Condé Montrose Nast was born in 1873 in New York City, a grandson of a strident Methodist preacher and the third child of a father who abandoned his wife and children when Nast was three. The family moved to St. Louis, where Nast attended public schools; when he went to college at Georgetown, he avoided trips home for want of train fare. After graduation, he returned to Missouri to pursue a law degree, and a career as a Midwestern lawyer beckoned. Then a fortuitous friendship changed his life. His college classmate Robert Collier, a wealthy publishing heir, offered Nast a job at his family’s magazine, Collier’s Weekly. In 1897, the preacher’s grandson headed back to where his life had started: the burgeoning secular cathedral of New York.
Over the next decade, Nast helped turn Collier’s into one of the country’s leading publications, attracting star writers like Upton Sinclair and Jack London. He lured the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson away from rivals by doubling his pay in exchange for an exclusive contract. The job also led to Nast’s initiation into the higher echelons of Gilded Age New York. Robert Collier had married into the family of Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, the society doyenne whose list of Manhattan’s “Four Hundred” most prominent citizens was the final word in America’s still-nascent social caste system. When Nast met Clarisse Coudert, an eligible daughter of a Four Hundred family, she was impressed by his friendship with Collier. They married in 1902, and Clarisse bestowed on her husband a rather apt kind of dowry: his inclusion in the Social Register. Overnight, Nast had entered the ranks of the American aristocracy; now he wanted to rise to its zenith. And he soon identified the perfect vessel for his ambitions: Vogue, a sleepy society gazette, barely solvent and barely read beyond a handful of drawing rooms on Fifth Avenue.
Founded in 1892 by a clique of old-money scions, Vogue attended to leisure-class concerns like golf, bridge, country club etiquette, and the passenger manifest on John Jacob Astor’s yacht. The publisher, a wealthy typography enthusiast named Arthur Turnure, once forgot to send an issue’s cover to the printers. With a select audience of fourteen thousand subscribers—forty times fewer than the readership of Collier’s—the magazine regularly expressed revulsion toward the encroaching hordes of the nouveau riche. Even a cataclysm like the Spanish-American War was an opportunity to provide readers with a lesson on understatement. “Don’t be so violently, alarmingly and visibly patriotic as to wear the tri-colors on everything,” Vogue instructed in 1898. “Bad taste never yet helped a good cause.” Above all, the magazine affected a tone of unerring authority, fueled by the egos of its founders and their credo, expressed in the earliest editorial meetings, that what “ ‘Vogue says’ was to be final.”
Nast was certain that Vogue’s potential was woefully untapped. In a rapidly changing nation, where mass industrialization had generated unprecedented new wealth and the term “conspicuous consumption” had recently been coined, Nast recognized that social aspiration was itself a commodity that could be harnessed for influence and, with shrewd marketing, lucratively exploited. He set about finding investors to help him purchase the magazine, using his own journey of upward mobility as the inspiration for his business plan. Nast was a social climber par excellence, exacting in his appearance—even as a young man, he adopted an old-fashioned pince-nez as his signature look—and a devoted reader of fashion magazines from London and Paris. To meld with the Newport crowd, he arranged for a camera to film his golf swing so he could improve his form at the tee.
In his pitch to investors, Nast had argued that the market for a guide to good living was surely there. And because Vogue would be aimed not just at the affluent, but also those who yearned to be, it could charge advertisers higher-than-average rates in exchange for access to the nation’s “wealthiest and most discriminating individuals.” At the time, most major magazine publishers simply strived for the biggest possible audience. Nast’s alternative model—“class, not mass”—was deeply counterintuitive: leaning into Vogue’s air of exclusivity could, paradoxically, broaden its appeal to readers and advertisers alike. As one Vogue editor put it: “He didn’t want a big circulation. He wanted a good one.” It was the motto from which all of Condé Nast’s future success flowed.
