Days of Wine and Junkets

Around two decades ago, I worked for the London offshoot of Condé Nast as an online writer for GQ. Online was not yet taken seriously, and rather than being allowed to sit with the magazine staff in their ritzy offices in the company’s expensive building, Vogue House, in Mayfair’s Hanover Square, we were all secluded in an attic-like mezzanine on the top floor. We were regarded as so irrelevant that the building’s lifts did not reach as far as our enclave, meaning that we were all faced with a steep climb up a ladder-like flight of stairs to get to our desks.

So much for the glamor that I had expected from a career in lifestyle journalism. Yet these privations aside, the year or so I spent working at Condé Nast was an extraordinary education. In those pre-credit crunch days, staff were drowning in freebies. Vogue was forever being sent expensive items of couture, and Glamour drowned in exorbitant make-up and perfume. The Condé Nast Traveller online editor seemed only to pop into the office to collect her post and dispense air kisses before she was off on yet another freebie press trip, and I never lacked for lunch, party, or dinner invitations, to say nothing of high-priced gadgets. I once turned up to see a friend holding a DVD player I had been sent that morning. (DVDs were fashionable, back then.) He was surprised to see it, and even more surprised that I found nothing out of the ordinary about holding a $500 piece of technology; it was, after all, my day’s post. And all this on a salary of about $22,000.

I thought of my time at Condé Nast while reading Michael M. Grynbaum’s highly enjoyable and often revelatory history of the company. Empire of the Elite skillfully and forensically charts its course from its foundation in the early 20th century by the eponymous Nast, a savvy publisher who turned Vogue into a fashion bible appealing to both Midwest matrons and the social elite, to the glory days under Samuel “Si” Newhouse. The canny, if thin-skinned, chairman understood that in order for his titles to appeal to the glitterati, it had to make stars of its editors. The likes of Anna Wintour, Tina Brown, and Graydon Carter therefore were treated not as mere journalists, but as much-lauded tastemakers in their own right, given every luxury and privilege that an A-list celebrity might expect.

As Grynbaum writes in the introduction, “To be featured by Condé Nast meant that one had arrived—as an actor, author, designer, thinker, or socialite.” There was no hotter ticket at the Oscars than the Vanity Fair party, no invitation more keenly prized than the Wintour-masterminded Met Gala. Condé Nast and those featured within its magazines became the contemporary equivalent of the Four Hundred, the glamorous few who would be feted not only in New York society, but throughout the rest of the world. It was somehow appropriate that when the film of The Devil Wears Prada was released in 2006, featuring Meryl Streep as the Wintour-esque boss of a fashion magazine named Runway, its distributors organized a well-attended private screening in London for Condé Nast staff. The peals of laughter owed as much to recognition of the on-screen situations (only mildly exaggerated) as they did to the comic chops of Streep, Hathaway, Tucci, and Blunt.

One of the strengths of Grynbaum’s book—which was written without any direct input from either Condé Nast or the Newhouse family, but with plenty of off-the-record insight from staffers current and past—is its relative briskness. At a time when many more established writers need five or six hundred pages to tell a story of an organization (hello, Susan Morrison!), it’s refreshing that Grynbaum approaches the saga at quite the canter. We first meet Tina Brown on page 53, for instance, by which time we’ve already had the company’s foundation, its precipitous decline after the Wall Street Crash, Nast’s death from heart failure, the company’s acquisition by the savvy Sam Newhouse Sr., and its resurrection from the doldrums. Nor is Grynbaum afraid of incorporating hoary but enjoyable anecdotes, such as the old chestnut about Newhouse’s wife Mitzi telling him to go out and buy her a copy of Vogue, only for her husband to return triumphantly to inform her that he had purchased the magazine itself.

The events that befell the company in its prime have already been told in various memoirs, most recently Carter’s When the Going Was Good, but Grynbaum is not writing with the sepia-tinted nostalgia of a faded lion recalling his glory days. Instead, he takes understandable delight in recapturing the Alice in Wonderland absurdity of a world in which the expenditure of vast amounts of money on photographers and star writers was not just seen as necessary, but a badge of honor. This led to situations where journalists were informed about a little-known policy that would allow them to buy, and expense, exotic animals, as long as the name of the creature rhymed with the name of their editor. In any other world, the sheer excess would seem crazy, but the magazines were making huge amounts of money, enabling those in charge of them to do exactly as they pleased.

Grynbaum is particularly good on the politics lurking behind the glitz. Nast himself and the Newhouses were painfully conscious of their status as arrivistes in New York’s often snobby and closed society, and while Sam Newhouse had his Park Avenue penthouse, it was subtly made clear to him, as a Jew, that he lived on the unfashionable end of the row, and that the grander, more socially acceptable residences were reserved for “real”—i.e., WASP—Americans.

And while Condé Nast weathered recessions, shifting political administrations, depressions, and wars with élan, the company has now found itself in decline. Grynbaum writes, “Condé is a husk of its former self, its clout diminished, its magazines closed or riddled by layoffs. Staff uproars over race and class have punctured its once-impenetrable aura.” The “hideous whiteness” of Vogue was perfectly acceptable for years—Iman and Naomi Campbell were the honorary black inclusions—but then there was angry discussion of boycotts, institutional racism, and what-have-you. By the time Wintour had to apologize for the inclusion of “hurtful or intolerant” material in the magazine, the jig was up.

There will be some readers who shrug and affect not to care about one journalist (this is, surprisingly for something so accomplished, Grynbaum’s first book) writing about the affairs of others. If so, this is their loss. As a Condé Nast veteran, I reveled in every cutting line, every piece of juicy insider gossip about the company that paid me a pittance but gave me the life of an A-lister for a year. But even those who would barely know the difference between Vogue and Vanity Fair should delight in this elegant, incisive account of the glamorous rise and precipitous fall of an all-American institution.

Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America
by Michael M. Grynbaum
Simon & Schuster, 345 pp., $29.99

Alexander Larman is a journalist, historian, and author, most recently, of Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty (St. Martin’s Press).

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