At the start of 1979, the Condé Nast Publications had not launched a new magazine since the debut of Glamour four decades earlier. In the years since, a new crop of mass-market publications had revolutionized the magazine world, while Condé’s titles effectively stagnated. Esquire, Playboy, and Rolling Stone found success by channeling the countercultural forces—sex, drugs, politics, and rock ’n’ roll—that were rapidly reshaping society. In their pages, writers like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Hunter S. Thompson forged the New Journalism, a blend of reportage and novelistic writing that transformed American nonfiction. George Lois’s covers for Esquire, some of which are now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, tackled urgent issues like civil rights, the Vietnam War, and the feminist movement. An Esquire feature on a US Army infantry brigade was represented on the cover by a single white-on-black headline, “Oh My God—We Hit a Little Girl,” prompting objections from sitting senators.
Condé had fallen behind, including with its core market of female readers. Hearst’s Cosmopolitan, chief rival to Condé’s Glamour and Mademoiselle, was revitalized in 1965 after it hired the editor Helen Gurley Brown, author of the best-selling Sex and the Single Girl. Brown discarded Cosmo’s previous emphasis on married suburbanites and turned the magazine into an enthusiastic champion of post-Friedan feminism, titillating readers with fellatio tips and a mantra of women’s independence. Back at Condé, some editors at Vogue still wanted to airbrush out models’ belly buttons when they were accidentally exposed during a fashion shoot.
“In the late 1970s, there were three tiers of magazines,” recalled Graydon Carter, who was starting his career in New York around that time. “At the top is Time, Inc. Then Hearst, because they had Bazaar. And then there’s Condé Nast. It was third-tier. It was a debutante’s finishing school.”
Phyllis Starr Wilson was the managing editor of Glamour in 1976 when she had an idea to improve Condé’s appeal to the modern woman. Under the placeholder titles Self or Woman, Wilson proposed a magazine devoted to women’s health and fitness, seizing on an emerging trend. Her fellow New Orleans native Richard Simmons had opened his first fitness studio in Beverly Hills three years earlier; The Complete Book of Running, a how-to manual for the nascent pastime of jogging, was about to become a bestseller. It was the dawn of private gyms and Jazzercise; Jane Fonda’s workout tapes and Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” were around the corner. Si himself was a fitness addict who regularly worked out in the afternoons and ran laps in Central Park. He had also seen surveys that showed Condé Nast readers responded well to the occasional article about fitness that cropped up in other magazines. He gave Wilson the green light.
Starting Self was Si’s first major decision since becoming Condé Nast’s chairman in 1975, and its success set the template by which he would vastly expand his empire in the 1980s. Bucking his father’s abstemious ways, Si approved what was then an unheard-of marketing budget for the launch of a new magazine: $20 million, the equivalent of roughly $80 million today. Television ads circulated in major markets (“Self: The First Word in Self-Improvement”) and the logo was plastered on billboards, buses, and aerial banners flown over well-to-do resorts. Self was aimed at a growing demographic of professional women with ample disposable income, its upbeat, just-between-us-girls tone anticipating Carrie Bradshaw by nearly twenty years: “Your boss wants you to work late. Your tennis partner wants you to meet him at the club. The man in your life wants—oh well, lots of things. Have you ever gotten the feeling you have so many people to please, roles to play and things to do, you don’t know who you are anymore?”
Ironically, the editor in charge of dispensing fitness tips to readers was no paragon of perfect health; Phyllis Wilson’s preferred form of exercise was belly dancing. “The last thing she’d have ever done was go for a walk,” one Condé editor recalled. But just as Condé Montrose Nast had exploited class anxieties in the Gilded Age, Self had identified a new kind of aspiration in the culture. Subscribers to Self—80 percent of whom worked, according to a 1981 survey, compared to half of all women—viewed financial success and social success as synonymous: to be elite in Reagan’s America was to be self-sufficient, healthy, sporty, and rich. “When I got married years ago, I bought Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal to learn how to keep house,” one Self reader said at the time. “Now, I’m trying to forget how to.”
Unlike rival magazines that balked at frank discussions of money, Self unabashedly embraced women’s pursuit of wealth and material happiness. The debut issue included a feature titled “You Too Can Fly over the Middle-Income Bracket Without Being Shot Down by Typical Female Guilt and Fear.” The magazine soon rebranded itself as “The Handbook of a New Generation,” with an ad campaign featuring a fashionable young woman juggling her makeup kit as she tried to leave the house in time for work.
