At its peak, Condé Nast was a bizarre, sui generis world that was simultaneously dysfunctional and successful. Because Si had endured his father’s disappointment, he was driven to dominate his competitors in a manner that Sam would have approved. And because, as a young man, Si had experienced the wrong side of snobbery’s sting, he was determined to signal his astuteness, his exquisite sensitivity to taste, an endeavor to which he applied the multibillion-dollar fortune at his disposal. “Si used money far more strategically than many people realized,” recalled Katrina Heron, an editor in chief of Wired. “Rather, every penny went to satisfy his idea and expression of empire. He created a calculated fiefdom of which he was completely and autocratically in control.”
Thus the culture of Condé Nast became an extension of Si’s id. Budgets were for the unimaginative; to care about a budget was to reveal oneself as insufficiently devoted to the pursuit of excellence. This was a land of unspoken codes and byzantine social rules, proficiency in which was required in order to succeed. The proper knotting of an ascot; the angle of a tie bar; how you dressed, how you spoke, where you went, who you knew—these considerations mattered deeply. What might have been superficial in other contexts took on outsize importance at a company defined by its mastery of perception and the minutest criteria of caste. Once, Alex Liberman overheard an editor mispronounce Françoise de la Renta—Oscar’s first wife and a Vogue editor herself—as “fran-SWAH,” not the correct “fran-SWAZZ.” Alex’s eyes narrowed. The editor was out of a job weeks later.
“That was the kind of thing that would kill your career,” recalled one Vogue veteran. “It revealed you were not a truly worldly person.”
Those who thrived there recall a paradise; those who flailed, a perdition. Oddly enough, the most widely known pop cultural depiction of the company, the Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway film The Devil Wears Prada, is perhaps the most accurate. Not because the movie gets all of the details right (it doesn’t), or because Runway and Miranda Priestly are exact stand-ins for Vogue and Anna Wintour (they aren’t), but because it captures the anxiety and ambition, self-discipline and self-regard, seriousness about silly things and silliness about serious things that defined the modern Condé Nast.
JOAN KRON WAS A SOUGHT-AFTER magazine writer in the 1980s when she was contacted about the possibility of taking over the editorship of House & Garden. A meeting with Si went well, and she left with the sense that the job might be hers.
Then Alex Liberman asked her to lunch at La Grenouille.
“He insisted that we have asparagus,” Kron said. “When the asparagus comes, it’s sitting in oodles and oodles of dressing.” Kron, hoping to appear fastidious, used her salad fork to pierce the stalks. “And Alex proceeds to pick up his asparagus and eat it by hand! Which I learned later was the European style.” She did not get the job.
“This is what I failed at,” Kron told me, laughing about it years later. “Eating asparagus.”I
Lucy Sisman was a highly respected graphic designer when Liberman summoned her to his weekend estate in Connecticut to discuss a position at Allure, then still in the prototype stage. He greeted her in painters’ overalls and invited her to take a ride around the property in his muscle car. Soon, she was hanging on for dear life. “He drove with reckless speed, like some sort of rally driver,” she recalled. “I was gripping the handles.” (One of Si’s friends recalled a similarly terrifying experience, in which the publisher tore his small boat around the crowded harbor near his country house in Bellport, Long Island.) Alex’s assessment of Sisman’s ability, she said, “was as much about my endurance of my terrifying ride as it was about anything else.” Sisman got hired. “I was just grateful I’d worn flat shoes.”
Lots of Condé alums recall just how important it was to master the folkways of the place. “I had to learn how to speak like a Condé Nast person,” said Jennifer Barnett, who grew up as a Navy brat and had no connections in Manhattan media when she moved to the city from Virginia in 1999. She was eking out a living at Hearst’s mid-market magazine Redbook when a chance encounter on the L train led to a job at Teen Vogue in 2004, the year after the magazine launched. “I would have worked at any publication at Condé Nast,” she recalled. “It seemed really fun and really glamorous.” She paid for a manicure and a blowout before her interview; when she was hired as the magazine’s managing editor, “I felt like I was Willy Wonka with the golden ticket.”
Even though she was bowled over by the glamour of her new workplace, Barnett quickly learned to adopt a default insouciance. “An editor in the elevator would say, ‘I’m going to have cocktails with Heidi Klum because she’s launching her Birkenstock line,’ ” she recalled. “Everyone around nodded like, ‘Yes, of course that’s what you’re doing.’ ” Language itself became a balancing act, with staffers feeling an implicit pressure to express themselves only in euphemistic, status-saving terms. Once, Alex objected when a colleague used the term flee to describe his family’s escape from Bolshevik Russia. “No, no. I didn’t flee,” Alex clarified. “It was an orderly exit.”
