By the late sixties, Samuel I. Newhouse Sr. was already a very rich man, enjoying the hefty profits of his mid-market newspaper empire. His purchase of Condé Nast in 1959 had added a dollop of glamour to his public profile, but his peers considered those women’s magazines an anomaly in the Newhouse portfolio, which mostly consisted of workaday papers based in locales such as Staten Island, New Jersey, and Syracuse. Sam, born in a Lower East Side tenement to Jewish immigrants, owned a co-op on Park Avenue, but he could not buy his way into the upper social echelons of the establishment.
But, just maybe, he could buy The New Yorker.
Like many other totems of the American elite, The New Yorker had Gatsbyesque origins. It was the creation of Harold Ross, a high-school dropout who grew up poor in Utah, and Raoul Fleischmann, the Jewish heir to a yeast fortune. Two men from outside the WASP establishment turned their Jazz Age journal into a beacon of sophistication, edited for those who aspired to belong to, or at least converse with, the intellectual gentry. The magazine’s mockery of upper-class mores—the social anxiety of William Hamilton’s cartoon WASPs; Charles Barsotti’s dogs who dryly reenacted the therapy sessions and business lunches of well-to-do professionals—only fueled its appeal to affluent mid-century readers. It was an effective editorial strategy, and a profitable one, too; at one point in the magazine’s glory years in the 1950s and 1960s, the sales department had to turn away advertisers. Under the genteel command of William Shawn, Ross’s legendary successor as editor in chief, The New Yorker published the pantheon: Updike, Cheever, Baldwin, Kael, McPhee, Salinger, a procession of twentieth-century stars. Eager to emphasize exclusivity, the Fleischmann family refused to solicit new subscribers, although discounts were quietly offered to undergraduates at the better universities. For a good chunk of the twentieth century, the magazine’s painterly covers became a synecdoche of cosmopolitanism in American living rooms, an efficient way to declare one’s allegiance to higher cultural planes.
In the late 1960s, Sam Newhouse arranged a meeting with Peter Fleischmann, Raoul’s son and the magazine’s heir apparent. The men met at the Newhouse residence, where Sam walked the scion to his study and began his pitch. Sam was a seasoned cajoler and dealmaker, but Fleischmann ended things quickly. He was not impressed by Sam’s newspapers. And as far as that frivolous magazine division, Condé Nast, was concerned… well, the less said about that, the better. This was the guy who thought he could run The New Yorker?
“It didn’t last long enough for me to finish my drink,” Fleischmann later recalled.
This rebuff was a great disappointment of Sam’s career, and it did not go unnoticed by his son. Si Newhouse had watched his father build a multimillion-dollar media empire whose reach extended around the country and into Europe. Sam had namesake buildings at universities and donated enough money to Lincoln Center to ensure one of its theaters would be named after his wife. Si now owned Random House and was the superintendent of Vogue. And yet he knew exactly how the Newhouses continued to be perceived: arrivistes grasping for status.
In 1984, the younger Newhouse finally saw his chance.
The plot kicked off in the Upper East Side auction room of Sotheby’s, a prime gathering spot for the Eastern elite. As bids flew for a Hockney painting, Si was deep in conversation with Donald Marron, a PaineWebber banker he knew from the board of the Museum of Modern Art, another signifier of membership in Manhattan high society. PaineWebber controlled a key tranche of stock in The New Yorker Magazine Inc., the publicly traded parent company of the magazine, and Marron confirmed to Si that the rumors were true: the shares might be in play.I By then, The New Yorker’s financial health had unraveled, and Fleischmann fils had proved to be an unsteady steward. Circulation had barely budged in the 1980s, and although the magazine still eked out a profit, its ad revenue had fallen nearly 40 percent in two years. Fleischmann had rejected shrewd proposals like investing in the American edition of Elle, in part because William Shawn objected, turned off by the idea of sharing a corporate owner with a fashion magazine. Instead, Shawn was enthusiastic about an all-French edition of The New Yorker, edited by himself. When Elle became a smash hit, The New Yorker saw none of the rewards.
