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Condé Nast Was Always a House of Cards. One Man Kept It Standing for Too Long

SI Newhouse was the right man for the magazine moment in the 1990s. Times changed, but his media empire didn’t.

Illustration by Maria Frade for Bloomberg

Despite his vast riches, newspaper heir Samuel Irving “Si” Newhouse Jr. didn’t count for much in midcentury New York. The son of a self-made magnate who’d been publicly dismissed as a “journalist chiffonier”—a ragpicker—he was a new-money Jew, stymied in society by a city stratified by race, religion and generational wealth. So when his father bought the enfeebled lifestyle publisher Condé Nast, Newhouse began “to grasp the social possibilities uniquely available to him as the newly minted heir to Vogue,” writes Michael Grynbaum in his new book, Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America (July 15, Simon & Schuster). “Si had grown up all too conscious of the fine gradations of New York society, the invisible old-world barriers that had kept him, by all appearances a wealthy scion, still stuck on the outside looking in.” (Newhouse died in 2017.)

Grynbaum, a veteran reporter for the New York Times, fills his chronicle of Newhouse’s half-century at the helm of the legendary publisher with enough gossip and arcana to satisfy even the most devoted of Condé Nast obsessives. But added together, it all feels a little sad. Newhouse was, Grynbaum shows, a striver who hired other strivers to publish magazines for a nation of, yes, strivers. Seen from that angle, the many tales of excess and infighting among Newhouse’s famous editors (Anna Wintour, Graydon Carter, Tina Brown) add up to less than the sum of their parts. However successfully these media titans chronicled and embodied the high life, they remained well-coiffed flunkies swanning about in a fragile house of cards. At the height of Condé’s cultural impact (arguably in the 1990s), the company barely turned a profit; one executive claimed the entirety of Condé Nast earned less than a single Newhouse-owned newspaper, the Staten Island Advance. It was elite, certainly, but not so much an empire as an expensive Potemkin village: America’s upper-middle-class taste and tastemakers, subsidized by a single man.