In the spring of 1966, The New York Times devoted nearly a page of its weekly features supplement to the phenomenon of upscale bachelor living in Manhattan. “An interesting city apartment,” the paper reported, “apparently doesn’t require a woman’s touch.” The lavishly photographed spread touted the exquisite decorating skills of single men and their tastes for Flemish tapestry, Chippendale ice buckets, and wraparound terraces. Conspicuous among these conspicuous consumers was one bachelor, pictured on a cushy sofa as a bow-tied servant poured him a cup of tea. A cigarette dangled from his fingers, and his feet were nestled in black espadrilles.
His duplex apartment, S. I. “Si” Newhouse Jr. explained to the paper, is “very much me at the moment.”
Shy old Sam Newhouse was so allergic to press coverage that he almost refused to cooperate with his own Time cover story. Now, his thirty-eight-year-old son was musing in public about the joys of a fox-fur bed throw, felt-covered walls, and a rug sewn from fifty jackal skins imported from Greece. Si gushed to the Times about his famed decorator, Billy Baldwin, and the domestic ministrations of his Filipino “houseboy,” Pedro, whom he deemed “one of the great luxuries of the world.” Abstract art and a stack of tasteful fashion magazines rounded out the image of a wealthy scion at rest.
Bragging about one’s living space is de rigueur among today’s celebrities and influencers, thanks in part to the massive popularity of Architectural Digest, published by Condé Nast. For Si’s tenement-bred father, who believed in the immigrant’s ethic of modesty and hard work, the Times feature would have been a massive embarrassment: his son and namesake in the paper of record sounding like a distracted prince, delighted by his own idleness. The Times article even raised the subject of Si’s recent divorce, a source of shame for the tradition-minded Sam, who was increasingly alarmed by his son’s playboy habits. The decorating story would prove to be among Si’s last major interviews in a publication outside of his family’s control. Looking back, the episode stands as an inflection point in the transformation of the Newhouse family, its uneasy passage from the privations of immigrant life to the trappings of newfound wealth, and the tensions between a sometimes austere patriarch and his prodigal son.
In fact, by the mid-1960s, Sam Newhouse had already started to lose interest in the glossy magazines under his control, which had proved less profitable than he’d hoped. He was refocused on his lucrative syndicate of mid-tier newspapers, while preparing his favored son—Si’s younger, steadier brother, Donald—to take over the family business. At the time, it would never have occurred to Sam that the spirit of self-gratification he so lamented in his firstborn son would prove to be the guiding light of Condé Nast’s future success. Si’s love of material pleasures drove him to mold the family’s magazines into global arbiters of taste, to revive moribund titles like Vanity Fair and GQ, and to extend the Condé Nast brand around the world. It was also the fuel that lifted the Newhouse name out of the regional newspaper trade and into the highest levels of social repute.
ONE EVENING IN THE 1950s, years before he would be featured in the Times, Si and his first wife, Jane, were due to attend an upscale cocktail party in Manhattan. (They had married in 1951, when Si was twenty-three.) Si, working a day job in the bowels of his father’s newspaper empire, was coming directly from a business appointment, so Jane got dressed alone and traversed the twenty-two blocks to her in-laws’ place at 730 Park. When Jane stepped off the elevator and into the exquisitely decorated duplex—the home her husband had grown up in, the nerve center of the Newhouse universe—her mother-in-law, Mitzi, approached.
“Go home,” Mitzi told her. “You look terrible.”
“I got a cab, went home, and I changed my dress,” Jane recalled decades later. “And I went back and joined them.” She laughed. “Can you imagine? That I did that? I cannot believe that I would have accepted that criticism and done that.”
It is difficult to understand the idiosyncrasies, indulgences, and ambitions of Si Newhouse—and the hugely successful magazines he came to control—without understanding the woman who raised him. Mitzi Newhouse weighed less than eighty pounds, yet she held enormous sway over Si for much of his life. She was acquisitive and anxious, snobbish and judgmental, as obsessed with fashion trends and party invitations and knowing the right people as any Edith Wharton antiheroine. She was invariably draped in Givenchy and Dior; at Si’s wedding to Jane, she carried a handbag that spelled out “Mitzi” in diamonds. When Mitzi attended a ball in 1962 at Blenheim Palace, the sprawling Oxford country estate of the Duke of Marlborough, she grew impatient when her chauffeured Rolls-Royce was forced to wait in a line of cars. Princess Margaret had just arrived and was being greeted by the hostess when Mitzi, fed up, barreled out of the Rolls. Her escort, the fashion designer Arnold Scaasi, attempted to explain that it was customary for a royal to be allowed to enter first.