Si embarked on a series of financial maneuvers to secure a sale, although once he expressed interest, it felt inevitable to many on Wall Street that the magazine would ultimately be his. Si had access to an enormous family fortune, and he was willing to overpay for what he wanted: a few years later, he would shell out $17 million for a Jasper Johns painting called False Start, an auction record for a work of a living artist. (The dealer Leo Castelli estimated that Si paid at least $8 million above the going price; Si later sold it at a loss.) Now Si was aggressively bidding for a different kind of masterpiece. He offered a significant premium over the share price, completing the acquisition in March 1985. Fleischmann had resisted Si’s father, but with his investors eager for a payout, he didn’t have the luxury of saying no to the son.
Even after Fleischmann accepted the deal, trading his family heirloom to a rival scion, he privately dismissed Si as a parvenu hell-bent on social acceptance. As Fleischmann’s wife, Jeanne, would later bitterly recall: “He wanted to buy it for his mother and put it on the coffee table. His father had wanted to buy it for the same reason. It was a classy thing to have.” In fact, at that time, Si might have been the only living Newhouse who thought buying The New Yorker was a good idea. According to Si’s daughter, Pamela Mensch, Donald Newhouse objected to the deal, as did the other Newhouse relatives who oversaw acquisitions at Advance Publications. The family had already sunk tens of millions of dollars into another Si plaything, Vanity Fair, which was gaining in cultural currency but not yet turning a profit. The Newhouse newspapers, overseen by Donald, enjoyed fat margins, and Donald had led speculative investments into a promising technology called cable television that was starting to catch on. Now Si wanted to spend more of his inheritance on yet another magazine whose financial prospects looked iffy at best, at a price—$168 million, or roughly $475 million in today’s dollars—that many analysts agreed was overinflated. “The decision to buy The New Yorker was not a corporate one; it was personal, and lonely,” Mensch recalled. “I doubt my father had ever before made a decision unsupported by his kinsmen.” But Si dug in, arguing that The New Yorker was a cultural institution of national importance, and the rest of the family ultimately deferred to his wishes.
The acquisition announcement, in March 1985, set off a hysteria. The New York Times carried two front-page stories about the news. One staff writer deemed the purchase “a deliberate affront to every artist, writer and editorial staff member”; another compared herself to Blacks in the antebellum South. “I do feel a little bit like a slave went on the block,” the writer Emily Hahn told the paper. Things only got crazier. Over the next two years, Si would confront a full-scale staff rebellion, make national news by firing Shawn, and find himself accused of coarsening American letters. With these philistine Newhouses intent on desecrating an icon, it was widely concluded that the best days of The New Yorker were behind it.
THE ANTI-NEWHOUSE VIEWPOINT, encouraged by the soon-to-be-exiled Shawn and his disciples, ignored several inconvenient facts.
In truth, The New Yorker had grown out of step with affluent 1980s audiences, who were losing interest in the magazine’s sentimental visions of a fading upper crust lifestyle. There were interminable articles devoted to topics like the future of wheat. E. J. Kahn Jr.’s five-part series on staple food plants opened with a thirty-one-page essay on corn. The new American elite craved glitz and consumption, not agricultural dissertations or the bons mots of high-WASP writers such as George W. S. Trow. A magazine defined by its feel for the establishment had failed to keep up with the establishment. And the business staff had little interest in change. Shortly after Si’s takeover, the ad sales department balked at a suggestion to solicit subscriptions by mail in order to boost circulation—a ubiquitous magazine industry tactic which The New Yorker had avoided for the past fourteen years. “We don’t want anyone who isn’t interested in us first,” one New Yorker marketing director scoffed. In a vow of editorial independence, published in the magazine shortly before Si’s acquisition was finalized, Shawn wrote that “we have never published anything in order to sell magazines, to cause a sensation, to be controversial, to be popular or fashionable, to be ‘successful.’ ” If he had, perhaps The New Yorker would not have withered financially and lost the support of its backers.
