EMPIRE OF THE ELITE: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America, by Michael M. Grynbaum
We may be facing a future without magazines, at least glossy ones, and passing into an era of disembodied media entities — an unholy maelstrom of websites, YouTube channels and, worst of all, podcasts. But the golden age of American magazines was very shiny indeed. In “Empire of the Elite,” Michael M. Grynbaum, a media reporter at The New York Times, has written a lively if elegiac chronicle of Condé Nast, the parent company to Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ and The New Yorker, among several other titles, too many of them now defunct.
The book sketches its birth and early decades; its acquisition by the self-made newspaper magnate Samuel I. Newhouse in 1959; the dramas and triumphs of its fat decades under his heir, Si Jr.; and finally the deaths (Allure, Details, Domino, Lucky, Portfolio and Self all shuttered; the younger Newhouse himself gone in 2017 at age 89) and diminishments of this century, including the humanitarian crisis that resulted when the unlimited office supply of Orangina bottles was cut off.
A newspaperman I used to work with liked to say that there are two types of media columnists — reporters who get the dish on newsroom gossip and critics who are philosophers of ink and pulp — but you never get the twain in one writer. Grynbaum belongs to the former category. When it comes to hirings and firings and office intrigues, the technical word for this book is juicy. He has all the details he can fit, and he has many of them from inside sources, both on the record and anonymous, even if much of it has been aired over the years in earlier tell-alls, screeds, biographies, diaries and gossip rags.
“Empire of the Elite” is weaker on questions of the company’s aesthetics and editorial approaches; here Grynbaum tends to repeat the conventional wisdom, swallow the hype or, in matters of controversy, teach the debate.
Grynbaum has given himself the task of mythologizing the mythmakers, where he might have chosen instead to demystify them. His prose style might best be described as “magaziney.” Here’s how he opens his chapter on the longtime editor of Vogue: “The Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan is dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis. One spring morning in 2014, the high priests of a different era gathered by the temple’s sandstone columns to hail another female deity: Anna Wintour.”
For all his reporting, the editors and publishers who are his main characters emerge with their auras intact, even reinforced. Another problem is that all the myths are basically the same. An outsider journeys to the big city desperate to become an insider, and then transforms that inner circle into his or her own image by getting hired to run a magazine at Condé Nast.
But first another outsider had to start it. Condé Montrose Nast grew up in St. Louis, the grandson of a preacher and son of a single mother after his father walked out on them when he was 3. At Georgetown he befriended the publishing heir Robert Collier, and in 1897 he became an editor at Collier’s Weekly, where he published luminaries like Jack London and Upton Sinclair. He married an heiress and purchased a distressed property, “a sleepy society gazette” called Vogue, in 1909, expanding its readership from the rich to “the less well-to-do cousins of the rich.”
Grynbaum calls this strategy “inclusive exclusivity” and lays out why it was a more lucrative formula for attracting advertising money than the mass-market tactics of, say, Ladies’ Home Journal. From there Nast accumulated a stable of magazines he either purchased or started — including House & Garden, Vanity Fair, Glamour — and at the time of his death in 1942, Time wrote that he was the man from whom millions “got most of their ideas, directly or indirectly, about the desirable American standard of living.”
When Newhouse Sr. bought Condé Nast Publications 17 years later — he already owned an archipelago of regional newspapers that provided enough income for him to live between an ornate mansion on Staten Island and a Park Avenue duplex — the company itself was a distressed asset. It was said that Vogue “was a toy for Mitzi,” Newhouse’s wife, but within a few years it would end up in the hands of her favorite son, Si, whose claim to outsider status was that he’d had to go to Syracuse because Harvard and Cornell turned him down.
When his father died in 1962, Si inherited the glossy, high-status Condé Nast, whose profit margin by the 1990s would be a mere 5 percent; his younger brother, Donald, got the newspapers, which were the business’s real cash cow. The magazines’ luxury advertising pages — always a priority and point of pride for Si — seemed like major moneymakers, but their point was never the bottom line.
