Owner of The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair dies at 89

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S.I. Newhouse Jr. in 1985. Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
OBITUARIES
S.I. Newhouse Jr., Who Turned Condé Nast Into a Magazine Powerhouse, Dies at 89
By JONATHAN KANDELLOCT. 1, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/obituaries/si-newhouse-dead.html

  "S.I. Newhouse Jr., who as the owner of The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity
   Fair, Architectural Digest and other magazines wielded vast influence
   over American culture, fashion and social taste, died on Sunday at his
   home in Manhattan. He was 89.
   
   His death was announced by his family.
   
   Mr. Newhouse, known as Si, and his younger brother, Donald, inherited
   an impressive publishing empire from their father, Samuel I. ("Sam")
   Newhouse, and built it into one of the largest privately held fortunes
   in the United States, with estimates of the family wealth running over
   $12 billion at the turn of the 21st century. While Donald led the more
   profitable newspaper and cable television operations, Si took charge of
   the more glamorous magazine division.
   
   Much of that glamour was created under Si Newhouse's direction. Though
   himself a shy man often painfully awkward in public, Mr. Newhouse hired
   some of the most charismatic magazine editors of the late 20th century,
   among them Tina Brown and Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair and Diana
   Vreeland and Anna Wintour at Vogue, and encouraged them to behave like
   the celebrities they extolled in his publications.
   
   It helped that he rewarded them with salaries, expense accounts,
   clothing allowances and housing loans that were the envy of their
   peers. Newhouse editors also enjoyed spectacularly generous budgets at
   their magazines, which often ran deep in the red for years before
   turning profits.
   
   "I am not an editor," Mr. Newhouse told The New York Times in 1989. "I
   flounder when people ask me, 'What would you do?'" His philosophy, he
   said, was to let his editors run free. "We feel almost that whichever
   way it goes, as long as it doesn't do something absolutely screwy, you
   can build a magazine around the direction an editor takes."
   
   But when Mr. Newhouse deemed a magazine's direction "screwy," he didn't
   hesitate to fire editors, sometimes so maladroitly that they first
   found out about their dismissals on television or in the gossip columns.
   
   Newhouse magazines were criticized for exalting the rich and famous
   through articles that gave equal importance to their personal foibles
   and professional exploits. But as circulation and advertising revenues
   at his periodicals soared, other publishers took up the
   glitz-and-scandal approach to journalism. By the end of the 20th
   century, even the most serious newspapers and magazines offered
   profiles of entertainers, businesspeople, artists and politicians that
   balanced weighty accomplishment with juicy gossip.
   
   His magazines came to stand for a golden era of publishing, and became
   an integral part of the culture they were covering.
   
   "With Si's passing, the big chapters in the history of magazines — as
   written by men like Si and Henry Luce — will have come to an end," Mr.
   Carter said.
   
   Two Hollywood movies, "The Devil Wears Prada" and "How to Lose Friends
   and Alienate People," were made based on accounts of life at two of Mr.
   Newhouse's flagship publications, Vogue and Vanity Fair. In 2007, Meryl
   Streep was nominated for an academy award for playing a character based
   on Ms. Wintour in the former. After the ceremony she attended the
   annual Vanity Fair Oscars party.
   
   Mr. Newhouse himself largely stayed out of the limelight. He did own a
   famed modern art collection that at one time was valued at over $100
   million. He and his second wife, Victoria, occasionally threw lavish
   parties at their Manhattan townhouse. And their dog was feted at an
   annual birthday bash at which Evian water was served to canine guests
   while their owners enjoyed caviar.
   
   But Mr. Newhouse was better known as a workaholic who arrived at his
   Midtown office before dawn and sometimes convened staff meetings at 6
   a.m. He claimed to read every one of his magazines — they reached more
   than 15 — from cover to cover. "I was brought up and trained in a very
   personal business by my father and his brothers, and they were all very
   personal operators and close to what they were doing," Mr. Newhouse
   said in a 1993 article by Mediaweek.
   
   
   Mr. Newhouse with Anna Wintour in 1989. Credit Ron Galella, Ltd./WireImage, via Getty Images
   
   Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr. was born on Nov. 8, 1927. His father, Sam
   Newhouse, the son of an impoverished Russian immigrant, was a lawyer
   who in 1922 invested his earnings in a failing newspaper, The Staten
   Island Advance.
   
