For all the tectonic change sweeping American society in the 1960s, it was a relatively quiescent time at Condé Nast, which had the atmosphere of a women’s finishing school when Si Newhouse began working there. The well-heeled and well-coiffed women who populated the halls often referred to the place as “the Eighth Sister,” a nod to the elite all-female Seven Sisters colleges that routinely sent their graduates into the company’s lower ranks. Inside the Deco-style Graybar Building, Condé’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters astride Grand Central Terminal, it was common to see Vogue editors in white gloves and silk veils wielding Cartier cigarette holders at their desks, where the typewriters were customized with an acute accent key so that memos and letters could spell “Condé” with the correct French flair.
Characters like Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, the reed-thin, exquisitely clothed Parisian fashion editor who may or may not have squandered a family fortune (no one quite knew where the money was from, or had gone), spent afternoons leafing through imported copies of Le Monde. Cecil Beaton might wander by holding a bird in a cage. Conversations in Russian and French floated through the hallway and junior editors regularly retreated to the swimming pool at the nearby Shelton Hotel for a lunchtime dip. Vogue was edited by, and primarily for, an insular class of socialites and fashion industry professionals. Compared to behemoths like Life and Newsweek, its reach was small—by design. At one point, the magazine quashed an effort to attract new readers, reasoning that if circulation expanded, so too would production costs, and then niche retailers like Harry Winston might not be able to afford to buy ads.
Si changed all this. Within twenty-five years of his arrival, Condé Nast would be transformed from a clubby little business to the imperious steward of global brands like Vanity Fair, GQ, Architectural Digest, and Allure. Si founded powerful new magazines and, taking a cue from his father, purchased and revived struggling rivals, including The New Yorker. He recruited Tina Brown and Anna Wintour and hired hyperaggressive salesmen to corner the market in luxury advertising. Condé went from a publishing laggard to the center of the culture-making industry. And Si remade himself from a feckless scion into an esteemed patron, splashing out millions to hire the country’s finest writers and photographers and filling his town house with blue-chip works by Johns, Rauschenberg, and Rothko.
He did not do it alone. One enigmatic and exotic figure was the driving force behind this personal and professional metamorphosis, the Rasputin to Si’s princeling: Alexander Semeonovitch Liberman, Condé Nast’s powerful editorial director. Silver-haired and darkly handsome, with a silky patrician accent that evoked his pan-European upbringing, Alex (as he was invariably known) was the embodiment of Condé panache: a snob, spendthrift, and sensualist. For decades, he personally reviewed every layout, headline, caption, and photo that appeared in a Condé Nast publication, impressing his style and artistic instincts on the entire oeuvre. He was also a cunning careerist. When Si arrived, Alex took him under his wing, tutoring the young heir in the ins and outs of superior taste. The notion of a partnership between diffident Si and sophisticated Alex struck many of their colleagues as far-fetched. But for all their differences in pedigree and personality, Si and Alex were two Jewish outsiders with something to prove. Their close collaboration would revolutionize American journalism, fashion, and design. For Si, it also represented something deeper—he would later describe their relationship as no less than “the most meaningful experience of my life.”
THEY MET ONE DAY in 1961 in the offices of Glamour, Vogue’s kid-sister publication that was aimed at a younger and more middle-class readership. Si had just started at Condé Nast, working as an assistant in the promotions department. He wanted to understand how a publication emitted from a New York skyscraper could conjure that intangible aura of class that had eluded his striving mother, bored his workaholic father, and fascinated Si himself. To his sophisticated new colleagues, Si had less in common with the editors of Vogue than with its striving subscribers, a group described that year by Gay Talese as “those thousands of female Walter Mittys who, under the hair dryer each week, can flip through the gossamer pages and perchance dream that they are the Countess Crespi lolling on Niarchos’ three-masted schooner, they are at Monaco being sketched by René Bouché, they are flying their own Beechcraft toward some exotic spot far, far from Oshkosh… far, far from the Bronx.” Or, in Si’s case, far, far from the Newark Star-Ledger, his last workplace before Samuel Newhouse agreed that Si could begin learning the magazine business.