The heart of Grynbaum’s book is the roster of insider-outsiders that Newhouse assembled to run his magazines at their zenith from the 1980s until the 2008 recession. First comes Alexander Liberman, the Russian Jewish refugee who served as Condé Nast’s editorial director from 1962 to 1994. But this outsider’s father, a prosperous lumber merchant, had also been an adviser to both Czar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin.
Grynbaum’s insider-outsider thesis is stretched thinner in the cases of Tina Brown, the daughter of a film producer, and Wintour, whose father was the editor of London’s Evening Standard; so he emphasizes their sheer will to get to the top. Brought over in 1983 from Tatler, the British society magazine Brown had run since she was 25, to serve under Leo Lerman on the sputtering relaunch of Vanity Fair, she told Newhouse, “The only thing I can do for you when you are ready is be the editor.” On first meeting her Vogue predecessor, Grace Mirabella, Wintour, then the fashion editor at New York magazine, was asked what job she might want, and replied: “Yours.” Thanks to Liberman, a few years later she had it.
The male editors in the stable were more plausibly hayseeds. Graydon Carter was born to a middle-class family in Ottawa, but by the time he replaced Brown at the helm of Vanity Fair in 1992 (she became the editor of The New Yorker), his résumé included profiling Trump for GQ, co-founding Spy magazine and editing The New York Observer. Art Cooper was a “Jewish kid in Pennsylvania coal country” who had edited both Penthouse and Family Weekly (now there’s range) when he was hired to give the gay-in-all-but-name GQ a hetero makeover in 1983, a decade before the word “metrosexual” was coined. David Remnick was the son of a New Jersey dentist but had already won a Pulitzer Prize when Brown hired him as a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1992, and was a beloved fixture at the magazine when he succeeded her in 1998.
What these editors have in common more than some Horatio-Alger-with-a-pica-ruler climb is that they were good at their jobs. They had strong visions and were good at marshaling talent to execute them. They were also the avatars of a major generational turnover in Anglophone culture. The term Grynbaum uses is “yuppie,” but a more relevant one might simply be “baby boomer.” With the exception of Cooper, who was born in 1937, these editors were of the generation born between 1945 and 1960, the first to grow up with television from the cradle.
That’s one way of explaining their comfort with the celebrity-infused high/low editorial formula Brown brought to Vanity Fair that quickly spread across the rest of Condé Nast. The new guard of editors were uninhibited in matters of sex and unrestrained in their pursuit of buzz. There was no shame in chasing whatever was hot. The embrace of vulgarity caused a few resignations when Brown took over The New Yorker, but now it seems to most readers and magazine hands the natural order of things.
Now that the golden days are over, and Wintour has announced her retirement as editor of Vogue — she will remain as Condé Nast’s chief content officer — it’s worth asking how powerful these maestros ever really were. Was Condé Nast an “empire” and did its editors determine the course of the culture, or merely channel its strongest eddies? The word “gatekeeper,” used nine times by Grynbaum in “Empire of the Elite,” has taken on too much salience lately in media circles. The best editors I’ve known have always been talent spotters, the sort who prefer saying “yes” to saying “no,” even if their jobs require them to say the latter more often.
The publishers and editors of Condé Nast thrived by saying yes to the culture around them, and it’s not too late for them to do so again if the economics of magazines can be figured out in the era after print advertising. There is enough money in the Newhouse family coffers to keep printing ink on paper for decades. (And if they lose their nerve, there are other billionaires around who like shiny things.) On the other hand, Grynbaum points out that the internet has democratized the empire of the elite. Anyone with an Instagram account can be Anna Wintour, and, like me, Tina Brown now writes on Substack. So much for exclusivity, inclusive or not.
EMPIRE OF THE ELITE: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America | By Michael M. Grynbaum | Simon & Schuster | 345 pp. | $29.99
The post A Juicy Chronicle of the Fat Decades at Condé Nast appeared first on New York Times.
