As much as it pains me to use a cliché, it does, at times, feel like I was “born in the wrong generation.” Making it as a writer seems near-impossible in the 2020s, where your personal identity, self-promotion, and internet presence matters as much as your work does — probably even more. Raised on Carrie Bradshaw’s modern dating column and Hannah Horvath’s irreverent blog-hopping, writing as a career seemed admirable and worthy, perpetually in vogue. It’s a bit disillusioning to grow up to websites that pay you in “exposure,” long delay times, and the feeling that no one, really, is first in line to read your work.
But Michael M. Grynbaum reveals it wasn’t always like this as he dusts off a recent history full of glamor, excess, and unfettered display — that of magazine publisher Condé Nast’s empire in the 80s and 90s. Empire of the Elite chronicles a decadent, lavish style of writing and reporting, while still delivering juicy literary squabbles and defenestrations of top editors. Apart from being a well-researched history, it’ll make you supremely jealous you weren’t among the lucky few to be employed in Manhattan at the time.
If you can get past the demands of Anna Wintour or other editors’ presumptuous demands, like removing the blueberries from a blueberry muffin (a senior editor requested only their “essence”), Vogue or New Yorker staffers were rewarded with luxury apartments, reporting trips, loans, Broadway tickets and available seats at Four Seasons or other posh dining options. To be an editor was to be visible, Si believed, and to understand good taste, a writer had to live it. Tina Brown, the editor of Vanity Fair, and later, The New Yorker, took this advice and didn’t hesitate to dole out massive funds in order to provide quality writing for her magazines (a few writers abused this, though, with one even using a company car to pick up drugs). She “firmly believed that if writers inhabited the shimmering world they covered, access and authenticity would follow.”
This was partly due to Si Newhouse, a Jewish outsider who inherited the Condé Nast dynasty from his father, Sam Newhouse, and eventually shaped it to greatness by poaching plucky editors from across the pond and tasking them with cultural oligarchy. Donald, Si’s brother, owned the family’s conglomerate of newspapers, which were the real moneymakers, so the Nast magazines acted as a “plaything” for Si, something to pour funds into and see what works and what doesn’t. “To care about a budget was to reveal oneself as insufficiently devoted to the pursuit of excellence,” Grynbaum writes of Si, a man who swapped out editors at will and was in constant pursuit of the “buzz” — are people talking about the latest cover of Vanity Fair? — than any financial gain. This bit him in the ass only towards the end, as he was slow to adopt digital platforms and in-person events, preferring to let the ink do the talking. But it made for quite a fun professional environment.
Brown is credited for kickstarting Vanity Fair, and later The New Yorker, integrating a winning formula of combining high/lowbrow articles to reel a potential reader in with the dishy stuff, then have them stay for the literary and erudite reporting The New Yorker was previously known for (a strategy she honed at the British Tatler). The writers were stubborn — there were resignations over the addition of print ads, which only bolstered the magazine. Later, an erotic commercial during Miami Vice advertised a short thriller by Frederick Barthelme in that week’s magazine — “Yes, that New Yorker,” the ad ended. “Our job is to make the sexy serious and the serious sexy,” Brown said.
Such respect (often one that is a tad overdue, when you consider the bills they racked up) of writers from Tina or Si will likely never happen again — the constant shutterings of magazines and the American president’s attack on journalism only adds to the undercutting of literary merit. When words can be ignored or changed at will, then what’s the point of them? Novelists and writers are making their crafts hobbies, toiling away at day jobs to support their passions. Thinking about it gets too depressing, so reasonably, Grynbaum contrasts our current era with the main focus of 90s journalistic authority and the idea of tastemaking, with someone like Anna Wintour’s critical eye at the helm.
Condé Nast in the 80s and 90s, Grynbaum notes, serves as a cultural lodestone for America, which makes sense why Si treated writers and editors with such esteem. “For decades,” he opens, “one company in Manhattan told the world what to buy, what to value, what to wear, what to eat, even what to think.” Now, everyone’s a freelancer, banging out quick thoughts on Twitter or Substack. The proliferation of digital media is like a Cambrian explosion — there’s a new outlet to be discovered every day, with its own ecosystem of writers trying to make a name for themselves. With so many different channels to pay attention to, the previous behemoths of Vogue and New Yorker are a few drops in a fountain of information. When was the last time people paid enough attention to a magazine cover for it to make a splash?
I recently read that by scrolling Twitter or TikTok, you’re taking away your agency by allowing a computer to dictate what you see. At the whim of an algorithm, your diet is decided for you. I love an Instagram Reel binge, but the amount of content we ingest recommended by humans is dwindling. Human creativity will always remain, but something else feeds it to us. Instead of a chic editor deciding what’s in or what’s out, Grynbaum writes, “We’re cosseted by a computer’s bloodless taste.”
But that lonely undercurrent isn’t enough to undermine Empire of the Elite, which is a polished chronicling of a saga in American life that might not ever happen again. We’re always saying we as a society value writers and artists — The Atlantic is reported to hedge six-figure bets on writers — but Si Newhouse’s generous, often reckless spending pushed it to the limit, the edges of which Grynbaum carefully dredges up and tracks in this entertainingly lavish biography. There goes the last great American dynasty…
Empire of the Elite is out now.
Great Job Sam Franzini & the Team @ Our Culture Source link for sharing this story.
