Cond

In an exquisite 30-room penthouse on Park Avenue death came last week to Conde Nast. He was 68; an amiable host; as publisher of Vogue, House & Garden, et al., a superlative technician of the publishing world. For a generation he was the man from whom millions of American women got most of their ideas, directly or indirectly, about the desirable American standard of living.

The apartment in which he died was the perfect complement to his publishing business and an index to the variety of his taste. There he entertained the same people for whom he published Vogue. There to his elaborate dinners, dances, cocktail parties, came socialites, Hollywoodites, Broadwayites, statesmen, royalty. The star of a Broadway opening was as thrilled by an after-theater party at Conde Nast's as she was by the first-night applause. The apartment which he himself planned to the last detail was so arranged he could entertain 100 cocktail guests on the roof, a dinner party of 50, another couple of hundred in the ballroom, all at the same time. Amidst 18th-Century French paintings, Chinese screens and a slightly rococo splendor, Conde Nast presided, bald and genial, peering sphinxlike through pince-nez glasses, the arbiter of his world.

But to Nast, society was only the work of evenings. The daylight was for publishing, and this was hard work. In the area he created, and in which he was lord, Nast became as expert as an assayer. His primary task as a publisher was to choose editors who best knew how to choose--out of the flooding hundreds of fashion ideas, from ruffles to shoes to dinner-table glassware--the fashions which had that indefinable "smartness" which he could sense, almost by smell. Then he--and they--went to work on the presentation--to "bait the editorial pages," as he once unblushingly said, "in such a way as to lift out of all the millions of Americans just the 100,000 cultivated people who can buy these quality goods,"

Vogue ran far ahead of this chill and modest ambition. Throughout the '20s and '30s, in its pages Nast decided what made fashion-sense in the welter of Parisian, New York and Hollywood ideas, about everything from decor to dogs. The Dest-dressed women in all U.S. towns were Vogue subscribers; stores fought to listed as outlets for goods advertised in Vogue, and thus the Nast judgments set patterns far beyond Vogue's own cirulation of a few hundred thousand. To his own women-readers Nast brought the excitement of modern art, from Seurat to Modigliani and to Covarrubias, the breath-taking photography of Steichen, Beaton, Lohse, Baron Hoyningen-Huene; and the vivid drama of fashion-drawings by Carl Ericsson, Sigrid Grafstrom, Count Rene Bouet-Willaumez and many others, which in turn influenced all U.S. advertising art. Vogue became a feminine bible of taste. Even its cheesecake was cool and cultured: cheesecake prettily iced. Technician Nast became a millionaire.

Conde Nast was not born to fashion. He was born in New York of a French mother and German father, grew up in St. Louis, went to Georgetown University, where he managed the baseball team. Classmate Robert Collier hired him to write advertising for Collier's. Nine years later, age 35, risen to business manager, he had built up the magazine's circulation, fattened its skinny advertising, and was making $50,000 a year. That was when he quit to go on his own.

He made dress patterns for Ladies Home Journal, until, for practically nothing at all, he picked up a tottering, 24-page fashion and socialite magazine. That was Vogue, which "had no friends outside the lonesome office of its advertising manager"--then. A decade later it had plenty of friends of just the right kind. It ranked second to Satevepost in ads, had sister editions in Paris, London and Buenos Aires. It also had a sophisticated brother, Vanity Fair, the editing of which Conde Nast turned over to Frank Crowninshield, the town's wittiest connoisseur of art and letters. They were a team. Nast built a 30-acre printing plant at Greenwich, Conn. In the boom he also went into the stock-market.* And just when he was ready to retire, he went broke. His last decade showed his qualities of honest pride and courage. Working seven days a week, he restored his personal and corporate fortunes, piloted Vogue through the '305 without making a single concession in its standards of smartness or excellence.

Always a keen student of the news. Conde Nast the man was strongly anti-Nazi and interventionist before Pearl Harbor. When the U.S. went to war, Nast the publisher took the lead in showing how patriotism can be smart and smartness patriotic. None could do it with so sure a touch.

* When a friend asked him later why he did it he replied: "I have asked myself that. I wish I knew."

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