Tina’s tenure at The New Yorker is still recounted by her detractors as a series of blasphemies wrought upon the institution. When rumors first swirled that she might replace Gottlieb, John McPhee referred to the dangling prospect of a Brown editorship as “the joke of Damocles.” Now, on the last day of June 1992, the New Yorker staff had been hastily gathered into a conference room where Si Newhouse, dressed surprisingly formally in a light green suit, welcomed them by announcing, “The rumors are true.” He extolled Tina’s talents and deployed the word evolution, to the disquiet of the old-guard writers watching him. Si offered only vague answers about what he wanted for the magazine, besides that it would remain a weekly. Then he was gone.
Tina, who had burst into tears that morning when she announced her departure to the Vanity Fair team, arrived later in the afternoon to meet with department heads. Outwardly, she was noncommittal about her plans—keep the cartoons, maybe add a black-and-white photograph or two—but her mind was whirring. In Tina’s view, The New Yorker was an elegant, elderly patient on life support, easier to praise than to read. Shawn and Gottlieb had effectively taken a literary jewel and embalmed it, preserving its vaunted traditions but leaving it stuck in an outmoded mid-century WASPiness. Tina found inspiration in Harold Ross’s original Jazz Age incarnation of the magazine, copies of which she had picked up at The Strand, particularly its irreverence and thumb-in-the-eye takes on the nouveau riche. She also believed its writing staff had become sclerotic with what she later called “an underbelly of mediocre talent—people who thought that they were good because they were there, as opposed to being there because they were good.” It would not have been lost on Tina that some of the most exciting literary chroniclers of 1980s New York were coming from outside the magazine; it was only after Jay McInerney was fired from his job as a New Yorker fact-checker that he published his breakthrough novel, Bright Lights, Big City.
“It was ten years into dying, maybe more,” Tina later claimed, of the magazine she inherited. “If I hadn’t come in at that moment…. It really was on its last legs, is the truth.”
Her changes happened quickly. Hendrik Hertzberg, the former staff writer who had artfully filleted Gottlieb’s tenure, returned as her executive editor. Tina named James Wolcott, one of her Vanity Fair stars, as The New Yorker’s television critic. She revived “Shouts & Murmurs,” a forgotten humor feature from Harold Ross’s era, and decided to make it the back page of every issue. Maurie Perl, her public relations guru at VF, arrived, too, with plans to modernize the magazine’s publicity and marketing efforts. For the first time, summaries appeared below headlines, and author’s names were transferred from the end of an article—where they had been tossed in, almost as an afterthought, and denoted with a retiring em dash—to the start, billboarded in the magazine’s signature Rea Irvin typeface. At the time, these innovations were widely received as something of a scandal; The New Yorker, after all, was a publication so immune to broadening its appeal with readers that it had barely bothered to include a table of contents until the 1970s. Back then, when the editor Daniel Menaker, a fact-checker at the time, mused to a colleague that some subscribers might appreciate a legible table of contents—you know, to help guide them through the articles—his coworker scoffed.
“It’s none of the reader’s business what’s in the magazine,” she said.
Tina had asked Si to take the summer to finalize her plans before formally taking charge, and she and Harry escaped to a dude ranch in Wyoming for a recharge before her October debut. It was there that she decided on her first cover, one of six possibilities that she had commissioned from New Yorker illustrators to make a conspicuous statement about the magazine’s new management. Laying out the options on her duvet, Tina alighted on an Edward Sorel sketch of a bare-chested, leather-clad punk reclining in the back of a Central Park hansom cab, the top-hatted driver looking startled. Over the last two decades, Tina had been the Oxford prodigy shaking up London society and the precocious twentysomething who conquered America. Now she was thirty-eight years old, with two young children, a seven-figure salary, and full entrée to the elite circles of Manhattan, Washington, and Hollywood. But to her old-world doubters, she was still the barbarian trying to breach the gates.
She went with Sorel.
