When magazines ruled the world

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3 days ago

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EDITOR'S NOTE: The CNN Original Series 'American Prince: JFK Jr.' airs at 9 p.m, ET/PT on Saturday nights.
John F. Kennedy Jr. launched his magazine 'George' 30 years ago, when it felt like publications in New York City were the most powerful and glamorous thing imaginable. Gossiped-about editors prowled the city in black cars and flew above the world on the Concorde, gleefully busting their enormous budgets as they canceled and created careers.
And then there was John. He liked to ride his bike around town.
'They called him a himbo. The New York Post used to tease him all the time,' said longtime magazine writer Nancy Jo Sales, who covered Kennedy for People magazine. She remembers him as being kind, dog-loving and always gracious. 'He was no dummy. I mean, look who his parents were. His mother was one of the most cultured people like ever in American social history. His father was — hello? He was a very smart guy. And I think what he really, really loved was journalism. He wanted to make a great magazine. And why would a guy like John Kennedy make a magazine like George? Because that was the coolest thing to do at that time — be in magazines. It was the most exciting thing to do, and it was the thing that mattered.'
After years of scheming, George arrived in September 1995. It was intended to merge politics and celebrity in a way that felt new — complete with Cindy Crawford in George Washington costume on the debut cover. 'Magazines still were fat and rich enough to be ambitious,' said the writer Sasha Issenberg, who was a teenage intern at George. 'John came to this with a big animating idea, not only about what the magazine could look like, but about a bigger shift that was underway in American politics and culture.'
This was, after all, 1995: the year Selena was killed, the year the federal building was bombed in Oklahoma City. O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of killing his former wife, and a doomsday cult killed 14 people in a sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. All the political ingredients of our current chaotic moment were already visible for those who knew to look.
And so, a Kennedy joined the ranks of the leaders of Vogue, People and Time, starting George with the company Hachette Filipacchi, home of Elle and Woman's Day.
'If you wanted to know what was cool in the '90s, you looked at a magazine. Now you probably look at social media. But back then, editors at magazines were the ultimate tastemakers,' said Amy Odell, fashion journalist and author of the 2022's 'Anna: The Biography.'
When George was conceived, Anna Wintour was beginning to become more famous than the supermodels she put on her covers. The film 'The Devil Wears Prada' — which turns 20 next year, if you want to feel old — cemented her status as character and caricature. But she wasn't alone. There was Graydon Carter, the Canadian rail worker who became editor of Vanity Fair, and Tina Brown who came from London and became famous as an editor because no one could tell if she was just brilliant or just outrageous — and Jane Pratt, whose Sassy magazine was so influential that her next magazine had to be named just Jane.
Unlike George, which was not named John.
'He was a famous person looking for a niche to slot himself into as a famous person,' said Matt Haber, longtime print and digital editor, and editor of Gazetteer SF. 'George was meant to be that. If he was around today, it would be a multimedia company, right? He would have a podcast anchoring it, and there'd be a show on Netflix, like 'JFK Presents.' He would be like, 'Call Her Daddy' or Joe Rogan, like he'd have a whole constellation of content around him. But back then, magazines were still the center of the culture — and if you wanted to make a statement, that's the way you did it.'
What did a magazine even do? For one, magazines fed Hollywood — even more than you might think. A huge business funneled content from magazines, creating movies from articles: 'Boogie Nights,' 'Hustlers,' even 'Shattered Glass,' from a magazine article about a magazine scandal. The Fast and the Furious and Top Gun franchises were based on magazine articles. Magazines invented and distributed the photo shoot, created literary stars like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Malcolm Gladwell and David Foster Wallace. They fed television — in the 1990s, Time built a TV studio in the office so their reporters could more easily go on CNN.
Their franchises became universal references: the September issue, the Swimsuit Issue, the person of the year, the Playboy centerfold, the New Yorker cartoon. They changed people too, for good and for worse. The rash of lad mags, crowded with bikini babes and bad advice for dudes, actively influenced the lads to be more sexist; studies showed that exposure to fashion magazines in the 1990s seemed to make girls hate themselves.
This all made quite a bit of money.
'I was an intern at Entertainment Weekly in 1998 and we got paid a salary,' said Haber. 'We got paid overtime if we stayed past six o'clock. We got a dinner voucher if we stayed past like 6:30' — plus car service home.