“You never say anything to anyone directly,” Barnett recalled. “You couch it all in flattery, and insinuation, which I did not know how to do. It was all very polished.” When a stylist botched a photo shoot, it was up to Barnett to break the news that the feature had been killed. “The way I had to do it was convey to her how much she was loved. ‘Everyone loves you! Amy [Astley, Teen Vogue’s editor at the time] adores you.’ Just reinforce how fabulous they were. And then you’d literally slip it in. I would say, ‘We’ve gone in a different direction.’ So flattering and so gentle. There was never to be a harsh word directly. If you were getting fired, you’d barely know.” Indeed, one Condé Nast employee was fired on the office elevator between the twelfth and fifteenth floors. His boss was leaving on vacation and asked for help carrying luggage to the lobby. As the car descended, the following scene played out:
“Darling, I had a wonderful idea: Why don’t you become a contributing editor?”
“Am I… fired?”
“Nothing like that, really, dear!”
The man deposited his boss into a waiting limousine. When he walked back into the building, a personnel director was waiting for him: “If you have a minute, follow me into my office.” The deed was done.
Liberman once confided his own subtle method of severing ties:
This is what I find best. Do it at the end of the day, not early. Just before they’re about to leave, go to their office, not yours. If you can sit next to them, on a couch, or a chair side by side, it’s better than doing it over a desk. Touch them—their shoulder, their elbow—and call them by name. Say, “George, may I be completely frank?” They always say yes. Then you can put the knife in and gut them right away. “All right, George. It’s not going to do. They’re going to fire you tomorrow, so clean out your desk tonight. There’s nothing I can do.” There. You’ve said it. Don’t try to explain; they’ll go on for some time. Steel yourself and listen. Listen for as long as you possibly can as they unburden themselves. When you can’t bear it a moment longer, calmly reach into your jacket and take out your agenda. Turn to a date two or two and a half weeks from that day, and make a lunch date. Do it someplace public, like the Four Seasons or Le Cirque. Say, “I don’t want to lose you, George. Let’s have lunch on the twenty-whatever.” Never break that lunch date, ever. And remember, they think they still might get something from you, so they won’t be nearly as nasty as they could be.
It was all of a piece with the conspicuous civility of the place, which prevailed even at moments of extreme ruthlessness. Condé’s swans were serene on the surface, even as they furiously kicked their legs underneath. “There was a way to comport yourself that was very strict,” recalled Linda Wells, who started her career at Vogue and then edited Allure for twenty-four years. “If you worked at Vogue, you had to embody the Vogue attitude. You might be making $10,000 a year and not be able to buy a movie ticket, but you had to be the biggest snob ever about which caviar was served, or would you have it with Champagne or sparkling wine.” The implicit pressure to live stylishly was intense. “We were in heels, Manolos,” recalled Plum Sykes, who joined Vogue in the late 1990s. “It was considered extremely unprofessional to go into the office in flat shoes. Maybe a pair of Chanel ballet flats, but a pair of brogues, absolutely not.” Sykes had a reputation as a quintessential “Vogue girl”: an Oxford grad with London society connections, rail-thin, hardworking, and a fixture of Manhattan’s junior party scene. “The clothes that people wear here in the day are probably clothes that normal people would wear on their most glamorous night out of the year,” Sykes said. “Who is going to wear a chiffon Dolce & Gabbana skirt like this to the office? Only me! Or only someone who works at Vogue.”
Sometimes, conforming to Condé’s expectations meant changing more than one’s outfit.
Right out of college, Carolyne Volpe landed her dream job as an assistant in the beauty department at Vanity Fair. She was over the moon; Volpe loved magazines and she was excited to work with SunHee Grinnell, the magazine’s uber-chic beauty editor. A few days into the job, Grinnell approached Volpe with a request. There was already another woman named Caroline working at the magazine, and it was confusing to have two. It would be a lot easier if Volpe went by her given name, Lynden, instead.
“I really like the name ‘Lynden,’ ” Grinnell told her, “so I’m going to call you that.”
Volpe had gone by Carolyne, a nickname bestowed by her parents, since she was an infant. On a dime, Carolyne was no more. “I was absolutely terrified of her,” Volpe recalled. “I would do whatever she said.” All her post-college friends know her as Lynden Volpe, the name she still uses professionally. Her mother was dumbfounded—“Why would you decide that?” she asked her daughter—but looking back, Volpe sees changing her name as just a natural part of fitting into the glam world of Condé Nast. Her boss “definitely wanted things a certain way, and wanted things to appear a certain way,” Volpe said. “She thought it was a chicer, more unique name, which it probably is.”
“Basically,” Volpe added, “anything she would have said to do, I would have said yes.”
IN NAVIGATING ALL THESE TACIT expectations, it helped to be rich. Nepotism was a fact of life at Condé Nast—at one point, dozens of Newhouses were employed throughout the company—and coveted, if menial, entry-level jobs often went to the well-connected. Tina Brown hired Angela Janklow, daughter of her powerful literary agent Morton Janklow, at Vanity Fair, where one eyewitness recalled Angela installing a light-up makeup mirror at her cubicle. The extended Janklow network was a noted beneficiary of Tina’s largesse: the November 1986 issue of Vanity Fair included an article by the writer Barbara Goldsmith, represented by Janklow; an article on the Lincoln Center Theater, where Janklow’s wife, Linda, was a director; an article on Warner LeRoy, Janklow’s brother-in-law; and an article by Angela. The apparent coziness was so glaring that The New York Times ran an item about it—only to backtrack a day later in an unusual “editors’ note,” informing readers that the newspaper “possessed no evidence” of any favoritism toward the Janklows at Vanity Fair and dismissing its own article as “unwarranted.” The fact that this quasi-correction appeared at all was, ironically, an even clearer sign of Janklow’s—and Tina’s—influence in Manhattan media circles.
