Autumn of the Moguls

by Michael Wolff

  I went into a Jerry Levin riff—about his isolation and oddness. He was General Dreedle.

  Now, quite likely ten percent of the people in this room had had personal dealings with Levin. But even for them, Levin had become some semifictional character. A punch line.

  I pushed it further.

  “In this craze of personal aggrandizement, of the creation of these bogus and corrupt empires and dictatorships, the same thing happened that happens in real dictatorships, real banana republics. Your society collapses. Your institutions become corrupt. The daily fabric of your life comes to be built on lies. Not to mention, your economy stops functioning. Everything is ruined. All is shit.”

  I was, for a second, Lenny Bruce.

  “Movies are shit.

  “Music is shit.

  “Magazines are shit.

  “Books are shit.

  “Radio is shit.”

  These media professionals, average age 55, no doubt complicit in the production of shit, applauded. (Briefly, I thought, I might have struck an age divide: Would an audience of college students think it all was shit? Or was it just this group of middle-aged Manhattan Jews, most responsible for the creation of the media business, that was most alienated by it?)

  In the middle of this all-is-shit rant, I saw that James Truman, the Condé Nast editorial director, was in the room.

  He was, arguably, one of the nation’s great tastemakers. I liked him very much and suddenly felt guilty about saying all was shit.

  Nobody, perhaps, except his boss, the 75-year-old Si Newhouse, was more important in that most influential of media sectors: the smart magazines.

  This audience at the ICP was surely a smart-magazine set.

  The smart magazines—defining a powerful countermedia, and a counterculture, to mass media and mass culture (sophisticates versus Babbitts, urbanites versus bumpkins, upscale versus Wal-Mart)—thrived through most of the 20th century, creating the most influential visual and writing styles, before being consolidated by Condé Nast in the eighties and nineties.

  James, who was standing in the back of the room while I spoke, with his arms crossed, and in a suit that I admired, was not the bad guy of this story. The smart-magazine business was filled with such profound incompetence that its ruination was accomplished less by any one person’s ambitions and avarice than by the negligence and weakness of many men.

  Still, there were notable figures in the demise of the form. Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, who, in this power vacuum, was able to accomplish legendary feats of self-promotion and to accumulate vast power for herself, is one. Indeed, she became a primary instrument through which Condé Nast managed to corner the market—not just to own much of the nation’s print media, but to exert vast influence over the media that it did not own.

  Condé Nast was a carriage-trade publisher fallen on hard times when it was rescued in the fifties by Sam Newhouse, father of Si and of Donald (who runs the larger and more lucrative side of the family business, its newspaper chain and cable stations) and husband of Mitzi (for whom he is said to have bought Condé Nast as a present). Sam Newhouse promptly reinvented Condé Nast as a rag-trade publisher. Its lot was fashion magazines (not to be confused with women’s magazines) at a time when fashion was something for your mother. The company was not—nor did it aspire to be—part of the journalism or cultural world.

  Three things changed in the eighties: Sam Newhouse died, and the awkward and unhappy but socially envious Si Newhouse took over; fashion designers came to occupy a major role in the life of the city; and the bull market ushered in the age of status and acquisitiveness. Around his increasingly important fashion titles, Newhouse added a lineup of affluent lifestyle magazines, including Gourmet, Architectural Digest, GQ, and Condé Nast Traveler. He added journalism too: relaunching Vanity Fair, buying the New Yorker, and inflating editorial budgets. Sparing no expense, the company again remade itself, and the New York media world flocked to its doors, attracted by its parties, its courtlike atmosphere, its salaries, its perks, its curbside rows of black Town Cars. (It is odd, though, that this normally combative world was so attracted to a company that prized English manners and frowned on the garrulous, or argumentative, or even expressive; the tone of smart magazines moved from urban Jewishness to mock English gentility.)

  Meanwhile, James Truman was growing up in Nottingham, England, in a middle-class family. A teenage pop-culture autodidact in the age of punk, he forswore college, took a training course in journalism, moved to London, and joined a local weekly, the Hampstead & Highgate Express, as a cub reporter. He was the sitcom character: the punk-rocker covering town meetings as he tried to write for London’s cooler rock magazines. Soon enough he ended up in New York, where he freelanced for The Face, the coolest of England’s rock magazines, and then got a job at Bob Guccione Jr.’s start-up, Spin. Within a year, he was the executive editor, and he and Guccione were inseparable friends, out on the town every night. But in short order, they quarreled over the direction of Spin and broke up, with Truman heading out to Los Angeles to try screenwriting.

  Unsuccessful at the movies, he arrived back in New York and famously caught the attention of Vogue editor Anna Wintour—the story, perhaps apocryphal, has her captivated by the way he wore a checkered Armani jacket—and shortly thereafter joined her staff.

  The magazine business in the late eighties and early nineties was deep in recession and identity crisis. Where the eighties had been about upscale titles, there was a recession-born belief that magazines needed to speak to a new, hipper, more jaded generation. “What’s next?” became something of an obsessive question, even for the exceedingly aloof, deeply unstreetwise Newhouse. Indeed, if you were a passionate what-next person and managed to get his ear, you were in the chips. Newhouse’s what-next forays included investing in The Face in London and, later, Wired in San Francisco as well as buying New York’s downtown fashion magazine, Details, which, in a turnabout, he grafted onto James Truman’s what-next idea for a young men’s Gen-X magazine.