'On Thursday and Friday nights, they'd have a bar,' said Kurt Andersen, co-founder of Spy and former editor of New York magazine, about his years as an architecture and design critic at Time. 'They served dinner, if you wanted their sh*tty dinners there. It was old school, in a way that now seems, like, 19th century to me.'
'I would say, 'Oh, I want to go write about the World's Fair in Seville, Spain. ' 'Okay, sure. Go.' I was never, ever turned down.'
The executives and stars enjoyed an even better class of perks. For the very top editors, Condé Nast secured mortgages for editors and top staffers or gave them cash to buy Manhattan apartments and townhouses. Some of their contracts had a wardrobe allowance, easily $40,000 a year, plus weekly flower deliveries and daily drivers. Writers like Dominick Dunne could earn half a million dollars a year while staying at no cost in an endless array of expensive hotels.
'The excess was legendary. For years, there simply were no budgets,' wrote Michael Grynbaum in 'Empire of the Elite,' his recent history of Condé Nast. In 1989, he wrote, Tina Brown, as the editor of Vanity Fair, flew the photographer Annie Leibovitz 41,000 miles in first class to photograph subjects for a portfolio. The writer Ann Patchett, tired of having houseguests, once pitched a story to Gourmet about staying alone in an expensive hotel for a week just so she could get a break. (The Hotel Bel-Air was apparently lovely.)
For Lisa DePaulo's first story at Vanity Fair, she said, 'I had to interview someone in Delray Beach, and I said, 'There's a great Marriott right near here, and it'd be a great place for me to stay.' And the travel department was like, 'You're with Vanity Fair. You can't stay at the Marriott.''
People magazine 'was, at the time, the most profitable magazine in America, and there was nothing that seemed off limits or extravagant,' said Janice Min, longtime magazine editor and current honcho of The Ankler. 'When I worked at InStyle, the whole staff went on an off-site to Antigua.' Fortune magazine once spent $5 million taking its staff to Hawaii.
George was not quite situated at the center of imperial luxury. 'At Condé Nast, you had Vogue and Vanity Fair and The New Yorker in the offices next to you. At George, we had Road & Track and Car Stereo Review,' said Issenberg. But there were upsides to having a Kennedy as a boss, beyond his looks and good temper, obviously. He took the entire staff to a Yankees playoff game, his friend and George editor Gary Ginsberg said. Kennedy always had great front row seats to the Knicks, and distributed the piles of designer clothes and ties that were sent to the office.
The office did have a distinct flavor of Kennedy mayhem. 'It was a constant circus of people coming in and out. You never know who you'd run into on any given day: Demi Moore, Barbara Walters, Katie Couric,' said Ginsberg.
And his very existence brought the publication the most important commodity a magazine could have: buzz. Though it came with baggage. 'For true American royalty, you had JFK Jr., and the Kennedys at the time, and so it never felt like it was going to necessarily land or hit, because it had that sort of sheen of a vanity project,' said Min. 'It obviously got a really disproportionate amount of coverage, probably with a strong hint of schadenfreude from other media that didn't necessarily love the idea. Even though they might have loved him, they didn't love the idea of, basically, an OG nepo baby coming in to try to stake a claim in the industry.'
Despite those doubts, George came in hot — for staffers in the first year, it was a struggle to write and edit enough stories to fill all the necessary pages, because the magazine kept growing as the ad sales team kept selling.
'It just seemed like if you had a good idea for a magazine, you could touch gold, with advertisers and with readers,' said Elinore Carmody, the founding publisher of George.
The ambition was sky-high, if sometimes wobbly. The magazine paid Gore Vidal 'like $25,000 or whatever' for a story about George Washington in the first issue, former George editor Hugo Lindgren told the Hollywood Reporter. Vidal delivered a piece about how terrible George Washington was — and Kennedy chose not to publish it.
In the leadup to the 1996 national political conventions, the mag secured Norman Mailer, the legendary chronicler of the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention, to cover them. The writer named his price and Kennedy agreed, said Issenberg. 'It ended up being an astronomical number — I wouldn't say that nobody blinked, because we knew it was an astronomical number — but somewhere in the bowels of the accounting department, they figured out how to pay.'
But Kennedy was not, staffers said, a walking checkbook or a dissociated nepo baby. 'John was a great editor, and I'm gonna tell you why,' said DePaulo. 'He wasn't a line editor, like the kind of guy who took your copy and made marks all over it. He was a visionary editor, which is much more important for a good writer.'
