Friday Book: Conde Nasty gossip

CITIZEN NEWHOUSE: PORTRAIT OF A MEDIA MERCHANT BY CAROL FELSENTHAL, SEVEN STORIES PRESS, pounds

WHEN, AT last year's London International Book Fair, rumours began to circulate that the German multimedia giant Bertelsmann had bought Si Newhouse's publishing group Random House, the initial reaction was laughter. Apart from anything else, in a business that makes politics look well-plumbed such a deal could not have been discussed, much less consummated, without word having leaked.

By 3pm the news had been confirmed, and it was almost possible to hear the sound of jaws dropping. Even Random House UK's chief executives had had no inkling that anything was up until 48 hours earlier, when a Bertelsmann emissary had summoned each of them to breakfast. Nevertheless, they assured everyone, it was business as usual, and Bertelsmann has a well-deserved reputation for not interfering in the day-to-day running of successful operations.

Which is more than can be said for Samuel I Newhouse Jr, known as Si, who inherited from his father a vast private media empire. The older Newhouse, who died in 1979, "sought profit and an empire to pass on to his sons so that they in turn could pass it on to their sons". The younger Newhouse "lives for the attention, the social cachet. Vogue, The New Yorker, Knopf and Random House have opened doors for the tongue-tied multibillionaire that would otherwise have slammed shut in his face."

Carol Felsenthal's book makes fascinating reading to those with an obsessive interest in the world of New York magazines, for each entrance and exit from Newhouse's Conde Nast stable is painstakingly detailed. Not for nothing was the firm nicknamed Conde Nasty, for Newhouse appears incapable of putting even senior executives out to grass with any sense of decorum. The venerable Diana Vreeland, who successfully reinvented American Vogue, was dispatched without ceremony. So too Robert Gottlieb, installed in 1985 to edit The New Yorker following its expensive acquisition by Newhouse. His successor, Tina Brown, jumped before she could be pushed.

In many ways, Si's behaviour is unsurprising. The spoon in his mouth was not merely silver but diamond-crusted for, by his birth in 1927, father Sam had made his first fortune with the Staten Island Advance and the Long Island Daily Press. The family was installed in a 14-room Park Avenue duplex which Sam's wife Mitzi endlessly redecorated in a style favouring Louises XIV and XV.

The eldest of eight in a family of Jewish immigrants, Sam had become the breadwinner at 13. He secured a job as a bookkeeper for two dollars a week, working for a lawyer who had accepted a 51 per cent stake in a local newspaper in lieu of a fee. Charged with taking care of the paper, young Sam saw that it was losing money because it lacked advertising. By 1916 he had a share of the equity and a salary of $30,000 a year. He never looked back, scooping up dozens of metropolitan papers and moving in early on cable TV.

When, in 1959, Sam bought Conde Nast as a 35th wedding anniversary present for Mitzi, who desperately wanted to appear in Vogue (she did, in 1964), his eldest son at last found an interest beyond spending the family fortune at upmarket restaurants. Si had grown up in awe of his father. Mitzi had favoured his brother Donald. Harvard rejected Si, so too Cornell, and he dropped out of Syracuse. Along the way, he married and divorced, and forged a friendship with the McCarthy crony Roy Cohn.

Si's 1980 purchase of Random House for $65m (pounds 38m) would have pleased his father. For a time, his stewardship was approved. He was in every day and got excited by books. But his acquisition of expensive celebrities such as Nancy Reagan and Donald Trump offended staff at what had always been a literary house. The head honcho Bob Bernstein was soon "retired" in favour of Alberto Vitale, characterised by the novelist James Michener as "an able number-cruncher, but not a man reared in the traditions of American publishing".

In the end, he may not have been so good at numbers; when Random House failed to turn a real profit, Newhouse decided to sell. Commentators alleged it was because there was no heir apparent, although Si's nephew Steven, a Yale graduate, seemed genuinely interested in publishing and had been groomed.

In an astonishing oversight, Felsenthal omits to mention Newhouse's purchase in 1987 of the ailing Chatto, Bodley Head and Cape combine, surely the jewel in the crown of British publishing, or the takeover two years later of Century Hutchinson. Fascinating as it often is, her book is an over- researched portrait of the Newhouse magazine empire which, even in New York, is of consequence to very few people. But, beyond the gossip, it reveals in chilling detail the extent to which the rich and powerful play chess with the lives of those who are forced to work for a living. Who cares that reputations, literary and personal, are trashed in pursuit of one man's vainglorious quest? Appearance is everything, but all that glisters is not gold.

The reviewer is assistant editor of `Publishing News'