“I Believe in My Self,” she said, happily.
Self’s brand of cheerful acquisitiveness immediately faced the kind of blowback that would be regularly lobbed at Condé Nast magazines in the 1980s: that it was a glossy vessel for a narcissism overtaking society. “Magazines used to teach social virtues. Now they preach self-fulfillment,” clucked one critic. “Self is just the latest example of the inward turning of Americans.” Perhaps, but there was no question it had struck a chord. Self became one of the most successful magazine launches in decades. Circulation nearly doubled in the first six months, from 300,000 to 500,000 readers; two years later, readership had soared toward 1 million. Americans were drifting from the lefty activism that had animated titles like Esquire, which by 1979 had fallen far from its 1960s peak. The new era was about excess and indulgence, and accidentally or not, Self had provided Si with a winning proof of concept. As the home of Vogue, Condé Nast had the right bona fides to be the arbiter of the new decade, to show the next generation of Americans how to live an elite life. What if it applied that formula beyond fashion: to health, food, lifestyle, travel, celebrity? How much bigger could it get?
Inspired, Si went on a spree. He bought Gentlemen’s Quarterly, a sleepy men’s fashion supplement previously owned by Esquire, and then Gourmet, a journal of high-end gastronomy. (Si was so eager to expand that he barely looked at Gourmet’s balance sheet and later wondered if he had overpaid.) Condé Nast had never published a magazine devoted to men’s lifestyles or the world of cooking and food; now it had both. Random House, the book publisher that was considered the class of the Manhattan literary world, was subsumed into the Newhouse stable in 1980. Si was borrowing his father’s methods, investing in money-losing properties and gambling that their untapped potential could yield a profit. But he had narrowed his focus to the upwardly mobile demographic. At Si’s instructions, House & Garden was repositioned from a housewife’s how-to manual to a chichi guide to embracing the new eighties lifestyle. Si had become alarmed at the burgeoning success of Architectural Digest, a California-based magazine that had supercharged the old House & Garden formula by filling its pages with the homes of celebrities. He replaced the veteran House & Garden editor Mary Jane Pool—a Condé Nast legend who had joined Vogue’s art department in 1946 and was still known to wear a sable cape to the office—and then intentionally sacrificed its longtime middle-class audience for a nouveau crowd. House & Garden was shifted to more upscale newsstands and removed from the magazine racks in supermarket checkout aisles; the price of an annual subscription tripled. The result was a steep drop-off in nationwide distribution, but an increase in the upscale readership that Si, and his growing list of luxury advertisers, desired.
Rivals scrambled to catch up with Condé’s growing influence among the free-spending leisure class. In one risible example, Esquire experimented with printing different versions of its October 1983 issue for readers of different household incomes. Subscribers in more affluent zip codes received a cover featuring a WASPy business executive, smiling beside a headline about the world’s best skiing destinations. Less well-to-do readers were mailed a version with a rumpled man chewing on a piece of hay.
Not all of Si’s ideas at that time came to fruition: a Condé Nast magazine about contemporary romance, called Love, never got out of the planning stages. But in recalibrating his empire for the new eighties elite, Si saw an opening in the market to execute a longtime fantasy of the aesthetes and nostalgists who roamed the Condé Nast hallways, a gambit that had never been attempted by his father.
Maybe the time was right to bring back Vanity Fair.
VANITY FAIR MAY HAVE BEEN a glittering jewel of Condé Nast’s Jazz Age glory days, but its demise during the Great Depression had mummified the brand as a relic of a bygone age. The title was borrowed from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress of 1678, which imagined “Vanity Fair” as a sinful bazaar ruled by Beelzebub that caters to all of humanity’s earthly delights. The phrase also invoked the status-conscious plot of William Thackeray’s famed 1848 novel, the story of a brilliant, vicious woman scheming her way into high society.
In the case of the magazine, the role of Beelzebub was cheerfully played by the editor Frank Crowninshield, whose first issue appeared in March 1914. A clubman and schmoozer who helped co-found the Museum of Modern Art, he made innumerable contributions to American culture; Emily Post once credited him with suggesting the idea for her book on etiquette. Under his editorship, Vanity Fair published Noël Coward and the humorist Robert Benchley, E. E. Cummings and Colette. Photographs came courtesy of Steichen, Horst, and Man Ray, and there were full-color reproductions of works by avant-garde painters like Matisse, Picasso, and Chagall, making the magazine among America’s earliest mass-market venues for the European modernism then sweeping the world of art and letters.