At Condé, pedigree had a professional purpose, too. Its magazines needed the sons and daughters of aristocrats to ensure continued access to the rarefied worlds they covered. If Vogue wanted to photograph the private gardens of, say, a minor Spanish royal, it helped to have the aristocrat’s backgammon partners on speed dial. Hence the hiring of Prince Michael of Greece as a contributor to Architectural Digest, in case an editor wanted to stage a shoot at a palace on Corfu. Some well-heeled employees didn’t bother to cash their payroll checks at all, prompting awkward reminder calls from the Condé accounting department. One grandee requested that her payments simply be forwarded straight to the New York City Ballet.
It also helped to be European. Kate Reardon was a well-bred nineteen-year-old in London in the late 1980s when she idly told a woman at a party that she wanted to work in magazines. The woman suggested she write to a friend: Bernard Leser, then Condé’s president. Suddenly, Reardon was on a flight to New York for an interview. Reardon figured somebody was impressed by her chic London postal address, or assumed she was Leser’s goddaughter. “I had absolutely no qualifications,” she recalled. “I had been given two weeks’ work experience at British Elle, but I hadn’t turned up for the second week because I was bored.” She was immediately hired as an assistant at Vogue, a coup she attributed to her posh English accent. (Telephone etiquette was an important focus at Condé Nast, where for decades new hires attended an orientation session on the proper way to answer calls and take messages.) Reardon soon found herself at a lavish Vogue photo shoot with Alec, Stephen, and William Baldwin, and a catered sushi lunch. “All my friends were at some excruciating B-level university in England and I was fawning around in stretch limos with Patrick Demarchelier and all the Baldwin brothers at once,” recalled Reardon, who went on to become editor in chief of Condé’s British magazine Tatler. “It was heaven.”
But creating glamour wasn’t always so glamorous. One exacting editor charged her assistant with the less-than-exalted task of removing the blueberries from her morning muffin; the editor preferred the essence of blueberries, she explained, but not the taste of the berries themselves. Vera Wang was a wealthy former debutante when she was hired as an assistant to Polly Mellen at Vogue. Wang showed up for her first day of work in a crisp white YSL dress. “Dearie,” Mellen told her, “you’re going to have to go home and change out of that dress, because you’re going to be on the ground here crawling around” on the floor of the fashion closet. The Herculean trials of Anna Wintour’s fleet of assistants (she usually employs two or three at a time) have passed into magazine legend: the 7:30 a.m. arrivals, the relentless flood of need-it-now tasks, from ferrying her clothes to the elite dry cleaner Madame Paulette to monitoring the tracking devices of her goldendoodles. Instructions for many of these responsibilities were maintained in a twenty-one-page booklet presented to her assistants upon hiring.
Anna’s brusque management style has fueled her intimidating public image. One Vogue editor was in a meeting with Anna when the telephone rang; Anna answered, then grabbed a tube of lipstick and scrawled a message on a sheet of paper that she silently handed across the desk: “Please leave.” But her workplace behavior did not substantially differ from those of hard-charging male chief executives in other competitive industries, who often rely on underlings to handle personal errands and evince little patience for ineptitude. The enduring caricature of Anna as a sadistic boss speaks in part to the sexist attitudes through which her career—along with the broader domain of Condé Nast—is often perceived.
FOR MIDDLE-CLASS MORTALS hoping to gain entry to Condé Nast, the application process could resemble an admissions interview at a finishing school. For many years, applicants for entry-level positions were administered a typing test—fifty words a minute, six mistakes allowed—as a minder watched over their shoulder, highlighting mistakes with a red pen. Polly Mellen was known to drop a pencil on the floor during an interview; if the assistant didn’t lean down to pick it up for her, they were dismissed. In 1951, when a twenty-one-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier applied for a position at Vogue, one of the standard questions on the Condé Nast employment form was “Are you a Communist?” (Bouvier’s answer: “No.”) Condé also sought information about an applicant’s hobbies, club memberships, and “amusements” (Bouvier: “riding, theatre and tennis”), a not-so-subtle way of discerning social rank that indicated a fitness for Condé’s upper-class culture.