It’s hard to imagine, in today’s fractionalized media environment, just how much attention a single print magazine could attract in that pre-digital era. So scrutinized were Tina’s first issues that even typos—Dan Aykroyd as “Ackroyd”—received coverage in the press. (Tina pointed out that publications like Newsweek never faced that level of criticism, and her ally Hertzberg dove into The New Yorker’s archives to see if its reputation for scrupulousness was itself factually wanting; he reported finding more than three hundred instances of past errors.) The talk show host Dennis Miller asked if Tina would photograph John Updike in the nude. There were sexist barbs, like one New Yorker veteran who called her “a great girl wearing the wrong dress.” The editorial page of The New York Times would later rebuke her for sullying the magazine with “a tarty breathlessness.”
Sometimes, the criticism was paired with a denigration of Si’s own supposedly unsuitable background, another echo of the opprobrium that the Newhouses had faced since Sam’s first days in the publishing business. “A great American magazine falls into the clutches of a Staten Island newspaper mogul who goes out and hires a British editor who seems to know this country mainly from television and movies,” lamented Garrison Keillor, the snobbish public radio personality who worked at The New Yorker under Gottlieb and quit the day that Tina’s appointment was announced.
Inside the building, the skepticism and hostility persisted. At one point, the magazine’s cartoonists believed there was a conspiracy afoot to banish them in favor of Annie Leibovitz portraits. Tina’s emphasis on “buzz,” a word that William Shawn despised, was anathema to the magazine’s old guard, who viewed themselves as the last defenders of high-minded cultural values they feared were draining from American life. Many New Yorker veterans prized a tone of leisurely understatement; their articles were meant to maintain a studied distance from anything that smacked of commercial intrusion. William Shawn once balked when he learned that an actor and director—Mel Brooks, according to several accounts—had asked for his New Yorker profile to run around the same week as the opening of his new film, High Anxiety. Shawn made sure that wouldn’t happen, reasoning that readers would find it distasteful, even vulgar, for a New Yorker article to be construed as a form of publicity. (The profile was eventually published ten months after the movie’s release, under the headline “Frolics and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man.”)
The magazine had a long tradition of publishing journalism that made an enormous impact, including milestones like John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” the devastating account of six survivors of a nuclear attack that occupied an entire issue in August 1946; Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” of 1962, which begat the modern environmentalist movement; and Hannah Arendt’s serialized examination of the Adolf Eichmann trial, in which she coined the concept of “banality of evil.” These were articles that, like the rest of Shawn’s magazine, were intended to be timeless, or at least, out of time—as accessible to the reader who bought an issue on the newsstand as the one who unearthed it in an attic years later. That its back issues tended to stack up on nightstands and country house bedrooms was a feature, not a bug. Counterintuitively, the magazine was a news periodical that allowed its readers to escape the static of everyday life, to immerse themselves in whatever rabbit-hole world a writer had spent months—or even years—spelunking and then meticulously conjured in sparkling prose.
Tina believed that the magazine needed more of a newsroom’s cadence to break out in the increasingly crowded media world of the 1990s, a world that her Vanity Fair had helped forge. “The important thing is that all by itself the magazine makes news and people are talking about it,” she said. She recruited writers who had experience scoring scoops. David Remnick, hired in 1992, brought the energy of a former Washington Post Moscow correspondent; Jane Mayer, a Wall Street Journal veteran, came aboard, along with the famed investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Ken Auletta, approached in 1992 to write about the media industry, said he would take the job if Tina agreed to pay for him to travel for four months, interviewing CEOs and moguls around the country, before he had to write a single article. Tina said yes—and added a clause to Auletta’s contract guaranteeing him first-class airfare. She also brought modern methods to The New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checking department. The team had long relied on phone calls to subject experts and a collection of reference guides; Tina arranged for access to the electronic research database LexisNexis and doubled the size of the team, from eight checkers to sixteen. Whereas writers were once allowed to report and tinker on articles for months, even years, on end, Tina began aggressively assigning breaking news stories—and demanding they be submitted in less than a week.
