The Condé Empire Was One Big Beautiful Grift
I read the Condé Nast book and now I've seen the media matrix.
Now that it’s August, and my inbox is crickets, I finally have time to indulge my sickest pleasure: reading about the media. Specifically, the industry’s “golden age,” or the handful of decades when editors enjoyed fat salaries and endless perks.
A slew of new-ish books recount this period of excess: Graydon Carter’s memoir, When the Going Was Good, Michael M. Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite, which tells the story of Condé Nast, and I also just got a galley for They All Came to Barneys, out in September, about the glory days of retail.
I’ve been putting the first two off for a while. It’s hard to stomach Tom Wolfe getting a rumored $12/word for bama bampa barama bam bammity when I’m still waiting on a major publication to pay me a measly sum for a story I was assigned in March. Many former Condé employees I spoke to about Empire of the Elite told me they were avoiding it altogether, visibly queasy even at the mention of the company.
I don’t blame them. (I also worked at Condé Nast from 2015-2017, and interned at the company in 2011, qualifying me to be a part of some class action lawsuit that I did not participate in for fear of retribution.)
But the book is so good. Unlike Graydon’s memoir, it reads like a Shakespearean drama, full of dumbfounding details that made me tap whomever was sitting next to me and go: You’re not going to believe this. I crushed it in two days, and now have a clearer picture of why things are the way they are today. It actually made me feel better. Of course this couldn’t last!!!
Before reading Empire of the Elite, I was under the naive impression that the golden age of magazines—the power lunches, the interest-free apartment loans, the insane budgets—was fueled by the fact that people used to buy a lot of magazines. Obviously, there is some truth to this. Graydon recalls dinner and wine being trolleyed to writers’ offices on closing nights at Time, which Condé Nast never owned. But the fabulous lives of Anna, Tina, Graydon, and other Condé editors were bankrolled by the Newhouses, specifically Si Newhouse, who was willing to light exorbitant amounts of his family’s newspaper and cable money on fire in exchange for cultural currency.
“The culture of Condé Nast became an extension of Si’s id,” Grynbaum writes. Like Mr. Nast himself, a “social climber par excellence,” who believed in “class, not mass,” Si wanted nothing more than for Condé to be the “lushest, wealthiest, most exclusive party in the world.” He believed that to write about the rich and famous, his writers and editors had to live like them, too. And every dollar it took to turn an outsider into an insider was a dollar worth spending. Despite The New Yorker losing tens of millions annually at one point, he still proudly showed up to the office in a New Yorker baseball cap and sweatshirt.
“Frankly, they didn’t care whether it made money,” one former Condé executive told Grynbaum. Instead, the company was the “pretty girl you have on your arm.” This image sold magazines. It also created the enduring myth of the Devil Wears Prada characters we love to hate today. However, it did not make Condé Nast, a privately held company, very profitable. “We were expected to be walking billboards for the fantasy we were selling,” said Vanity Fair editor Dana Brown.
Grynbaum calls Condé editors the “original influencers,” in the sense that they cultivated an aspirational image of wealth and taste, which they then monetized. I agree with this, but in my mind, they were also some of the original grifters, too. Not in a nefarious way—and I don’t mean to minimize their talents or the quality of their work—but they projected a picture of success that I now understand to be false. Or, maybe not false, but intentionally misleading. The town cars and the five-digit wardrobe allowances all served to prop up the idea that they were the best in the biz. And for a time, we believed them. But, as with any good grifter story, it all had to come crashing down eventually.
The fact that Condé Nast could not recognize and harness the incredible grifting powers of the internet and social media is arguably one of the biggest bag fumbles of our time. They were too snobby to see their own tricks reflected back at them through a screen. And still, today, the company hinders its writers and editors from being the kind of big personalities that Anna, Tina, and Graydon were, for fear that they might sully the brand’s image, or worse, discover greener pastures and never return.
Because of Substack, some writers and editors may be able to catch a glimpse of those golden age perks today. But there won’t be another Si Newhouse, and no rich person will ever be able to turn their pet magazine project into the media empire that he did. Grifting is an art, and Condé Nast did it so, so well. It almost makes me miss working there—the thrill of grifting together, instead of alone.
Below is everything I underlined in the book, which you can buy here.
Weird food stuff:
Anna Wintour’s go-to lunch will forever be the most confounding Condé legend. But the editors in the building have always expressed their editorial powers with weird food preferences…
Si banned garlic from the Condé cafeteria kitchens because apparently, he hated flavor. (Sensing some anti-Italian sentiment here…)
Diana Vreeland demanded that her secretaries serve her a daily scoop of ice cream with a “precise, semi-melted consistency.”
The Royalton, a former Condé power lunch spot, made sure a cappuccino was waiting for Anna every time she walked in. But they had to time it right. If the cup sat for more than two minutes, it would be dumped, and another one would be prepared. One barback estimated that nearly a dozen might be drawn before she arrived.
One editor made her assistant remove blueberries from her morning muffin because the editor preferred the “essence” of blueberries but not the taste of the blueberries themselves.
GQ editor Arthur "Art" Cooper suffered a stroke during his regular lunch at the Four Seasons, which Si was rumored to have paid for even after Art’s retirement, and passed away four days later at age 65.
