Jane Cullins Sanderson

DEADLINE MEMPHIS: Journalist and author Jane Cullins Sanderson, 100, died Saturday evening, December 13, 2025, at the Methodist Hospice Residence near Germantown, Tennessee.

She has now re-joined her soulmate Robert Wright Sanderson, the gregarious and charming Memphis art dealer and realtor to whom she was married for 44 years until his death in May 1999.

Mrs. Sanderson was the proud mother of her and Mr. Sanderson's two daughters, Lisa Sanderson of Culver City, California, a writer and producer, and Laura Sanderson Healy (John Healy) of Marina del Rey, California, a former journalist and writer. Mrs. Sanderson was also the loving grandmother of photojournalist Lucile Sanderson Healy of West Hollywood, California, and Benjamin Wright Sanderson, a BFA Musical Theater Senior at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind.

Mrs. Sanderson was the intrepid Memphis/Nashville Special Correspondent for PEOPLE magazine for two decades, traveling to 22 states to report human interest, news and entertainment stories, many of them covers. Her enthusiastic championing of the booming New Country Music scene in the late 1980s inspired her to fly to New York to enlighten her editors about it; they sat up and paid attention to Mrs. Sanderson, a favorite reporter at the magazine for her pursuit of a story.

While being escorted through the locked doors of a Tennessee State Penitentiary, Mrs. Sanderson strode fearlessly into the room where she would interview Dr. Martin Luther King's assassin James Earl Ray when HBO was putting on a "mock trial." With her typical sass, her opener to Ray was: "You have used 27 aliases in your life so I would like to know -- who am I talking to today?" PEOPLE featured Jane Sanderson in a Publisher's Letter praising her extraordinarily immediate reporting of a last-minute news cover story on Reba McEntire losing her entire band as well as her manager in a plane crash.

Mrs. Sanderson worked for both Scripps-Howard newspapers in Memphis for a combined total of 20 years. At the Memphis Publishing Company, Jane Cullins launched her career writing for the Society page of the morning newspaper, The Commercial Appeal.

Years later, she went to work for the afternoon paper the Memphis Press-Scimitar where she became the editor of Showtime, the big weekly entertainment supplement. With her picture and bylined column, Mrs. Sanderson wrote about Memphis musicians B. B. King, Al Green, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and visited Isaac Hayes at Stax Records ("He called me one day to come and see how he had done his new Cadillac, and it had been trimmed with 24-carat gold on the outside and white ermine inside. He was so proud of it," she said.) She interviewed all kinds of entertainers, covering new movies, music, theater, art and literature. Her daughters went to every rock concert at the Mid-South Coliseum and many operas, symphonies and concerts at the old Auditorium downtown.

One of the highlights of Mrs. Sanderson's Press-Scimitar days was writing about the late in life New York comeback of the legendary Memphis-born Blues author, singer and actress Miss Alberta Hunter, whom Robert Altman had commissioned a soundtrack album from for REMEMBER MY NAME, which premiered in Memphis. Alberta invited Jane to come see her perform at the first Kennedy Center Honors and wanted her to come to the all-star party President Jimmy Carter was giving at the White House. Jane's great friend Danette Watkins a well-connected cultural light from Lepanto, Arkansas, (who would also produce Bill and Hilary Clinton for a PEOPLE story Jane was doing in Arkansas) got them into the gala before the honors event. Hunter was elated to see Jane come through and gushed, "You done made it!" Hunter was so proud to be invited to meet "my president" and to sing her set to pay tribute to the iconic Black opera star Marian Anderson who was chosen as one of the first Kennedy Center honorees.

Mrs. Sanderson reported regularly on "The King" of Rock and Roll and introduced her daughter Laura to Elvis and Priscilla backstage at The Auditorium when he was honored by The Jaycees in 1971 ("Thank you for not making a liar out of me," she teased Presley after writing every day in the paper that he would attend the ceremony for the year's "Ten Outstanding Young Men" of the country). Mrs. Sanderson took her mother Lucile, a big Elvis fan, and her younger daughter Lisa to Elvis's last concerts in the mid-1970s, and when the news broke that he had died August 16, 1977, she sped across Union Avenue to Baptist Hospital and began her reporting, slinking around the facility like The Pink Panther might have done.