Decades before Spy magazine and Gawker, Vanity Fair inaugurated a feature, “We Nominate for Oblivion,” that skewered the potentates of the day. The magazine also offered instructional entry points for the less well-to-do. One advertisement in 1929 featured a Cubist canvas by Picasso and the eye-catching caption, “Somebody paid $3,500 for this—WHY?… What do you say when your pretty dinner partner asks you? Could you even tell if this were wrong side up? You’ve got to know. Not just gulp soup! One way to find out… READ VANITY FAIR.” With its features on athletes, intellectuals, artists, politicians, aristocrats, and libertines like Josephine Baker, Vanity Fair invited readers to join a fabulous party—not unlike the ones thrown by Nast in his Park Avenue penthouse—and provided a guided, gimlet-eyed tour of the proceedings.
In the early 1980s, though, the average well-to-do American had never heard of Vanity Fair. Frank Crowninshield’s name and legacy were mostly forgotten. But his editorial credo—his promise to capture “the progress and promise of American life”—could have been borrowed from a speech by Ronald Reagan. Once again, America had entered an age of runaway wealth creation abetted by government deregulation, with the railroad barons of Crowinshield’s day substituted by arbitrageurs and junk-bond specialists. The word yuppie was entering the lexicon; Alex P. Keaton made his first appearance on network television in the fall of 1982. The minting of a new financial overclass meant a renewed market for cultural sherpas who could tell parvenus which artists to collect and which writers to read, what theater was worth seeing and which celebrities were worth ogling. And the long fade-out of the sixties had yielded a baby boom generation that was busy casting aside its ideals in favor of the pleasures of the material world, as embodied by the four-figure Shiatsu massagers on sale at their local Sharper Image. As Condé Nast’s advertising campaign aptly put it, Vanity Fair was “a magazine whose time has come… again.”
It was a fiasco almost from the start.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT, in the summer of 1981, that Condé Nast was set to resurrect the iconic Vanity Fair caused a stir in Manhattan’s media and literary circles. In those pre-digital days, the launch of a new national magazine devoted to arts and culture was a significant event. Rumors spread about the amount of money the free-spending Newhouses were willing to commit to the project: as much as $3,000 ($10,000 today) for pieces of 750 words. For writers, photographers, and stylists, it was an opportunity to attract a mass audience to their work; for editors and critics, it was a chance to shift the zeitgeist. “When I was a kid, I felt I’d missed the boat—all the great magazines were gone,” recalled the photographer Jonathan Becker, who was driving a cab to make ends meet until he got the call to join the new magazine. At one point, Becker had been forced to skip town for the West Coast because his tab at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side literary hangout, was called in by the proprietress. “The idea that Vanity Fair was coming back was just a salvation,” Becker said. “It was a source of excitement for everybody in the arts.” Si, a longtime devotee of The New Yorker, was thrilled to be launching a legitimate rival that could compete in the realm of arts and culture. And it didn’t hurt that owning a shiny property like Vanity Fair, with its Roaring Twenties lineage, could raise his own standing among New York’s elite.
Alex Liberman had his own incentives. Frustrated by the lack of recognition for his art and sculpture, Alex had grown self-conscious that he would forever be known for his oversight of Vogue, an institution for which he cared deeply, but had come to conclude was, at heart, a trivial enterprise. A throwaway remark by Diana Vreeland, uttered while the two were sparring over some detail in an upcoming issue of Vogue, haunted him: “This is only entertainment.” For Alex, Vanity Fair represented a chance for redemption, highbrow proof that his talents stretched beyond the commercial world of fashion and retail. For all the hours of calibrating skirt lengths and hemlines, Alex could not accept that a women’s magazine would end up as the sum total of his life.
In this chip-on-the-shoulder spirit, Si and Alex decided to select an editor in chief whose literary bona fides were unimpeachable, whose intellectual aura would silence any critics who doubted that Condé Nast, home to frivolous and feminine titles like Glamour, Brides, and Mademoiselle, was capable of creating a so-called “smart magazine.”
