The Free Press
Let me tell you about my first lunch with Art Cooper, the late, legendary editor of GQ magazine. It was 1990, and he was trying to lure me away from Esquire, where I had been writing a monthly business column for several years. Along with The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, GQ was one of the marquee publications of Condé Nast, the iconic magazine company with a reputation for profligacy. So I knew the pay was likely to be good. But the lunch was intended to give me a taste of just how freely Condé Nast spent its money.
We ate at the Four Seasons in the Seagram Building, on Park Avenue. Back then, it was Manhattan’s premier power lunch spot, also known as the Condé Nast cafeteria because so many of its editors and top executives ate there every day. The maître d’, Julian Niccolini, greeted Art effusively, and led him to his usual table. Without even asking, a waiter brought him a cocktail. Art ordered the spécialité de la maison: an absurdly expensive piece of Dover sole. I had the lamb chops. We went through two bottles of wine, and after we had settled on the financial terms, we celebrated with several glasses of cognac. When lunch was over, three hours later, Art and I staggered out without even looking at a bill. It was sent directly to the Condé Nast accounting department.
Those were the days, my friends.
Art, sadly, would die in that very restaurant; in June 2003, shortly after his retirement, he had a massive stroke while having lunch with his archrival David Zinczenko, the editor of Men’s Health. At 65, he hadn’t yet gotten around to writing his memoir, meaning that only those of us invited into his inner sanctum—where, at 5:00 p.m., he put Sinatra on the turntable and pulled out the vodka from his private fridge—got to hear the corporate gossip he couldn’t resist telling.
But another Condé Nast editor, Graydon Carter, who presided over Vanity Fair from 1992 to 2017, has just spilled the beans, in a brand-new book about what he calls “the last golden age of magazines.” Its title is When the Going Was Good, and if anything, that’s an understatement.
Once upon a time, Vanity Fair, with its glossy photographs and stories about the rich and famous, drew ads that cost upward of $100,000 a page. In the fall especially, issues could run to 400 pages or more, stuffed with advertisements for expensive clothes, expensive watches, expensive everything. In his memoir, Carter writes that as the editor of Vanity Fair, he was expected to attend the big fashion shows. The expectation came, of course, from fashion advertisers, though all these years later, he doesn’t acknowledge that. Indeed, amid the tales of expense accounts abused, special issues published, and editors and writers lauded, there is almost nothing in his memoir about the actual business of magazine publishing.
And why would there be? So long as the money kept pouring in, and so long as the Newhouse family, which owned Condé Nast, was happy, the business side was not his problem. That’s what publishers were supposed to take care of. And so he—and everyone else in the company—spent and spent and spent, and never, apparently, thought twice about it. It was what one did at Condé Nast.
Carter first discovered the magazine world’s culture of crazy expense account spending as a young writer for Time magazine, the flagship publication of Time Inc., which was then the biggest magazine company in the country. Of that era, he writes that he expensed so many meals that “I went five years without ever turning on my oven.” Journalists, he suggests, felt that in comparison to what they might have earned in a less noble industry, they didn’t make all that much money—so padding one’s expense account was a way to boost one’s pay.
Everybody in the office seemed to be cheating on their expenses, all the way up the chain of command. It was almost encouraged. Carter tells the story of a Time magazine writer assigned to cover the pope’s visit to the U.S. In an effort to duck the assignment, the writer said he was scheduled to take a vacation in Maine with his family. His editor responded by telling him that, if he took the assignment, he could send his family to Maine and expense the vacation. So the writer, who had never intended to take his family to Maine, had stationery made up of a fictitious vacation spot, in order to create fictitious receipts, for which he was reimbursed. He even expensed the cost of the stationery. That was paid too.
“Extreme expense account creativity,” Carter writes, “was looked upon with the same sort of reverence as writing a particularly fine story.”
Having lived through this era, I find these stories amusing but unsurprising. During the time I spent in “the golden age,” I was never that extreme, but I certainly treated myself well—staying in five-star hotels, taking sources to the best restaurants I could find, and expensing weekend flights to my summer house in Canada. When I first turned in a draft of this story, my editor, who is all of 29, expressed bewilderment at the way we spent money back then. “Explain why you did it,” she insists, as if there is some mystery here. There isn’t. We did it because nobody said we couldn’t. Nothing more complicated than that.