Jane wrote about every rock star coming to Memphis and every other performance in the city. She made it a point to take her daughters Lisa, 4, and Laura, 7, to see The Beatles play their afternoon show in Memphis in 1966 (it would be their last concert tour) and in 1972 Mrs. Sanderson took the girls and her husband Bob to meet Sonny and Cher backstage at The Coliseum. In 1980, Mrs. Sanderson waited in her station wagon for Laura to finish interviewing Roger Daltrey of The Who her William and Mary college radio show; Laura and Lisa had nabbed him in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency after their Memphis Concert in 1980, and he talked happily for two hours over bottles of beer sitting on the floor.

The smiling, vivacious Jane Laura Cullins was born a true "Showbiz Kid" in Memphis August 20, 1925, to wonderful parents, Lucile Brett and Edward Cullins (Jane's elder sister Ann Cullins Beam, two years older, also died at 100 years). All of the arts appealed to the young Jane as she grew up; her mother Lucile, a social woman of great heart and a propensity for comedy, would ask her to sing and encourage her to write poems, and her father Edward, a kind and hardworking Southern gentleman, would take her to visit the movie theaters he owned and operated in Memphis with his brother Chalmers. Jane was presented to "Father of the Blues" Mr. W. C. Handy when he came back to Memphis for the opening of the stunning W. C. Handy Theater (also a music venue where Duke Ellington and all the greats played) that her father and his brother co-founded in Orange Mound, Memphis, a Black neighborhood which is recognized today for its historical importance and solid community.

Growing up, Jane was fascinated meeting dozens of theatrical legends like Mae West backstage at The Orpheum Theater, the picture palace and stage in downtown Memphis managed by her uncle Chalmers Cullins, who had long worked in Vaudeville and brought acts to Memphis like Will Rogers and Harry Houdini. Jane's father Edward did the books for The Orpheum and her grandparents, Olien and Annie Cullins hosted Rogers and other travelling performers at their home on Union Avenue in Midtown Memphis. Sammy Davis, Jr., once recalled to Johnny Carson on his show once how when he was a little boy on the " Chitlin' Circuit" with his father, Chalmers Cullins had given the Davis's his room in the Cullins's' home when they could not find a room in town.

Jane attended Bruce Elementary, Bellevue Junior High and Central High School in Memphis and as a teenager worked for her father at the family's Idlewild Theater in Memphis's Midtown neighborhood near the home she and her parents and sister lived in with her grandparents Lucile Harrison and James Brett. She graduated from the University of Alabama with a degree in Journalism in 1947 and moved to New York to work briefly. Jane returned to Memphis and wrote advertisements for Lowenstein's Department Store downtown before starting with the newspaper, as mentioned above.

Throughout the 1950s when she was scribing for The Commercial Appeal, Jane built her writing style and voice. She would later appear in two William Faulkner biographies related to her daring coverage of a "World Exclusive"" front page story in the Commercial when Faulkner's daughter Jill got married in Oxford, Mississippi. "Now they're coming in disguise," Faulkner drawled after the elegant and tall Miss Cullins mischievously introduced herself to the recent Nobel winner as he gazed into the woods underneath a huge magnolia, announcing that she had just covered his daughter's wedding for the paper. (Jane had elicited a secret invitation for herself and her photographer from Mrs. Faulkner, who had asked, "just don't tell Bill.") The church wedding and reception at Rowan Oak, the Faulkner's' home, was strictly forbidden by the press and Faulkner had recently said he would shoot any reporter who set foot on his property again after LIFE magazine had published photos taken inside his house. When Jane asked the paper to let her go to New York to cover favorite singer Judy Garland's comeback and that was the beginning of her stellar career as an entertainment reporter and editor.

