Slimming mirrors, free Hugo Boss suits — and Anna Wintour’s wasteful lunch

In the late 1990s, when billionaire publisher SI Newhouse decided to move his Condé Nast headquarters from 350 Madison Avenue to 4 Times Square, there were grumblings amongst staffers at Vogue, Vanity Fair and other magazines within the media empire. 

While the new location was only two blocks from the former headquarters, there were concerns that Times Square was seedy — and too far from a beloved upscale Italian restaurant, Mangia, from which staffers liked to order pricey grilled eggplant. There were also worries about whether the closet space in the new offices would be large enough to contain everyone’s designer coats.

To boost enthusiasm for the move, Newhouse and Condé’s then editorial director James Truman had an idea: They would build an elaborate cafeteria for employees. 

The resulting dining area wasn’t your standard feeding frenzy space. Newhouse hired star architect Frank Gehry to design it. The venue, rumored to cost as much as $30 million, featured 39 cozy banquettes — the better for gossiping. Seventy-six panels of Venetian glass glittered from the ceiling. And the pièce de résistance? The distorted mirrors on the columns were specially designed by Gehry — to make employees look thinner

“It was a very witty architectural gesture … that encouraged performance, and made people look and feel good,” Truman says in the new book, “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America,” by Michael M. Grynbaum (Simon & Schuster; out today). 

Grynbaum portrays the lavish spending at Condé Nast during its magazines heydays in the ’80s, ’90s and early aughts — and the jaw-dropping displays of excess enjoyed by editors including Vogue’s Anna Wintour and Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter.

“[Newhouse] empowered his editors to fuel his new American fantasyland, urging experimentation and extravagance that competing publishers balked at and could not compete with,” he writes. “[His] billions funded an operation where sizzle and status often mattered more than breaking even.”

In 1989, famed photographer Annie Leibovitz was supposedly hesitant about renewing her contract with Vanity Fair and asked for a $250,000 raise. Newhouse told the magazine’s then editor-in-chief, Tina Brown, to go along with it, saying “Don’t nickel and dime her.” 

Alan Richman, a writer who started covering food for GQ in 1986, recalls going to Tokyo for two weeks in 2008 for the magazine. Upon returning, he filed an expense report for $14,000, prompting an editor to ask: “Is that all?”

Even more over-the-top, the magazine paid for Richman to travel to Milan and Florence for the Italian menswear shows, even though he didn’t cover fashion. His role? To select wine that would suit GQ’s editor, the late Art Cooper, when he entertained Italian advertisers. 

In NYC, Cooper was known to spend lunch holding court in his dedicated booth at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, where he would enjoy a martini and a very pricey bottle of Italian wine. It wasn’t uncommon for the tab to more than $500, but no matter, it was charged straight to Condé. 

“[Newhouse] liked his editors to live the upper-class-lifestyle they pedaled,” Grynbaum writes. “He didn’t have to tell Art Cooper twice.”

Cooper even borrowed a million bucks from Condé to buy a second home in Connecticut, where he’d host staffers for summer getaways, sometimes pitting them against each other on the tennis court. One winner was awarded a Hugo Boss suit. 

Other top editors, including Carter and Wintour, also got favorable loans from the company to buy homes.

Spending lavishly was the norm. Editors jetted to Europe on the Concorde and stayed at five-star hotels. Those who booked cheaper lodging were chastised.

Staffers also dipped into petty cash and took limos all around town on the company dime.

Grynbaum writes of editors, some of whom had dedicated drivers, using company cars to pick up Chinese takeout or go to the chiropractor — and “at least one” assistant who made use of the tony transportation for a drug run. 

“As Si explained it,” he asserts, “Condé did not have to answer to shareholder, and it was important to keep valued employees happy.” 

And the big spenders had the smallest details of their lives catered to. 

Carter, who served as Vanity Fair’s editor-in-chief for 25 years, had an assistant meet his car each morning and carry his briefcase to his office, so that he could stroll through the lobby unencumbered. At the end of the day, the assistant would transport the briefcase to the car, after the editor asked, “Will you do the honors?”

Another key task for Carter’s assistants was traveling ahead of him to prepare his suite at lavish hotels, stocking the desk with the same pencils and ashtray that the had in the NYC office.