When he became the editor of Vanity Fair in 1992, Carter could have put a stop to the spending culture he inherited from his predecessor, Tina Brown. That would have made the magazine much more profitable. (David Remnick did exactly that when he replaced Brown as editor of The New Yorker in 1998, turning a money-losing magazine into a profitable one.) But Carter liked the lifestyle too much to let go of it. He liked flying on the Concorde when he went to Europe (round-trip ticket: $12,000). He liked having two assistants instead of one. He liked having his own personal driver, and he liked presiding over Vanity Fair’s uber-expensive Oscar party.
And so, Carter set the tone. “At Vanity Fair in those early days, anyone on the editorial floor could take out pretty much any amount of reasonable cash just by signing a chit,” he writes. “Flowers went to contributors at an astounding rate, sometimes just for turning a story in on time.”
He cites approvingly how his deputy, Aimée Bell, gamed expense accounting at Condé Nast: “She figured out early that the accountants budgeted your expenses based on what you spent the previous year,” he writes. “That meant that what you needed to do was set a high bar early and build on a large amount of expenses.”
He adds: “And I was fine with that.”
“This, in its essence, was Vanity Fair.”
Of course, Vanity Fair spent money on journalism, too—gobs of it.
He paid Dominick Dunne $500,000 a year to cover the O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers trials, “plus generous expenses and months of free and continuous accommodation at the Chateau Marmont or the Beverly Hills Hotel.” He recruited Michael Lewis and a half dozen other brand-name writers who were paid at least as much. He even proudly recounts the time Vanity Fair pursued a major story about Lloyd’s of London, the insurance company, “which may have been the most expensive per word magazine story ever written.” And it never ran! To hear Carter tell it, this is what you had to do: To get the best stories, you needed the best writers, and to get them and their stories, you had to spend lots and lots of money.
And it couldn’t last forever.
After five years working for Art Cooper, I moved to Time Inc.’s business magazine, Fortune. For the first half of my tenure, the good times rolled. Because Time Inc. was a public company, the editors were more conscious of profits than Condé Nast editors, but we flew business class, had staff retreats in the Virgin Islands, and sometimes spent months reporting stories, without thinking too much about it. Unfortunately, the other thing we weren’t thinking about was the prospect that the internet was about to eat our lunch.
For Fortune, the good times ended in 2000 with the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The big e-commerce advertisers that had made us fat and happy during the dot-com bubble disappeared. Far worse, the auto and financial industry ads, which had been the bedrock of our advertising base for decades, also dwindled. Magazine advertising just wasn’t as cost-effective anymore. At around the same time, I was promoted to executive editor. At the first meeting I attended as part of management, our painful task was to decide which nine staff writers would have to be laid off. John Huey, the editorial director of Time Inc., sardonically asked, via speakerphone: “How are you enjoying management so far, Joe?”
Cutting costs wasn’t enough to save Time Inc.; the company didn’t embrace the internet until it was too late. (I left in 2004.) In 2018, it was sold to a competitor, Meredith Corporation, which sold off some of its best-known titles. Fortune, which is now a shell of its once-proud self, is owned by a Thai billionaire.
The magazines that are profitable in this new era are the ones that have strong websites with original content, like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, with subscribers now covering the bulk of the costs instead of advertisers. But no one in the industry spends money the way we did in the old days. Editors are actually expected to work with their business colleagues. As a former business editor, I think that’s as it should be.
These days, it’s often said that nobody has the money to pay for serious journalism anymore. But maybe that’s just nostalgia speaking. When I look at the journalism landscape, I see plenty of stories that are every bit as good as those we published “when the going was good.” Maybe even better.
It turns out Carter’s thesis was wrong. Good editors can solicit great work without breaking the bank. With the economics of the magazine business having shrunk so dramatically, they really have no choice. What is required is the ability to make intelligent assignments to hungry writers who aren’t necessarily name brands; to hew to deadlines; and, if the story goes awry, to avoid throwing good money after bad. Remnick’s New Yorker, which is notoriously parsimonious, has been proving for years that outsize expense accounts are not necessary to produce great work. But so have publications like The Atavist Magazine and Texas Monthly and The Ringer and, yes, The Free Press. And lots of others. The Great American Magazine may be dead. But great magazine journalism is not.
And I’ll let you in on a little secret. Every once in a while, after a long day at the office, I still treat myself to a glass of wine and a steak dinner, like I used to do in the old days. And occasionally, very occasionally, my editor has even picked up the tab.
The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.
In the 1990s, magazine writers lived like rock stars. Today, accused terrorist Luigi Mangione is feted as a rock star—but he’s not the first of his kind. More than 50 years ago, Ulrike Meinhof threw her life away for the thrill of political violence. This week on Breaking History, Eli Lake unpacks the Luigi Mangione moment and the unsettling phenomenon of turning killers into icons.