When Ronald Galotti was running magazines at Condé Nast, he was used to entertaining the likes of Linda Evangelista and Gianni Versace.
That was then.
Now, the company he keeps is a little different.
One recent morning, he and his wife, Lisa Galotti, woke up at their farmhouse in North Pomfret, Vt., to find an unexpected guest fluttering around their fireplace.
“It’s a baby hawk,” Mr. Galotti said to his wife. “He must have come down the chimney. Get me a towel.”
So she did. At which point, he pulled the bird out of the fireplace, let out a choice expletive as it tried to take a bite of his index finger, and continued with a tour of the property.
In the 1990s, Mr. Galotti was arguably the best-known magazine publisher in America, the guy who had helped build up Vanity Fair and Vogue. Granted, that role does not generally bring the same fame as editing those titles can, but it was not as if Graydon Carter had served as the inspiration for Mr. Big, the highflying, limousine-riding, sometime paramour of Carrie Bradshaw in “Sex and The City.”
Mr. Galotti had.
Then, in 2003, Mr. Galotti, at the age of 54, and serving as the publisher of GQ magazine, was fired by his bosses at Condé Nast. In 2004, he announced in New York Magazine that he was moving 270 miles away to a giant plot of land up a dirt road and that he was going to fish and hunt and cut down trees and raise chickens and even join the volunteer fire department.
His friends, his enemies, New York media watchers of the ’90s and 2000s were all certain: There was no way Mr. Big would last up there.
But it’s been more than 20 years. And he did not come crawling back to civilization or try to rescale the heights of a media empire that has since receded.
That empire — or its heyday at least — has ignited a curious flurry of interest lately.
“When the Going Was Good,” Mr. Carter’s memoir about (among other things) working as the editor of Vanity Fair, was a recent best seller. “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America,” by Michael Grynbaum, a New York Times media reporter, comes out later this month. And Anna Wintour recently announced she would give up her role as editor in chief of American Vogue, signifying the end of that particular job title, and an era.
It’s a moment that seems to affirm Mr. Galotti’s retreat.
“I’m not sitting in the chair anymore,” he said. “But it seems like the destiny is not good.”
A Jacuzzi in Manhattan, via Peekskill
Where magazine editors might pride themselves on being erudite, publishers are a little like gangsters by way of Madison Avenue.
A story Mr. Galotti takes great pride in telling involves going to see S.I. Newhouse Jr., the billionaire owner of Condé Nast, sometime in the late ’90s or early 2000s. At his apartment near the United Nations, he found a Damien Hirst sculpture containing a cow’s head dripping in formaldehyde.
“I said, ‘How much did you pay for that?’” Mr. Galotti said, sitting in the living room on the ground floor of his house, wearing what he usually wears these days — loose Levis and a red flannel shirt with chest pockets. “He said something like $1.2 million. I said, ‘For that price, I could have just taken the client’s head and put it in there for you.’”
Mr. Galotti was born in the Bronx, which you can still hear in his voice, telling his origin story, even after several decades in Vermont. He grew up in Peekskill, N.Y. His parents ran a liquor store together. At 9, his father died of a heart attack. Mr. Galotti recalls being a mediocre student, but he worked hard at a farm, where he tended to the horses and the chickens.
In school, he got into fights and did not study. During his senior year, the principal informed his mother that he had skipped too much school and would not graduate with his class. In Mr. Galotti’s memory, an arrangement was worked out by which he would enter the Army. In exchange, he would receive his diploma.
It was then the time of the Vietnam War and he went to the Philippines, with the Air Force.
During his time in the service, he got married. When he returned to the states, he and his first wife moved to Cocoa Beach, Fla., where he worked as a waiter, and then started a heating and cooling business.
After that enterprise went under, Mr. Galotti moved back to New York, where he and his wife lived in her mother’s basement. He said his mother became involved with a guy who ran a trade publishing company. Mr. Galotti went to work for him, selling ads in the highly specialized area of sewing goods.
In 1970, Mr. Galotti and his first wife had a little boy. He died in a car accident at age 4. The marriage, he later said, was quickly over, and Mr. Galotti plunged further into the work of selling.
By 1978, he was at Hearst working for Country Living. He became its publisher in 1982 and, while at Hearst, he also met his second wife, a fellow publisher with the company.
In 1985, he was hired by Mr. Newhouse to be the publisher of Mademoiselle, the company’s middle-market magazine for young women. Two years later, he was tasked with being the publisher of Condé Nast Traveler, a new magazine the company was starting with Harold Evans, an esteemed British newspaper editor whose wife, Tina Brown, was now editing Vanity Fair.
In 1990, he moved to Vanity Fair. In 1992, Tina Brown left to edit The New Yorker.
Mr. Galotti remained in place.
Although Graydon Carter, Ms. Brown’s replacement at Vanity Fair, would preside over the magazine for more than two decades and become an industry behemoth, the magazine actually struggled in its first year under his leadership, partly because of a nationwide recession.
Mr. Galotti said he figured Mr. Newhouse would fire Mr. Carter. Instead, Mr. Newhouse fired Mr. Galotti, only to rehire him soon after as the publisher of Vogue, working alongside its editor, Anna Wintour.
Mr. Galotti learned two important things from that experience. The first was that everything about his life was on loan.
“Whenever you got summoned to S.I.’s office, you didn’t know if you were going to be promoted or fired,” he said.
The second was that he did not really like Anna Wintour.
“Tina and I were buds,” Mr. Galotti said. “It was like family. Anna Wintour is really all about business. I never really witnessed anything she did that wasn’t about business.”