“I’m going in now!” Mitzi shouted, sprinting up the steps to the entrance, where she was presented to the princess without delay.
It’s notable that the other man accompanying Mitzi that evening was not her husband, but her oldest son. Si, who was thirty-four years old at the time, “seemed very young” to Scaasi, who got the impression of a man still very much in thrall to his mother. Before the ball, Scaasi was dressing for dinner when Mitzi called: “Arnold, Arnold, do you know how to tie a bow tie? We are having the most terrible trouble.” The designer hurried to the Newhouse suite and discovered Mitzi, in a dressing gown, beside a shoeless, trouser-less Si, looking bewildered in an unbuttoned tuxedo shirt, his legs poking out in long black stockings. Scaasi assisted Si with his shirt studs and then tied his white bow tie.
“I thought they would send me a tie that was already made and would just clip on,” Si explained. It was like something out of a New Yorker cartoon about the hapless rich.
Mitzi’s squiring Si to aristocratic dinners in Europe was in keeping with a closeness between mother and son that dated to Si’s childhood. Sam’s idea of quality time with his young sons was bringing them to his office on the weekends, a routine that started when Si was barely five years old. Mitzi tutored Si in softer matters, imparting her enthusiasms for art, design, and the finer things in life. In the fall of 1939, when Si was eleven, the Newhouses enrolled him at the private Horace Mann School for Boys in the Bronx. The Our Crowd Jews had their own favored institutions—the Sachs School, which later became Dwight, educated Herbert Lehman, Henry Morgenthau Jr., and other sons of prominent German-Jewish families—so Horace Mann became the preferred choice for a newer generation of Jewish aspirants. Si was a managing editor of the student paper, The Record, and served as president of a “Speakers Club” that arranged visits by prominent public figures. But his extracurricular contributions were less meaningful than the friendships he forged with a pair of ambitious boys who went on to prominence. One was Allard K. Lowenstein, who became a liberal civil rights activist and served a term in the US Congress. The other was Roy Cohn.
It can still come as a shock that the maestro of Condé Nast—whose magazines advanced the careers of so many gay and progressive writers, artists, editors, and photographers—was also a lifelong confidant of Cohn, the notoriously savage lawyer and conservative political fixer who abetted Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt, played Aristotle to Donald Trump’s Alexander, and was immortalized in Tony Kushner’s 1991 play Angels in America as a closeted gay man who denied having AIDS up until he died from the disease. Yet Si and Roy were close for their entire lives, often speaking by telephone at least once a day. Roy grew up at 1165 Park Avenue, a mile north of Si’s place, and the boys often carpooled together to class. As a teenager, Roy—who, like Si, had an overbearing mother—had already found his knack as a behind-the-scenes player, engineering the election of friends to the Horace Mann student government.
Si was awed by Roy’s silver tongue and easy confidence, traits that Si would come to deeply admire in others, perhaps because he lacked them. Si was awkward in every way: moody and sullen, prone to shyness and melancholy, the sort of depressive, navel-gazing tendencies that his father, forced to start work at age thirteen to provide for his impoverished family, never had much patience for. In high school and college, Si sometimes felt so dejected that he confided to Lowenstein, his close friend from Horace Mann, that he had entertained thoughts of suicide; Lowenstein was once so alarmed by Si’s late-night phone calls that he traveled from Westchester to the Newhouse home to console his friend.
Si’s doldrums may be explained by the pressures he was facing at home. Sam Newhouse had long gravitated toward Si’s younger brother, Donald, who embraced the family’s nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic and rarely rebelled. Si, meanwhile, fought with his father over everything from his grades at Horace Mann to his subscription to PM, a left-wing pro-labor newspaper published in New York City that Sam, an ardent capitalist, worried would corrupt his son. In letters to Lowenstein, written when he was sixteen years old, Si repeatedly describes his efforts to free himself of Sam’s expectations, writing at one point, “S.I.N. Hopes Once and For All To Rid Self of Family Influence.” (Si used his monogram, “S.I.N.,” to refer to himself.) Si, who throughout his life could be opaque to the point of obscurity, expressed himself in these letters using a format he knew well: each missive is designed like the front page of a newspaper, complete with headlines. “WAR DECLARED,” reads one, referring to a titanic fight between Si and Sam. “Mother, Father Intent on Crushing Newfound Liberalism and ‘PM Influence’… ‘Social Position Too High,’ They Say! S.I.N., Shocked, Will Fight Back.” According to the letters, Sam blamed Lowenstein for Si’s middling marks in class and demanded that his son cut off the friendship, calling Lowenstein a “leftist” who had led Si “onto evil ways.” Si, who wrote that he fought “violently” with his father over the matter, described Sam as “stupid, stubborn, malicious and mean.” It isn’t clear if Sam recognized just how much the friendship meant to his son, who ended at least one of his lengthy notes to Lowenstein with the sign-off, “Love, Si.”