Si had also just purchased his bachelor pad and had no idea how to decorate it, so he called on Alex, a painter and sculptor in his spare time, for advice. Alex was keenly aware of Si’s importance to the future of the company, and by extension, his own career. He quickly befriended the young heir, escorting him on lunch breaks to Leo Castelli’s Upper East Side gallery, and drew on his copious connections to make crucial introductions. Alex arranged for Si to meet Barnett Newman for lunch at Barney Greengrass; before long, Si was an important Newman collector. Most weeks, Si and Alex met at the Grill Room at the Four Seasons, where Alex came prepared with the latest art world gossip. Si, who was still learning to tell his Rauschenberg from his Rothko, began bursting into Alex’s office, brandishing auction catalogues and demanding Alex’s opinion on the pieces he wanted to buy.
It is not hard to see what entranced Si about Alex. Raised by a father who eschewed glamour and a mother who crassly galloped toward it, he had never met anyone as singularly refined and well connected as this curious new friend. With his bespoke suits and neatly trimmed mustache (he was often said to resemble the British actor David Niven), Alex evinced the manner of a pre-Revolution Russian aristocrat. In fact, he was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, the only child of a successful Jewish lumber merchant. His father, Semeon, served the czar’s family until 1917, after which he pivoted to an advisory position with Vladimir Lenin. Their life was relatively comfortable but scarred by upheaval; by the early 1920s, his parents had joined the exodus of White Russians who escaped Bolshevik rule for the uncertainties of a new life in Western Europe. Alex attended elite schools in Britain and France and eventually became a designer at Vu, a trendsetting Parisian weekly whose large-format photographs directly inspired Henry Luce’s Life magazine. (In a neat bit of proto-Condé nepotism, Alex was hired thanks to his mother, Henriette, who was a doyenne of Paris’s artistic émigrés and carrying on an affair with Vu’s publisher, Lucien Vogel.) Alex built a reputation as an avant-garde designer, but his life was upended again after the Nazis invaded France, forcing him and his wife-to-be, Tatiana du Plessix, to flee. They arrived in New York in 1941; within weeks, Alex had secured a job in the Vogue art department thanks to Vogel, who by then was employed at Condé Nast.
One day, Alex made a fateful doodle. Pondering a photograph by Horst P. Horst of a swimsuit model balancing an oversized red beach ball on her toes, Alex’s pencil arced across the page. In an elegant cursive, he spelled out V O G U E—with the ball taking the place of the ‘O.’ Frank Crowninshield, the former editor of Vanity Fair, wandered by and spotted Alex’s design; he took the drawing to Nast himself and declared that a genius was in their midst. (The drawing, which ran on May 15, 1941, remains one of Vogue’s most famous covers.) By 1943, Alex had been promoted to Vogue’s art director; by 1944, he was overseeing art at every Condé magazine.
Alex’s contributions in the years that followed were legion. He discovered Irving Penn, then an aspiring painter, when Penn was laboring in the art department at Saks Fifth Avenue. Alex later hired Penn as his assistant at Vogue, and urged him to refocus on photography. In 1945, Alex persuaded Edna Woolman Chase to publish Lee Miller’s photographs of cadavers at Buchenwald in Vogue, among the first depictions of the Holocaust in an American publication. Alex integrated artwork by Mondrian into Vogue layouts and posed models in front of Jackson Pollock drip paintings, his way of exposing readers to contemporary art under the auspices of fashion. In 1942, he asked Marcel Duchamp to design a Vogue cover that conveyed “some sense of Americana”; Duchamp’s submission—a portrait of George Washington’s head covered in bloodstained medical gauze, as if an assassination had just occurred—was politely rejected.
