A magazine editor, in 1962 Fisher was working at a new magazine called Playboy when publisher Hugh Hefner ordered the creation of a new feature for the magazine: an interview.
Fisher looked through a slushpile of celebrity profiles and found an unpublished article about jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. It was written by the then-unknown Alex Haley. Fisher asked Haley to spend more time with Davis and capture more of his “raging commentary,” which set the style and tone of the Playboy Interview feature for decades to come.
Thomas Weyr, who studied Playboy’s beginnings, says Fisher “made the Playboy Interview a form of literary expression that neither the looser models — from the Paris Review to Redbook — nor the television version ever matched. [The magazine’s interview feature] has become one of the most vibrant and important public-opinion forums in the United States.”
Fisher stayed at Playboy and edited all its interviews until he left in 1974 — to help Haley finish his first novel, Roots. Fisher died in California May 31 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease and strokes. He was 69.