Rattled by the sale and the reputation of his new owner, Shawn seemed to misapprehend the degree to which Si Newhouse held him and his magazine in awe. Si had worshiped The New Yorker since boyhood, telling his children that a subscription was a prerequisite for living a cultivated life. Shawn’s sway over his writers, and his ability to attract the finest literary talent, struck Si as a kind of magic, and by some accounts, he genuinely wanted Shawn to serve out the rest of his career in the Newhouses’ employ. “I’ve never seen Si so excited about anything,” Roy Cohn said after the New Yorker purchase. “It’s like the crown jewel.” Hoping to allay Shawn’s fears, Si guaranteed him editorial independence and created a firewall between The New Yorker and Condé Nast, installing the magazine in a separate arm of the Advance empire so as not to “taint” its writers with the perceived shallowness of Vogue and its glossy ilk. In his first meeting with the staff, Si tried to cut the tension with an attempt at humor. “You mean you don’t want Jerry Hall on the cover of The New Yorker?” he asked, referring to the current issue of Tina’s Vanity Fair, which featured the Texan model and Mick Jagger paramour wrapped in a bedsheet and not much else. The line didn’t land quite as Si had hoped; a mocked-up VF cover was soon circulating in the New Yorker office, featuring Eustace Tilley’s head pasted atop Hall’s seminude torso.
The dynamic deteriorated from there. “Si has got himself some of America’s glories,” Leo Lerman noted in his diaries, “but also a nest of seething neurotics, making fantastical demands.” Shawn, in particular, was sensitive to any hint of meddling, having been accustomed to a level of hands-off ownership that would be unimaginable now (and was barely imaginable in 1985). According to Calvin Trillin, Peter Fleischmann “was so careful about not interfering with the magazine that Peter never complimented Shawn on a piece in The New Yorker—because that would imply there were pieces that he didn’t like.” Staffers were also appalled when Newsweek published a story that mentioned Si’s friendship with Cohn, whose values represented everything their liberal, literary set despised. Jonathan Alter, who wrote the Newsweek article, recalled the horrified reaction: “The New Yorker people were calling me up and screaming: ‘What do you mean, Roy Cohn?!’ ” The genteel New Yorker staff was revolting against its arriviste owner. In her private notes from the time, Lillian Ross, the veteran staff writer and Shawn’s longtime mistress, described Si as “very much the ravenous Jew now in the country club. Looking around hungrily.” (Ross and Shawn were themselves Jewish, and not known to be anti-Semitic, but they were quick to condemn evidence of social climbing, a trait they considered vulgar.)
The backlash intensified when a new publisher, Steven T. Florio, entered the picture. Florio was the star salesman who had reinvigorated GQ: an earthy, cigar-smoking thirty-six-year-old Italian American from Jamaica, Queens, whose swagger, mustache, and loudly striped suits made him look like he’d burst from a Dick Tracy comic strip. Florio came to Condé Nast in 1979, imported from Esquire, where he was advertising director. Hugely charming and unabashedly crude, Florio was a boiler-room type who got results by carousing with clients and browbeating his staff. At GQ, he boosted ad revenues and helped shed its “gay” reputation to broaden its appeal to mainstream readers. Si loved the fact that Florio made him money. But he was also drawn to Florio’s wiseguy image, so redolent of the studio-era gangster movies that Si adored and regularly rewatched in the screening room at his Upper East Side town house. Florio, the outer-borough peacock, stood out from the refined staff of The New Yorker “like he was an alien,” Ken Auletta recalled. In her private notes, Lillian Ross compared his appearance to a thug “who takes the prisoner to [the] back room and applies lighted cigarettes to bottoms of the feet.” In May 1985, weeks after his purchase, Si named Florio the next president of The New Yorker. Understatement was all well and good when it came to the articles, Si figured—but maybe the sluggish sales force could use a kick in the caboose.
Florio charged in like a rhino. He cleared out the old-guard circulation and sales staff, most of whom considered the idea of aggressively marketing their magazine to be a gauche undertaking at best; their reputation in the advertising world was summed up as “We’ll tell you whether you can be in The New Yorker or not.” Florio’s pride in these firings didn’t engender much appreciation in the office. “I just blew it out of here with a fire hose,” he bragged of his dismissal of the sales team. Under his guidance, The New Yorker created a direct-mail campaign to entice new subscribers—the first time it had actively solicited new readers since 1971. Florio introduced tear-out cards for advertisers like L.L.Bean, allowed a gatefold cover featuring a Ford Taurus, and ran lengthy advertorials that mimicked editorial content, business-side intrusions that would have been unthinkable under the Fleischmanns. A market survey was mailed to subscribers, asking readers their reactions to statements like “I am envious of friends who are more affluent” and “I like to think I’m a bit of a swinger.” The editorial staff was so insulated from commercial imperatives that some writers were horrified when Florio had the temerity to run ads that filled up half a page, rather than the small squares that ran next to articles, almost in deference to the pristine text alongside. (Full-page ads remained out of the question.) But the real pearl-clutch moment came when Florio accepted an advertisement for Obsession, the Calvin Klein fragrance, featuring a mass of lithe nude bodies shot by the photographer, and one-time GQ favorite, Bruce Weber. Sexy ads were virtually ubiquitous in the mid-1980s glossy magazine trade. But they were considered heresy at the prudish New Yorker, where Shawn once insisted that a writer change the word pissoir to “a circular curbside construction.”
