Bonnie Fuller drops her burgundy leather Marc Jacobs handbag on the floor and carefully places her extra pair of shoes – black Louis Vuitton slingback stilettos nestled like newborns in a black-silk drawstring pouch  – on the coffeetable.

The clock has been ticking for 45 minutes when the woman who all but invented the celebrity newsmagazine arrives – late -- to her own photo shoot. She got stuck at the office – again.  She’s in black Versace – fur-trimmed coat and cute little shirt with double slits that kick up in the back when she walks – and black high-heeled Manolo Blahnik suede boots that reach nearly to her knees. Just when you think you’ve got her pegged, she takes off her coat like a butterfly opening its wings when emerging from a cocoon and reveals a bright turquoise Versace sweater and matching silk blouse that light up her face like a movie marquee.

She’s no sooner said she’s sorry than she’s slipped into the director’s chair. Leaning into the lights as though she and the camera are old friends, she declares, “I believe in living a very full life.”
Make that a Fuller life. The Fuller life – that “jam-packed, maxed-out, full-to-the-very-top existence” – includes a high-profile career (she’s the chief editorial director of American Media Inc., where she oversees 23 publications, including Star, America’s No. 1 celebrity newsweekly, and its spinoff sister, Celebrity Living); four children (nursery school to college age); and a very, very supportive husband (Michael, her first and only for the last 22 years).

As this particular day proves, living the Fuller life brings high excitement and high anxiety. She has precisely one hour to do this Manhattan photo shoot and interview, and then her driver is taking her to Stamford, Conn. to listen in on focus groups that will help her make high-level decisions about the magazines in her stellar stable.

How does she do it all? So glad you asked that because she’s here to discuss “The Joys of Much Too Much,” her new book, and to tell you, that you, like she, can have it all, even if you only skim this article. In fact, if you really do what she says, you’ll be so busy living your Fuller life to the fullest that you’ll never finish this profile.

So be it. Sacrifices must be made. And it’s just fine with Fuller because it means that you have learned to prioritize and multitask, to juggle, not to balance. “Balance,” Fuller decrees, “is boring. I would much rather suffer from normal stress than die of boredom. And I don’t think you should drive yourself crazy trying to balance because if you work, it’s impossible to spend an equal amount of time on your work and home life. Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have a wonderful time with your children and make the most of your time with them. If you’re constantly trying to balance, you’re signing up for a very long road of guilt. And I don’t think that you should spend your life being guilty.”

The Fuller life means reading magazine page proofs in the delivery room as you’re waiting to give birth; bringing your month-old baby to the office instead of taking a long maternity leave; keeping a pair of high heels in your office just in case you are called out to a formal meeting; skipping Friday-night services and having a late Shabbat dinner so you can meet a deadline; writing a check to the Make-A-Wish Foundation or  Columbia University Medical Center’s Hope & Heroes Children’s Cancer Fund instead of attending the opening-night galas; being the last parent to RSVP a birthday party; and checking your groceries at the coatroom of a tony Manhattan restaurant while you’re having dinner with a client. “The biggest challenge in life,” she says, “is spending enough time with your family. And you have to have a really supportive partner to do this, and your partner has to take some responsibility for the family, too.”

This thought, uttered two seconds into the interview, is punctuated by the shrill b-r-r-ring of her cellphone. It’s her husband, Michael; she says she’s busy and will have to call him back.

That taken care of, she wants to talk about Star and Celebrity Living, and when she discovers that she left the latest issues at her office, she goes into full-throttle Fuller mode and dispatches her driver to pick them up. “He’s just sitting there waiting for me anyway,” she says.

Where were we? Oh, yes, the idea of Fuller’s that women can, indeed, have it all, all they have to do is do a little rearranging, borrowing a little time here and there. You know, call their husbands back AFTER their media interviews. “But you always have tradeoffs in life,” she continues. “There will be weeks, and days, where you can’t get as much family time as you want.”

If you follow all the advice in the women’s magazines, some of the very same ones that Fuller has been in charge of in her more than two-decade career, you know that the conventional wisdom is that you can’t have it all. Fuller’s philosophy is something to take note of because she has a reputation in the publishing world for finding the pulse of her readers and giving them more than enough voice to be heard loud and clear. And she’s never been wrong yet. “Most women today do have to work,” she says. “It’s not an option to work two days a week or retire to the suburbs, so I say choose the too-full life because it’s a very rich life. I found it depressing in the last few years that every time I heard of a breakthrough book for women, in the end the answer in the book was to give up.”

But that’s because the authors were trying to be perfect at home and at work, she says. “Perfection is pretty impossible to attain; in the end, it’s an empty goal because it’s not attainable. I’m totally not perfect; I get tired, I get cranky and things pile up in my house. But it’s not worth quitting your career over.”

Instead of focusing on perfection, focus on your priorities, she says, and they will give you the ability to get what you want. “You cannot give in and be pulled in a thousand directions,” she says.

Although Fuller’s a self-described workaholic – “I work far too much,” she says more than once  – and has been roundly attacked in the press for not quitting her job when one of her daughters had leukemia – family is the most important element of her life. “I didn’t quit because we needed the medical insurance,” she says. “My husband quit his job instead, but I was with her when she needed me to be there. I love my career, and my career allows my family to have a very enriched life.”

Men don’t have to choose between family and career, and neither should women, Fuller says. “Men don’t have to make some Solomon’s choice,” she says. “They just assume that they will have both, but women agonize over these issues and feel sometimes that they do have to make a Solomon’s choice.”

It is important, she says, for women to have it all, adding that her mother regretted not having a career. “The most fulfilling path in life involves discovering your passion then finding the career that allows you to express that passion then layering in love and family,” Fuller says. “A stimulating career will inevitably make your personal life more interesting. I want the women who read my book to feel that it is possible to have the career that they want. It is a blueprint for them if they want multiple things in their lives. And that is the road to the happiest life. The book is not written for every single woman. It is written for the women who have aspirations for themselves, and I want to help them realize those aspirations.”

Nurturing those aspirations is important, Fuller continues, simply because life is uncertain. “You never know what’s going to happen in life,” she says, pointing out that her mother was forced to sell the family home when her husband divorced her after two decades of marriage. “Your marriage could end, and you be born with an inheritance, but that doesn’t mean that the money will last forever. You cannot assume that somebody is going to take care of you. You’re much better off assuming that you’re going to take care of yourself and to plan your life that way. Make sure you have developed skills, and doing that will make you happier.”

Lest you think that this is all so easy for Fuller to say because she is, after all, Bonnie Fuller, she’s more than happy to tell you all about her humble beginnings and what she calls her unlikely transformation from geeky girl to glamour gal.

“How did a Canadian Jewish girl from a dysfunctional family grow up to be a successful magazine editor in New York City?” she asks, adding that she was a “short brunette, with bitten-to-the-quick nails, flyaway hair, adult acne and no family connections or money” who just assumed that she could land her dream job. “I’ve been able to make it happen, and my book shows how you can, too.”

It was in Toronto’s Rosedale neighborhood, where she grew up, that Fuller learned to be independent. “I could get on a bus and go downtown and go shopping,” she says. “I could go to Kensington Market and museums and art galleries, and I could enjoy the cultural environment when I was a teenager on my own.”

After graduating from the University of Toronto and working for a couple of Canadian newspapers, including the Toronto Star, she became editor-in-chief of Flare magazine. In 1980, she landed her first U.S. position – as a fashion reporter for Women’s Wear Daily. By 1989, she was editor-in-chief of Young Miss, the teen magazine she  redesigned and relaunched as Young & Modern, boosting circulation from 700,000 to 1.75 million. From 1993 to 1996, when she was editor-in-chief, she launched Marie Claire in the American market, doubling its rate base to 500,000, an achievement that received Advertising Age’s Award for Magazine Launch of the Year.

At Cosmopolitan, her next stop, in 1996, she revamped the title following on the high heels of legendary editor Helen Gurley Brown. She raised the rate base from 2.25 million to 2.4 million, a feat that earned her the title of “Editor of the Year” from Advertising Age.

Two years later, she gave Glamour a makeover, strengthening its coverage of beauty, health and women’s issues, and raised its rate base from 2 million to 2.1 million, a record. For all of her efforts, she got fired in 2001 after being at the helm only three years. Unemployed for eight months, she started writing “The Joys of Much Too Much,” and she didn’t give up. “Most people I know who got fired wound up in a better place or on a new path,” she says. “So did I.”

It was Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner who showed her the way. He hired her to restructure, redesign and repackage what was then US magazine, turning it into US Weekly, what Fuller calls the lifestyles, lookstyles and lovestyles magazine of the stars. Newsstand sales increased more than 100 percent, and once again, Fuller was named Advertising Age’s “Editor of the Year.”

“I took a huge salary cut,” she confides. “But it led to my current job.”

As chief editorial director of American Media, Fuller oversees some of the  publishing industry’s hottest titles. In addition to Star and Celebrity Living, her empire includes Shape, Men’s Fitness, Natural Health, Fit Pregnancy, Flex, Country Weekly and MPH.

A simple summary of her career, magazine title by magazine, can’t convey the full Fuller effect on the industry. Among other things, she gave Glamour readers stories on serious topics like genital mutilation in Africa and taught them how to dress to fit their figures. It was her novel idea, a first in the industry, to show Marie Claire readers that they could dress well even though they were on a $1.98 budget. It was she who asked YM readers to detail their most embarrassing moments in the smash-hit column “Say Anything,” and it was her idea to quench the seemingly never-ending thirst for star-studded news by launching the Star spinoff “Celebrity Living.”

Although Fuller does rely upon market research, she’s more likely to follow her gut feeling when it comes to divining what readers want. “I’ve always been able to empathize with my readers and with what their concerns are,” she says. “I don’t think that most women feel incredibly confident inside. Most of us have some insecurities. I, too, have an ‘inner loser.’ I felt I could relate to my readers and put myself in their shoes. I WAS the reader. I love to read magazines. When I was at YM, I really had to think back to what I was like at 14 and what did I want to read then. When I got to US Weekly and Star, there was a magazine I wanted to read that didn’t exist, so I created it.”

Now, with the publication of “The Joys of Much Too Much,” readers will get a chance to get some insight into the real Bonnie Fuller – career woman, mother and wife. She has Norman Vincent Peale-type advice for all three of the elements she juggles so successfully. On job interviews: Splurge on two things – shoes and a good handbag. On marriage: Hunt for a man as hard as you would a job. On children: Don’t delay, heed your biological clock.

Speaking of clocks, Fuller checks her diamond-studded Lil’ Kim Royalty wristwatch, and there’s only time to squeeze in a couple of more words of wisdom.  “Life is a marathon,” she says as she picks up her Louis Vuitton high heels and puts them in her shopping bag. “And you have to take the time to prepare yourself to survive, and part of that is keeping yourself in the best health possible.”

Where does she see herself running in the future? Well, right now, with the Louis Vuittons, that would be Stamford. As in Connecticut. She laughs. She’s due for those focus groups. No, make that she’s due TO BE LATE for those focus groups.

At this moment, with the driver waiting, Fuller can’t see much further than that stop on the road ahead. “I’m very deeply involved in what I’m doing, and I want to continue doing it,” she says. “I’m just at the start of working on all the various challenges of this position.”

As she walks out of the photo studio, she stops at the microwave and heats up a cup of coffee she bought for the ride to Stamford. It’s rush hour, and she’ll be in the car for at least a 60 minutes.
 More than enough time to change into those Louis Vuitton slingbacks, if she needs to, and review her paperwork. And, oh, yes, return that call from her husband.