She was particularly puzzled by the magazine’s tolerance (and ongoing paychecks) for the longtime staffers who failed to produce any writing of note. The most egregious example was Joseph Mitchell, a legendary chronicler of New York City life who walked into the office every weekday morning, shut his door, and then departed around 5 p.m. Since 1964, he had not published a word in the magazine. “Joe Mitchell would suddenly float into my office wearing a trilby hat, like the ghost of Christmas past or something,” Tina recalled. “I would think, ‘Wait a minute. I thought that you were dead.’ ” Tina did try to coax some material out of Mitchell, urging him to write about a fire at Manhattan’s Fulton Fish Market and to contribute a short remembrance of William Shawn for a tribute after the former editor’s death in December 1992. Mitchell, who died in 1996 and suffered from depression much of his adult life, always declined.
Tina modeled the kind of editorial cadence she expected, routinely editing multiple drafts of stories into the wee hours. Writers became accustomed to her 3 a.m. faxes, with thousands of words marked up in pen and comments scrawled in the margins. She also continued her practice from Vanity Fair of axing or shelving finished stories at the last minute if something timelier emerged, prompting some staffers to call her “the Terminator.” “Tina wanted something in the magazine every week that was right on the news, something you couldn’t get elsewhere,” said Jeffrey Toobin, another of her early hires. “That saved the magazine. I don’t know if it would still be in business without that.”
Not all of her efforts were successful. When Tina wanted to re-energize “Talk of the Town,” famed for its sophisticated take on Manhattan life, she hired Alexander Chancellor, the Old Etonian former editor of London’s Spectator, to oversee the section. Chancellor, it turned out, knew very little about life in New York. On his walk to work one morning, a few weeks into the job, he stopped by Rockefeller Center to see the installation of its famous Christmas tree. Chancellor told bemused colleagues how fascinated he was by the ritual and that he planned to write an article about it. A more experienced editor, Charles McGrath, gently discouraged him—the tree, a tradition since the thirties, was not exactly news—and the piece was killed; Chancellor left the magazine a year after that.
But Tina had otherwise taken the lumbering ocean liner of the magazine’s editorial system and begun molding it into a speedboat, equipped to handle breaking news. And in the summer of 1994, a story broke that put The New Yorker, for the first time in years, at the forefront of the American news cycle.
JEFFREY TOOBIN WAS AN ASSISTANT United States attorney in Brooklyn who had freelanced for The New Republic when a friend, David Remnick, recommended him to Tina. He wrote “Talk of the Town” pieces and, in the summer of 1994, a longer feature about television tabloid shows like Hard Copy paying cash for interviews, a practice that damaged the credibility of key witnesses and had derailed several criminal investigations. One such witness was a woman who said she had seen O. J. Simpson driving erratically in Brentwood on the night that his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend Ron Goldman were murdered. Tina encouraged Toobin to drop everything and fly to Los Angeles to see what he could dig up. “There’s no story in New York,” Tina told him. “Just go.”
Before he left, Toobin called Alan Dershowitz, who had taught him criminal law at Harvard and was now a member of O. J.’s defense team. Dershowitz suggested that he look into a LAPD cop named Mark Fuhrman. At the LA County courthouse, Toobin was directed to a subterranean warehouse of crumbling dockets, where he found Fuhrman’s lawsuit seeking a disability pension because, the cop claimed, he had been psychologically harmed by his years of interacting with Black people. (Fuhrman lost the case.) Toobin photocopied the file and made his way to the Century City office of O.J.’s attorney Robert Shapiro, where he bluffed his way inside. Shapiro had just posed for a picture by Richard Avedon, who Tina hired in 1992 as the first-ever staff photographer for The New Yorker; after the O.J. murder first broke, Tina had assigned Avedon to shoot portraits of both the prosecution and the Simpson defense team. Flattered by the attention, Shapiro agreed to speak with Toobin, and the reporter promptly shared what he had discovered.
Shapiro looked back at him. If you think that’s bad, he said, wait until you hear about the planted glove.