In the Condé offices, his authority became absolute: Alex’s impeccable manners and exacting standards set the template for a Devil Wears Prada office culture that was elegant and cutthroat all at once. In his courtly way, Alex addressed nearly everyone as “my dear” and rarely flashed a temper, even as he found subtly savage ways to assert power: generations of Condé editors learned that even a raised eyebrow meant Alex had sized up their work and silently deemed it trash. “When I took layouts or story ideas up to Alex, he would always begin his judgments with ‘Friend’ or ‘Dear friend,’ ” recalled Gabé Doppelt, an editor in chief of Mademoiselle which joined the Condé Nast stable in 1959. “I learned early on that they were not the same. ‘Friend’ was just that, a term of endearment, but ‘Dear friend’ was a warning shot across the bows. It let me know that what would follow was a harsh evisceration of what he’d just looked at. I would be crushed, and the mere mention of the ‘dear’ before the ‘friend’ sent shivers down my spine.” His behavior eventually earned him a nickname: the Silver Fox.
Alex also cared deeply about status—particularly his own. He raised snobbery to an art, slicing the gradations of caste gossamer-thin: he might instruct a friend headed to the Ritz Paris to stay on the quieter Rue Cambon side of the hotel, never the grander suites overlooking the Place Vendôme. (Coco Chanel preferred the Cambon entrance, Alex explained, adding that the Vendôme side was vulgar.) Alex’s stepdaughter, the novelist Francine du Plessix Gray, later wrote that “power and publicity were the two motivations that had inspired much of his life.”
He and Tatiana, by then a celebrated hat designer at Saks, established their East Seventieth Street town house as a center of postwar New York social life. Guests at their parties might include haute Europeans like Marlene Dietrich and Christian Dior, or artists like Salvador Dalí and René Bouché. Like many of the stars who passed in and out of Condé Nast over the decades, Alex was a chameleon, an outsider who masqueraded as an insider—and sometimes prized that masquerade to a fault. When Princess Margaret and her husband, the photographer Lord Snowdon—whose own career had been advanced by Alex’s decision to publish him in Vogue—visited New York in 1967, they arranged to stay at the Libermans’ home. Alex was so eager to flaunt his association with the royal couple that he evicted his stepdaughter and son-in-law from their bedroom so Margaret would have more space.
This was a world quite alien to Si Newhouse, and it thrilled him. Alex brought Si along to photo shoots, explained his theories of magazine design, and instructed him on what set an Irving Penn or Cecil Beaton photograph apart from the pack. “If Si Newhouse knows anything about how to pick up a fork, look at a picture, or have a conversation, it was taught to him by Alex Liberman,” said the art critic Barbara Rose, who knew both men well.
For Alex, this was an act of corporate survivalism above all else. Unbeknownst to Si, Alex was struggling with his own prospects at Condé Nast. He had recently fallen out with his chief rival, another dashing Russian émigré named Iva Patcévitch, who had run the company since Nast’s death in 1942 and orchestrated the sale to the Newhouses. “Mr. Pat,” as he was known, had been friends with Alex for nearly two decades, but their relationship cooled dramatically in the aftermath of the company’s sale in 1959. Alex had encountered anti-Semitism before, but he was taken aback by Pat’s private contempt toward the Newhouses; Pat’s wife referred to Sam and Mitzi as “the little heebs.” If Pat was going to ice out the Newhouses, Alex reasoned, he would welcome them in from the cold. A multigenerational seduction ensued. After an afternoon with Alex at the galleries, Si would go to dinner at Sam and Mitzi’s Park Avenue place and discover Alex and Tatiana at the table, regaling his parents with anecdotes about their glory days in Paris. Tatiana arranged lunches for Mitzi with her socialite friends; Sam began turning to Alex for advice on the magazine business. In a matter of months, Alex had become consigliere to the Newhouse family. At the end of 1962, Sam promoted him to “editorial director” of Condé Nast, the omnipotent role Alex would retain for thirty-two years.
Those who knew Si in those years believe that Alex came to occupy the role of a stand-in father, given all the tensions Si had suffered with Sam earlier in his life. At times, Si resisted the comparison, but when Alex turned eighty, Si wrote a letter describing Alex as “associate, friend, brother, father… there have been elements of all these in our relationship with none of the tensions there might have been.” He added: “I hope we continue forever—in a deep sense we will.”