Nast won control of Vogue in 1909. He introduced color photography, raised newsstand prices to create a greater perception of luxury, and paid large sums for the services of star photographers like Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton, just as decades later his company would secure Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz to exclusive contracts. To appear more cosmopolitan, Nast included dispatches on European society, drawing on his and his wife’s socialite friends as correspondents. Rumors began to circulate that Nast was descended from the Condé branch of France’s royal House of Bourbon, or perhaps related to the political cartoonist Thomas Nast. Neither was true—Condé was a family name—but Nast didn’t mind the gossip, because it buttressed his reputation.
Crucially, Nast also sought to make middle-class readers—those who might be curious about Parisian fashions but couldn’t afford a Cunard crossing—feel included. He mailed free copies of Vogue to Midwestern department stores and Junior Leagues, to lure audiences outside of New York. Vogue included retailers’ names in fashion spreads so readers would know where to buy the clothes, a primordial step toward democratized luxury; until then, chic dress shops like Henri Bendel kept their inventories secret to all but the most “proper” upper-crust customers. “It is the avowed mission of Vogue to appeal not merely to women of great wealth, but more fundamentally, to women of taste,” Nast wrote. “A certain proportion of these readers will be found, necessarily, among the less well-to-do cousins of the rich.” His strategy of inclusive exclusivity was a moneymaker. In 1910, Ladies’ Home Journal was read by forty-three times more Americans than Vogue—but Vogue was carrying 44 percent more pages of advertising.
One event did more than anything to prove that Condé Nast, in the eyes of high society, had arrived. In 1914, Vogue threw a fashion show at the Ritz-Carlton ballroom featuring American designers, a radical idea at the time. Chic Americans considered domestic designs a poor substitute for French couture, but as Europe descended into conflict, it had become increasingly difficult to obtain the latest fashions. Debutantes were out of luck, and so was Vogue: with fewer clothes to feature, advertising revenue sagged. Vogue’s editor in chief, Edna Woolman Chase, pitched Nast on the idea of a fashion contest to boost the American garment industry. To ensure high society’s blessing, Chase trekked to the Hudson Highlands mansion of Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, who had succeeded Mrs. Astor as a key social arbiter, to ask if she would be a patron of the event. Mrs. Fish was about to rebuff Chase’s offer… until her secretary mentioned to Chase that her son was an aspiring illustrator, and how wonderful would it be if his drawings were to appear in Vogue? A deal was struck, and Mrs. Fish was persuaded to get onboard. The Fashion Fête, as it was known, was presented as a charitable event for Great War widows and orphans. It was the Met Gala before the Met Gala—a magazine marketing stunt turned public sensation—and it made headlines around the world. In a few short years, Nast had transformed insular Vogue into a global tastemaker. British Vogue was introduced in 1916; Vogue Paris followed in 1920. By 1926, American Vogue touted the second-highest advertising volume of any magazine in the country.
Having landed on a profitable model, Nast set out to conquer new subsets of elite audiences. In 1911, he had invested in House & Garden, an obscure architectural publication in Philadelphia. As with Vogue, Nast intuited that the magazine could appeal to a broader audience: America’s growing population of newly affluent homeowners eager to signal their status through decor. His next acquisition further advanced the sophisticated image accruing to the Condé Nast brand. He bought a men’s magazine called Dress, which he considered a prospective rival to Vogue, and revamped it as a lively compendium of wit and commentary on the arts, society, and current affairs. He changed the name to Dress & Vanity Fair and hired a new editor, Frank Crowninshield, who dropped the Dress.
Unlike Nast, “Crownie” was no outsider. A Boston Brahmin born in Paris and educated in Rome, he was an aesthete and bon vivant who co-organized the famed Armory Show in 1913, now considered the dawn of American modernism. At Vanity Fair, Crownie published art by Picasso, Matisse, and Gauguin and writing by Gertrude Stein, Aldous Huxley, and Noël Coward. He also liked humor writing, and he spotted a potential talent in a young woman named Dorothy Parker (then Rothschild) who was toiling on the Vogue copy desk. Crownie hired her to write theater criticism, for which she showed an affinity: years later, at The New Yorker, she panned a production with a nine-word summary: “The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy.”
