William J. Garry; Witty Editor of Bon Appetit

William J. Garry, a witty onetime stage manager who for the past two decades edited Bon Appetit, a magazine for connoisseurs of fine dining, died Thursday at age 56.

Garry, who had worked in his Los Angeles office until a few days ago, died of lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, spokesmen for the New York-based Conde Nast publication group said.

“The magazine flourished under his stewardship and richly reflected his own passions for cooking and entertaining,” Conde Nast Chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr. said in a letter to his staff announcing Garry’s death. “His equal skills as a writer were captured in his monthly letter from the editor, which he made into a widely followed forum for his original and sometimes contrarian ideas about everything from food to philosophy.”

Born in San Francisco, Garry graduated from Dartmouth College and earned a master of fine arts degree at Columbia University. He began his career as a stage manager, actor and director. But he was a facile writer and soon changed his focus to publishing.

Garry joined Bon Appetit in 1980 as managing editor and a few years later became editor in chief. He had already spent a decade editing such publications as True magazine, Epicure, the House Beautiful special publications Home Decorating, Colonial Homes, Home Remodeling and Gardening & Outdoor Living, and, immediately before joining Bon Appetit, a financial magazine called Free Enterprise.

In 1998, when Bon Appetit initiated its annual American Food & Entertaining Awards, Garry explained the reasoning behind them to media watchers: “Every month Bon Appetit defines the essence of American culinary arts and entertaining, and with that, the inception of the first annual American Food & Entertaining Awards is a natural extension of our editorial philosophy.”

That formal statement was about as serious as Garry ever got. Although both food and entertaining were very serious subjects to him, he never seemed to tire of making light of them.

When his magazine joined competitors in rating top restaurants a couple of years ago, he said: “I don’t believe in polls. So we sat down and threw a lot of food at each other and came up with the winners.”

Tiring of food writers’ annual spring love affair with a certain skinny green vegetable, Garry proclaimed April 19, 1999, “Give Asparagus a Rest Day.” When his magazine produced an issue surveying culinary offerings in London, he assured fans that English food “is not overcooked crap anymore.”

Three years ago, Garry was so appalled at the food served at a banquet for the National Magazine Awards in New York’s fabled Waldorf Astoria Hotel that he dared a colleague to place a room service order for tastier fare. The two soon were offering their banquet tablemates pizzas and a platter of shrimp.

Asked by Inside Media in 1992 to comment on a tendency of his competitor, Gourmet magazine, to focus on travel as much as food, Garry responded, only slightly tongue in cheek: “I hope you understand that I hate them. They are my competition, and I hate them.”

Garry is survived by his second wife, Mary Duncan Macnab.