When staffers spotted Graydon waiting in line at the Condé cafeteria stir fry station, it “[sent] chills through the lower ranks,” as it marked the beginning of the end. After the 2008 crash, Fiji water was removed from the fridges and replaced with Poland Spring. By 2009, that supply started dwindling too. “We won’t have any more after this,” one staffer lamented at the time. “We have to start drinking tap water.”
Good ideas:
In 1998, GQ published “The American Male Opinion Index,” revealing that two-thirds of respondents spent thirty minutes or more each day on grooming. I wish publications today still made this much of an effort to get to know their readers—and leverage their access to them.
Tina, a buzz maven, created “The Hot List” in 1992, ensuring that the who’s who of media, culture, and politics received hand-delivered copies of The New Yorker at their homes or offices on Sundays before the magazine hit newsstands. It cost the company a rumored $1 million, but being on the list, which was secret and constantly changing depending on “who was up and who was down,” was a flex on its own. Someone should copy this method of distribution.
I love this insane quiz. But sometimes, the snobbery went too far. Once, Alex Liberman, Condé’s editorial director of 31 years, overheard an editor mispronounce Françoise de la Renta—“fran-SWAH” instead of “fran-SWAZZ”—and the editor was out of a job weeks later.
In 2006, Steven Newhouse led the acquisition of Reddit for $10 million. When the website went public in 2024, the Newhouse family reaped roughly $2.1 billion. “To the degree that the Newhouses can keep bankrolling Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker into the next decade, it may be the success of an anarchic, low-fi social media platform that guarantees it,” Grynbaum writes.
Bad behavior:
I had no idea that one of Si Newhouse’s closest confidants was Roy Cohn, whom he met at Horace Mann. “There is little doubt that Cohn and Si discussed The Art of the Deal,” Grynbaum reports. Graydon wrote the first magazine profile of the “short-fingered vulgarian,” but the book led to The Apprentice, and the rest is history. (Condé’s parent company, Advance Publications, acquired Random House in 1980.)
The OG New Yorker writers sound like little babies. They were prudish and “insulted by commercial imperatives,” like ads. The magazine barely bothered to include a table of contents until the 1970s. “It’s none of the reader’s business what’s in the magazine,” explained one staffer.
Steve Florio, the “brash-talking publisher and favored corporate son of Si,” was seen hugging young women on the ad sales team during an office evacuation shortly after the 9/11 attacks. His BMW license plate read “MAGAZINE.”
Delicious digs:
“This is what they’d done with such largesse?” said Tina Brown, then editor of Tatler, about Richard Locke’s first issue of Vanity Fair in March of 1983. “This flatulent, pretentious, chaotic catalog of dreary litterateurs in impenetrable typefaces?” To me, this is the media equivalent of when Barbara Kruger called the Supreme guys a “ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers.”
Incredible Excess:
Alex Liberman believed that “money should be used to facilitate a creative life and to eliminate fatigue.” Amen. “I take taxis all the time,” he continued, “I find them restful and stimulating.”
Speaking of taxis, Condé signed Big Apple Car service in 1988, eventually contracting 170 cars to ferry editors (and sometimes Chinese takeout) around town. Directing traffic was Louis “Red” Menchicchi, a “cigar-smoking, suspender-wearing Staten Islander who wielded a beeper and a walkie-talkie.” It should come as no surprise that the company was owned and operated by Diana Clemente, the eldest daughter of Anthony Spero, a Bonanno family consigliere and one of New York’s last Mafia kingpins.
For Vanity Fair’s 15th anniversary party in 1988, Tina requested 16 female saxophoneists to play in head-to-toe Calvin Klein. I’d like to request this for my funeral, please.
When Tina threatened to leave Vanity Fair for Harper’s Bazaar, Si offered to pay in perpetuity the long-term medical expenses of her aging parents in Europe and threw in a five-digit clothing allowance as well.
When Robert Gottlieb was effectively fired in 1992, after editing The New Yorker for a little over five years, he was offered a severance package of roughly $350k a year for the rest of his life. He died 31 years later. “By a conservative estimate, Advance Publications paid him about $10 million over three decades to not work at its magazines.”
In 2006, Graydon left a prototype for Portfolio, a Condé magazine that hadn’t launched yet, in the back of a gondola in Venice. He told John Kelly, one of his assistants at the time, that he had six hours to find it, “otherwise, we’re screwed.” Kelly grabbed an envelope with a rumored 10,000 Euros in it (a typical amount for an assistant to take out from the building’s internal cashier’s office for an overseas trip) and bribed gondoliers until he got it back.
Just plain stupid:
In the mid-1980s, Alex declared computers a “phase.”
When Condé bought Wired in 1998 (without paying to secure the rights to its website and other digital offshoots), editor Katrina Heron was offered a $40k annual clothing allowance (low for an editor) and encouraged to accept an interest-free loan for a down payment on an apartment in San Francisco (common for an editor). When she left in 2001, no one at the company asked for the money back, so she mailed a check to the accounting department. What loan, they asked? “This is the worst-run business,” she remembered thinking to herself. “These people are idiotic.”
When Deborah Needleman launched Domino in 2005, she pitched My Deco File, a website where users could collect images and store them to create mood boards. So, basically, Pinterest. It went live in 2008, but Condé refused to staff the operation. It was shut down five months later, and Needleman left the company. Pinterest launched in 2010.
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“I take taxis all the time,” he continued, “I find them restful and stimulating.”
me...
Loved this one! It paints the picture of what I so wanted to join but timing had it that the battle between print and digital was at its peak. Just requested from the library to continue to get the scoop!