  As Details grew and seemed to thrive under Truman’s editorship, he became Condé Nast’s what-next prince. In him, rock and roll mixed with fashion sense mixed with Englishness mixed with sexual ambiguity (a kind of upper-class Englishness) mixed with Chance the Gardener crypticness and added up to a strange, compelling authority that appealed most of all to the equally delphic Alexander Liberman. It was Liberman, at age 81, planning his retirement as editorial director and as tutor and confidant to the company’s chairman, who made the match between Newhouse and Truman. Liberman and James had a mutual appreciation of the court life—who was in, who was out—at Condé Nast. Liberman was the Machiavelli of the organization, with James always amused by this Machiavellianism. The twosome of Liberman and Newhouse become a threesome. And while it was necessary that James get along with Si, James was also chosen for the job because Condé Nast had a pop-culture problem—it was out of touch. James Truman was a rock journalist, perhaps the only rock journalist they had ever met, and they believed he was in touch with what they didn’t understand.

  To be the hip pilot fish, the harbinger of things to come, sounds like a better job than it probably is.

  Indeed, all the problems of what-next-ness—e.g., that you almost always guess wrong when you’re trying to guess—unfolded at Details. Truman’s vision of the magazine as a modified downtown-nirvana-slacker-what-are-we-going-to-do-and-what-are-we-going-to-wear-when-we-do-it youth-culture magazine was almost immediately eclipsed by bull-market-hip-hop-Internet culture. (Hence, the decision to buy Wired in 1998—although Condé Nast was perhaps the least wired of all major media companies.) After the fading of Generation X, Details became—in a process that was nearer a long, horrific struggle—a magazine about work and entrepreneurship, then a magazine about Frank Sinatra—Rat Pack—style cool, then a paler version of Maxim, the successful soft-sex men’s magazine, and on …

  Truman, uncoupling himself from Details i
n time to avoid the fate of its next three editors, managed to get the classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for promotion.

  He became the editorial director of Condé Nast and the confidant of Si Newhouse, the most powerful man in the most superficial business in America.

  “With both of them,” in a picture a Condé Nast editor once painted for me, “birds fly north and birds fly south in the middle of a conversation. They do this halting, tentative, incredibly polite stuttering thing as they try to guess what the other is thinking. It’s like two vacuums facing each other. If you have a problem with awkward silences, you will never have that problem more so than with Si and James.”

  The close but unclear relationship of James with his patron seems to have both increased James’s power and confused it. His power, in some sense, is maintained by doing nothing.

  Indeed, everybody seems to turn into a novelist when it comes to trying to describe his role:

  “He is a mysterious, fey, ephemeral figure.”

  “He has a weird kind of Zen cryptic authority.”

  “He has exquisite, impeccable, faultless taste.”

  “It’s all about how he wears his clothes—which he does like no one else.”

  To me he is a sentinel postmedia figure.

  He is, possibly, a brilliant magazine talent—possessing humor, stylishness, audacity, cruelty, verbal originality—but he believes that magazines as a genre, as a business proposition, are over.

  This is because nobody reads anything anymore (and even though magazines have become shorter in the things they write, their audience still largely remains the people at this ICP lecture), because there’s too much media for magazines to compete with and counter, because magazines are too slow in a fast-information culture, and because the demands of a huge and consolidated company, like the one where James works, are inimical to the eccentricities of a good magazine.

  Still, James makes, by all accounts, about a million a year.

  I once tried to interest James in leaving his job and getting involved with an independent magazine—to own something. It was clearly only partly the Condé Nast money that held him. I really didn’t think he believed that there was a business, much less a purpose, for the old idea of the smart magazine.

  It was not that there wasn’t talent to put out such a magazine (although there might not be that either) but there wasn’t an audience that would be receptive to the voice of an independent magazine.

  It was something like poetry—and what clear-eyed person would want to be a poet?

  What James had done most recently, at Condé Nast, was to create a nonmagazine magazine. This was his very successful project called Lucky (“the magazine about shopping”), which was really a magazine in which the editors produced advertisements, which, in itself, attracted other paid advertising.

  It was a very smart nihilist’s idea of a very smart magazine. It was a joke that James was making. (Interestingly, as James was creating Lucky he had become more and more immersed in his own personal spiritual issues, going on semireligious retreats for extended periods of time.)

  Anyway, as I was outlining my concept at the ICP of media = shit, and the collapse of the culture from which media has heretofore emerged, and the attendant egoization, or, by any other name totalitarianization, of the media, I was suddenly seeing James as one of the lonely figures of the business, even with his million dollars.

  Everybody here at the ICP, affluent and serious and middle-aged people, with their earnest interest in the artistic possibilities of photography, had been sidelined by the media culture.

  But James was, oddly, sadder for understanding the irony.

  I rushed through the conclusion of my talk—the part in which I describe how the consolidated media business inevitably falls apart—and took a few questions. Then I finished and went over to see James.