By the mid-1990s, the divining of status persisted in other ways. In 1994, applicants to become assistants at Vogue were presented with an impromptu oral exam: four typed pages of 178 notable people, places, institutions, literary titles, and other cultural ephemera, all of which had to be identified on the spot. It was at once a test of elite cultural literacy, and a striking declaration of the sort of shared knowledge and values that mattered at a place like Vogue—which, like the rest of Condé’s magazines, was itself a monthly dispatch of people, places, and ideas, both high and low, that its editors believed a discerning citizen ought to know about. The ideal candidate would recognize Fassbinder as the New German Cinema director, Evan Dando as the lead singer of the Lemonheads, the Connaught as the London luxury hotel, and the opening sentence of Proust’s “Swann’s Way.” Devised by the Vogue editors William Norwich and Charles Gandee, the list is an insight into the status-conscious universe that Condé wanted employees to be conversant in, even those whose main role at the company would be fetching cappuccinos for their boss. Want to be a part of Condé Nast? This was your obstacle course:
“We did it as much for ourselves as for our colleagues and for the applicants,” Norwich recalled. “I thought it was too long, and Charles thought it was too short!” The list performed its function: Norwich confirmed that he weeded out several Vogue applicants who had never heard of Diana Vreeland.
Being in charge of a Condé Nast publication carried its own highly specific set of expectations. When the editor in chief of Wired, Katrina Heron, flew to New York to meet with her new bosses, she booked a modest room at the mid-market Royalton. Steve Florio chastised her and told her to switch to a hotel more commensurate with her position. She ended up at the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, which was several times the price. “Good,” Florio said, when he heard about her new digs. “When people have breakfast with you, they want you to be staying at the St. Regis.”
Lucy Sisman, the art director at Allure, was similarly scolded when she attended her first Paris fashion week as a Condé employee. The phone in her undistinguished hotel room rang, and she heard Alex’s voice on the other end.
“I understand that you’re not staying at the Ritz.”
“That’s right.”
“My art directors stay at the Ritz.”
“There was a kind of largeness to being an editor in chief that was an uncomfortable role for me,” recalled Linda Wells, who was a reporter at The New York Times when Alex recruited her to edit Allure in 1990. “As a reporter at the Times, your job is to be watching what happened, to essentially be invisible. And suddenly I had to be visible and be a public person. I had to entertain, and go to benefits and co-chair benefits, and get press. It was so foreign to me. Like, boom, I had to be it. I never anticipated that part of the job.” Dominique Browning, the editor who relaunched House & Garden in 1996, would be hauled into Steve Florio’s office to be reprimanded: “You’re not in Page Six enough. We need to see you wearing more designer clothing.” Those who felt uneasy about embodying the Condé brand tended not to last long at the company. When John Leland, a mild-mannered Newsweek editor, was hired in 1994 to run the edgy Condé men’s magazine Details, he was presented with a major perk: a leased Mercedes sedan. “I wasn’t that interested, but they felt I should have a car,” Leland recalled. He felt uncomfortable driving in a luxury vehicle—“it was a carjacking waiting to happen”—and eventually swapped it out for a more modest Saab convertible. Later, Leland chafed when his bosses dispatched him to hobnob with Gianni Versace at the Milan men’s fashion shows, a milieu where he felt woefully out of place. Leland tried to democratize the articles in Details, hoping that readers in their twenties and thirties would find their own lives and challenges reflected in its pages. Democracy, it turned out, was not desirable at Condé Nast: he was ousted after ten months.
BUT IF YOU MADE IT at Condé Nast, you reaped the spoils.
The mandate to live expensively had deep roots in the company’s DNA. In 1928, when Edna Woolman Chase was planning to build a country home on Long Island, Condé Montrose Nast offered her a gift of $100,000—$1.8 million in today’s dollars—for its construction. Edward Steichen, the pioneering fashion photographer, received a $35,000 contract to shoot for Vogue and Vanity Fair in 1923—$625,000 in today’s dollars. Alex Liberman believed deeply in this tradition. For decades, he served as the in-house philosopher of excess, defending the company’s decadent spending as the necessary price of achieving artistic excellence. Alex was a proselytizer of waste—creative waste. It cost money to generate the avant-garde design, iconic photographs, and ambitiously reported journalism that distinguished Condé Nast from its competitors, to reach the heights that Alex believed were necessary for the company to be, as he put it, “one of the great civilizing forces in America.” Thanks to Alex’s ideas and Si’s largesse, Condé culture boiled down to a simple dictate: it was always better to spend than not to spend.
Editors were encouraged to toss away photo shoots and kill expensive articles. When Vogue commissioned Irving Penn to photograph a broken Champagne glass, Alex insisted that the magazine smash a hundred samples from Cartier in order to procure the perfect image. “We were always given this idea that you had to aim for some sort of artistic perfection,” said the photographer Sheila Metzner, another Liberman protégée. “Your references were the greatest movies, or the greatest books, or the greatest artists—and whatever you had done before, you had to do better than that.” This was the mandate that allowed Diana Vreeland, in the 1960s, to spend tens of thousands of dollars insisting that Richard Avedon twice reshoot a fashion spread on the color green. Vreeland wanted the hue to resemble the baize of a billiards table, and upon reviewing Avedon’s contact sheets, she was convinced the photographer hadn’t gotten the color quite right. Finally, fed up, Avedon tore off a strip of felt from an actual pool table and presented it to Vreeland’s office. See? he demanded. It’s the right hue.