Nast had no inkling that, in the far-off world of the 1980s, a resuscitated Vanity Fair under the editor Tina Brown would spark a revival of the company that bore his name. In the 1920s, he was just happy to count another success. Actors, artists, and writers clamored to be in the pages of Vanity Fair, which became a monthly chart of who was in and who was out in Jazz Age society. In a precursor to the celebrity-soaked Vanity Fair Oscar party, Nast began hosting all-night soirees at the palatial Park Avenue penthouse where he moved in 1925. Vanderbilts mingled with Marx Brothers and French nobility flirted with Hollywood moguls. Guests like George Gershwin, Fred Astaire, Samuel Goldwyn, and Edna St. Vincent Millay ascended to Nast’s thirty-room spread, which featured a seventy-five-foot-long, glass-covered outdoor terrace filled with chrysanthemums. The opulent interiors, with Louis XV furniture and Savonnerie rugs, were designed by the society decorator Elsie de Wolfe. Diana Vreeland, a regular attendee who boogied one night with Josephine Baker, recalled, “Everybody who was invited to a Condé Nast party stood for something.”
The name Condé Nast had meant nothing when he moved to Manhattan at the turn of the century. Now an invitation to his apartment meant the height of social success. Mr. Nast had become the new Mrs. Astor, and the thousands of copies of his magazines that landed on the nation’s doorsteps and newsstands had become monuments to his cultural authority. Still, Nast hoped for something more permanent. After he took over a printing plant in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1921, he erected a pair of enormous obelisks, engraved with titles rendered Roman-style: “VOGVE”, “HOVSE & GARDEN”, “CONDÉ NAST PVBLICATIONS.” The pillars doubled as a monument to his own ego and as a billboard: they were installed astride the Boston Post Road, the preferred motoring route for Manhattanites and Fairfield County residents taking their progeny to New England prep schools. (Long after Nast died, and the printing plant was replaced by a Hyatt, the obelisks sustained his legacy: Lauren Santo Domingo, who later became a Vogue editor and significant tastemaker, drove by them every day growing up in Greenwich. “Probably why I became obsessed with working at Condé Nast one day,” she joked.)
Nast’s upward passage halted abruptly in 1929, when Wall Street collapsed. Condé Nast stock fell from ninety-three dollars a share to two dollars. The crash not only annihilated the fortunes of wealthy Americans; it also cratered the advertiser and reader base of the magazines that catered to them. For Nast, the crash was devastating: he lost a significant portion of his personal wealth. A man who built his life on illusions, Nast now tried to carry on the act. He continued throwing parties even as he relied on wealthy friends to keep him afloat. In 1933, a British media baron, Lord Camrose, quietly purchased a controlling stake in Condé Nast. Nast’s name was still on the executive suite, but his control over his eponymous empire was gone. In March 1936, Vanity Fair was folded into Vogue. Nast had a final success with Glamour of Hollywood, a celebrity-focused magazine started in 1939. By then, he was in his mid-sixties, twice divorced, on the verge of serious heart trouble, and millions of dollars in debt; the prospect of restoring past glories was fading. In 1942, a bank took his Long Island country house, and he suffered a second heart attack. Nast died that September in his Park Avenue aerie, overlooking a city whose splendor and ferment he had done so much to package and sell to the world. His prized penthouse furnishings were sold for cheap at a disappointing auction.
But in death, the myth of Condé Nast bloomed. “Does the young woman in Fort Smith, or San Antonio, or Birmingham, or Topeka dress somewhat better than her ancestors, and does she have a surer appreciation of the world of manners and decorum and what might be called the art of gracious living? Then much of the credit must go to Condé Nast,” wrote the New York Herald Tribune. Time eulogized him as the man from whom millions of people “got most of their ideas, directly or indirectly, about the desirable American standard of living.” Condé Nast, the mortal—the child abandoned by his father who once struggled to decipher the codes of the rich—had evanesced into Condé Nast, the brand: global icon of sophistication, unimpeachable arbiter of the best that life had to offer.
