“American culture was shifting Si-ward”
8/30/25
Just finished “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America” by Michael M. Grynbaum. Lots of juice for the magazine junkies among us. And written with sharpness and style. Here’s the author early on, setting a scene of Si Newhouse finally feeling free to break from the influence of his father, Sam:
Now, as he sat in the gilded sanctum of Emanu-El, the encomia to his father emanating from the lectern, Si gazed at the dark wooden coffin, festooned with roses, that would be Sam’s final resting place. He was a few months shy of his fifty-second birthday, and this was the first time that the specter of his father’s disapproval, a looming presence in his life since childhood, had fully lifted. Sam Newhouse had never fully respected the magazines that Si had chosen as his life’s work; in his mind, Condé Nast was a minnow in the Newhouse sea, an unserious realm best left to his unserious son. No longer. Si had ambitions of his own, which over the next decade would vastly expand the Newhouse empire. On the day of Sam’s funeral, Advance Publications was valued at roughly $2 billion. By 1988, it would be worth $7 billion, a 250 percent increase. It would control the esteemed New Yorker, a revived smash-hit version of Vanity Fair, and the gastronomic bible Gourmet. Its dowdier titles would be revamped to appeal to an ascendant and free-spending aspirational class. Sam had been too set in his ways to detect the coming trend, but American culture was shifting Si-ward. The idealism of the I960s was yielding to the materialism of the 1980s, a new preoccupation with the navel-gazing, ego-stroking life. Si, who at Condé Nast had surrounded himself with the masters of the zeitgeist, was prepared, and he had already put something into motion that marked the true start of Condé’s inexorable eighties rise, a magazine whose prescient title managed to dovetail with both the spirit of the era and Si’s own newfound sense of liberation: Self.