This was a significant scoop. Toobin had received a preview of the stunning defense strategy that O. J.’s lawyers were planning to unleash: that a racist cop had taken outrageous steps to frame the football star for the crime.I Toobin typed up the story that afternoon from an office overlooking the La Brea Tar Pits. It ran, days later, in the next week’s New Yorker under the headline “An Incendiary Defense.” The article made waves even before the physical issue hit newsstands that Monday. Because Maurie Perl had instituted a system of previewing newsy articles to other media outlets, wire services picked up the story on Sunday night. Toobin’s reporting was the lead story on many Sunday evening newscasts, and he was quickly booked onto Charlie Rose and Larry King Live. Tina hired a service that flew a banner advertising the scoop above nearby beaches, in case any summering New Yorker readers had left the issue behind at their Manhattan apartments. Perl estimated that the coverage of the article, in just the first two days after publication, reached roughly 170 million people.
Any media organization in the 2020s would kill for that kind of attention, and that kind of earthshaking scoop. In 1994, The New Yorker came under intense attack. Toobin was accused of carrying water for O. J.’s defense team by injecting their highly speculative glove theory into the mainstream. “I want to welcome The New Yorker to the field of tabloid journalism,” quipped Mike Walker, a gossip columnist for the National Enquirer. “If we had printed what Jeffrey Toobin printed in The New Yorker, there would be so much gnashing of teeth and wailing throughout the land.” Walker was speaking on an episode of ABC’s Nightline devoted to the media frenzy surrounding the case; when the ethics of Toobin’s reporting came up, Fred Barnes, a senior editor at The New Republic, called it “bad journalism.” Toobin defended himself by pointing to the care with which he had written his piece: twice, he had described the defense theory as “monstrous,” and the article closes with a warning of the ominous implications that it carried for the tinderbox of race relations in post–Rodney King Los Angeles. The final sentence, a quote from Dershowitz, is a clear signal to readers of those dangers: “Once I decide to take a case, I have only one agenda: I want to win. I will try, by every fair and legal means, to get my client off—without regard to the consequences.”
“Because I wrote about O. J., I was a symbol of the stuff people didn’t write about,” Toobin recalled when we met at a diner on the Upper West Side to talk about the article. “O. J. was the classic high/low story. It was about fundamentally what Black people think about the criminal justice system, which is a very serious subject. But it was also Kato Kaelin, the Dancing Itos, were Marcia Clark and Chris Darden fucking? All that silly stuff. It was illustrative of a lot of things.” One New Yorker stalwart, the heterodox cultural critic George W. S. Trow, was not convinced. He was so incensed by the magazine’s coverage of the Simpson case that he resigned, writing a fiery letter to Tina that accused her of “kiss[ing] the ass of celebrity culture.” Tina riposted that she was distraught, “but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.”
Tina had once described Vanity Fair as “the great high/low show,” juxtaposing “Demi Moore’s pregnant belly” with “Martha Graham’s dance aesthetic.” But it was arguably her New Yorker that achieved the distinction of a true postmodern magazine. It is striking to realize the degree to which her tenure, so controversial in its day, laid the template for our modern notion of upper-middlebrow journalism. Malcolm Gladwell, hired by Tina in 1996, began his witty explorations into pop psychology that became national phenomena and made his name an adjective, “Gladwellian.” Susan Orlean interviewed Mark Wahlberg about his Calvin Klein underwear ads. Tina asked Gay Talese to tackle Lorena Bobbitt. In 1993, Tina assigned James Wolcott an article on Rush Limbaugh, the trash-talking conservative radio star who was quietly on his way to becoming one of the foremost forces in American culture. Her hires included now-stalwarts of the magazine like Hilton Als, Anthony Lane, and Dorothy Wickenden. Tina’s ethos was a mix of hard-nosed reporting, literary flourish, true-crime titillation, and highbrow pop culture criticism, served up in dishy, easy-to-digest fashion. Back at Vanity Fair, Tina once admonished one of her top editors there, and later at The New Yorker, David Kuhn, to rewrite the “boring” headline and display type he had drafted for an article by the legendary choreographer Agnes de Mille.