The magazines, however, were being read by fewer and fewer people, their influence ebbing against competitors like Harper’s Bazaar, Life, and Esquire. Nast, master of the mores of the Gilded Age, now seemed poised to share the lukewarm legacy of that era, remembered with a hazy nostalgia and unmistakable whiff of must. The indignity must have seemed total in 1958, when the ailing Condé Nast Publications were sold to the parent company of Britain’s working-class Daily Mirror, a gauche fate for once-glittering Vogue. Within six months, the company changed hands again. The new owner was a diminutive Jewish publisher of mid-market newspapers with little public profile, a child of immigrants born into poverty who concentrated his business in second-tier cities like Cleveland, Ohio, and Syracuse, New York, whose parvenu wife happened to like reading the fashion pages. The transaction merited little mention in the press.
No one imagined that the most glorious, most profitable, and most powerful years of Condé Nast were still to come.
NAST HAD BEEN DEAD for nearly seventeen years when Samuel I. Newhouse, the wealthy but obscure owner of a national newspaper chain, purchased the tattered remains of the Nast magazine empire in 1959. It was effectively a fire sale. On the cusp of the 1960s, Condé’s magazines felt more retro than cutting-edge, their pages preoccupied with cotillions and fedoras just as the world of debutantes and formal dressing was being swept away.
So, the Condé kingdom needed a savior. But who was this newcomer Newhouse? “A 5-3, kinky-haired, thick-lipped, friendly-eyed, flat-nosed dynamic insomniac who likes to buy publications,” clucked Women’s Wear Daily, the institutional voice of the fashion elite. “He went to work at 12 because he needed the money.” Collier’s compared his rumpled appearance to that of “a not-too-successful salesman, or perhaps a dealer in antiques.” On the rare occasions he granted interviews, Sam Newhouse emphasized that he was a workaholic who didn’t get out much; he even declined to respond to questions from the society roster Who’s Who. To the Condé snobs, the idea that this unfashionable man could take charge of the most fashionable of American magazines was absurd. Newhouse was rich—his newspapers made a mint—but it was the wrong kind of rich, the slightly embarrassing fortune of a crass salesman. His company, Advance Publications, was based in, of all places, Staten Island. And then there was his wife, Mitzi Newhouse, who purported to have “a sixth sense about fashion.” Vogue, it seemed, had been reduced to a naïf’s bauble.
“It was a toy for Mitzi,” one editor griped to Women’s Wear, “like Marie Antoinette getting her farm.”
Newhouse, who had been underestimated his entire life, shrugged it off. What the society wags failed to notice was that Sam and Nast had several things in common. Both men were born to mediocre fathers and moved to Manhattan determined to succeed. Both applied a shrewd financial acumen to the chancy business of magazines. And both eventually celebrated their success by acquiring grand residences on Park Avenue, just fifteen blocks apart. In their overlapping lifetimes, Nast and Newhouse traversed distinct but parallel pathways of the American dream. But first, Nast had to escape Missouri, and Sam had to escape his past.
Solomon Neuhaus was born on May 24, 1895, inside a five-story tenement building at 53 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, a world away from the Gilded Age aristocracy that held sway a few miles to the north. He was the oldest child of Meier Neuhaus, a rabbi’s son who had endured an odyssey of his own. Meier was born in a tiny village near Vitebsk in Russia, trekked to Western Europe by caravan, and then crossed the Atlantic in steerage in 1890. He spoke no English. Meier married Rose Arenfeldt, an immigrant raised on an Austrian farm, and then found work as a machinist in the garment industry. When Solomon was around one, the family moved to New Jersey, settling near Bayonne with other Russian Jews who toiled as laborers. In 1902, Meier restyled himself “Meyer” and changed the spelling of his surname to Newhouse, perhaps an effort to improve the prospects of a new business manufacturing suspenders. Solomon became Sam, or “Sammy” to his family. The suspenders venture failed, and the Newhouses fell into poverty. Meyer, who suffered from severe asthma, left the family for long stretches to convalesce in rural settings. To support her eight children, Rose sold sundries door to door to neighbors, trudging to Manhattan on the ferry to pick up linens and dry goods and hauling them back to Bayonne.
