A Juicy
Chronicle of the Fat Decades at Condé Nast
“Empire of
the Elite,” by Michael M. Grynbaum, is a story of (mostly) insider-outsiders
who helmed the glossiest American magazines in their heyday.
By Christian
Lorentzen
Christian
Lorentzen’s work has appeared in The London Review of Books, Bookforum and
Harper’s Magazine. He also writes on Substack.
July 15,
2025
EMPIRE OF
THE ELITE: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America, by
Michael M. Grynbaum
We may be
facing a future without magazines, at least glossy ones, and passing into an
era of disembodied media entities — an unholy maelstrom of websites, YouTube
channels and, worst of all, podcasts. But the golden age of American magazines
was very shiny indeed. In “Empire of the Elite,” Michael M. Grynbaum, a media
reporter at The New York Times, has written a lively if elegiac chronicle of
Condé Nast, the parent company to Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ and The New Yorker,
among several other titles, too many of them now defunct.
The book
sketches its birth and early decades; its acquisition by the self-made
newspaper magnate Samuel I. Newhouse in 1959; the dramas and triumphs of its
fat decades under his heir, Si Jr.; and finally the deaths (Allure, Details,
Domino, Lucky, Portfolio and Self all shuttered; the younger Newhouse himself
gone in 2017 at age 89) and diminishments of this century, including the
humanitarian crisis that resulted when the unlimited office supply of Orangina
bottles was cut off.
A
newspaperman I used to work with liked to say that there are two types of media
columnists — reporters who get the dish on newsroom gossip and critics who are
philosophers of ink and pulp — but you never get the twain in one writer.
Grynbaum belongs to the former category. When it comes to hirings and firings
and office intrigues, the technical word for this book is juicy. He has all the
details he can fit, and he has many of them from inside sources, both on the
record and anonymous, even if much of it has been aired over the years in
earlier tell-alls, screeds, biographies, diaries and gossip rags.
“Empire of
the Elite” is weaker on questions of the company’s aesthetics and editorial
approaches; here Grynbaum tends to repeat the conventional wisdom, swallow the
hype or, in matters of controversy, teach the debate.
Grynbaum has
given himself the task of mythologizing the mythmakers, where he might have
chosen instead to demystify them. His prose style might best be described as
“magaziney.” Here’s how he opens his chapter on the longtime editor of Vogue:
“The Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan is
dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis. One spring morning in 2014, the high
priests of a different era gathered by the temple’s sandstone columns to hail
another female deity: Anna Wintour.”
For all his
reporting, the editors and publishers who are his main characters emerge with
their auras intact, even reinforced. Another problem is that all the myths are
basically the same. An outsider journeys to the big city desperate to become an
insider, and then transforms that inner circle into his or her own image by
getting hired to run a magazine at Condé Nast.
But first
another outsider had to start it. Condé Montrose Nast grew up in St. Louis, the
grandson of a preacher and son of a single mother after his father walked out
on them when he was 3. At Georgetown he befriended the publishing heir Robert
Collier, and in 1897 he became an editor at Collier’s Weekly, where he
published luminaries like Jack London and Upton Sinclair. He married an heiress
and purchased a distressed property, “a sleepy society gazette” called Vogue,
in 1909, expanding its readership from the rich to “the less well-to-do cousins
of the rich.”
Grynbaum
calls this strategy “inclusive exclusivity” and lays out why it was a more
lucrative formula for attracting advertising money than the mass-market tactics
of, say, Ladies’ Home Journal. From there Nast accumulated a stable of
magazines he either purchased or started — including House & Garden, Vanity
Fair, Glamour — and at the time of his death in 1942, Time wrote that he was
the man from whom millions “got most of their ideas, directly or indirectly,
about the desirable American standard of living.”
When
Newhouse Sr. bought Condé Nast Publications 17 years later — he already owned
an archipelago of regional newspapers that provided enough income for him to
live between an ornate mansion on Staten Island and a Park Avenue duplex — the
company itself was a distressed asset. It was said that Vogue “was a toy for
Mitzi,” Newhouse’s wife, but within a few years it would end up in the hands of
her favorite son, Si, whose claim to outsider status was that he’d had to go to
Syracuse because Harvard and Cornell turned him down.