Soon, Florio hit on his next horrifying initiative: TV ads. Shawn disdained television, even devoting a hundred pages of a 1980 issue to George W. S. Trow’s remonstrance against the medium, “Within the Context of No Context.” But Florio, with Si’s approval, believed The New Yorker needed to reach younger readers—not just because advertisers preferred them (although they certainly did), but also to prevent the magazine from sleepwalking into obsolescence. The result was a series of commercials dramatizing New Yorker articles that aired in prime time during popular shows like Miami Vice. One spot featured a scene straight out of a soft-core erotic thriller: a voyeur sitting in his car on a luridly lit street, gazing at a beauty strolling by in a body-hugging pink dress. In voiceover, we hear, “I sat in the dark, and imagined flirting with a pretty Latin girl in a short, tight, shiny dress, her skin perfect and brown.” The sequence ends with the revelation that the sultry sequence was adapted from “Driver,” a short story by Frederick Barthelme in a recent issue of The New Yorker.
Cue the slogan: “Yes, The New Yorker.”
The ad represented everything the staff had feared about the “Condé” influence. Privately, Shawn was incensed, while the smooth-talking Florio euphemistically told the Times that the editor was merely “energized by the more aggressive selling of his words.” But what was so wrong with aggressive selling, anyway? The magazine’s subscriber base was loyal but aging; as Florio put it, “The New Yorker reader is a 64-year-old member of a bird-watching club.” What good was all that exquisite prose if few people under the age of fifty were reading it? Si had kept his word and refrained from weighing in on Shawn’s editorial decisions. But that meant many of the same sloggy pieces still appeared week after week; one year after the Newhouse purchase, the magazine ran a three-part series on identifying the World War II–era remains of GIs in New Guinea. The New Yorker once set the cultural agenda for upper-middle-class elites. Now it dawned on Si that Shawn, who had recently turned seventy-nine, had failed to grasp that the tastes of that elite had changed. Fifteen years earlier, Condé Nast shivved Diana Vreeland to save Vogue. It was time again to sharpen the knife.
OVER HIS DECADES LEADING CONDÉ NAST, Si Newhouse fired many powerful people. None of these ousters caused a firestorm like that of William Shawn.
The precise chronology remains in dispute, but many accounts agree that Si urged Shawn for months to identify a suitable successor, and Shawn’s ideas failed to please. Jonathan Schell, a Shawn protégé (and school chum of his eldest son, the actor Wallace), was not well liked among the staff; Charles McGrath, a bookish, soft-spoken type, was respected, but lacked the kind of charisma that Si preferred. Meanwhile, Si had grown close to Robert Gottlieb, the rock-star editor in chief of Knopf. Gottlieb had discovered Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, along with countless other literary bestsellers, and he had been working under the Newhouse umbrella since 1980, when Advance Publications acquired Knopf’s parent company, Random House. Si and Gottlieb had a lot in common. Both were secular Jews who grew up in New York; they liked to watch old movies together and wore the same sort of conspicuously slouchy clothes. Gottlieb even encouraged Si to dress comfortably in the Condé offices, urging his billionaire friend, “You don’t need to impress anyone.” Si liked the idea of Gottlieb running The New Yorker, but he was hesitant to guillotine Shawn too soon. Then, one day in January 1987, according to Gottlieb’s account, Shawn went to lunch with Si and, out of a sense of good-soldier obligation, asked a bold question: “Mr. Newhouse, would you welcome my leaving sooner rather than later?”
Startled, and rather delighted that Shawn had offered his own head on a platter, Si nodded yes.
“Then I will,” Mr. Shawn resolved.