“Don’t you get it?” Tina asked, impatiently. “Our job is to make the sexy serious and the serious sexy.”
This was, of course, a great way to sell magazines. But in the context of The New Yorker in particular, Tina’s approach was giving elite Americans permission to think seriously about subjects that the old version of the magazine had rarely deemed worthy of deep consideration: tabloid scandals, hit sitcoms, right-wing demagogues, porn stars. She wasn’t so much dumbing down The New Yorker as expanding the universe to which it applied its smarts. When Tina dispatched the feminist writer Susan Faludi to cover the plight of male actors in California’s adult film industry, the resulting article appalled some readers; the headline was “The Money Shot,” and it was almost certainly the first time that The New Yorker printed the word cum. But Faludi’s piece is a triumph of literary journalism, empathetic to its subjects and almost scholarly in its interrogation of modern masculinity. (Sample sentence: “A porn shoot is an intricately delineated ecology.”) The tone was wry at times, but Faludi took seriously an American demimonde that most mainstream publications treated with condescension or point-and-laugh immaturity. What appeared week to week in The New Yorker, house organ of the tasteful monied classes, was reshaping the kind of cultural fare that readers felt comfortable consuming. Would the vogue for true-crime podcasts among the public radio set have happened without Tina paving the way? Or the elite embrace of HBO dramas like The Sopranos, which would become the subject of university symposia? When magazines became eligible for Pulitzers, in the 2010s, The New Yorker received one of its first prizes for, of all things, television criticism.
After two years of Tina at the helm, the magazine’s circulation was up by 30 percent, from roughly 630,000 to 817,000. But her internal critics viewed those statistics as merely another sign that Tina’s pursuit of buzz had lowered institutional standards. The resentment simmered until three years into her tenure, when it burst spectacularly into public view. The culprit was one of the most popular celebrities in America: Roseanne.
TINA MAY NOT HAVE ANTICIPATED the backlash that ensued when she decided to feature Roseanne Barr in The New Yorker, but it wasn’t the first time she’d encountered the shit-stirring power of the comedienne’s blue-collar charms. The December 1990 cover of Vanity Fair was an arresting Annie Leibovitz photograph of Roseanne in a Dynasty-style fur stole, straddling the prone body of her then husband, Tom Arnold. It horrified high-society readers, one of whom confided to Dominick Dunne that the magazine had “gone too far this time.” In early 1995, Tina asked her theater critic John Lahr to write a profile of Roseanne, which ran for nineteen pages under a headline touting “her real importance in America’s comedic tradition: the essence of her art and how she used it to make rage about sex and class funny.” Lahr accurately captured Roseanne’s gleefully déclassé persona. Throughout the article, the actress liberally deployed the word fuck—a word once verboten in the magazine’s pages—and at one point is quoted instructing her critics to “suck my dick.” This kind of thing was, to put it mildly, a departure from the usual New Yorker tone.
Tina loved the article, and she decided to double down. Shortly after Lahr’s profile appeared, she flew to Los Angeles and spent three hours with Roseanne at her Brentwood mansion. There, she pitched an idea: The New Yorker was planning a special double issue that would interrogate the state of American womanhood. How would Roseanne feel about guest-editing it? Plans were drawn up for Tina and a pair of her top deputies to spend three days at Roseanne’s house for a brainstorming session with the comedian and her friends, a group that eventually included the actress Carrie Fisher. (Tina thought it would be fun to ask Roseanne about the “cost per minute” of her marriage to Tom Arnold, “and what you get for your money.”) Word of the summit promptly leaked, prompting Ian “Sandy” Frazier, a staff writer since 1974, to quit. “If the magazine were to fail, I would rather that it fail as itself, and not as some weird hybrid entertainment publication,” Frazier told the Associated Press. Tina shot back that Frazier was unfamiliar with the magazine that employed him: “If you ask Sandy about the last six issues, he won’t be able to tell you what’s in them.”