The deprivations of his early years still gnawed at Sam decades later. When he appeared on the cover of Time in 1962, Newhouse told the magazine that his middle initial, I, stood for nothing at all. He later tried to bolster his father’s reputation, insisting that Meyer Newhouse’s failures were the fault of a swindling business partner; Meyer, in fact, had lost his company all by himself. In a privately published memoir, intended for the Newhouse family, Sam confessed to experiencing “a certain shame” about his origins, although he also drew a direct link between his childhood penury and the ambition that drove his climb up the American ladder. “I was small, young and poor, and I learned as I grew,” Sam wrote. “I could no more stop forging ahead than a blade of grass could turn away from the light.”
Anointing himself his family’s breadwinner at thirteen, Sam left school after eighth grade and enrolled in a typing and bookkeeping course, but struggled to find work. One prospective employer burst into laughter when Sam came to his office for an interview. “I can’t hire you!” the man said. “Your head doesn’t even come to the top of the desk!” Eventually, Sam found a mentor in Hyman Lazarus, a political fixer and godfather type to Bayonne’s Jewish families, whose law office sat above the newsroom of the failing Bayonne Times. Lazarus hired Sam to manage the books, and when he purchased the Times, he put sixteen-year-old Sam in charge; within a year, the newspaper had turned a profit. Like Nast, Sam had considered a career in the law, but decided he showed more of a knack for publishing. Also like Nast, he quickly set his sights on expansion. The Staten Island Advance, a stalwart of New York City’s then-rural outer borough, was struggling to stay afloat, and in 1922, with Lazarus as a partner, Sam took a majority stake.
Not long afterward, Sam met the woman who would play an improbably large role in the destiny of Condé Nast. Mitzi Epstein was a chatty four-foot, eight-inch brunette, a fashion student at what later became known as the Parsons School of Design. Mitzi’s parents, Sam and Judith, ran a prosperous women’s clothing company that imported scarves from France; they enjoyed foreign films and retained an in-house Hungarian cook at their Upper West Side apartment. This sophisticated lifestyle impressed the tenement-bred Sam, who also appreciated that Mitzi was the first woman he’d dated who was shorter than he was. The Epsteins, however, were skeptical. Staten Island, Bayonne, and a life of little-known newspapers was not the bright future they had envisioned for their daughter. Judith Epstein even encouraged Mitzi to date one of Sam’s taller friends; in his memoir, Sam noted with satisfaction that “the other fellow went into bankruptcy.” Eventually, the Epsteins yielded, and on May 8, 1924, Sam and Mitzi were married at the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan, where guests took home cake slices wrapped in white satin boxes.
The couple settled into a handsome Tudor house in the Staten Island neighborhood of Ward Hill, on a bluff with sweeping views of the harbor. Mitzi was the lead decorator, but Sam, buoyed by success, insisted on one detail: the railing of the home’s primary staircase was bent into the shape of his initials. Sam descended to breakfast each morning along a row of S’s bisected with I’s, a strip of wrought-iron dollar signs. The family soon expanded: a son, S. I. Jr., was born by cesarean section on November 8, 1927; in what was perhaps a sign of the family’s assimilationism, the baby was named after its father, in defiance of Jewish custom that discouraged such a practice. Another child, Donald, arrived two years later.
Ward Hill was a symbol of how far Solomon Neuhaus had traveled from Orchard Street. After taking over the Advance, Sam bought up more struggling papers in Long Island, Newark, and Syracuse and turned them into profit centers; his holding company, Advance Publications, eventually included lucrative outposts in Alabama, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Oregon. But Mitzi, tempted by the Manhattan tableau out their window, yearned for more. She read smart fashion magazines like Vogue and considered herself an aesthete; she also held strong opinions on how an upwardly mobile New York family ought to live. The couple’s Saturdays soon revolved around a short drive to the ferry terminal and then a windswept ride across the water, the city’s bouquet of skyscrapers growing large on the horizon. In Manhattan’s gilded canyons, the Newhouses absorbed art, design, and opera, and Mitzi perused fashionable boutiques. A different sort of life beckoned.