Where Si wilted under the glare of Sam’s disappointment, he found Alex patient, encouraging, tolerant of missteps. Si still struggled with the social graces that came naturally to the Condé set. “He didn’t really move with the ‘right’ crowd,” recalled Grace Mirabella, who later edited Vogue. “He hadn’t had the ‘right’ sort of first wife. Or the right clothes. Or manners.” Alex was appalled when Si invited him to see the latest decorations in his Condé Nast office: framed comic strips, a collection that later included original cels from Krazy Kat. (In an example of Alex’s politesse, he later claimed to his biographers that this choice was in fact an endearing trait of Si’s that demonstrated the publisher’s omnivorous taste.) Vogue was a particularly tough nut to crack. When Si worked in the magazine’s promotions department, he encouraged the magazine to accept ads from lower-tier companies to raise revenue. “Si couldn’t resist, say, a toilet paper promotion or God knows what,” the Vogue editor Babs Simpson recalled. It was up to Alex to swoop in, suggesting to Si that toilet paper ads may not be quite right for Vogue.
Si’s love life was a mess, too. He was an heir to an enormous fortune, and yet several women he pursued in those days recalled their fathers sternly warning them off any potential romance. One ex-girlfriend recalled his “weenie boyness.” At this deeply awkward time in Si’s life, Alex became a role model for how to be more courtly, more urbane. He was “very at ease with himself in the world,” Francine du Plessix Gray said of her stepfather, “and I think it may be that ease in the world which Si needed the most.”
All this time, Alex was subtly indoctrinating Si to his firm belief that Condé Nast stood for something more than mere commerce: “a certain dignity, a certain decency, a sense of quality, a chance for people to be creative.” For Alex, the haute European, Vogue represented a beacon of high-mindedness in an otherwise crass American culture: “We were part of a crusade, an ideal, of communicating civilization, communicating culture, communicating thought.” Before Vogue, he argued, “there was no concept, frankly, of a real American life.” This corporate noblesse oblige inevitably blended with Alex’s own ego and his belief that Condé Nast’s success rested solely on his shoulders. As he told his biographers about the company, “I just, frankly, feel, to a certain extent, I own it.”
In darker moments, away from the luminosity he projected in public, Alex harbored a refugee’s fear of his world evaporating overnight. He had seen firsthand how the beaux mondes of czarist Moscow and interwar Paris were shredded by war and violence. Condé Nast had been his life raft. How many of his and Tatiana’s friends came to their parties, sent gifts, and bought her hats, because entrée to Alex meant entrée to Vogue? The company footed the bill for his and Tatiana’s vacations in Italy and France; it had even secured the mortgage on his house. And while Condé art directors might cower at the sound of Alex’s footsteps or simper as he tore apart their layouts, there was one person whose opinion mattered to him above all else: his wife. Alex was in thrall to Tatiana, who had once been married to a French viscount, and she relied on Alex to provide the first-class, jet-setting lifestyle she expected. It was no mystery whose favor the entire edifice of their comfortable lives rested on. Often, when Alex returned from the Condé Nast office at night, Tatiana would greet her husband with a question:
“Did you make Si happy today?”
By 1968, Alex’s investment in the Newhouses had paid off. At his urging, Sam and Si recruited Diana Vreeland, then the country’s most innovative fashion editor, to leave Harper’s Bazaar and become the editor in chief of Vogue, ushering in a renaissance at the magazine. And in a corporate coup de grace, he vanquished Patcévitch, his friend-turned-rival, after an incident that exemplified the now-entwined fates of Alex and Si. The drama unfolded during a weeklong gathering of the international jet set in Portugal hosted by a Bolivian tin tycoon, the kind of costume-ball extravaganza that was de rigueur for the social elite of the time. Sam and Mitzi attended nearly every gala and meal that week, save one: a cocktail party at their hotel thrown by Patcévitch, who had neglected to include them. Informed of the slight by her hairdresser, Mitzi was furious. Back in New York, Sam quietly asked Alex if he thought Pat was still worth keeping around. Sensing his opportunity, Alex did not say yes.