Wintour, who recently shifted from Vogue’s editor-in-chief to global editorial directorial, had to have her daily cappuccino perfectly timed. She had a standing lunch reservation at the Royalton, where a restaurant staffer would start making the drink 10 minutes ahead of her planned arrival, in case she was early. If the drink sat out for more than two minutes, it was tossed out, and a new one prepared.

Sometimes Wintour ran so late that, a former employee at the Royalton told Grynbaum, as many as 12 cappuccinos might be made to get the timing just right. 

Wannabes looking to work at Condé, meanwhile, had to clear a high society bar for entry. 

In the mid-1990s, those applying for an assistant job at Vogue faced an oral exam where they had to identify, on the spot, various people, places and elements of culture high and low, from a typed list of 178 entries. 

“The ideal candidate would recognize Fassbinder as the New German Cinema director, Evan Dando as the lead singer of the Lemonheads, the Connaught as the luxury London hotel, and the opening sentence of Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way,’” Grynbaum writes. 

Once in, those from common backgrounds sometimes had to be schooled to behave more like privileged WASPs and British aristocrats.

“I had to learn how to speak like a Condé Nast person,” Jennifer Barnett, a Navy brat-turned-Teen Vogue editor, told Grynbaum. “You never say anything to anyone directly.”

When Carolyne Volpe arrive as a beauty assistant at Vogue in her early 20s, her boss told her there was already a Caroline at the magazine — and said she should go by her given first name, Lynden, instead, though no one in her life had ever called her that.

“She thought it was a chicer, more unique name, which it probably is,” Volpe says in the book.

When employees were fired, it was handled with upper crust stealth.

Alex Liberman, the publishing company’s legendary editorial director, had a strategy where he would pop into someone’s office just before going home time, gently touch their arm or shoulder and say something like, “May I be frank, they’re going to fire you tomorrow.” He’d then make a point of telling the person he wanted to keep in touch and arrange a lunch date, on the spot, for a few weeks out — somewhere fancy but public.

Photo shoots could be especially over-the-top and wasteful. 

Numerous samples of pricey baubles from Cartier were smashed for Irving Penn to get the shot just right. In the 1960s, Vogue editor-in-chief Diane Vreeland had Irving Penn reshoot an elaborate fashion spread not once but twice because the shade of green wasn’t just right.

In 1988, a Vogue team spent weeks in Kenya for a disastrous shoot featuring Kim Basinger in safari garb. Twenty-three trunks of clothes had to be shipped to Africa, and falcon was hired for the actress to hold — as her designer heels sunk into the mud and she feared it would attack her face. 

The following year, Tina Brown, then the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, had Leibovitz shoot 2,500 rolls film and fly 41,000 miles around the world— in first class, of course — to create a high-wattage portfolio of stars of the decade. 

Eventually, the purse strings had to be tightened. 

In 1996, the Wall Street Journal reported that nine of Condé’s 14 magazines were unprofitable, and that the company had lost some $20 million in the fiscal year ending in 1994.

Still, there was optimism.

In 2007, Condé launched Portfolio magazine, with a reported $100 million behind it. Tom Wolfe was reportedly paid a whopping $12 per word to write a 7,400-word story for the new project.

Its first sentence, which would have netted Wolfe more than $200? “Not bam bam bam bam bam bam, but bama bampa barama bam bammity bam bam bammity barampa.”

“We are the top-end publisher and it has served us well and I believe it will stand the test,” Charles Townsend, the CEO of Condé, said at the time. But, as Grynbaum notes, “it didn’t.” 

The final nail in the coffin was when Portfolio editors rented a live elephant for a photo shoot. A threatening pachyderm standing over a banker at a desk was meant to convey that credit derivatives were the “elephant in the room” in the banking world. The magazine abruptly folded in 2009, in the depths of the recession, after two profitless years.

Newhouse passed away in 2017 at age 89. That same year, the company was reported to have lost more than $120 million.

Two years prior, Condé Nast had left Times Square for 1 World Trade Center, where Self, Glamour, Teen Vogue and Allure were all reduced to online-only editions. Details and Lucky were shuttered.

As Carter wrote earlier in his own book, “When the Going Was Good,” earlier this year, “You never know when you’re in a golden age. You only realize it was a golden age when it’s gone.”