Richard Locke was sitting at his cramped desk in the castle-like headquarters of The New York Times in the spring of 1981 when his phone rang. Alex Liberman, a man he knew only by reputation, wanted to have lunch and discuss an idea. Locke found this strange: What did a fashion publisher want with a literary critic? For a moment, he hesitated.
“That’s very interesting,” Locke told Alex, “but at the moment I’m sort of overbooked.”
The Silver Fox was undeterred. “No, Richard,” Alex replied, “I’d really like to speak with you.”
Tweedy and cerebral, Locke, not yet forty years old, was an odd choice for the rakish Vanity Fair. A literary critic with an impeccable Northeastern pedigree, Locke grew up in Manhattan, boarded at Lawrenceville, and studied at Harvard, Cambridge, and Columbia, taking classes with Lionel Trilling and Susan Sontag. He had worked as an editor at Simon & Schuster before joining The New York Times Book Review—two upstanding organs of mid-century, upper-middle-class respectability. Locke had come recommended by two influential figures in the Condé Nast orbit. One was Robert Gottlieb, the Knopf editor in chief who edited Robert Caro and Joseph Heller and had recently entered Si’s employ after the Newhouses purchased Knopf’s owner, Random House. The other was the novelist Francine du Plessix Gray, Alex’s stepdaughter. Because he had been passed over by the Times to be the next top editor of the Book Review, Locke was susceptible to Alex’s entreaties at lunch, and the two agreed to meet again at Alex’s minimalist office. Locke prepared for the meeting by rooting around the Vanity Fair archives, and he pitched Alex on a publication that would encompass a mélange of cultural forces, both high and pop. “It wasn’t just the literary magazine, it wasn’t just a visual magazine, it wasn’t just reviews, it wasn’t just articles, it wasn’t just art, it wasn’t just gossip,” Locke mused. “It was all of these different kinds of things brought together, in what we hoped would be a slowly evolving unity of sensibility, and ultimately some degree of celebration.”
Bingo. “That’s exactly the kind of thing we’re interested in,” Alex said.
Locke was hired and set up a skunkworks on the fourth floor of 350 Madison Avenue, the Manhattan office tower that since 1973 had served as Condé Nast’s headquarters; he spent nearly a year compiling a 172-page prototype issue. To this day, the cover is a knockout: an exuberant headshot of the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov (a Liberman friend), photographed by Richard Avedon, surrounded by bright swaths of color and the Vanity Fair logo bannered across the top at a jaunty angle. This first stab at a modern Vanity Fair captured the high/low wit of the original: puckish illustrations by Edward Koren and Maurice Sendak, a feature on the newly born Prince William, an “Impossible Interview” between Bo Derek and Ayatollah Khomeini. (The latter was a revival of an old VF feature that imagined impertinent conversations between odd celebrity pairings like, say, Joseph Stalin and John Rockefeller.) Visually, the prototype was a feast: a black-and-white Irving Penn photograph of Luciano Pavarotti at full bellow, followed by Mick Jagger, topless and sporting a bushy Hemingway-style beard. (Annie Leibovitz had bumped into the freshly hirsute rock star in Central Park and insisted that he pose then and there.) A fine-arts portfolio included an erotic Matisse sketch and a photograph of the artist posing with a nude model. Jonathan Becker’s portrait of the French film director Louis Malle, brooding and darkly handsome, added to the sense of European glamour.I
Mixed among the celebrities were signs of the magazine’s literary ambitions. Locke had recruited writers more typically read in The New York Review of Books, the low-circulation intellectual journal that was among his chief inspirations. Robert Hughes, the erudite art critic, and Helen Vendler, a Harvard professor, came aboard, along with the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick. Publicly, Locke sounded the notes that his Condé Nast bosses wanted to hear—“We live in a world in which one can go from hearing Mick Jagger to the Metropolitan Opera’s Stravinsky production to the Mudd Club,” he told one journalist—but by the time the actual first issue appeared, the magazine had veered more “Rite of Spring” than Rolling Stones. Vanity Fair’s March 1983 debut did not feature a glitzy celebrity on the cover. Instead, readers were greeted with an illustration of the Greek god Pan playing a tune on his pipe.
It was not the sort of thing that moved magazines at the supermarket checkout line.