“Oh,” Vreeland said, distractedly. “But I meant a billiard table in the late afternoon sunlight!”
Vreeland once flew David Bailey to India for a shoot involving white tigers that never ran. Recalling that the British photographer Norman Parkinson had glimpsed fields with white horses on a trip to Tahiti, she enlisted him to return to the island, “select the finest Arab stallion,” and drape the animal in mounds of silver and gold fabric. Upon arrival, Parkinson was told that all of the white horses had been eaten by French colonizers. When a (brown) stallion was finally located, and weighed down with 150 pounds of fabric, the horse got spooked and leaped into the air, sending the fabric flying. A pony had to be used instead. When Polly Mellen came over from Harper’s Bazaar in 1966, her first assignment was “The Great Fur Caravan,” a five-week-long, first-class tour of Japan with Avedon and the model Veruschka, accompanied by enormous trunks of winter clothing carried by a crew of local laborers.
“Money,” Mellen told me fifty-six years later, “was not something that was given a thought.”
The grand only got grander when Si Newhouse took full control of his father’s company, and Condé’s revenues and relevance began to swell. Alex, who saw no distinction between creative pursuit and financial comfort, believed that the propagators of Condé’s luxurious dreamland ought to live inside the lives they conjured on the page. “I believe that money should be used to facilitate a creative life and to eliminate fatigue,” he said. “I take taxis all the time; I find them restful and stimulating.” Shortly after Grace Mirabella assumed the editorship of Vogue in the early 1970s, Alex called her to his office at 350 Madison and offered some advice on an upcoming shoot she was overseeing in Paris. “Take the Concorde,” Alex instructed. “Spend a lot of money. Get yourself there in the most expensive way possible, take pictures over ten times if you need to. Do it all grandly!”
Perks were legion. One Vanity Fair editor, on assignment in London, lived in the Dorchester hotel with her husband and children for a month—with a separate room reserved for their full-time nanny. A VF writer flew back and forth to London for a ten-minute interview with Tony Blair. Todd Purdum estimates that he spent $100,000 on an article for Graydon about London’s financial industry that never ran. Once, Annie Leibovitz ran up a $475,000 bill for a Hollywood Issue shoot that involved an elaborately constructed set that traveled from Los Angeles to New York to London. (“It was like Vietnam, the expenses,” Graydon recalled.) Over lunch with Si, Graydon gingerly broached the subject.
“I do have to talk to you about something,” Graydon began. “It’s a good-news-bad-news situation.”
“What’s the bad news?” Si asked.
“I think we just shot the most expensive cover in magazine history.”
“How much?”
“$475,000.”
Si paused. “What’s the good news?”
“It looks like a $475,000 cover.”
Si was fine with it.
In fact, the notion that an editor might concern herself with a subject as gauche as money was viewed as… déclassé. “If you’re not 10 percent over budget,” GQ’s Art Cooper once told a colleague, “you’re a wimp.” During one pleasant period, Condé editors were allowed to have Federal Express pick up their luggage and ship it to their hotel ahead of them, so they could travel light. Around the same time, an assistant at the magazine happened to glance at Annie Leibovitz’s expenses for a single photo shoot and realized it was more than they made in a year.
The company footed the bill for any number of eccentric costs. When the writer Ann Patchett flew to the Amazon for a story in Gourmet, she stumbled on a turtle for sale at an outdoor market. She called her editor, William Sertl, to see if Condé would pay for her to buy the animal and save it. Sertl approved, citing a policy “that permits writers to expense any animal that rhymes with the name of their editor.” Max Vadukul, a staff photographer at Tina’s New Yorker, was in India, staking out the Catholic mission of Mother Teresa, when his team sought shade under a nearby tree. A monkey clambered down a branch and snatched a bag containing thousands of dollars in cash out of his editor’s pocket—the funds for the entire rest of their stay. Vadukul’s assistant sent a fax to Condé Nast (complete with a drawing of a monkey) that explained their predicament, and the company wired over thousands more.
Photo shoots were particularly elaborate affairs. In 1988, the Vogue editor Stephen Drucker spent three weeks in Kenya for a safari-themed shoot with the actress Kim Basinger. Twenty-three trunks of clothing and props were shipped to the African heartland, where a large crew slept in tents equipped with electricity and working toilets. The shoot was a disaster. Basinger’s couture high heels kept sinking into the mud. Polly Mellen, the fashion editor, rented a falcon and chained it to Basinger’s wrist; terrified, the actress was in a near panic that the bird would peck her face. At one point, a team of assistants was tasked with surrounding Basinger with a canopy of parasols to protect her skin from the hot sun. Sheila Metzner, surveying this chaotic and confused scene, turned to Drucker and whispered, “There is such truth in this moment.” (Later, the older English gentleman who was serving as Vogue’s safari guide sidled up to Drucker. “Is it really like this for you 365 days a year?” he asked.)
