Martin Filler on Si Newhouse and Donald Trump
| Before 2024 and 2016, before The Apprentice, before Trump Steaks, and even before the Trump Taj Mahal, there was The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump’s best-selling 1987 book published by Random House. This month in the NYR Online, Martin Filler writes about Si Newhouse—the owner of Random House as well as Condé Nast’s suite of magazines, and a longtime friend to “Donald Trump’s Svengali,” Roy Cohn—whose part in Trump’s rise from magazine gossip-fodder to president, writes Filler, “cannot be minimized.” Below, alongside Filler’s essay, are five articles from our archive about what Filler calls “the golden afternoon of glossy print journalism.” Condé Nast’s editors shone brightest in its premillennial heyday, but the media company’s opaque proprietor, S. I. Newhouse Jr., made his most consequential discovery in Donald Trump. “Each generation that passed through The Village Voice created its own idiom, its own way of seeing the city.” —April 11, 2024 “I also saw these magazines as glamorous arenas in which to publish essays. Joan Didion, Penelope Mortimer, Alice Munro, and even the quirky Jane Bowles had their early work published in Vogue, and Mademoiselle was known for publishing writers who went on to make a name for themselves, like Truman Capote and Carson McCullers.” —January 30, 2023 Snobbish New Yorkers may have snickered at the glitziness Paige Rense favored in the pages of Architectural Digest, but the rest of America lapped it up. Love it or loathe it, her approach conveyed an impressively unified vision and it did indeed make AD’s parent company, Knapp Communications, pots of money. —November 4, 2018 “In her diaries of her years at Vanity Fair, Tina Brown is certainly adept at noting, with her unforgiving eye, the flaws in others. Revulsion brings out the best in her.” —February 22, 2018 “‘Great’ is a heavily overworked word among Americans, and for this reason was not used casually at The New Yorker, with its distaste for overstatement and tired adjectives. Soon, however, New Yorker people began calling William Shawn ‘a great editor,’ and some flirted with heresy by suggesting that he was superior even to the sainted Harold Ross.” —March 23, 2000 Save $168 on an inspired pairing!
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