Inside the issue, Locke had replaced the zippy designs of the prototype with chunky blocks of text. There was a symposium on the music of Wagner and a piece by the art critic Clement Greenberg, whose famous essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” had been published by the Partisan Review forty-four years prior. The centerpiece was the unabridged text of a new Gabriel García Márquez novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which stretched on for 102 pages. Locke deserves credit for publishing new work by a Nobel laureate, but there was a reason why The New York Review of Books didn’t attract Condé-style advertisements from European automakers or high-end fashion brands. “The idea of publishing a memoir by the late Elizabeth Bishop—that was hot stuff for us,” recalled one of Locke’s deputies, Elizabeth Pochoda. “We were behind the eight ball of the cultural shift and the celebrity culture. It was at the moment when it was beginning to take over, and we couldn’t have looked more fossilized.” Flipping through the issue in London, Tina Brown, then the editor of Tatler, was appalled: “This is what they’d done with such largesse? This flatulent, pretentious, chaotic catalogue of dreary litterateurs in impenetrable typefaces?”
Compounding the trouble was the blowout publicity campaign that Si had mounted for his new bauble. Condé Nast had done the 1983 equivalent of going viral: the debut of Vanity Fair was touted on billboards and in television ads, fueled by a marketing budget of roughly $30 million in today’s dollars. In a bizarre stunt, the ads featured a Leibovitz photograph of a bare-chested John Irving, the author of The World According to Garp, clad in a red wrestling singlet. The hype did its job: one Manhattan newsstand sold out three hundred copies in four hours, and 100,000 copies were sold nationally in three days. Unfortunately for Si, the people who bought the magazine didn’t like it. The New Republic wrote that “the twelve pages of ads for Ralph Lauren’s clothes stand out as by far the most appealing, likable, and even interesting thing in the whole 294 pages.” Esquire’s design maestro, George Lois, pronounced it “incredibly bad.”
Si offered a feeble public defense—“We never believed we were producing a perfect magazine when we relaunched Vanity Fair”—but inside 350 Madison, panic set in. “This is a disaster,” Si said over and over again in meetings. Feeling attacked, Locke retreated into his office, looking to some visitors like an anguished schoolboy. Alex, shocked by the vicious criticism—and ever cognizant of his place in Si’s kingdom—grew increasingly anxious that he might take the blame. “It is Richard’s magazine,” he insisted to The New York Times. (In fact, one designer later said Alex had overseen the art direction and that the snoozy cover of Pan was his idea.)
At one point, Locke persuaded Truman Capote to write a gossip column; who wouldn’t want to read world-class rumormongering from Capote, the sybarite who relished needling the rich? It all seemed in line with the spirit of the classic Vanity Fair. But when Capote’s draft arrived, Locke was aghast. The celebrities Capote dished about were outdated—and in some cases, dead. Capote included a lengthy description of Greta Garbo’s apartment, an anecdote about meeting Noël Coward in Portofino (Coward had died a decade earlier), and a bizarre attack on Meryl Streep’s nose (“it reminds you of an anteater”). The VF editors rejected the column, which prompted Capote to sell the piece to Esquire and publicly cast a hex on Locke, grumbling, “I hope nobody ever attributes Vanity Fair to anybody but Thackeray.”
Capote was close to getting his wish. By the time the bad reviews rolled in, Locke’s second issue had already closed, meaning he would have no opportunity to respond to the feedback. And the highlight of his next issue was a twenty-five-thousand-word excerpt from V. S. Naipaul’s new memoir. Alex urged Locke to loosen up—“You need to schmooze,” he cooed at one point—but two months later, Locke was out. “From the beginning, there was a conflict between the magazine that I believe I was asked to create, a magazine of writing and ideas, or a magazine of jazzy layout and bits and pieces,” Locke told reporters. “And jazzy layout won.”