In 1989, Tina Brown paid for Leibovitz to fly forty-one thousand air miles in first class—and develop 1,500 camera rolls, at a time when film processing was hugely expensive—to create a massive end-of-the-decade Vanity Fair portfolio of stars like Rupert Murdoch and Michael Jackson. Later, when Leibovitz balked at a Vanity Fair contract renewal, Si instructed Graydon Carter to acquiesce to the photographer’s request for a $250,000 salary boost, on top of the hundreds of thousands of dollars she was already paid each year.
“Don’t nickel and dime her,” Si said.
In a practice dating to mid-century, Condé also provided access to “petty cash,” a perk in which magazine staffers could walk up to an in-house teller, working behind a bank-like glass window in 350 Madison, and request money to pay for incidental expenses, including, but certainly not limited to: lunches, dinners, breakfasts; taxi rides, dry cleaning, gym passes; movies, Broadway plays, concerts; cigarettes, six-packs, and bottles of Champagne. Recipients were expected to sign for the cash, which was kept in a physical vault inside the Condé building. The amount of money that was disbursed could be stunning. In the early nineties, Hamilton South, Tina Brown’s editorial promotions director, was wrangling a major Hollywood event for Vanity Fair on the Sony Pictures studio lot, where he was having trouble coaxing unionized workers into performing tasks outside of their usual duties. The solution, he discovered, was to hand over envelopes of money. During a three-month period, South withdrew “many many thousands of dollars” from the petty cash window in New York, and brought it to California to use for bribes.
By the late 1980s, black cars, queued and purring outside the Condé Nast offices, had become an icon of the company and its swagger. A generation of Condé personnel enjoyed the pleasures of Big Apple Car Service, the company’s hired fleet of limousines and town cars. High-ranking editors were often granted a personal full-time driver, available at all hours of the day. (An option of smoking or nonsmoking car was provided.) Stacks of Big Apple vouchers were kept in every magazine’s office, readily disbursed to assistants and interns who needed to zip a rack of skirts to a fashion shoot or collect contact sheets from a star photographer’s studio. The rides, charged directly to a central Condé Nast account, occurred more or less unsupervised; any employee could hop into a Big Apple car and specify where they wanted to go, no questions asked. Some advantage-taking occurred. Eliot Kaplan, a GQ editor, said he took a black car to his chiropractor appointments twice a week, and the car waited for him outside until he came out. At least one editorial assistant used a car for a drug run. Another high-ranking editor routinely called a Big Apple car to pick up his Chinese takeout, charging Condé for an empty vehicle to ferry around a box of lo mein. Si got wind of that one—and he signed off. As Si explained it: Condé did not have to answer to shareholders, and it was important to keep valued employees happy.
Big Apple Car signed its contract with Condé Nast in 1988, the year Anna Wintour took over Vogue. By the early 2000s, the account represented 30 percent of Big Apple’s annual revenue. As many as 170 Big Apple cars handled Condé rides on workdays between noon and 7 p.m., but few of the well-coiffed passengers knew much about the company behind this most indispensable of perks. Big Apple Car was owned and operated by a woman named Diana Clemente, the eldest daughter of one of New York’s last Mafia kingpins. Her father, Anthony Spero, a Bonanno family consigliere, ran his enterprise from an unassuming building in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, that also housed a pet shop called And Your Little Dog Too; the car service headquarters were next door.II Big Apple became so ingrained in Condé’s corporate culture that a dedicated dispatcher was stationed at the building: Louis “Red” Menchicchi, a cigar-smoking, suspender-wearing Staten Islander who wielded a beeper and a walkie-talkie to direct the endless stream of limo traffic. (At Christmastime, he dressed up as Santa Claus.) Menchicchi went fishing with Steve Florio, and when Florio’s daughter got married in Florida, Menchicchi attended as a guest; Diana Clemente went, too. Even after the 2008 stock market crash, when Condé’s finances were flagging, the Newhouses ensured that the black car culture would continue. When the family negotiated a move to 1 World Trade Center in the early 2010s, hours of discussions with the landlord concerned the logistics of ensuring that town cars could easily access the building without interference from the post-9/11 security apparatus at Ground Zero. When Art Cooper was pushed out of GQ in 2003 after a twenty-year tenure, he wryly acknowledged his favorite amenity in a farewell toast. “I shall miss seeing you,” Art told his fellow editors, “but I’ll probably see you more than you think. I’ve accepted a job as a Big Apple VIP driver.”