The outcry outside the magazine was even more intense. Maureen Dowd published a Times column headlined “Eustace Silly,” in which she observed that both Tina and Roseanne were “slaves of the buzz.” Tina defended her decision: “It will be great to bring that iconoclastic, fresh voice into the corridors of The New Yorker, to stop the kind of earnest, passé, cliché-ridden approach to women’s issues that starts to rise like a mushroom cloud over a meeting.” Several months after the “Eustace Silly” column, The New Yorker published an unflattering assessment of Dowd’s writing by James Wolcott under the headline, “Hear Me Purr.” (Tina had long been attentive to the Times columnist’s critiques; back at Vanity Fair, she once referred to her in an internal memo as “The Dowd.” Still, at one point, Tina tried to hire her to serve as The New Yorker’s Los Angeles correspondent; Dowd declined.)
The “Special Women’s Issue” was published in February 1996, featuring a feminine “Eustacia Tilley” in a low-cut dress on the cover, and a clarification that while Roseanne had acted as a consultant, the actress had not, in fact, edited any of the actual printed words. And what exactly was in this issue that caused so much agitation and fuss? The table of contents is a Murderers’ Row of writing talent: Katha Pollitt on the demonization of poor women, Francine du Plessix Gray on aging, poems by Mary Karr and Joyce Carol Oates, and an affecting, almost painfully tender reflection by Wendy Wasserstein on her relationship with her oldest sister. Tina suborned Wolcott into contributing a wry account of the backlash against Barr—“Semicolons our forefathers had died for were being sacrificed in a bonfire of cheap celebrity”—that identified the Roseanne Resistance as “a sort of rhetorical class warfare carried on under the guise of Good Taste. It’s the last refuge of a snob.” And, indeed, the last refuge of an earlier generation of New Yorker readers and writers, who still clung to a retrograde version of the magazine that no longer clicked in the culture of the 1990s.
One last scandale arose from the issue’s publication. Tina had commissioned an essay by the cultural critic Daphne Merkin about her fetish for spanking and sadomasochism. The article, “Unlikely Obsession,” is a gripping personal account, in which Merkin plumbs the origins of her kink and its role in her romantic life, entwined with an erudite review of the literary and psychoanalytic history of bondage, including discursions into Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s predilection for spanking and the Luis Buñuel film Belle de Jour. Such an essay, published in the 2020s, would barely register in the sea of sexual confessionals that at this point have become near-mandatory for mainstream outlets like The New York Times Magazine. In 1996, Merkin’s article shocked the literary world. The week the issue hit newsstands, a mother at Merkin’s daughter’s school accosted her to ask if she was crazy. She received a call from a friend who had just returned from a dinner party where her article was the topic of fierce debate; guests were wondering what Daphne looked like, her turn-ons and turn-offs. “I froze internally,” Merkin recalls. “I kept thinking, ‘I wrote this while my parents were alive?!’ ”
The tut-tutting stretched across the country: The Seattle Times ran an editorial deriding the article as “warmed-over prurience.” Merkin received dozens of letters from readers, some horrified, others delighted to see their private thoughts expressed so unabashedly in public. At one point, a friend spotted a personal ad in a Midwestern newspaper: “SWM seeking Daphne Merkin type for mutual involvement and pleasure.” Her byline had morphed into a symbol, a reminder of the immense reach of weekly magazines before the revolution of the internet.
Looking back, Merkin’s essay broke a taboo that paved the way for Jane Pratt’s xoJane, online sites like Thought Catalog, and the soul-baring and sexually candid first-person pieces of The Cut. It sent a signal, to a status-conscious audience, that it was okay for women to write about their erotic life in the pages of an upstanding magazine. David Remnick, Tina’s successor, would later say, semiseriously, that he was proud of having been the first editor to get the term blow job into the magazine.II “People were proprietary about The New Yorker, and saw it still as the ‘clinking glasses in the Connecticut suburbs’ way, as a bastion of WASP rectitude,” Merkin told me, of that earlier age. “The feeling was, ‘Our New Yorker doesn’t touch this.’ ” The fact that Tina had encouraged her, Merkin said, spoke to the magazine’s newfound vigor and relevance. She considered it a feminist statement, too.