Soon after, Patcévitch received word from the Newhouses that his duties as president of Condé Nast were no longer required. He was later asked to vacate the elaborate town house on East Seventieth Street where he had lived for years. The building, Sam reminded him, was owned by Condé Nast, and another executive at the company now required the property.
A few weeks later, Si moved in.
ON AUGUST 31, 1979, from his seat in the first pew, Si watched as a thousand A-list mourners filed into Temple Emanu-El, the Fifth Avenue headquarters of Manhattan’s Our Crowd Jewry, to pay respects to his father and namesake, dead at eighty-four. Among those murmuring condolences were Senator Jacob Javits, Governor Hugh Carey, and Vice President Walter Mondale; President Jimmy Carter sent a message of sympathy. A few weeks earlier, Sam Newhouse had experienced a massive and disabling stroke, the latest in a series of medical episodes that had begun in 1977 and robbed him of his energy and mental acuity. From the time of their births, Sam had intended for Si and Donald to inherit his empire. (At one point, concerned that a calamity could threaten the future of the business, he prohibited his two sons from flying together on the same airplane.) But it had taken a catastrophic health crisis for the patriarch to finally relax his grip.
For all his micromanaging, Sam had allowed Si to become the chairman of Condé Nast at the start of 1975, a move that formalized his son’s leadership of the Newhouse magazines and, in the view of the family’s close associates, was a tacit and overdue acknowledgment that the prodigal son had finally grown into his professional adulthood. By then, Si was in his late forties, and he had matured in his personal life, too. In 1973, he remarried, to a woman with the kind of society bona fides appropriate for the WASPy world of Condé Nast: Victoria Carrington Benedict de Ramel, an Episcopalian, half-English, half-American graduate of Brearley and Bryn Mawr and the ex-wife of a French count. Victoria personified the kind of cosmopolitan and intellectually serious image that Si had long desired for himself and the magazines he controlled. The couple shared a passion for classic movies, modern art, and the opera, embarking on regular pilgrimages to the Salzburg Festival in Austria. Victoria was fluent in French, proficient in several languages, and would later become a noted architectural historian. The days of Bachelor Si gallivanting to nightclubs with Roy Cohn were finished.
And yet, despite his bigger title, Si still never made a major decision at Condé Nast without running it by his father first—a filial reflex that, despite his occasional lamentations about it to friends, Si never really questioned or tried to change. As long as Sam was alive, Si could not shake the identity that had been imprinted on him from birth: the shy child, too timid to second-guess his father’s decisions. When Sam was eighty years old, in 1976, Si and Donald strongly advised him against using $305 million of the family’s fortune to acquire a Midwestern newspaper chain. Sam overruled his kids’ objections and went ahead with the purchase anyway.
Now, as he sat in the gilded sanctum of Emanu-El, the encomia to his father emanating from the lectern, Si gazed at the dark wooden coffin, festooned with roses, that would be Sam’s final resting place. He was a few months shy of his fifty-second birthday, and this was the first time that the specter of his father’s disapproval, a looming presence in his life since childhood, had fully lifted. Sam Newhouse had never fully respected the magazines that Si had chosen as his life’s work; in his mind, Condé Nast was a minnow in the Newhouse sea, an unserious realm best left to his unserious son. No longer. Si had ambitions of his own, which over the next decade would vastly expand the Newhouse empire. On the day of Sam’s funeral, Advance Publications was valued at roughly $2 billion. By 1988, it would be worth $7 billion, a 250 percent increase. It would control the esteemed New Yorker, a revived smash-hit version of Vanity Fair, and the gastronomic bible Gourmet. Its dowdier titles would be revamped to appeal to an ascendant and free-spending aspirational class. Sam had been too set in his ways to detect the coming trend, but American culture was shifting Si-ward. The idealism of the 1960s was yielding to the materialism of the 1980s, a new preoccupation with the navel-gazing, ego-stroking life. Si, who at Condé Nast had surrounded himself with the masters of the zeitgeist, was prepared, and he had already put something into motion that marked the true start of Condé’s inexorable eighties rise, a magazine whose prescient title managed to dovetail with both the spirit of the era and Si’s own newfound sense of liberation: Self.