'Often we'd be in a meeting with six or eight editors who had come from some great magazines,' Issenberg said, 'and John would crystallize a story before anybody else did. That was all from instinct, curiosity, being a smart person and a sharp reader — not the result of any formal training or coaching.'
The pantheon of magazine editors were themselves accustomed to a version of the scrutiny that Kennedy had faced his whole life. They were covered both as business figures by a then-aggressive industry press and as characters in the gossip columns.
'Condé Nast editors were the original influencers, their lives a top-to-bottom marketing campaign for the company that hired them,' wrote Grynbaum in his history of the company.
'We were selling a fantasy, a lifestyle, and that crossed over into the real world and our appearances. We were expected to be walking billboards for the fantasy we were selling,' wrote Dana Brown, a magazine editor who started as the assistant to Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter, in his memoir 'Dilettante.'
'When I was the editor of Us Weekly, I was written about all the time, for better or worse, in Page Six, and I was not alone,' said Min. 'It was the comings and goings of magazine editors who were sort of viewed as like a royal class in New York City.'
The scrutiny could feel like it was coming from everywhere all the time. 'Every publication had someone who was obsessing over the magazine industry,' said Min, who generally had the best reputation of any magazine editor. 'There was someone named Keith Kelly, who worked at the New York Post, whose Media Inc. column was feared. There was Gabriel Sherman and Gabriel Snyder too, people who worked at the New York Observer. There was Jacob Bernstein at Women's Wear Daily. And so you would come back to your office and you would see a message from one of them, and you'd be like, 'Oh, crap, now what?' It could be anything, like your newsstand sales were down, that maybe they're talking to someone else for your job, that we're hearing that SI Newhouse' — the owner of Condé Nast — 'exiled someone to the wrong table at the holiday party, which means they're on the outs.'
As in all industries in the hysterics of extravagance, the funds were distributed unequally. 'I'm not sure it was that lucrative a time unless you were in the 0.5% of the industry,' said Stephen Rodrick, a longtime magazine writer. He got his start making $200 a week as an intern at The New Republic in Washington, DC.
He did, however, get paid $10,000 in expenses once for a story for George magazine. 'George went out of business before I could do my expenses and I remember having $2,000 left over. It became my severance package.'
'Look up what journalist salaries were in the 1990s. They were not huge salaries, except for a very small number of people, maybe at a place like Vanity Fair. But I wasn't at Vanity Fair in the '90s. I was at New York magazine. We were paid very middle-class kind of salaries,' said Sales. 'The story that I lived and that I knew was not about money or excess. It was more like, just cool people who had a lot of talent or just were interesting, and they were just gathering in these nightclubs and having fun and dancing.'
It was this vibe, not the messy open vein of constantly flowing money, that made magazine life so captivating.
'It could be a nice middle-class living with the tradeoff that you weren't chained to your desk and got to go to interesting places and meet interesting people,' Rodrick said. 'I might write about the making of a Fiona Apple record at Abbey Road one month and then do a true crime saga and then profile a boxer.'
'This is the kind of glamour I'm talking about, when New York was just full of interesting, stylish, talented, beautiful people, and nothing was staged, and everything was real, and you just were covering it for a magazine. It had nothing to do with money or salaries or expense accounts,' said Sales. 'The glamour was just being in the game. It was just being in the game and having those little business cards that said New York magazine or whatever.'
Sales did finally go to Vanity Fair in 2000, where Graydon Carter 'hired me when I was eight months pregnant, and I had the baby, and five days after I had that baby – five days after I had that baby! – I was in a car going out to the Hamptons to do my first story for Vanity Fair on a girl nobody had ever heard of named Paris Hilton. With my baby beside me in a little basket!'
Kennedy died in July 1999. George outlived him for a while, losing 'close to' $10 million in 2000, and finally shuttering in March 2001.
'When he died, I kind of knew in my gut that without him, there's no magazine,' said DePaulo. 'But I wished it had gotten to the point that he wanted it to be, which was that it would live without him.'
'The magazine could have this — John liked to say — post-partisan worldview, and could generally treat politicians as noble people trying to do a good job and have fun with sometimes silly things,' Issenberg said. 'I don't think that would have survived 9/11 — which was only eight months after the magazine folded — let alone the financial crisis, or the Trump years or backlash to Obama. It would just be very hard to write about current politics with that sense of amusement and detachment, because the stakes have gotten so high.'