“No one called Mailer confessional, and what else was he?” Merkin said. “No one questioned Updike when he wrote about pink vulvas.”
ONE OF TINA’S ENDEAVORS to boost readership would have a long-lasting effect on the broader media industry. Together with her publicity maven Maurie Perl, Tina created what became known as “The Hot List.” In 1992, there was no “Politico Playbook,” and it would be another decade before ABC News created “The Note,” widely viewed as a progenitor of morning email tip sheets. Setting the national news agenda had to be accomplished on a person-to-person basis, assignment editor to assignment editor. At enormous expense, rumored to be about $1 million annually, Perl arranged for copies of each week’s New Yorker to be couriered directly to the homes or offices of influential journalists, politicians, morning TV bookers, chief executives, and opinion leaders. These were the influencers before influencers: the behind-the-scenes gatekeepers of the mass media platforms that were, at the time, the only means of communicating widely with movers and shakers. The hand-deliveries happened on Sundays, after the magazine had been printed, but before it hit newsstands on Monday morning. Every network news anchor received a copy; so did every living president. Al Gore and Bill Clinton were on the list, along with Peter Jennings and Dan Rather. Stacks of copies were dropped off in the cloakrooms of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court, along with the newsrooms of The New York Times and The Washington Post. The list itself was a closely guarded secret. Because it was updated frequently by Tina and Maurie, it represented a real-time inventory of who was up and who was down. To be included on Tina’s distribution list—with its high concentration of Manhattan, Beverly Hills, Georgetown, and Mayfair postcodes—quickly became a status symbol of its own.
Before Tina introduced this practice, Condé Nast’s publicity team relied on a small circle of media and lifestyle reporters, some at barely noticed trade papers like Ad Age, to drum up attention. But Tina wanted her stories read immediately by media’s big hitters, who could then amplify The New Yorker’s reporting through their own news outlets. It was no longer enough for someone to stumble on an article while waiting at the doctor’s office. “The way Tina looked at the magazine, it needed to be talked about,” Calvin Trillin recalled.
Perl, who cut her teeth in PR at ABC News working with Barbara Walters, knew Sundays were an agenda-setting day in the American news industry: over coffee and pancakes, journalists watched political talk shows like Meet the Press, perused the fat Sunday newspapers, and tuned in for 60 Minutes in the evening. “By the time The New Yorker got into people’s mailboxes on Monday or Tuesday, you’d be behind the curve,” she recalled. Perl also liked to put her thumb on the scale; when Tina published an enormous Janet Malcolm essay on Sylvia Plath, Perl’s team called reporters with the “suggestion” that the piece be compared with a previous lengthy New Yorker classic, Hersey on Hiroshima. These methods were widely adopted. Today, nearly every leading publication and TV network issues press releases that loudly tout scoops, major investigations, and groundbreaking essays.
The New Yorker began receiving so much press attention under Tina that other Condé Nast editors, including Art Cooper at GQ, requested Perl’s services, or phoned her for a personal tutorial on how to inject their content into the cultural bloodstream. “The questions journalists once asked themselves on the eve of publication were: Is this smart enough? New enough? Important enough?” observed The New York Times, in a mid-1990s report on Tina’s influence. “Now they are just as likely to ask: Will there be a buzz?”