By May 1940, the Newhouses were wealthy enough to rent a thirteen-room duplex apartment at 730 Park Avenue, in one of America’s most desirable neighborhoods. This was no Ward Hill. 730 Park encased gracious apartments with marble staircases and East River views. The Newhouses’ unit, on the seventh and eighth floors, included a formal library and four maid’s rooms; among their new neighbors was the composer Richard Rodgers, of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Mitzi commissioned an expensive renovation in antique French style from a decorator who said he had done work for the du Ponts; a foot pedal at the dining table summoned a servant. Thus the Newhouses settled on Park Avenue—but not Park Avenue, meaning the insular WASP society of boarding schools, men’s clubs, and Ivy League signet rings that represented membership in America’s financial and social elite. Despite their ample residence and household help, the Newhouses were still marked by the stigma that New York’s chattering classes affixed to Sam’s generation of Eastern European Jewish immigrant stock. (In fact, the Newhouses’ building was one of the few Park Avenue addresses at the time that allowed Jewish tenants.) The family took annual trips to Europe, wintered in Florida and Acapulco, and later bought a sprawling estate in New Jersey with a tennis court and five-car garage. But Sam Newhouse was too blatant a striver to be welcomed by a Manhattan society where sangfroid, not sweat, was prized. Reporters often called Sam “restless,” “hustling,” and “indefatigable”—dirty words for the Vogue set that preferred a studied ease.
It wasn’t just the WASPs who looked askance. Sam was also rebuffed by the city’s “Our Crowd” circle of wealthy old-line Jewish families, the mainly Germanic banking and merchant dynasties of Lehmans and Loebs and Kuhns who had amassed fortunes well before the arrival of poor Jewish refugees in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sometimes referred to as the “One Hundred,” a cheeky variation on the old Four Hundred list, these elite Jews policed their ranks and rejected arrivistes as firmly as old Mrs. Astor.I This narcissism of small differences underscored just how difficult it would prove for Sam to transcend his lowly background, even as his fortunes grew.
On top of these indignities was the low opinion of Newhouse within his own profession. Sam once offered to buy The New York Times from its “Our Crowd” owners, the Sulzbergers, but the family did not seriously consider his proposal. Sam’s reaction underscored the separation between himself and the city’s more established Jews: “They’d never sell to a kike like me.” When Newsweek went up for sale in 1960, Sam submitted a bid significantly higher than the market value of the magazine, which was controlled by the family of Vincent Astor, one of America’s wealthiest men. Condé Montrose Nast, despite his prosaic origins, had few problems wooing Vincent’s grandmother Mrs. Astor, but in 1960, Sam’s entreaties received a cooler reception. Vincent’s widow, Brooke Astor, insisted that Newsweek would never fall into his hands; Newsweek was available, it seemed, but it was not available to a Newhouse. While it’s hard to pinpoint the reason for Brooke Astor’s opposition, it’s likely she and her advisers were channeling the dim view of Sam that prevailed among their fellow sophisticates. When Sam tried to buy The Washington Post in 1963, his solicitations so repelled Katharine Graham, the Post’s high-born publisher, that she complained about it in her memoir years later, marveling that the “ever-eager” Newhouse would not take no for an answer.
This sneering view of the family was best summarized by A. J. Liebling, the great wit of The New Yorker and mainstay of its “Wayward Press” column of media criticism, who dismissed Sam as a pretender who had purchased second-class newspapers through the disreputable practice of preying on more upstanding owners and exploiting family feuds. Liebling’s own father, like Sam’s, was a Jewish immigrant who had arrived in America penniless. But the Lieblings prospered in the fur trade, and A. J. grew up in comfort on the Upper East Side. As a second-generation American Jew, Liebling could have evinced some sympathy for Sam’s difficult path, a recognition that the difference between his father’s success and Meyer Newhouse’s failure may have boiled down to circumstance and luck. That Liebling forged ahead with his ridicule makes all the crueler the French slur that he later assigned to Sam, a sobriquet that rankled the publisher for the rest of his life. In Liebling’s phrasing, Sam was a “journalist chiffonier”—a ragpicker.
