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By the late twentieth century, few institutions influenced culture with the punch—or the expense account—of Condé Nast. But decades earlier, in 1975, when publishing heir Si Newhouse took over as chairman, Condé Nast was just a mid-tier magazine house where properties like Vogue, Glamour, and House Beautiful were all struggling for relevance. Newhouse soon realized his gift for hiring the right people and then getting out of their way. In 1984, he brought on editor Tina Brown to revive Vanity Fair; in 1985, he purchased The New Yorker; and in 1988, he named Anna Wintour editor of Vogue. Newhouse hired Graydon Carter, who launched the famed Vanity Fair Oscar Party. He acquired GQ, Tatler, Bon Appétit, and Architectural Digest; launched hits like Allure, SELF, and Condé Nast Traveler; and took his publications to the international market.
Condé Nast’s magazine issues weren’t just a dispatch from the front lines of style and society; they were engines of cultural production. Hollywood royalty mingled on the page with actual monarchs and self-made pretenders. (“I’m a first-class sort of person,” Donald Trump told Carter in a 1984 GQ cover story. “I only go first class.”) The high-low mix of stories is common today but seemed scandalous at the time. Political careers were made and unmade. And oceans of money flowed freely—oh, the fortunes that were spent!
In his new book, Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America, Michael Grynbaum draws on his years of media reporting at the New York Times and dozens of interviews with former editors, photographers, writers, and insiders. Grynbaum reconstructs the peak of Newhouse’s tenure—when editors reigned and photographers and writers lived like aristocrats—and the inevitable unraveling that ensued, when Condé Nast became, as he writes, a “husk of its former self.” Our conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.
AD: The stories of opulence in your book about Condé Nast’s heyday are incredible: editorial director Alex Liberman insisting photographer Irving Penn smash a hundred Cartier Champagne glass samples until he got the perfect shot; Vogue editor Stephen Drucker spending three weeks in Kenya for a safari-themed shoot with the actress Kim Basinger; the list goes on. How much of this was part of Si Newhouse’s plan for the brand?
MG: The power of Condé Nast was so much in its own myth. It was a business decision to overspend, to project opulence, because it made readers want to buy into that fantasy, and it made advertisers want to be a part of it. The head of a magazine would have a twenty-four-hour chauffeur. They would be encouraged to take the Concorde to Europe. When Graydon Carter was editor of Vanity Fair, he would often travel to Milan or Paris as part of his job. One of his assistants would fly out a day ahead, check in to his hotel suite, and rearrange the desk to essentially replicate everything that he had in his office, so that when Graydon would arrive at the hotel, he would sit down and have his stationery, his sharpened pencil, his ashtray, have this seamless transition. It’s unimaginable in today’s attenuated media environment.
Writers were often encouraged to stay at a five-star hotel for weeks on their reporting trips. And by the way, the company wanted this because, if you were meeting with a Condé Nast writer, they wanted the subject to go meet them at the Chateau Marmont or Claridge’s in London. They wanted ad sales executives to be having all of their lunches at the Four Seasons. The mystique mattered so much.
For Newhouse, the ideal editor in chief was a curator of culture.
Influencers before influencers.
It was a Gilded Age of gatekeeping.
When Tina Brown took over Vanity Fair, at the start of 1984, it was struggling and was failing to find an audience. She was unafraid to tackle guilty pleasures that were commonplace in the London papers, but less present in the more buttoned-up American press.
Magazines up to that point were often focused on a single subject matter and aimed at a niche for their readership, but Tina had the insight to mix and match, to have a serious essay about American foreign policy followed immediately by a juicy investigation into a family squabbling over the patriarch’s riches, or a flashy celebrity profile with sexy photographs of beautiful people.
In a funny way, it precedes the media culture today, where on your phone you scroll from one subculture to the next. Those early issues of Vanity Fair had what Tina Brown liked to call “The Mix,” which was to edify, to titillate, to entertain, to educate. It was a full-course meal for the reader, a novelty in American magazines at the time.
There was also a change in the broader culture going on in that era: wealth was becoming something people wanted to talk openly about, even show off. How did those early days of yuppie culture play out on the pages of Condé Nast?
The same week that Tina Brown’s first issue of Vanity Fair went on sale, the first episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous premiered on broadcast TV. That really sums up this swinging Reagan eighties moment, where consumption and materialism and new wealth were celebrated in a way that was foreign to the older American establishment. Condé Nast’s magazines really surfed the wave of that cultural shift, and it both mirrored and drove that trend in the culture.
One story I particularly love is Claus von Bülow, who was a staple of Newport society, this very elegant man who had been put on trial for murder for killing his wife. This was a society scandal, and Tina assigned Helmut Newton, the fashion photographer, to take a picture of von Bülow at his home. Newton persuaded him to put on these leather, sort of s&m-coded jackets and pants. They were just astounding photographs of a socialite and accused murderer showing off in his finest leather. In the eighties people were scandalized by this, because it seemed to be glamorizing this disreputable character.
I was fascinated by the symbiosis you describe between Newhouse and a young Donald Trump.
There’s this hidden history to that. Si Newhouse actually came up with the idea for The Art of the Deal, which was the book that catapulted Trump to national fame. Newhouse was inspired by a cover story of GQ magazine in 1984, a profile of Trump that sold very well on the newsstand. At the time, Newhouse also controlled Random House, and he persuaded Trump to sign a book deal. There are these amazing photographs of the book party at Trump Tower, where Newhouse is proudly standing beside Trump with the waterfall behind them.
Condé Nast was the ultimate expression of the Manhattan elite that Trump always yearned to join. He yearned for their approval. Trump appeared often in the pages of Vogue. He proposed to Melania on the red carpet at the Met Gala one year.
After he was elected president in 2016, there were only two media organizations that Trump deigned to visit in person. All the rest came to Trump Tower, but Trump agreed to go to the New York Times and Condé Nast. It tells you a lot.
So how well did Condé Nast adapt when wealth stopped being as socially acceptable?
The answer is poorly, at least for a while. There’s no question that the rise of the internet and the smartphone were real factors in the decline of print media and the decline of Condé Nast’s power.
Cultural attitudes toward the wealthy shifted significantly after the 2008 financial crash. A lot of resentment and suspicion of elites rose up, and this was difficult for a company that had built itself on selling exclusivity. Condé Nast really struggled and continues to, to some degree. They’ve made strides in diversifying their workforce, in elevating people of color and voices that were otherwise excluded. But ultimately, these magazines are still about saying, “I know best.” And in our more democratic media culture today, that can be a tough sell.
At the same time, you quote Tina Brown saying, “What is boring about reading everything online—and it is boring—it’s just an uncalibrated list of stories.” Do you agree with that?
I’m a bit of an old soul. It’s a good thing that there are more voices in our media. It’s a bad thing that the media is so chaotic. It can be very difficult to sift through the culture. And so, in some ways, we need gatekeepers more than ever, because we have more information than ever.
I do think that we ultimately want judgment and discernment. There’s a reason why we love awards shows. I think people have an urge to be told what’s worth paying attention to. The most popular Substackers today have a very specific point of view and perspective. People find it comforting to be turning to a writer who looks out at this chaotic landscape and tells them what’s worth thinking about. There is still a place for what magazines represented.
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