  “I love your idea that all these people are crazy,” he said. “They’re all psychopaths and sociopaths.” He giggled.

  I giggled too.

  I wasn’t sure if we were giggling at the audacity of saying this, or at the condition of living like this.

  “And what about yours?” I said, meaning Si Newhouse, James’s psycho- or sociopath.

  “Oh, yes!” James said, but it was not clear exactly what he was agreeing with, if anything.

  I said, “Are you coming to this Foursquare conference?”

  “Should I?” James said in that strangely open way.

  “I’m doing Murdoch,” I said. “One on one on stage.”

  “Are you going to torture him?” James giggled again. “Oh, I want to come!”

  “Come!” It seemed suddenly much less interesting if James didn’t come.

  “Are you really going to go after him? Oh no, I forgot. You love Murdoch.”

  “I’m having lunch with him today.”

  “Where?”

  “In his office.”

  “What’s his office like? I would love to know. How interesting.”

  3

  MY DINNER

  WITH RUPERT

  I Confess: I had something like a crush on Rupert. Where before I might have thought of him as one of the certain bad guys of the age, I’d had dinner with him in the spring and … well … you shouldn’t discount a certain mogul irresistibleness.

  At another conference—Richard Wurman’s Spring 2002 TED in Monterey, California—I’d grabbed the PR diva Pam Alexander one evening for a drink. As soon as I asked her, she began looking over my head (she towers over every room) with her eagle social eyes for someone else to add to the party. Why socialize with one person when you can do a multiple schmooze? Having a drink is a scalable pursuit.

  Pam, in her midforties, with a Leni-Riefenstahl-althete-like figure, followed the conference circuit—in some ways she had helped create the conference circuit.

  The PR firm she had founded, Alexander Communications, which had become the most influential firm in the years of the technology boom, and which she had sold to WPP, the international advertising and marketing conglomerate, for something upward of $50 million, and of which she was still chairman (although a peripatetic chairman), had pioneered the breakthrough perception that conferences were themselves a kind of media. That being at the right place and at the right time and gaining introductions to the right people was worth not only the $5,000 or so it would cost to go to a conference, but the $40,000 a month that Alexander Communications might charge to get you to the right conference and position you at the right cocktail parties at the conference and seat you at the right dinners.

  There was even a further iteration to this analysis in which it was not only conferences that were media, but relationships that were media—quite as though you could imprint relationships (who you knew and who you knew who knew someone else) with the message that you wanted to disseminate and distribute to your specifically targeted audience.

  This is, obviously, one of those notions that’s both brilliant and bullshit at the same time. It’s the essence of how mediocrities promote other mediocrities. It’s the back door to the meritocracy. And it is, of course, a fancy way of saying who you know is what counts. The media is a country club. You campaign to get in and we only let in the people we like—or who suck up to us. Or, as possibly, the notion was much less grand than one might be tempted to think, and was in fact just a way to make friends in an ever-increasingly fractured and disconnected world.

  At any rate, I had become exceedingly fond of Pam.

  “Who else can we get?” she wondered aloud, scanning the clusters of people in the lounge area outside the conference-center auditorium. “Do we want Kurt?” she asked, or rather calculated. Kurt Andersen, the writer and occasional media entrepreneur, was sitting in a comfortable chair, watching on a monitor the session in progress. The session, a dull one, was about the design of the Airstream trailer. “Go ask him,” Pam instructed. “I’ll be back. Just stay with Kurt, don’t leave.”

  “My family had one of those,” Kurt
said about the Airstream trailer on view on the flat-screen. I had a brief and affectionate mental picture of Kurt, a chilly ironist and world-weary mediaist, as a sunny fifties kid.

  Kurt and I watched Pam move through the room, aware that she could as easily drop us; the bubble may have burst, but the impulse to network continued. She could trade up, we knew (for Deepak Chopra, possibly, or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg or Yo-Yo Ma, who were all at Wurman’s conference).

  Indeed, suddenly, in a turnaround athletic in its speed and grace, Pam went from talking to the middlers (people she might invite for a drink, but only if there was no one better to invite) to, somehow—and I didn’t catch the exact microsecond of the transition—talking to Murdoch.

  Proximity is the drug. The closer you are, the higher you feel. We proximity crackheads have a biological response to those we want to be closest to. At TED, it was Murdoch.

  It was not just that Murdoch was the biggest mogul at the conference. There was this other thing: Part of the cleverness of the TED conference was having unlikely people in the mix (e.g., Naomi Judd, Courtney Love). Murdoch represented no small challenge to the liberal sensibility here (Richard Dawkins, the biologist, lectured the conference on the importance of atheism), but now here he was, in the fold.

  I felt a short blush of bashfulness—even though, it seemed to me, I might be responsible for Murdoch’s being here.

  After last year’s TED, I had introduced myself to Murdoch at another conference, and after I’d awkwardly talked to him for a few minutes about conferences themselves (“Do you come to many conferences?” I believe had been my pathetic conversational gambit), Murdoch had expressed polite interest in TED. I’d relayed this interest to Wurman, who had then besieged Murdoch for the better part of the year.