People (magazine) members regularly slept on the floor of their offices two or three nights each week and severely limited all non-essential outside engagements. The premier edition for the week ending March 4, 1974 featured actress Mia Farrow, then starring in the film "The Great Gatsby", on the cover. That issue also featured stories on Gloria Vanderbilt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the wives of U.S. Vietnam veterans who were Missing In Action. The magazine was, apart from its cover, printed in black-and-white. The initial cover price was 35 cents (). The core of the small founding editorial team included other editors, writers, photographers
Of a Fire on the Moon to meet his deadlines for the magazine. His account, which ran to 115,000 words, was published between August 1969 and January 1970 in three long installments—"A Fire on the Moon", "The Psychology of Astronauts", and "A Dream of the Future's Face". In a foreword to Mailer's first installment, "Life" Managing Editor Ralph Graves introduced "some 26,000 words—the longest non-fiction piece Life has ever published in one issue." On February 26, 1970, after the magazine series had concluded, Mailer wrote to Apollo 11 commander, Neil Armstrong, "I've worked as assiduously as any writer I know to portray the space program in