After a short break to have her two daughters, Mrs. Sanderson went back to work writing advertising for Lucky Heart (a Memphis cosmetics firm that also marketed hoodoo materials) and other local businesses, then she joined up with Frenchman Yves Macaire's attractive monthly The Delta Review in the mid-1960s selling ads, brightening the pages as Fashion Editor and sometimes laying out the magazine on her dining room table with Macaire, who became a lifelong friend of the Sanderson family and hosted them in France. The cultural magazine ran for about ten years and was well-respected and read widely in the South.

While Mrs. Sanderson was editing and writing SHOWTIME at the Press-Scimitar, PEOPLE contracted Jane as a freelancer in 1978 to report on the first anniversary of Presley's death. She quickly became an established "stringer" for the magazine and after the newspaper folded in 1983, she carried on with PEOPLE, going on tour with The Judds and working full-time for the magazine. She brought Garth Brooks to the world's attention with his first national magazine story in PEOPLE and covered the Country Music awards in Los Angeles and Nashville every year, along with the popular FanFair in Nashville with the musicians meeting their public. She snuck into the funerals of Jerry Lee Lewis's young wife in Louisiana and Loretta Lynn's son who drowned in a Tennessee river ("There is always a back door," she taught her daughters."). Billy Ray Cyrus and Reba McEntire became good friends.

Adventures for PEOPLE included going still-busting in the mountains of North Carolina with one of the state's best enforcers, attending the gala debutante party in South Carolina for the gussied up pet pig of a neurosurgeon, watching a Labrador dive for treasure in the waters off Destin, Florida, and a Mississippi dog who tended bar and served beer to patrons. For PEOPLE's sister publication at Time Inc, IN STYLE magazine, Jane wrote about Beale Street restaurants, interviewing B.B. King at his (King had played at Jane's father's W.C. Handy Theater in Orange Mound early on) and covering the opening of ""Elvis Presley's Graceland"" restaurant in the old Lansky's building.
Mrs. Sanderson, a sixth-generation Memphian on three sides, co-founded Art Today in Memphis and was a volunteer and member of The Woman's Exchange of Memphis (a charitable tea room and auxiliary store of hand-made baby clothes and goods) and the historical and philanthropic heritage group The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America (she was a keen genealogist and hit it off with author Alex Haley at his home near Knoxville, Tennessee, when she interviewed him in PEOPLE).

Jane Cullins, whose ancestors included several early settler families of Shelby County who had come from North Carolina, was baptized at Germantown Presbyterian Church which her great-great grandfather Moses Neely built and which is the only antebellum church standing in Germantown. After their marriage, Jane and Bob realized that their families had a historic connection at Germantown: Bob's great-grandfather Colonel William Lawrence Sanderson who led the 23rd Indiana Volunteers in the Civil War, was for a time the Union Commander at Germantown, Tennessee, and he had agreed not to burn down the Presbyterian Church after its reverend Dr. Evans and Jane's forbear Moses Neely visited him and asked that it not be destroyed. Sanderson, a Presbyterian and a Mason like the two before him, put his cavalry horses in the sanctuary instead.

Mrs. Sanderson attended Idlewild Presbyterian Church in Midtown Memphis with her parents and grandparents and then her own family all her life, raising funds with her husband Bob for the construction of the gymnasium there that Laura and Lisa enjoyed, trampolining, roller skating and playing on the basketball teams. She also edited and helped produce the first cookbook (the "red one") of The Woman's Exchange of Memphis.

Mrs. Sanderson loved her family and friends intensely and would do anything to help people out. Of her long career, she said: "I just loved doing it, all of it!" May she rest in peace.
-- Laura Sanderson Healy, Jane's daughter

Visitation will be from 10:00-11:00 AM, Service at 11:00 AM Friday, December 19, 2025, at Canale Funeral Directors.

A private burial will take place at Memorial Park Cemetery.