From Vogue to Talk to GQ to Out of a Gig
Part of having a life on loan involved having a “spectacular” house in Water Mill, N.Y., that S.I. Newhouse gave him a no-interest loan in order to purchase. His plush apartment in the city, on East 57th Street, with a four-person Jacuzzi in the master bathroom, was a rental paid for entirely by the company, he said.
“David Copperfield lived there and I had a glass atrium into the sky,” Mr. Galotti said, recalling a famous neighbor. Every event in his private life, he said, seemed to flow from his role as a Condé Nast publisher.
Recently single again after the end of his second marriage, he met Candace Bushnell at a fashion show in 1995. She had just started writing a column in The New York Observer, “Sex & The City.” “She was a great girl,” he said. “We had a great time and there was no future attached to it. And there was never intended to be. I never was deceptive. I never said I loved her.”
What did he think of what Ms. Bushnell wrote — columns that made it fairly clear she was in love with him, or at least incredibly infatuated with him?
“I can’t help that,” Mr. Galotti said. “There’s nothing worse than when you love me and I don’t love you.”
In early 1996, he met Lisa at a work event in Aspen.
“I found him very intriguing, because to me he was different than the rest of the V.I.P.s,” Ms. Galotti said, sitting on a lounge chair a few feet from her husband. “He looked the part of the city guy, he had his slicked-back hair.” She recalled that it was a four-day event, and that they stayed up every night well past midnight just talking.
She soon came to stay with him at his house in Water Mill.
While she was there, Mr. Galotti called Ms. Bushnell and told her to come clear her things out of his closet. Within three months, Lisa was living with him in the city.
By the end of the year, they had eloped.
Ms. Bushnell does not seem to be holding it against him. “He’s a really nice guy, that’s the truth,” she said recently.
Soon after he and Lisa married, Mr. Galotti made another change: He went off with Ms. Brown to start Talk Magazine, with financing from Harvey Weinstein and Hearst.
To get the attention of ad buyers at Louis Vuitton, Mr. Galotti sent them a trash can filled with old issues of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. In August 1999, he and Ms. Brown hosted everyone from Madonna to Henry Kissinger at a launch party for the magazine on Liberty Island. When the magazine folded in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and the end of the first dot.com boom, Mr. Galotti was quickly hired as the publisher of GQ, another Condé Nast title.
He believed he was in line to run the company, but things did not turn out that way.
Since 1983, GQ had been edited by Art Cooper, a guy whose suits were three piece and whose lunches involved martinis. Mr. Galotti came in and quickly began pushing for his retirement. Four months after that effort succeeded, Mr. Cooper suffered a massive stroke during one of his lunches at the Four Seasons.
He died a few days later.
When Mr. Galotti was fired from GQ by Mr. Newhouse within a month, a number of people in the Newhouse empire could not help wondering (including to Jay McInerney, who wrote a cover story for New York Magazine about Mr. Galotti the following year) if Mr. Newhouse had sacrificed Mr. Galotti to assuage his own sense of guilt. Mr. Galotti remains unapologetic about it. “There was no way anyone could have foreseen he would pass away like that,” he said. “It was tragic. Art was a terrific guy. It was purely a business decision.”
The way Mr. Galotti tells it, he had been planning to exit the magazine world back when Lisa first moved to New York to be with him. He’d said it would take five years and it ended up being seven. At the same time, he was also angling for or being considered for C.E.O. of Condé Nast, depending on whom you asked. Had that happened, it seems unlikely that he would be sitting here in his rustic Pomfret living room.
“Where do you think you would be?” Lisa asked, as we discussed the alternate possibilities.
“Probably dead,” said Mr. Galotti.
‘Running to Reality’
Another lesson of being an ad salesman is that everything has a price. When Mr. Galotti moved to Vermont, he put that principle into practice.
“New Englanders deserve their reputation,” he said. “They’re crusty. They don’t immediately accept outsiders.”
So he helped bankroll a renovation of the nearby firehouse and took lessons to become a volunteer fireman. Lisa volunteered at the ski area. And Abigail, their daughter, now 26 and working in hospital administration, enrolled at the local school.
“A lot of people thought Ron was running from reality,” Ms. Galotti says. “He was running to reality.”
The timing was good, according to Tina Brown. In a phone interview, she said: “He escaped the penny-ante malaise of the media business. He left just before it really went sour. How many other people can say they did that?”
On an iPad, Mr. Galotti showed me a picture of himself holding the carcass of a dead animal he’d shot. “If you want to know the two most damaging things in the world, the first are human, the second are beavers,” he said.
Then he moved to a nearby shed, where he climbed into his favorite toy — a massive tractor that he said cost $55,000 (“$120,000 if you bought it today,” he said) and that was paid for by the magazine editor Jason Binn in exchange for some business advice.
“This is my baby,” he said.
We rode up and down the hill by his house scooping up branches. Mr. Galotti started off slow, then quickly floored the thing. I sat shotgun and held onto the railing for dear life as he chuckled and drove. When we returned to the house, he headed up to the bedroom, where framed photographs of Mr. Galotti and various celebrities lined the walls: Mr. Galotti with Dolly Parton, Mr. Galotti with Sylvester Stallone and Janice Dickinson, Mr. Galotti with Linda Evangelista.
Back downstairs, he showed off a bit of Mr. Big swag, including a ceramic bowl made for him by the Vermont potter Miranda Thomas that depicted a bunch of fish swimming in a circle.
At the bottom of the bowl was the word “Big.”
He conceded that he sometimes missed his old life. “The hard part was not being able to tell people what to do and losing people who idolize your intelligence,” he said.
Recently, he has been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to gin up interest for a memoir of his own.
The working title is “Goodbye Mr. Big.”
Jacob Bernstein reports on power and privilege for the Style section.
The post Mr. Big Is Alive and Well and Married in Vermont appeared first on New York Times.