   Under the name Advance Publications, Sam Newhouse and his brothers
   slowly built up one of the largest newspaper chains in the country,
   including, among more than a score of others, The Long Island Daily
   Press, The Star-Ledger, The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and The St. Louis
   Globe-Democrat. Though always profitable, Newhouse newspapers weren't
   revered for quality. More, a respected journalism review, once listed
   three Newhouse publications among the country's 10 worst dailies.
   
   To please his wife, Mitzi, who loved Vogue, Sam Newhouse in 1959 bought
   Condé Nast, a company that published the magazine along with Glamour,
   House & Garden and Young Brides. Their older son, Si, preferred Condé
   Nast to the newspaper chain, which was eventually turned over to
   Donald, two years his junior.
   
   "Si would come to see the magazine acquisitions as his big chance,"
   wrote Carol Felsenthal, the author of the 1998 biography "Citizen
   Newhouse." "He could make his mark apart from his father and brother,
   while inhaling the glamour and glitz for which he had a growing taste."
   
   Before joining the magazine division, Si Newhouse, by his own
   admission, had been at loose ends. He dropped out of Syracuse
   University and worked halfheartedly at Newhouse headquarters. His first
   marriage, to Jane Franke, with whom he had three children, Sam, Wynn
   and Pamela, ended in divorce in 1959 after eight years.
   
   Mr. Newhouse is survived by his wife, Victoria, his brother, Donald,
   two children, Sam and Pamela Mensch, five grandchildren and three
   great-grandchildren. His son Wynn died in 2010.
   
   At Condé Nast, especially during his early years there, Mr. Newhouse
   leaned heavily on the guidance of Alexander Liberman, who was an
   accomplished painter, photographer and sculptor, besides being
   editorial director of the magazine group.
   
   "Alex's greatest characteristic is that he will never leave well enough
   alone," Mr. Newhouse told The Times. "He is always probing and
   pushing." A lot of Mr. Liberman's pushing involved getting his boss to
   spend money on talent. "No one will ever thank you for saving money at
   Condé Nast magazines," Mr. Liberman told one of his editors, according
   to a 1996 Wall Street Journal article. "They'll only thank you for
   making a great magazine."
   
   On Mr. Liberman's advice, Mr. Newhouse hired Diana Vreeland, the
   celebrated fashion editor, to run Vogue in 1962, and soon afterward,
   also lured Richard Avedon, the leading fashion photographer, to the
   magazine. Over the years, Mr. Newhouse expanded his stable of magazines
   by adding Self, Allure, GQ, Gourmet, Condé Nast Traveler, Architectural
   Digest and Details, among others.
   
   With Mr. Liberman counseling him, Mr. Newhouse also began amassing a
   major collection of postwar art, including works by Willem de Kooning,
   Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Mark di Suvero,
   Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist. In
   1988, Mr. Newhouse paid $17 million for a Jasper Johns painting, at the
   time a record price for the work of a living artist.
   
   A major milestone in Mr. Newhouse's empire-building was the revival of
   Vanity Fair, a magazine of wit and sophistication that had ceased
   publication in 1936. Mr. Newhouse resurrected it in 1981, and after
   quickly dismissing its first two editors, he hired a 35-year-old
   British journalist, Tina Brown, to run it.
   
   Under Ms. Brown's formula of mixing adulatory Hollywood cover stories
   with other articles whose subjects ran the gamut from the vulgar to the
   profound, Vanity Fair's circulation soared past one million. Among the
   magazine's most-discussed covers was a photo of actress Demi Moore,
   seven months pregnant and nude. But Vanity Fair also ran probing
   psychological profiles of Mikhail Gorbachev and Fidel Castro.
     
   
   Samuel I. Newhouse with his sons, S.I. Newhouse Jr., left, and Donald, right. Credit Anthony Edgeworth
   
   Mr. Newhouse hired Ms. Brown's husband, Harold Evans, a former chief
   editor of the Times of London, to introduce Condé Nast Traveler and
   then to run Random House, the largest American book publisher, which
   Mr. Newhouse had purchased in 1978.
   