'We were launching a quote 'post-partisan' magazine at the very time that the country was fracturing,' said Ginsberg.
'John was ahead of his time,' said DePaulo. 'George was ahead of its time. Now, the intersection of politics and pop culture is in every publication.'
'It was, as it turned out, the moment before the end,' said Andersen. 'But, boy, what a moment before the end. The end being the internet, obviously.'
Because it wasn't long before the rest of the industry met similar roadblocks. Condé began to get a dose of reality when it launched a magazine called Portfolio, envisioned as a high-flying business title, in 2007. After the company spent a year and a fortune preparing to launch it it, it lived for two years. 'All I did for a year was go to extremely expensive restaurants and woo people to write for us,' editor Jim Impoco told Grynbaum. He gained 25 pounds.
'I don't think the company could ever recover from the recession in 2008. And it was just a slow decline from there,' said Odell.
Writers also got an even shorter short end of the stick. Steady jobs turned into gig work, paid by the piece. 'We stopped getting salaries at Vanity Fair a long time ago, I think it was maybe 2009, after the financial crash. I don't know about the other Condé Nast magazines, but we stopped getting a monthly check,' said Sales.
A whole host of magazines shuttered, went digital, stuttered, burned out. 'I'm sorry to say magazines mean nothing today,' said Jann Wenner, former owner of Rolling Stone and Us Weekly, in 2023.
Some of what once was marches fabulously on, adjusted to a newer world. Vanity Fair still throws its big Oscars party; Bon Appetit flourished as a food video company for some time; the New Yorker actually makes money; Vogue operates successful digital video franchises; Teen Vogue ran to the ramparts of the youthful revolution; The Atlantic is now the last publication that has decided to vigorously spend its way into a future of importance. Only time, and the vast pockets of the magazine's backer Laurene Powell Jobs, will tell how that story ends.
The same magazines that could once make or break a designer or an author, announce a new star, or dictate what we'd all be wearing a few months later today have a fraction of that influence. This week Vanity Fair fired its chief film critic and two writers who covered Hollywood and shut down its blog — which was run by the same editor who first wrote about Condé's elaborate mortgage gifts for editors nearly 20 years ago.
Vogue, at least, stayed in power by leveraging the smarts and fame of Wintour. That fame has more to do now with the benefit she hosts and dominates each year, even as speculation about her departure from the magazine swirls almost monthly. The influence of the magazine has floated away from and above the monthly bundle of printed paper. 'Now it's less about the Vogue cover and what that's saying about fashion or culture and now more about the Met Gala and how that can provide a temperature read on culture –– that's kind of Anna's way of showing these days who's in and who's out, what's in and what's out,' said Odell.
'Social media, which has all its ails, of course, and some could argue, has had an incredibly detrimental effect on society, also did something great, which is that it democratized information — and the role of the gatekeeper has completely diminished,' said Min. 'Magazine editors were celebrities, which seems almost comical today, but you were really running through the information and the kinds of information that we're getting to the public through a pretty tight funnel. And that funnel' — which she described as 'overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male' — 'was pretty much reflective of wealthy people who live in Manhattan with a view of what the world wants to read and consume, and setting an agenda that definitely was not one-size-fits-all.'
Kennedy's human curiosity took him beyond that frame. He wanted to appeal to people who didn't fit the typical demographics for political magazines — women, young people, Americans in the middle of the country — and he delighted in stories that embodied the best of what politics could be, DePaulo said. She recalls that he asked her to write about her small-town hometown mayor who fixed potholes and chased skunks out of residents' yards.
Instead of a post-political magazine, the world got post-magazine politics. Kennedy's instincts about politics and culture converging proved to be spot on: Donald Trump, who was on the cover of George's March 2000 issue, understood this acutely and catapulted his celebrity and influence to two presidential terms.
Trump still puts himself on fake magazine covers for validation, but some version of his celebrity and influence — and the attendant and unnerving public scrutiny — is now available to anyone who wants it.
'Everybody's a reporter now, and I'm not saying that in a totally disparaging way,' said Sales. 'It's not necessarily a bad thing, completely. It's interesting to see what people come up with, and they go around and record life as it's happening and put it on social media. Whatever. It's just where we are now.'