Perhaps the most legendary perk of all were the interest-free loans offered to top editors and executives, allowing them to live in the sorts of opulent apartments and homes that regularly appeared in the pages of their magazines. Condé signed on as the mortgage guarantor, or in some cases purchased a property outright, with the editor only responsible for monthly costs. Longer-serving editors, in subsequent contract negotiations, sometimes earned a forgiveness of the loan, which effectively added ownership of a multimillion-dollar property to their compensation packages. Condé was the lender on a $1.64 million mortgage for Anna Wintour’s Greenwich Village town house in 1993. Advance Publications, Condé’s parent entity, lent Graydon Carter $3.8 million for his four-story Greek Revival–style town house on Bank Street in the West Village. When David Remnick and his family bought an Upper West Side duplex in 2000, listed at $3.25 million, Advance secured the loan. It wasn’t only editors in chief who benefited. Grace Coddington, one of Anna’s top deputies at Vogue, borrowed $400,000 from the company when she bought a West Village apartment; Maurie Perl, the company’s head of public relations, received assistance when she bought on the Upper West Side. Condé secured mortgages for the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik (Upper East Side), the Lucky editor Kim France (Carroll Gardens), Art Cooper’s GQ successor, Jim Nelson (Chelsea), the Cargo editor Ariel Foxman (West Village), and the Self editor Alexandra Penney, who moved into an apartment in River House, overlooking the East River, where she still lives decades later.
These were life-altering gifts. Looking back, it’s astounding to think that writers and editors were rewarded to this extent. For a chosen few creative New Yorkers, Si Newhouse was a startlingly effective engine of social mobility. But it all had a purpose. Si wanted his company to represent the acme of luxury and excellence. Editors used their grand apartments to host parties for celebrities, socialites, important advertisers, and business tycoons. It was a critical part of the Condé mystique, the magic that made it a source of envy from rivals and a magnet for readers and advertisers alike. “We were expected to be walking billboards for the fantasy we were selling,” the Vanity Fair editor Dana Brown observed. Si wanted Condé Nast to be the lushest, wealthiest, most exclusive party in the world.
IN A SENSE, ALL THIS luxury was nirvana for a magazine editor: endless funds for the most ambitious aesthetic pursuits. “The mandate from Si was, ‘You are wildly creative and talented, and here’s an open line of credit,’ ” recalled a former executive. “ ‘Make me the most fabulous magazine that drives the zeitgeist.’ ” Yet the charmed life of virtually no budgets doubled as a gilded cage. Editors in chief were often kept in the dark about the financial performance of their magazines, leaving them constantly guessing as to where they stood with the boss. For all of the seemingly mindless profligacies that made up day-to-day life at Condé Nast, Si Newhouse refused to overspend a penny of the currency he considered most precious of all: control.
Sarah Slavin, a longtime Condé Nast executive, offered an example of how this system worked. In the 1970s, Slavin was working at Vogue, where she was expected to oversee the magazine’s finances. One day, she received a call from Billy Rayner, Condé Nast’s editorial business manager and one of the few people at 350 Madison who actually kept track of the spending at every magazine. Rayner was himself the sort of high-status, impeccably connected character who often found a professional home at Condé Nast. His mother was a Palm Beach society fixture and his aunt, Betty Parsons, ran a famed Manhattan gallery that exhibited paintings by Alex Liberman; during summers home from boarding school in the 1950s, Rayner lived with Betty on Long Island and befriended Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. His first wife was Chesbrough (Chessy) Hall, a socialite who became a famous decorator; Chessy’s stepfather was Iva Patcévitch, then the president of Condé Nast, where Rayner, formerly a stockbroker, went to work. Although Rayner had a genteel, kooky reputation—he was often seen wearing his telephone headset upside down—Slavin was leery of him. She knew that Vogue had been spending a lot of money, even by its own lavish standards, and this was the call to the principal’s office she had been dreading.
Inside his tastefully decorated office, Rayner gestured for Slavin to have a seat.
“Sarah,” he began, in a plummy tone, “you’re spending an awful lot of money on models.”
“Oh dear. I’m so sorry. How much did I spend?”
Rayner laughed and sat back in his chair. “Oh,” he said, dismissively, “you don’t need to know that! Just spend less.”
Dumbfounded, Slavin walked back to the Vogue offices and informed Grace Mirabella that Condé Nast had decided the magazine was overspending on models.
“How much did we spend?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. He won’t tell me.”
Mirabella sighed and shook her head.
There was, no doubt, a gendered aspect to all of this. The majority of Condé Nast’s workforce and customer base were women, but almost all of the business executives who controlled the company’s purse strings were men. While Condé was a rare company in the 1970s and 1980s where women could ascend to positions of tangible influence, their power was, for the most part, limited to the editorial side of the shop. Tina’s managing editor at Vanity Fair, Pamela Maffei McCarthy, recalled asking a Condé production manager how much it would cost to delay a print run, since she wanted to correct a mistake that a late fact-checking call had turned up. “Don’t you girls worry about what things cost,” the manager replied. Linda Wells encountered similar challenges at her magazine, Allure, in the 1990s. “We would not receive any guidance on what would be an appropriate amount to spend,” she recalled. “It was infantilizing. There was an element of ‘You’ve got the keys to the kingdom,’ and there was an element of ‘We’re just little ladies who will be patted on the head.’ In the end, it wasn’t a good thing.”
Mirabella, who as editor of Vogue was among the world’s most important cultural arbiters, was left hugely frustrated by this dynamic. When Condé decided to raise the newsstand price of Vogue, she learned of the change from a rival publisher, not from Si or Alex. In her memoir, she recalled confronting Si and asking to be made a vice president of Condé Nast, with a direct say in the business operations of her magazine. “What do you want to do that for?” Si replied. Tina was adored by Si, yet she routinely found herself enraged when he made major business decisions without her. “Si was extremely secretive and precipitous in his decision-making,” Tina told me. “He maddened editors all the time by firing their publishers and replacing them without any conversation at all with the editor, even though the editor-publisher relationship is so critical, and you would think he might have at least asked how they felt about it.” Tina’s eventual departure from The New Yorker would be prompted in part by Si’s refusal to offer her a more direct financial stake, such as equity in the success of her magazine.
In 1994, Alex, who had endured a series of heart attacks and bypass surgeries, agreed to step down from the omnipotent editorial role he had occupied for more than thirty years. At eighty-one, he had spent more than half a century at Condé Nast. This was a moment that Si had long feared—he and Alex were so close that they eventually lived in the same luxury high-rise building, overlooking the United Nations—but it also presented an opportunity to signal a new direction for his magazines. Several accomplished women were clear candidates to succeed Alex. Anna had become the world’s most powerful stylist and had revived Vogue for the celebrity-soaked, youth-obsessed 1990s. Tina had proven her facility with pizzazz at Vanity Fair and literary journalism at The New Yorker. There was also Rochelle Udell, an accomplished creative director who designed Calvin Klein’s Brooke Shields denim campaign and had taken up a powerful advisory role at Condé, consulting on Self, Mademoiselle, House & Garden, Glamour, and The New Yorker. Elevating a woman to the most influential job in American magazines, at a company whose overall readership skewed female, would have amounted to a profound statement by Si.
He picked a man instead. James Truman, thirty-five, was a puckish Brit who had worked under Anna at Vogue, where he donned skinny suits and dated a string of socialites. He became the editor of Details, Condé’s edgy young men’s magazine, and transformed it from a Manhattan cult favorite to a mass-market success, but that was the extent of his achievements. Pretty much all of Condé was shocked by Si’s pick, given the talents of the women that Truman was competing against. It fell to Alex to blurt out the truth. “It is better for a man to be in this job, because you deal with other men,” Alex told a reporter for New York magazine. “The business side is nearly all male, and you deal with the engravers, printers, all these things. And I think the women editors are more receptive to something from a man, and there may be female resentment, jealousy. Is that very sexist, what I am saying?”
Alex’s candor buttressed an anecdote involving Ruth Whitney, the longtime editor of Glamour, who once presented Condé sales executives with an upcoming issue that included a story tentatively titled “The Glass Ceiling.”
“What is the glass ceiling?” one of the salesmen asked obliviously.
“John,” Whitney replied, “you’re standing on it.”
Male editors were not immune from Si’s condescension, either. When Harry Evans, Tina Brown’s husband and a famous journalist himself, launched the high-end leisure magazine Condé Nast Traveler in 1987, he was informed by his superiors that he did not need to follow a budget. Bewildered, Evans called up Louis Gropp, then the editor of House & Garden, to ask how he could gauge his magazine’s financial progress. “Well, you might get a call if you’ve spent a lot of money,” Gropp explained. “Somebody from the accounting department. They’ll be soft-spoken, and very polite, and if you can explain things reasonably and coherently, they’ll thank you, and you’ll never hear about it again.”
EFFORTS TO REIN IN RUNAWAY spending had been sporadically tried and promptly discarded over the years. In the 1920s, Condé Montrose Nast hired an efficiency engineer at Vanity Fair who deposited a slip on every writer’s desk in the morning noting exactly how many minutes they had been late arriving to the office. Frank Crowninshield crumpled these up and threw them in a wastebasket. In the mid-1980s, a Condé Nast executive named Linda Rice decided to give efficiency another shot. Rice had started as a production manager at Vogue dealing with the humdrum logistics of getting the magazine to the printers; she got along well with Alex Liberman and rose to become one of Condé’s top executives. Rice was taken aback to discover that, unlike most of its competitors, Condé Nast had no internal computerized budgeting system. Virtually all spending decisions were made on the fly, with Si verbally approving any overages (and he almost never said no to his favorite editors). Alex, for his part, detested paperwork—“Typing stifles creativity,” he once told a colleague—and preferred to run the business on instinct. “He’d get the idea that this is not the year to send sixty-five giraffes from the south of Africa or India to the Arctic,” one executive recalled.
Rice took it upon herself to devise an accounting system to keep track of the costs of each photo shoot. Instead of an editor unilaterally ordering pricey retakes, they would now be expected to plan ahead, submitting a form that delineated the precise costs of travel, models, props, and photographers, and obtaining a superior’s sign-off. All was going smoothly with plans to introduce the new system until Alex got ahold of the new form. Rice received a phone call asking her to come to his office. When she walked in, Alex was sitting calmly behind his white Parsons desk. He picked up a copy of the budget form, raised his hands above his head, and theatrically tore the sheet in half.
There was a reason that editors at Hearst, envious of their profligate rival, developed a nickname for Condé Nast: “Our Irrational Competitor.”