Did Tina go too far in her pursuit of buzz? Her track record was not entirely clean. Ethics issues cropped up early in her tenure. An unsigned “Talk of the Town” piece about the criminal trial of a former East German strongman, Erich Honecker, was revealed to be written by Honecker’s lawyer’s spouse. (“Questions were not asked that should have been asked,” Tina conceded.) Michael Ovitz, Tina’s muse from Vanity Fair, was mentioned ten times in a special issue on movies. A Richard Avedon fashion spread that depicted the model Nadja Auermann in carnal ecstasy with a skeleton ran for twenty-six pages and seemed hopelessly out of place; the shoot cost so much money that a mortified New Yorker editor later shredded the expense sheet out of embarrassment. Tina was fixated on topicality, sometimes to a fault; when John Seabrook approached her with a draft of an article titled “The Man Who Invented the Intermittent Windshield Wiper”—which, among other topics, digressed into Thomas Jefferson and the history of American patent law—she was unimpressed: “Too much then, not enough now.” A joke went around that Tina had left a disapproving note on a draft of an article: “Galley five and no celebrities yet.” Even her fans allowed that Tina sometimes privileged flash above substance. Anthony Lane recalled pitching her a story on The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard’s play about the English poet A. E. Housman. Tina paused to consider the idea.
“Is Housman hot?” she asked.III
For her part, Tina described her methodology as a kind of furtive delivery system for status-conscious readers. She believed that modern audiences, distracted by cable television, talk radio, and other droning forms of lesser media, needed an extra pull to engage with the more thought-provoking articles she put out. “My goal, far from being to dump the long, serious, traditional pieces of The New Yorker, had been to find new ways to market them so that they will be read by a new and younger audience—and therefore preserved,” she said in 1994. “The newsier piece acts as the tugboat or the seduction point for the reader to pick up the magazine and become engaged. They then find themselves in a friendly mood towards the more challenging and quieter pieces.” She also didn’t mind a touch of the vulgar. “Tina always said a lapse in taste was an absolutely essential ingredient to her philosophy,” recalled Ruth Ansel, one of her art directors at Vanity Fair. “If something wasn’t exactly beautiful or refined, she would want it because it had power and it had impact. Things that are too tasteful are too safe.”
In this, Tina was ahead of the curve. Some of her supposed offenses from that era now look downright quaint. “Tina decided there should be a fashion issue, and Richard Avedon would become the lead photographer,” said Stephen Schiff. “And that was just a huge controversy. It was like, ‘How dare you? This is The New Yorker!’ Can you imagine that that was a controversy?”
From his executive suite inside 350 Madison, Si Newhouse happily watched all of this unfold. Technically, Si had adhered to his original agreement to wall off The New Yorker’s operations from the rest of Condé Nast. In practice, there was little separation. Tina still reported directly to Si, and when The New Yorker’s publisher, Steve Florio, left to become Condé Nast’s chief executive, Florio’s brother Tom stepped in to take his place. Under Tina, The New Yorker was fulfilling the Condé mandate of telling Americans which subjects were worth thinking about. In fact, it was telling more Americans than ever before. The magazine’s circulation had stood around 500,000 subscribers when Shawn was replaced in 1987; it rose above 600,000 under Gottlieb. In 1996, circulation was at nearly 870,000.
It all came at a price: The New Yorker was now losing tens of millions of dollars annually. Tina’s innovations were not cheap. She paid hefty fees to her writers and ran up production costs by tearing up issues at the last minute. Si did not relish accumulating debts; the bloody trail of decapitated editors in his wake offered proof of that. But it was obvious that Tina’s work at the magazine was satisfying him on a different, perhaps deeper level. Si had shown little interest in the newspaper side of his father’s empire—the “hard news” side, where matters of import, at least by Sam’s standards, were reported and discussed. His brother, Donald, had taken up oversight of all that. The fact that The New Yorker was now a player in the world of current affairs meant that Si had finally achieved the kind of legitimacy of which his father, perhaps, would have approved. Maybe Sam never thought he had it in him.
In the Condé Nast offices—amid arguably the planet’s most heavily groomed and well-coiffed workforce—Si was often seen wearing a wrinkled New Yorker baseball cap, above a faded New Yorker sweatshirt. At his summer home in Bellport, Long Island, Si kept a Boston Whaler at a local dock that he sometimes liked to aggressively steer around the harbor.
A friend recalled the boat’s name as Eustace Tilley.