Lowenstein, like Cohn, was a closeted gay man, and it has not been lost on observers that several of Si’s closest adolescent friends were gay. (Another was Sanford Friedman, who became a novelist whose books contained explicitly gay themes.) Si’s sexuality has been a matter of some speculation over the years. Those who suspected he was gay often cited his enthusiasm for art and design, straying into the realm of ugly stereotypes. It is true that, given the time period and the socially conservative family he grew up in, Si may have been disposed to suppress any stirrings of same-sex attraction. But in my research, I found no evidence that Si ever pursued a gay liaison or expressed interest in one. Graydon Carter recalled that Patricia McCallum, who later married the actor Michael York, dated Si when she was single in the 1960s. Graydon asked Pat, “How was Si in bed?” Her reply: “Fantastic.”
In 1945, with college on the horizon, Si was hopeful for the academic and social validation of an Ivy League acceptance, setting his sights on Harvard. But his academic performance at Horace Mann was middling, and he was rejected not only by Harvard, but Cornell, too. It was yet another moment that showcased the limits of the Newhouses’ privilege: at the time, Cornell was considered such a safe bet for wealthy private-school boys that Si had prematurely shared his plans to go there in his Horace Mann yearbook. The rejection left him reeling. Spurned by these elite institutions, Si instead matriculated at Syracuse University in upstate New York, a second-tier college in a town where his father owned two newspapers and a radio station.I As an undergraduate, Si wrote for the campus paper under the nom de plume of “Si Mason.” But he did not relish his time at Syracuse, and he eventually asked his father if he could abandon his studies and go work at the family’s newspapers. When Sam relented, Si left without a degree. He did, however, leave with the prospects of a wife.
SI FIRST SPOTTED JANE FRANKE across the room at a Syracuse frat party. She was laughing in a friendly, uninhibited manner, and sitting on another man’s lap. “I didn’t feel the least bit embarrassed,” Jane recalled decades later, “and that appealed to him.” They were soon going steady, watching foreign films together and attending nights at the opera. “I felt as if I were Bette Davis’ boyfriend,” Si wrote to Jane after one date in 1948, signing off with “Love.” By the end of 1950, they were engaged.
Jane was a middle-class girl from Westchester County, where her father, Chester Frankenstein, ran an auto parts dealership. According to Jane, Mitzi avoided telling friends about her daughter-in-law’s maiden name “because it was so shocking.” (Jane shortened it to “Franke” at the suggestion of a school guidance counselor.) The couple married at the Waldorf-Astoria in March 1951; a rabbi performed the ceremony, though Jane accessorized with an ivory-bound Bible covered in clusters of white orchids, perhaps a nod to the family’s assimilationist aspirations. Si and Jane later sent out a holiday card: “To Mommie + Father,” it read. “Merry Christmas.”
The couple moved around as Si apprenticed at his father’s newspapers, including stints in Portland, Oregon, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, before settling at 1185 Park Avenue, the luxurious address Mitzi had deemed “practically in Harlem.” Three children—Sam III, Wynn, and Pamela—were born in quick succession. Si, however, was growing restless. Jane was happy to stay home with the kids, but Si liked the nightlife; soon, they were regulars at the 21 Club, El Morocco, and the Copacabana, dining alongside Broadway stars and gossip columnists like Walter Winchell. Around this time, Si reconnected with Roy Cohn, who, after the disgrace of the Army-McCarthy hearings, had made his way back into New York power circles. Roy and Si began going on double dates, sometimes with Roy’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, Barbara Walters; on family vacations in Florida, the Newhouse kids played cards with “Uncle Roy.” But Cohn was also subtly driving a wedge between Si and Jane, suggesting to Si that, given his family fortune, he could aim higher for a spouse.
