Health Detective.” One day, I got a call from the head of that station saying Frank had suggested me as a theatre correspondent. It had not been my previous beat, but for at least a decade, my ‘Stage Right or Not’ has become a popular podcast and taken me to more Broadway shows than I ever would have imagined.
For that and for so many other things, I say thank you, Frank. You will be missed.