When his
father died in 1962, Si inherited the glossy, high-status Condé Nast, whose
profit margin by the 1990s would be a mere 5 percent; his younger brother,
Donald, got the newspapers, which were the business’s real cash cow. The
magazines’ luxury advertising pages — always a priority and point of pride for
Si — seemed like major moneymakers, but their point was never the bottom line.
The heart of
Grynbaum’s book is the roster of insider-outsiders that Newhouse assembled to
run his magazines at their zenith from the 1980s until the 2008 recession.
First comes Alexander Liberman, the Russian Jewish refugee who served as Condé
Nast’s editorial director from 1962 to 1994. But this outsider’s father, a
prosperous lumber merchant, had also been an adviser to both Czar Nicholas II
and Vladimir Lenin.
Grynbaum’s
insider-outsider thesis is stretched thinner in the cases of Tina Brown, the
daughter of a film producer, and Wintour, whose father was the editor of
London’s Evening Standard; so he emphasizes their sheer will to get to the top.
Brought over in 1983 from Tatler, the British society magazine Brown had run
since she was 25, to serve under Leo Lerman on the sputtering relaunch of
Vanity Fair, she told Newhouse, “The only thing I can do for you when you are
ready is be the editor.” On first meeting her Vogue predecessor, Grace
Mirabella, Wintour, then the fashion editor at New York magazine, was asked
what job she might want, and replied: “Yours.” Thanks to Liberman, a few years
later she had it.
The male
editors in the stable were more plausibly hayseeds. Graydon Carter was born to
a middle-class family in Ottawa, but by the time he replaced Brown at the helm
of Vanity Fair in 1992 (she became the editor of The New Yorker), his résumé
included profiling Trump for GQ, co-founding Spy magazine and editing The New
York Observer. Art Cooper was a “Jewish kid in Pennsylvania coal country” who
had edited both Penthouse and Family Weekly (now there’s range) when he was
hired to give the gay-in-all-but-name GQ a hetero makeover in 1983, a decade
before the word “metrosexual” was coined. David Remnick was the son of a New
Jersey dentist but had already won a Pulitzer Prize when Brown hired him as a
staff writer at The New Yorker in 1992, and was a beloved fixture at the
magazine when he succeeded her in 1998.
What these
editors have in common more than some Horatio-Alger-with-a-pica-ruler climb is
that they were good at their jobs. They had strong visions and were good at
marshaling talent to execute them. They were also the avatars of a major
generational turnover in Anglophone culture. The term Grynbaum uses is
“yuppie,” but a more relevant one might simply be “baby boomer.” With the
exception of Cooper, who was born in 1937, these editors were of the generation
born between 1945 and 1960, the first to grow up with television from the
cradle.
That’s one
way of explaining their comfort with the celebrity-infused high/low editorial
formula Brown brought to Vanity Fair that quickly spread across the rest of
Condé Nast. The new guard of editors were uninhibited in matters of sex and
unrestrained in their pursuit of buzz. There was no shame in chasing whatever
was hot. The embrace of vulgarity caused a few resignations when Brown took
over The New Yorker, but now it seems to most readers and magazine hands the
natural order of things.
Now that the
golden days are over, and Wintour has announced her retirement as editor of
Vogue — she will remain as Condé Nast’s chief content officer — it’s worth
asking how powerful these maestros ever really were. Was Condé Nast an “empire”
and did its editors determine the course of the culture, or merely channel its
strongest eddies? The word “gatekeeper,” used nine times by Grynbaum in “Empire
of the Elite,” has taken on too much salience lately in media circles. The best
editors I’ve known have always been talent spotters, the sort who prefer saying
“yes” to saying “no,” even if their jobs require them to say the latter more
often.
The
publishers and editors of Condé Nast thrived by saying yes to the culture
around them, and it’s not too late for them to do so again if the economics of
magazines can be figured out in the era after print advertising. There is
enough money in the Newhouse family coffers to keep printing ink on paper for
decades. (And if they lose their nerve, there are other billionaires around who
like shiny things.) On the other hand, Grynbaum points out that the internet
has democratized the empire of the elite. Anyone with an Instagram account can
be Anna Wintour, and, like me, Tina Brown now writes on Substack. So much for
exclusivity, inclusive or not.
EMPIRE OF
THE ELITE: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America | By
Michael M. Grynbaum | Simon & Schuster | 345 pp. | $29.99
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