The end of the marriage came abruptly—in a manner that foreshadowed Si’s notorious style of firing editors at Condé Nast. Jane, by her recollection, had traveled with friends to the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, but Si declined to accompany her. When Jane returned to her hotel one night, there was a cable waiting from her husband: he wanted to split up. Jane was stunned. She flew back and the two briefly reconciled, but Si eventually hired a divorce lawyer: Roy Cohn. “We weren’t meant to be together,” Jane told me, as we chatted in the sprawling apartment at 1185 Park where she and Si once lived. (Jane kept the apartment in the divorce and never moved out.) She showed no signs of bitterness, even noting that Si became a more doting father after their split, playing with their children most days after work. But Jane partially attributed the marriage’s collapse to Cohn, for encouraging her husband to seek out a glitzier lifestyle than the one she preferred. Si, she recalled, “wanted to squeeze everything into his life.” The couple were no longer living together in 1959 when the Newhouses purchased Condé Nast, but she recalled feeling happy for Si when she heard the news.
“He loved magazines,” Jane said. “That’s where he got his thrills.”
CONDÉ NAST TURNED OUT to be the greatest gift that Sam could have bought for his wayward son.
Si had been visiting Newhouse newspapers since he was a child, but in his first forays into the workforce, he showed little acumen for the job. Colleagues viewed him as ineffective and uninterested in daily journalism; he alienated the blue-collar staff of the Newark Star-Ledger by wearing monogrammed shirts. The daughter of a longtime Newhouse executive remembered that Si would shut his office door and chat on the phone with Mitzi for hours; when Si was urged to focus on his work, he’d reply, “I have to finish with my mother.” His brother, Donald, meanwhile, married a woman whom Sam and Mitzi adored, and moved into the apartment at 730 Park directly below his parents. “If I asked Donald to jump off a bridge for me, he would do it,” Sam once told a colleague. “If I asked Si to do it, he’d turn away from me.” One evening, when the family was dining together at 730 Park, Si insisted on being served a different entrée from the rest of his relatives. From the head of the table, Sam uttered wryly, “Si gets whatever he wants.”
“Mitzi gave him better treatment than she gave her own husband,” recalled Jane, who witnessed the exchange. “He was a little bit jealous. It was a little bit sad.”
Si’s spending habits became a source of family tension. In 1962, Sam rebuked his son for the sin of charging eleven dollars’ worth of shaving cream ($115 in today’s dollars) to his expense account. When Si asked his father for a Jaguar sports car, Sam was so frustrated that he dispatched a deputy to tell his son to buy a cheaper American vehicle instead. “When you grow up with a mother like that who is so focused on you, you’re bound to pick up her taste and her preoccupations,” Si’s daughter, Pamela Mensch, told me. “Early on, he got very dependent on having an affluent sort of life.”
Indeed, Si came by his snobbery honestly. For years, Mitzi employed a personal assistant she referred to as Alice “Hee-gahnz,” pronounced with a continental flourish. Her grandchildren assumed that Alice was European, maybe German or French. They only discovered later that the woman was an American and her name was Alice Higgins—a mundane moniker that Mitzi evidently demanded she elevate for appearances. This obsession with status only accelerated after Sam purchased Condé Nast. In June 1964, Mitzi reached the pinnacle: Vogue’s “People Are Talking About…” column, a regular feature that purported to keep readers abreast of society trends. That week’s readers were greeted with a formal Cecil Beaton photograph of Mrs. Samuel I. Newhouse, “a woman of astonishing energies… with a feeling for the amenities of life.” Vogue depicted Mitzi as a philanthropist with passions for French furniture and Dixieland jazz; nowhere did it mention that she was married to the owner.
Nineteen sixty-four was also the year that a different Newhouse found his place at Condé Nast. In a mix of pragmatism and desperation, Sam appointed Si as Vogue’s publisher. Sam had always relied on his relatives to oversee many of his media properties; at one point, dozens of Newhouses were employed across different components of the company. Somebody had to take care of the magazines, and Sam figured it made sense for Si, given his Mitzi-like interest in art and design, to start learning that side of the business. In reality, Sam considered the Vogue job beneath the rank of his eldest son. Vogue was supposed to be a waystation for Si before he applied himself to more important matters, like the family newspapers—a respite for a stubborn child who had gotten lost in life and was grasping for purpose.
But Si was besotted by the world of Vogue and the fascinating characters who inhabited it. It was the first time that he had found a role in his father’s empire that he relished, where he did not feel woefully out of place. The cover of Vogue’s October 15, 1964, issue featured an Irving Penn photograph of a pouty model, her head encased in a satin bonnet studded with glittered flowers. The headlines touted features on “Balenciaga: The Big Excitement” and “7 Top Diets Explored and Rated by Vogue.” Inside, next to the table of contents, an almost imperceptible change had been made to the masthead. In tiny type, the words “Publisher: S. I. Newhouse, Jr.” appeared for the first time.
Si’s ascent had begun.