SI AND ALEX DECIDED TO TRY again. Locke’s successor would be Leo Lerman, whose legend at Condé Nast rivaled that of the magazine whose fate now lay in his hands. At sixty-eight, Lerman had been a fixture of Manhattan’s entertainment and arts world since the early 1940s. His intimates included Anaïs Nin, W. H. Auden, Maria Callas, and Marlene Dietrich, all of whom attended the martini-fueled salons he threw with his partner, the artist Gray Foy. This fabulous life was entirely self-invented. Lerman was born into a Jewish immigrant family who lived in Manhattan on East 107th Street, in the neighborhood that would later be called Spanish Harlem; his father was a housepainter. In his early teens, Lerman came across issues of the original Vanity Fair and was entranced by its depiction of café society; he spent the rest of his life seeking to replicate the delights in its pages. As an editor at Mademoiselle and Vogue, Lerman had published work by Rebecca West, Iris Murdoch, and his old friend Truman Capote, whom he met at a party when Capote hopped onto Lerman’s back in a stairwell and demanded a piggyback ride.
Lerman was the kind of eccentric who might be shunned at a buttoned-up publisher like Hearst, but was celebrated in the stagy realm of Condé Nast. He strolled the halls in a Borsalino hat and wielded an elaborately decorated cane; a watch fob and bushy beard completed the image of an Edwardian dandy. He wrote only in purple ink—an ophthalmologist once warned his eyesight would fail him, and it was the one color he would be able to see—and he often dismissed colleagues from his office with a playful “Begone!”
To Alex and Si, Lerman’s old-world charm was the perfect antidote to Locke’s stuffiness, and his exacting taste in art, books, classical music, and dance seemed well suited to a cultural compendium like Vanity Fair. But Lerman quickly fell into the same highbrow trap as Locke. For his covers, Lerman assigned Irving Penn to shoot severe black-and-white portraits of intellectuals like Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, and Italo Calvino, celebrities in only a very narrow sense of the word. People magazine featured movie and TV stars; Lerman’s January 1984 issue of VF teased “a candid interview with screen queen Hanna Schygulla,” a German actress best known for her appearances in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films. (The issue sold terribly—surprise!) At one point, Lerman put Francine du Plessix Gray, Alex Liberman’s stepdaughter, on the cover. Francine was a respected novelist, and perhaps Lerman wished to earn Alex’s goodwill, but the notion that any readers beyond a rarefied slice of literary Manhattan would recognize Francine on their newsstand was laughable. Advertisers began to bail; each issue of Vanity Fair was thinner than the last. Lerman, whose health was deteriorating, began whittling away afternoons in his office, reminiscing about his favorite mid-century ballerinas and apologetically telling his staff, “I’m in a very purple mood today.”
The commercial failure of these early Vanity Fairs was not just a result of its editors’ foibles. Alex and Si had tasked Locke and Lerman with assembling a sophisticated journal of culture that appealed to affluent readers. But what Alex and Si considered high culture—products of literary and artistic seriousness, consumed by a discerning upper class—turned out to be hopelessly out of date. Elite American taste was changing. Si’s parents had flocked to the opera, and Lerman had embraced the ballet to prove he wasn’t just a painter’s kid from Harlem. But the new American rich felt less restricted in their cultural pursuits. The New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s meant that self-styled intellectuals dissected The Godfather and The Deer Hunter with as much vigor as any novel by Joyce or Woolf. Steven Bochco’s Hill Street Blues debuted on NBC in 1981, an early sign of television’s artistic growth; MTV arrived later that year. Old hierarchies were breaking down. The strict separation of high and low art, espoused by critics like Greenberg (featured in Locke’s debut issue), had been usurped in the intervening decades by Sontag’s embrace of camp—the intellectual happily slumming in the lowbrow—and the rise of postmodernists like Jeff Koons, whose readymade “sculptures” of Hoover vacuum cleaners debuted at the New Museum in 1980. Si, whose own cultural tastes ran to the great Russian novels and classical music, had wanted to replicate The New Yorker’s role as a cultural authority in respectable upper-middle-class life. Instead, he constructed a magazine whose instincts were caught in the past.
By the end of 1983, Vanity Fair was still showing few signs of success. While his brother, Donald, generated big revenues at the Newhouse newspapers, Si’s big bet had turned Condé Nast into an object of mockery among the elites whose approval he still craved. The posthumous disapproval of Sam, who surely would never have okayed such a lavish experiment as Vanity Fair, also loomed large. Si could have fired Lerman and folded his new magazine then and there, retreating to the relative comfort of a life as the man who published Vogue. Instead, he went for one final roll of the dice. He would turn over Vanity Fair to an editor four decades younger than Lerman, an upstart with little reverence for mid-century high culture, an impudent outsider who promised a fresher, zestier take on the new American establishment.
Her name was Tina Brown.