Thrilled, Si marched straight to Gottlieb’s office to share the news: He was to replace Shawn at once. Gottlieb, however, suspected that a consequential miscommunication had occurred. The well-meaning Shawn had failed to realize the consequence of his words, thinking he was merely proposing to Si a gradual timeline for a departure, not tendering an immediate resignation. Si, ever allergic to small talk and dillydallying, was convinced Shawn had yielded the position, which was now his to reassign. “The ultra-forceful Newhouse and the passive-aggressive Shawn were constitutionally incapable of understanding each other,” Gottlieb would write years later.
This interpretation may explain why Si was convinced he had done nothing untoward, and why Shawn and his allies came to believe he had been unceremoniously ousted. Regardless, Shawn was stunned when Si walked into his office and handed him a pre-written press release announcing his “retirement.” It was as if a bomb went off at 25 West Forty-third Street. Lillian Ross, who had urged her colleagues to greet Si with chants of “Shame, shame,” after he first bought the magazine, organized a protest letter urging Gottlieb to reject the job; it was signed by 154 writers, artists, and editors, including the reclusive J. D. Salinger. The letter, after a dutiful review by the magazine’s fact-checkers, was hand-delivered to Gottlieb—who then received a phone call informing him he had been given an incorrect copy. Could he hold off on an answer until the “correct” version could be obtained? “This did not speak well for the efficiency of the gang on 43rd Street,” Gottlieb noted dryly in his memoir.
Gottlieb politely declined the staff’s request that he turn down the editorship, and on February 13, 1987, Shawn left the New Yorker office for the final time. As it often did at Condé Nast, an unpleasant exit came wrapped in the balm of generous severance. Si extended to Shawn whatever amount of money he needed to live comfortably in retirement and provide for his daughter, Mary, who had autism and had been institutionalized since she was young. Si also offered Shawn an office at 350 Madison, but Shawn declined, citing his dislike of the building’s elevators. Instead, Shawn accepted a workspace from an unlikely source: Lorne Michaels, the Saturday Night Live impresario, whom Lillian Ross and Shawn had befriended when she researched an article about him for The New Yorker. For several years, the wizened, genteel Shawn toiled away at his editing projects inside Michaels’s personal corner office at his company, Broadway Video.
It was there, in exile, that Shawn and Ross, who quit after his ouster, wrote a feature-length screenplay about a philistine fashion publisher who purchases a famous literary magazine called Info and proceeds to wreck it. “The rag-pickers have got to us,” moans one of the Info writers upon hearing about the sale, a nod to Sam Newhouse’s old nickname. The script is a vivid snapshot of Condé Nast’s reputation in the late 1980s. Si’s stand-in is Ron Farley, son of Dottie (a dig at Mitzi) and owner of the magazines Style, Onslaught, Attitude, Man’s Way, Lawn & Home, Urbs & Suburbs, and Me, whose cover features “a smiling model with inch-long, tombstone teeth” in “a low-cut bosom-revealing gown.” (“The worse Info is, the better it is for business,” Ron declares.) Gottlieb is rendered as Sheldon Laibrook, a nebbish with a habit of “fraudulent ‘intellectual’ double-talk.” When the Lillian Ross character, Wendy Marigold, pitches a serious feature about wealthy horse owners, Sheldon leeringly requests the Vanity Fair version: “Tell me how they spend their nights in Kentucky. The high life. The revels. The kinkiness. The partying.”
“Their nights?” Wendy asks, horrified.
“Nights. The sex. The bi-sex. Liven it up. That’s what people want to know.”
The screenplay includes a blowout party at the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur, seemingly a parody of Tina’s Vanity Fair soirees, complete with a Tama Janowitz type (Bam Horowitz) who snorts coke, carries a red balloon around, and asks, “Who’s got the most power? The Pope or Donald Trump?” Ross and Shawn, who detested the Condé-ization of the book world, include a literary agent who declares, “Don’t think books. Think deals!” and an anxious intellectual who wonders, “Is Magic Realism on its way out?” Wendy/Lillian denounces Ron/Si—“I despise the slop you pour out over the world!”—and Andrew Mann, the Shawn-like editor of Info, compares his magazine to a moral crusade: “There are cynics who accuse us of thinking that we are working as though we think we are saving Western civilization. For all I know, maybe we are.”
