A Juicy Chronicle of the Fat Decades at Condé Nast

New York Times

15-07-2025

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.
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