IT WOULD BE TEMPTING to assert that Sam’s subsequent decision to purchase Condé Nast was a straightforward example of social aspiration, an outsider seizing a plum opportunity to buy his way into the long-sought graces of the upper class. Here, in a slightly bruised condition ripe for the taking, was all the prestige of Vogue, its historic ties to the Four Hundred, its taste-making editors whose opinions mattered to all the snobs who so casually and callously disdained the Newhouse name. In one anecdote, repeated so often that some otherwise authoritative accounts of Condé Nast have accepted it as fact, Sam claimed that he bought Vogue as a thirty-fifth-anniversary present for his wife. One version of the story went that Mitzi asked Sam to go out and buy her Vogue—that is, an issue from the newsstand—and he instead came back owning the company.
If there is any truth there, it lies in Mitzi’s very real fixation on status and class. A woman besotted by clothes, socialites, and celebrities, she relished the company of boldfaced names and all outward signs of social rank. She also adopted a conspicuous and, at times, crass kind of snobbery, to which her family was not immune. When her son Si and his first wife, Jane Franke, moved into a sprawling co-op at Park Avenue and East Ninety-third Street—in a luxury building complete with an interior courtyard, Gothic limestone entryway, and porte cochere—Mitzi declared herself less than impressed.
“My god,” she exclaimed to her son. “You’re practically in Harlem!”
So, yes, Vogue made sense as a vessel to advance Mitzi’s social ambitions. But while Sam was generally happy to bankroll his wife’s indulgent lifestyle, he also felt conflicted about the world of affluence she adored. Mitzi “wanted a Park Avenue life,” recalled Sam’s granddaughter, Pamela Mensch. “I’m sure my grandfather would have happily lived the rest of his life in Staten Island.” For Jews like Sam who had clawed their way out of poverty, the uptown world of the wealthy was often viewed with indifference, and perhaps some contempt. “I got the idea that eating at Sardi’s or living at 730 Park Avenue was the sort of thing that Sam thought, or somebody had persuaded him to think, that somebody in his position ought to do, rather than something that was natural to him,” said Calvin Trillin, the longtime New Yorker writer who, as a young correspondent at Time, trailed Sam for a cover story on the Newhouse empire. Sam was uneasy about the publicity, Trillin recalled, and irritated about having to answer so many questions from a journalist. After a day of interviews, Trillin hopped out of Sam’s limousine and was nearly hit by a passing car.
“Be careful,” Sam warned him. “I wouldn’t want to go through this again.”
In reality, when Condé Nast was presented to Sam as an acquisition target in 1959, his interest was more straightforward and hard-nosed: Was it undervalued, and could he wring a profit? For all of its residual glitz, Condé Nast appealed to Sam because it was his favorite kind of distressed asset. The company had lost $534,528 in 1958 ($5.6 million in today’s dollars). Vogue was making less money than its Hearst-owned rival, Harper’s Bazaar, and Nast’s Greenwich printing press had become a woeful money pit. Plus, Sam, who had previously tried and failed to buy The Saturday Evening Post, had been looking to break into the magazine business—not for the glamour, but for the lucrative advertising.
There was, however, a younger Newhouse who sensed more potential in the family’s newest asset. Sam Newhouse was happy for his status-conscious wife to enjoy the perks of owning Vogue, granting Mitzi the illusion that she had been accepted by the elite. His eldest son, S. I. Newhouse Jr., had little use for illusions. Like Condé Montrose Nast, Si wanted to be elite—to choose, rather than be chosen—and by the early 1960s he was beginning to grasp the social possibilities uniquely available to him as the freshly minted heir to Vogue. It was Si who believed that the mystique of Condé Nast, and the refinement of its readership, could be the key to something more profitable, influential, and exciting than, say, a regional newspaper in Oregon. Si had grown up all too conscious of the fine gradations of New York society, the invisible old-world barriers and codes that had kept him, by all appearances a wealthy scion, still stuck on the outside looking in. And he knew exactly how his father, and by extension all of the Newhouses, was perceived. When Sam died, in 1979, at age eighty-four after a long decline, his New York Times obituary quoted him referring to himself as a “shrimp” and repeated Liebling’s insult. In death, Sam Newhouse had made the front page—but he was still the chiffonier.
And so Si bided his time. His vengeance would come slowly, and then all at once.