The screenplay ends with Mann restored to his rightful editorship and, oddly, Wendy married to Sheldon Laibrook, although not before she has carried on a covert affair with an Arab sheikh who reminisces about his childhood enjoyment of the “talking camels” in Info cartoons. The script was never produced. The 1980s celebrity-industrial complex, wrought in no small part by the Condé Nast blend of art and commerce (“Don’t think books. Think deals!”), had little use for a lamentation on a literary paradise lost.
BACK IN REAL LIFE, Robert Gottlieb was neither the change agent that Lillian Ross had feared nor that Si Newhouse had hoped.
Gottlieb’s eye for literary talent was unsurpassed; Le Carré, Cheever, Morrison, and Robert Caro were among his writers, and he would later edit Katharine Graham’s Pulitzer-winning memoir. But his bookish personality and kitschy interests—he was among the world’s leading connoisseurs of plastic handbags, even publishing a book about his collection, which he kept on shelves above his bed—didn’t quite mesh with the energies required of a weekly periodical. “He wasn’t interested in journalism. He wasn’t interested in getting the story,” Calvin Trillin told me many years later. “America was not one of Gottlieb’s interests, except in a sort of a camp way. I remember my first conversation with him. He thought a good American story would be about a toilet museum that one of the bathroom companies had.” Gottlieb’s eccentricities could be charming—he kept a toaster in his office that, on an hourly basis, popped out slices of plastic bread—but his self-satisfied demeanor did not help matters. Tina Brown claimed that Gottlieb, at a dinner party, told her blithely that, as an Englishwoman, she “could never understand The New Yorker.”
To be fair to Gottlieb, Shawn was a near-impossible act to follow. Tina, watching the drama unfold from her offices at Vanity Fair, was appalled at the intransigence of the old-guard New Yorker staff, especially when one complained to her that Gottlieb was now assigning stories, rather than allowing writers to germinate ideas on their own. It was the endless freedom afforded by Shawn, Tina believed, that had led The New Yorker into the dreary indulgences that repelled modern readers and had stripped the magazine of any urgency or cultural vim.
From Si’s perspective, however, there was one key area where Gottlieb’s skills fell hopelessly short: his congenital aversion to the spotlight. Si, so introverted and awkward in private settings, liked to live vicariously through the exploits of his butterfly editors. Tina and Anna Wintour, with their whirling social calendars, offered Si the perfect entrée to the elite circles he adored. All the publicity also drummed up business for Condé and kept the luxury advertisers keen. Gottlieb was the inverse: soon after his appointment at The New Yorker, he attended a ballet performance and became deeply uncomfortable when he realized dozens of people were staring at him. “It confirmed my long-standing belief that being a public figure is hell,” he later wrote.
Gottlieb, who once bragged that he had never visited a magazine office before Newhouse offered him the New Yorker gig, also retained a snobbishness toward Condé Nast, insisting that he had nothing to do with that glossier, tawdrier arm of Si’s empire. So critical was this distinction to Gottlieb that, more than thirty-five years after he was named editor, he declined to speak about the subject. “I never worked for Condé Nast,” he wrote in a message a year before his death in 2023. “When I was at The New Yorker it was completely separate. My (very happy) relationship was with Si Newhouse directly. I just don’t have a single thing to say about CN.”
That relationship notwithstanding, Si had come to believe that Gottlieb’s approach was no longer working. The subscription rate barely moved; financial losses were still adding up. Si had withstood all those slings and arrows from the literary set because he believed the Condé buzz machine could coexist with The New Yorker’s gravitas. But Gottlieb was, at his core, a preservationist. He enlisted Ingrid Sischy, the hip editor of Artforum, to remake the front-of-the-book culture listings, “Goings On About Town,” but his indifference toward infusing topicality and celebrity into the magazine left it out of sync with the broader culture. “The New Yorker is no longer a kind of secular religion, as it once was,” Hendrik Hertzberg, a one-time lion of the magazine, wrote in a sour 1989 assessment of Gottlieb’s early tenure, echoing a widely held view that The New Yorker had become an ossified curio of fading WASPdom—“merely a magazine,” in Hertzberg’s subtle dagger. For Si Newhouse, these words would have carried an extra sting. He had achieved a lifelong dream—his father’s dream—to control an American literary treasure. But the reputation lingered of the chiffonier, that insult that had originated with the magazine’s own A. J. Liebling. Despite his trust in Gottlieb, Si had gotten no closer to reviving The New Yorker’s reputation—or his own.