   Mr. Newhouse's buying spree reached its apex with his 1985 acquisition
   of The New Yorker, the premier intellectual magazine in the country.
   Two years later, he replaced its legendary, septuagenarian editor,
   William Shawn, causing an outcry among the staff.
   
   Although Mr. Shawn's successor, Robert Gottlieb, was a highly respected
   book editor, the move added to Mr. Newhouse's notoriety for firing even
   the most pre-eminent editors. In 1971, he fired Ms. Vreeland as editor
   of Vogue. Her replacement, Grace Mirabella, was informed of her own
   dismissal in 1988 when the gossip columnist Liz Smith announced it on a
   New York television newscast.
   
   "The way it was handled was graceless — without making a pun," Mr.
   Newhouse was quoted as saying by one of his biographers, Thomas Maier,
   in a 1995 article in The Quill. "The P.R. of it got all bitched up."
   
   But Mr. Newhouse wasn't any better at handling the 1992 dismissal of
   Mr. Gottlieb from The New Yorker. Mr. Gottlieb, who was traveling in
   Japan, found out he had lost his job when he was awakened in the middle
   of the night by a call from a reporter asking for comment on his
   firing. Mr. Gottlieb, like other former Newhouse editors, readily
   acknowledged that he had received a generous severance package.
   
   While job stability wasn't a hallmark at Newhouse publications, his
   employees could count on perks that were unusual in the industry. Even
   junior editorial assistants grew accustomed to catered lunches and use
   of a car service. Senior editors received clothing allowances that ran
   into the tens of thousands of dollars, first-class airfares, virtually
   unlimited entertainment expenses, and million-dollar loans at
   subsidized interest rates to buy condominiums and country houses.
   
   Editorial budgets ballooned as Newhouse publications spent without
   restraint to hire the best-known writers, photographers and editors. "I
   believe in waste," said Mr. Liberman, Condé Nast's editorial director.
   "Waste is very important in creativity."
   
   But eventually Mr. Newhouse's largess created a river of red ink.
   Because his publications were privately held, he did not disclose their
   finances. But according to a 1996 Wall Street Journal article, Condé
   Nast lost up to $20 million in 1994 as nine of its 14 publications ran
   deficits. Unprofitable magazines like Mademoiselle and Gourmet were
   shut down. Random House was sold to Bertelsmann, the German publishing
   giant, for $1.4 billion in 1998, two decades after Mr. Newhouse had
   paid $60 million for it.
   
   Mr. Newhouse's new concern for the bottom line soon claimed the
   free-spending Ms. Brown. Despite her success at raising Vanity Fair's
   circulation, the publication continued to lose millions of dollars a
   year. When she moved over to The New Yorker as Mr. Gottlieb's
   replacement in 1992, she failed to stem that magazine's huge losses and
   stepped down in 1998.
   
   Under a new editor, David Remnick, The New Yorker regained its
   reputation as a highbrow magazine and also edged into the black.
   
   Despite the fiscal constraints, Mr. Newhouse pledged $100 million to
   start Portfolio, an ambitious glossy business magazine edited by Joanne
   Lipman. It made its debut in 2007, but it never turned a profit, and
   after only two years, it was shut down.
   
   During the period of retrenching, Mr. Newhouse sold most of his art
   collection and moved out of his large townhouse into a smaller
   apartment. While his publishing ventures were in no danger of
   foundering, he dedicated himself to making certain that they would
   prosper after his retirement. "With a third generation coming up, we
   had to make strategic decisions," he told Business Week in 1998.
   
   Mr. Newhouse began to step back from the business in the late 2000s at
   around the same time that publishing, buffeted by a global recession
   and the spread of the web, became a very different proposition. Condé
   Nast, like all publishing companies, has had to tighten its budgets and
   focus more relentlessly on the bottom line. But until recently, when
   the company moved offices, Mr. Newhouse could still be seen having
   lunch in the company cafeteria — a landmark piece of contemporary
   architecture that he had designed by Frank Gehry.
   
   Correction: October 1, 2017
   An earlier version of this obituary misstated Mr. Newhouse's given and
   middle names. He was Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., not Solomon Isidore.
   It also misstated his father's given name. It was Samuel, not Solomon.
   
   -----------
   Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting."