The Newspaper Collector
Oil derricks weathered under the south western sun; tramp steamers rusted in their harbor slips. But the visitor from New York heeded neither the heat nor the scenery. Samuel I. Newhouse, 67, had come to the Texas Gulf Coast port of Beaumont for only one reason -- to run down a rumor that the city's two news papers were for sale. Beyond that possibility, Beaumont held no charms for the little man from the big city. And when the rumor proved false, the visitor could not get out of town fast enough.
But Sam Newhouse's unopened check book smoldered in his briefcase. Buying newspapers is not only his chief pleasure; it is the purpose of his life. Surely there must be a paper for sale somewhere in the vicinity. On impulse, Sam headed for Houston. There he goggled at the sights: sleek Cadillacs schooling in the streets, glittering shops, new buildings all over the city, and more new buildings rising on nearly every block. A heady boomtown flavor hung in the humid air. Without pausing even to examine a copy of the Post, Hous ton's leading daily, Newhouse sought out its co-proprietor, Mrs. Oveta Gulp Hobby, and put in a magnificently reckless bid. Would she sell him the paper for, say, $40 million cash? No, said Mrs. Hobby politely, she would not.
Disappointed a second time, Sam Newhouse telephoned Newspaper Broker Allen Kander in Washington, D.C. He was down South. Where could he buy a newspaper? Try New Orleans, Kander suggested. Newhouse did. And just two weeks after that long-distance phone call, U.S. journalism's smallest publisher (5 ft. 3 in., 136 Ibs.) closed the biggest deal in U.S. journalistic history. For $42 million--more than three times what the Louisiana Territory cost the U.S. in 1803--Newhouse bought both of New Orleans' papers: the morning Times-Picayune (circ. 195,151 daily, 307,-983 Sunday) and its evening companion, the States-Item (163,650).*
The Louisiana purchase not only set a record but hoisted Sam Newhouse to the top of the heap. With 19 dailies having a combined daily and Sunday circulation of 5,700,000, he now owns, in whole or part, more newspapers than anyone else in the U.S.; he has one more than the Scripps-Howard chain, eight more than the shriveled empire governed by the descendants of William Randolph Hearst (although the circulation of Scripps-Howard and Hearst each exceeds that of the Newhouse papers). Nor does Newhouse's ascendancy end there. Scripps-Howard, Hearst, and the whole U.S. newspaper field are contracting. Newhouse is still growing--at such an exponential rate that the price he paid for New Orleans is almost one-third the cost of all his other properties combined. Among the country's newspaper giants, Sam Newhouse seems to know best how to make daily newspapering pay.
"You Run It." He has successfully made money out of newspapers for 40 years. Beginning with the $49,000 he invested in 1922 for a slice of the tiny, money-losing Staten Island Advance, he has spent some $122 million collecting properties that now include not only his newspapers but three radio stations, six TV stations and two magazine publishing firms, a 66% interest in Conde Nast and Street & Smith. By conservative estimate, these possessions are worth $250 million today. They produce a handsome annual gross in excess of $125 million.
This solid-gold pyramid was erected by a man who knows nothing about the editorial end of journalism, and cares even less. To him, newspapers are "properties," usually identified by locale. "I just bought New Orleans," he told a friend after his Southern coup. Newhouse once had a chance to buy Israel's Jerusalem Post, but turned it down--thereby sparing his friends the observation, "I just bought Jerusalem." His properties are valued not by content but by readership. "It's a great paper," said Newhouse, after buying a minority interest in the Denver Post two years ago. "It has a circulation of 250,000." When he is moved to talk about the printed matter in his papers, Newhouse sounds like an atheist discussing the relative merits of Christianity and Buddhism.
In the strict sense, Newhouse does not publish newspapers, or even run them; he merely collects them, leaving editorial policy to the executive hands he inherited when he bought out their previous employers. "How do you want to operate?" Newhouse asked Jack Langhorne, publisher of the Huntsville, Ala., Times, after buying that paper in 1955. "Just like we've been operating," Langhorne replied. "O.K., Jack," said Newhouse. "You run it." It was the last command from Newhouse that Langhorne ever got.
All of Newhouse's editors and publishers enjoy the same unfettered freedom, and all of them exercise it at will. The boss never compliments an editor or reporter--lest silence the next time be construed as censure. Newhouse's name appears on the masthead of only three of the 19 papers. He rarely reads any of them; the only paper delivered daily to his 14-room Park Avenue duplex in Manhattan is one he does not own (but wishes he did): the New York Times. Newhouse papers disagree not only with one another but with the proprietor. Newhouse himself favors integration, but not to the point of rebuking the publisher of his Birmingham, Ala., paper, the News, which is rabidly racist. A registered Democrat, Newhouse voted for Kennedy in 1960; eight of his papers endorsed Nixon.
Newhouse takes a special pride in the truculence of Syracuse Her aid-Journal Editor Alexander ("Casey") Jones, whose editorial positions rarely jibe with the boss's. Newhouse is partial to New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller ("The type you want in politics"), and on a recent visit to Syracuse he asked for Casey's opinion of Rocky's general performance. "I think it's silly," said Casey. "Oh, that's interesting," said Casey's employer mildly --and abandoned the subject.
"My Passion, My Delight." However gratifying Sam's laissez-faire attitude may be to his editors and publishers, outsiders either find it confusing or don't believe that it exists. The conventional picture of a chain publisher is of a man who uses his papers like a megaphone to extend the range of his own voice. Because Newhouse does not take a public stand on the issues of the day, because he does not force his personal convictions into his papers, because he has no interest more consuming than the solvency of his properties--and because he automatically becomes an "outsider" wherever he buys--he is frequently treated with suspicion and downright hostility. Upon learning that the New Orleans Times-Picayune had been sold to Newhouse, U.S. Senator Russell B. Long of Louisiana complained to Publisher John F. Tims: "After all the time I've spent getting you people to understand me, now what do I have to do --start all over?"
Oregon's maverick U.S. Senator Wayne Morse considers Newhouse a national plague. "The American people," cried Morse, in a sulphurous 1960 speech from the Senate floor, "need to be warned before it is too late about the threat which is arising as a result of the monopolistic practices of the Newhouse interests." That same year, when Newhouse bought into two Springfield, Mass, dailies, Sidney R. Cook, treasurer and board member, promptly called the interloper "a menace" and "a graveyard superintendent" who "goes around picking up the bones--preying on widows and split families." Added Cook: "I can tell you this. Newhouse will never get into Springfield." Newhouse has not since set foot in the city.
The New Yorker's A. J. (The Wayward Pressman) Liebling, a self-appointed spare-time judge of journalistic transgressions, has bestowed on Newhouse the title of "journalistic chiffonnier"--a French word that means "ragpicker." While Newhouse was angling for Portland's evening daily, the Oregon Journal (he hooked it last year), David Eyre, then the Journal's managing editor, pointedly referred to him in print as Samuel ISIDOR New-house." (Newhouse is indeed of Jewish descent, but his middle initial stands for nothing at all.) Last week, inspired in part by Newhouse's acquisition of New Orleans and in part by an ambition to make headlines, Democratic U.S. Representative Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn announced that the House Judiciary Committee would investigate newspaper monopolies --among them Sam Newhouse's--as soon as Congress adjourns.
Early Chains. As a "monopolist," Newhouse has to give considerable ground to the early U.S. chain builders. Beginning in the 1880s, and teaming with one partner or another, a onetime Rushville, Ill., farm boy named Edward Wyllis Scripps bought or started 52 dailies as well as a news agency (United Press) and various feature syndicates. Hearst, another prodigious newspaper buyer, acquired a total of 42 dailies, also had his own wire service (International News Service), a Sunday supplement (American Weekly), a kit bag of magazines, and even a film company (established mainly to produce star vehicles for his mistress). In 1933, with 27 papers, Hearst controlled 11.2% of U.S. daily circulation and nearly 20% on Sunday.
Observing such men, Frank A. Munsey, who was something of a chain welder himself, predicted in 1903 that "it will not be many years--five or ten perhaps--before the publishing business of this country will be done by a few concerns." Munsey's timing was off and his prophecy far too sweeping. But for a whole catalogue of reasons, U.S. newspapers have found it increasingly expedient to cut down competition for the sake of survival.
Economic pressures chopped even the giants to size. Hornblower Hearst was so vastly unconcerned with the balance sheet that his papers ran at a constant loss; in the early 1930s his empire nearly foundered in red ink. Only drastic pruning snatched him from financial ruin--and the trimming is still going on. Since the Chief's death, the Hearst organization has added only one paper (the Albany, N.Y., Knickerbocker News) while eliminating five--the last only last week, when Hearst's 125-year-old Milwaukee Sentinel (circ. 192,899), weakened by a prolonged strike, was sold to the independent Journal (370937). Scripps-Howard, too, has been forced to economize, has not added a link to the chain since 1956.
Newhouse's papers pay because his attention is riveted on the business side of newspapering. Alert for the smallest money-saving maneuver, quick to invest in new machinery when it promises to cut costs, he manages to make even sick papers pay--occasionally with a helping hand from luck. Shortly after selling the St. Louis Globe-Democrat to Newhouse in 1955, Publisher E. Lansing Ray died, leaving the paper--and the surprised Newhouse--$1,000,000 in life insurance.
In 1939, when he bought Syracuse's two evening papers, the Herald and the Journal, both were losing money--$450,000 the year before. Overnight, Newhouse changed the loss to profit. To get full city coverage, Syracuse advertisers had been compelled to buy space in both evening papers, at a retail rate of 10^ a line in each. Newhouse merged the two papers, retaining their best individual features. Then he raised the Her aid-Journal's retail ad rate to 13-c- a line. Merchants responded to the bargain, and retail ad sales rose nearly $1,000,000 the first year.
Still Dropping. But merging papers is only one of collectivization's many forms. Among small dailies, the tendency today is to form into an "intercity" paper--a single daily replacing two or more in neighboring towns. Today there are more than 70 such papers, some of them with sizable circulations: the Herald-News, serving Passaic and Clifton, N.J. (circ. 74,227); the San Gabriel Valley (Calif.) Tribune in West Covina spreads its 52,152 circulation over seven neighboring towns.
In larger cities, editorially competitive morning and evening papers sometimes cut costs by sharing the same mechanical plant, the same advertising, circulation and distribution departments. Frequently, the stronger of two papers in a big city buys the weaker one out--a device that Newhouse has used many times. William Randolph Hearst Jr., editor in chief of the Hearst papers, has estimated that if a competitive morning and evening paper each clears $100,000 in annual profit, under the same management they net not $200,000 a year but $500,000. Hearst is presently testing this formula in San Francisco, where his morning paper, the Examiner, last June bought out Scripps-Howard's interest in the city's only evening paper, the News-Call Bulletin.
As the economics of existence continues to clamp down on U.S. newspapers, combining into chains seems the surest chance for survival. Fifty years ago, the eight U.S. newspaper groups then in existence controlled 10% of total daily circulation. Today there are 118 chains, with a combined circulation of 27.4 million--almost half the total daily circulation in the U.S. (59,200,000). Since chains not only stifle competition but kill newspapers (generally by merger), their effect has been dramatic. From a high-water mark of 2,461 daily papers in 1916, the number has steadily fallen, to 1,760 today. It is still dropping. Daily newspaper competition has all but disappeared. It survives in only 60 of the country's 5,911 cities--and in two-thirds of these the competition is token, i.e., between morning and afternoon papers.
No Need for Two. The gradual decline in the chorus of political voices, the equalizing effect of the big wire services, whose international coverage appears--often verbatim--in nearly every U.S. daily, the glandular growth of syndicated features and columnists, and even the steadily rising per-copy cost of newspapers have all combined to help winnow the ranks. Newsmagazines have cut heavily into newspaper readership. So .has TV, which, from a-dead start around 1948, now absorbs some 14% of every advertising dollar--and five hours daily of the average televiewer's leisure time.
Says University of Minnesota Journalism Professor Raymond B. Nixon, who has made a study of the trend toward press monopoly: "The newspapers have changed their roles since the rise of monopolies "nd chains. They are not regarded today as primarily political mouthpieces." Today's reader, says Nixon, "buys newspapers for information and expects both sides of political questions. When newspapers started doing this, the need for reading two newspapers disappeared." The nation's press, always provincial in character, has become even more so. The metropolitan daily must bid for its readers not only against newsmagazines and TV, but against the suburban press--which has expanded in almost exact proportion to the contraction of the big-city press. Even one-note chains have come to recognize that each link must be deeply embedded in local affairs. Newhouse recognized this from the start. "The heart and essence of the Newhouse formula is strong local management," says Philip Hochstein, 58, who joined the Newhouse organization in 1927 and is now editorial consultant to all the papers. "The Newhouse group goes all the way from the neighborhood paper to the regional paper, but it stops there."
The Right Time. Shrewd as he is in his chosen business, Samuel I. Newhouse was cast by accident in the role of newspaper collector: he just happened to appear at the right time, with the right price and an insatiable appetite to buy. Only chance determined that what he bought was newspapers.
As the oldest of eight children born, on May 24, 1895, to Meyer and Rose Fatt Newhouse, young Sam almost missed childhood altogether--so did most of the young Newhouses. Father Meyer, a Russian Jew who migrated to Bayonne, N.J., before completing his rabbinical training, was a man of many miseries. He never succeeded in lifting his family above wretched poverty. Frail and asthmatic, the unhappy Talmud scholar worked occasionally in a factory, making suspender ends, but everybody had to pitch in. Mother Newhouse sold drygoods door to door; Norman, one of Sam's three brothers, .was set to peddling papers at the age of five.
When Sam was 13. his father's health failed, and by the rigid seniority rules governing the Newhouse clan, the oldest male child took over as head of the family. Sam's qualifications for this office were fewer than his years: a grammar-school education at Bayonne's P.S. 7, plus whatever acumen he had absorbed in a business course in Manhattan (to save the 3-c- ferry fare, young Newhouse toted newspaper bundles across the Hudson River in both directions). Before leaving New Jersey for more arid climates. Father Newhouse introduced his son to Hyman Lazarus, a police-court magistrate who also practiced law on the top floor of the Bayonne Times.
One disbelieving look at his new clerk and the judge scaled Sam's salary to size --nothing at all the first month, then $2 a week. But what Sam lacked in stature he more than made up in drive. He spent his nights studying law in Newark, was admitted to the bar a week after his 21st birthday. After that, he actually tried--and lost--a case. (Chagrined by defeat, Newhouse doled out of his own pocket the $80 damages that his client had sought in court. Today he is convinced that the jury was fixed.) "
Take Care of It." But luck had already taken Newhouse away from the law. As payment on a bad debt. Judge Lazarus had picked up a 51% interest in the Bayonne Times, an anemic daily with 3,000 fickle subscribers (they kept defecting to Bayonne's other papers). Lazarus entrusted the paper to a succession of managers, all of whom failed dismally to make the paper pay. In 1912, Lazarus bodily evicted the last of these, Octavus Roy Cohen, who had spent most of his working hours courting the girls at the Bayonne Opera House next door. "Sammy," said Lazarus to his little law clerk, "go down and take care of the paper until we get rid of it." Newhouse was barely 17.
Before the judge could dispose of the Times, however, Newhouse had it running in the black. No particular magic was fnvolved. With the common-sense shrewdness that has served him ever since, Newhouse followed the sensible premise that he and the Bayonne Times could learn a trick or two from the big-city press. He studied the display ads in Manhattan papers, then spent long hours in Bayonne stores, helping their owners to map merchandising campaigns. The city burst out in a rash of special sales, many of them the handiwork of Sam Newhouse --and all of them, naturally, advertised in the Bayonne Times.
Togetherness. Gratified and impressed, Judge Lazarus made no objection when Newhouse asked for a cut of the paper's take instead of salary--a move that eventually meant $20,000 a year to Sam while he was still in his early 20s. Nor did the judge protest when Newhouse loaded the payroll with kin. As Sam expanded, this nepotism amounted to infestation. At one time, Newhouse employed five dozen relatives, although death, weddings and other forms of attrition have materially trimmed the list.
But the Newhouse empire still abounds with Newhouses and in-laws. Brother Theodore, 58, is officially associate publisher of the Newhouse papers, regularly visits the Newhouse properties in Birmingham and Portland, Ore. Brother Norman, 56, is the sole official scanner of the Newhouse papers. He also serves as editor of the Long Island Press. Newhouse's two sons are being groomed for succession. Samuel I. Jr., 34, is currently watchdogging his father's magazine interests. Donald, 32, accompanies Pop on some of his trips, also oversees the Jersey Journal in Jersey City.
Bayonne clearly was not big enough either for Sam's talents or for his numerous tribe. In 1922, by passing the hat among the family and by coaxing $49,000 from the judge, he raised $98,000 for a controlling interest in the Staten Island Advance. It was Bayonne all over again: a sickly property suddenly cured of its ills. Just three years later, Newhouse bought out his partner (although the judge kept the Bayonne Times, which is still owned by his son Herman), and by 1927 he had chased down the last stray share of Advance stock. Sam Newhouse now owned a newspaper. The pyramid had begun.
Leaping a Continent. Slowly, Newhouse accumulated the capital on which to grow. He dislikes borrowing from out siders, has done so rarely: to help him buy the Birmingham News and the Huntsville Times--$8,500,000 on an eight-year note, which Newhouse retired in three years--again this year, when New York's Chemical Bank New York Trust Co. lent him about $20 million toward the purchase of New Orleans.
Seven years passed before Newhouse felt sufficiently provident to buy his second paper. In 1932 he paid $750,000 for 51% of the Long Island Press (later he got it all) in Jamaica, L.I., which was part of the Ridder newspaper chain. After that the pace quickened and prices soared: $3,200,000 for three papers in Syracuse (Sam reduced them to two), $3,500,000 for Harrisburg, Pa., $5,600,000 for the Portland Oregonian in 1950 (see box). With Portland, Sam Newhouse's newspaper menage, until then clustered in the East, spanned the continent. And for the first time, the shy little man from Bayonne began to attract national attention. Not all of it was favorable.
"I Can Wait." Each fresh Newhouse invasion met with stiff local opposition and generated heated arguments about the purity of his motives, his methods, and his influence on U.S. journalism. When Newhouse bought a part of the Denver Post from the daughter of one of the paper's founders, the other daughter took immediate steps to lock him out. "I can wait," said Newhouse, who is never content with less than all of anything he buys.
Fellow publishers seldom speak cordially of Sam. "All he's interested in," says a Chicago colleague, "is the cash register. I don't think he gives a damn about the papers; he just treats them like so many hardware stores. For any publisher you respect, any of those who deeply love journalism, Sam Newhouse would be the last person to sell a paper to." To Eugene Pulliam, who owns nine newspapers in Indiana and Arizona (the Indianapolis Star and News, Phoenix Arizona Republic], making money in newspapering is "secondary." Says Pulliam: "There's a spiritual quality to journalism. I still believe a publisher ought to run his paper personally and stand up and have his say. If you just want to make money, you ought to be in the bond business." Pulliam has his conservative say, and his papers also earn a liberal profit.
Monopoly's Virtues. But such critics miss the crucial point: Newhouse is not the cause, he is merely a symptom of the trend toward monopoly. Nor does every one agree that press monopolies are necessarily evil. The census of dailies has declined, but daily readership has risen stead ily from 27.7 million (26% of the popu lation) in 1920 to more than 59 million (31%) today.
Says Barry Bingham, editor and publish er of Louisville's two dailies, the Courier-Journal and the Times: "A monopoly even has some compensating virtues, such as reducing the danger of pressure from ad vertisers on matters of policy, and banish ing the temptation to sensationalize stories and headlines for the sake of sales." Furthermore, says Bingham, there is still plenty of competition around -- from news magazines, radio and television, all of which "now share the news function and, to an increasing extent, the editorial function." Many papers, in fact, have joined the competition by buying TV stations of their own.
Good, Bad, Indifferent. Still, Newhouse is vulnerable to valid criticism. If he has not debased the quality of U.S. journalism, he has not notably improved it either. Most of his papers are editorial ly as good, bad or indifferent as when he bought them. The Portland Oregonian, which won a Pulitzer Prize before Newhouse took it over, has since won another. The merits of the Staten Island Advance were negligible in 1922, and still are. One notable exception is the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, which has vastly im proved since Newhouse picked it up for $6,250,000 in 1955. The directly responsi ble party, however, is not Sam, but Pub lisher Richard H. Amberg, whom Newhouse sent down from Syracuse.
A man with Chamber of Commerce en thusiasms, Amberg took over a paper that, in his words, was a "bowl of Jell-0," and gave it both form and a vivid personality. Today, the once loftily global-minded Post-Dispatch is fully aware that it has a home town competitor.
Fact is, Monopolist Sam Newhouse has probably done journalism more good than harm. Along with his intrusion into a city, for example, goes the pledge, implied but never yet broken, that the papers he buys will stay alive -- and healthy. "When I bought the Advance," says Newhouse, "there were two papers in Staten Island, five in Queens. Now the only papers in those places are the three that I own. I've got more circulation around New York--765,000--than the New York Times. Harrisburg and Syracuse were sick papers--they would have folded. Newark was in bankruptcy. St. Louis was offered to Ridder and to Jack Knight [of the Knight newspaper group], and they turned it down. If I hadn't bought it, St. Louis would be a one-newspaper town. What is the measure of what is good for the newspaper business?"
The Capitalist. Long years of experience, together with some coaching from the public-relations firm he hired after buying Portland, have taught Newhouse to project a better image in public. But he does not understand his antagonists. He is basically an uncomplicated man, whose reasons for acquiring new properties can sometimes sound whimsical ("I was attracted to it"). He bought Conde Nast mostly as a 35th wedding anniversary present for his wife Mitzi, who attended New York's Parsons School of Design and lives in a whirl of high fashion. "Sam Newhouse never pretended to be a public benefactor," says Phil Hochstein. "He doesn't claim to be with the people. He's a capitalist." Brother Ted has said that Newhouse's business could just as easily have been shoe factories, and in confessional moments Sam agrees.
Capitalist Newhouse rules his barony with deceptive informality. He has no office in any of his plants; that function is filled by a thick briefcase packed with what Newhouse calls "problems"--unfinished business. He keeps track of his assorted properties by periodic visits, and since there are so many properties, Newhouse by necessity leads a peripatetic life. Even in his own news rooms, Sam Newhouse wears the cloak of anonymity. Says Clarence Hanson Jr., publisher of the Birmingham News: "If he walked through the building this afternoon, he wouldn't be known to more than eight or ten people."
His day, when he is home in Manhattan, begins at 7:45, when he steps into his 1959 Cadillac limousine. "Long Island City, John," he says to his chauffeur, or "Jamaica, John"--and off they go. There is little variance to his rounds. Mondays and Tuesdays are spent in and around his various New York fiefs, with one lunch reserved for Iva Patcevitch, president of Conde Nast; Tuesdays take Sam to Syracuse by overnight train, and home again by air on Wednesdays; every other Thursday he takes a plane to St. Louis; every other Friday a plane to Harrisburg.
Casual as the routine may seem, it is by no means perfunctory. "I remember the first time he came to Portland," says Oregonian Managing Editor Robert C. Notson. "I made a statement about our circulation in Clark County, Wash. Newhouse asked me for the exact figures. As I stalled for time, he said, 'Never mind. Here's what the facts are.' And recited them out of his head." In Syracuse, if the weather is good, Newhouse walks through the heart of town, attended by respectful aides, as he makes his way from the Her aid-Journal to the Post-Standard. "How is retail business going?" he asks. "What is being., built on that site over there? That vacant store--what kind of business moved out?" By the time he enters the Post-Standard building, Newhouse has deftly and accurately taken the city's business pulse.
Not Gregarious. Newhouse has long since lost interest in accumulating wealth. The $350,000 annual salary that he pays himself could be met solely by the profits of his first paper, the Staten Island Advance (circ. 52,120). And, as is the case with so many wealthy men, Newhouse's tastes are not extravagant. Besides the Park Avenue apartment, whose gold-and-beige decor has been described as "nouveau-avfesome," he owns "Greenlands," a comfortable country house on 140 acres in Harbourton, N.J., where he takes pleasure in informing first-time visitors that the father of the previous owner of the estate invented the flush toilet. The years have treated him kindly. His curly hair is running to grey, but his pink face is unlined and glowing with health. He walks briskly, like a man 15 years his junior. He watches his weight ("Our family has a tendency to blow up"): steaks, fruits and nonfattening desserts dominate his diet, but he is unmindful of the caloric content of Scotch on the rocks.
Sometimes he plays nine holes of golf at the Green Acres Country Club near Harbourton--but usually alone, because companions upset him and throw him off his game. The Newhouses are inveterate Broadway first nighters, and, in season, they go to the opera every Monday. Although Mitzi schedules three or four social evenings a month, her husband is not gregarious. One of his closest friends is Gossip Columnist Leonard Lyons--but Lyons is under gentle order never to mention Newhouse in print.
But diffident as he is, behind a facade of poised and meticulous politeness Sam Newhouse does not quite conceal an oversupply of nervous energy. He characteristically sits on the edge of a chair; and he has the attitude of a man who is just about to dash for a train. He is a chronic door opener and reacher-for-the-check. He generally keeps several $100 bills in his wallet so that he can pay cash for the dinner tab wherever he eats.
Once a year the Newhouses fly to Europe, where Mitzi, in her new capacity as wife of the proprietor of Conde Nast, makes the rounds of the fashion houses and takes a certain satisfaction in the fact that the arbiters of style now employ models in her size (which is 3). Within three weeks her husband is bored, and they go home.
The Habit. Newhouse himself has difficulty articulating his purpose in life. He just goes on buying newspapers, simply because that is what he has been doing most of his life. Whatever his motives, the pyramid he built is in no danger of demolition. To perpetuate it, Newhouse established a charitable foundation in 1945 whose ten shares of voting stock will go equally, on his death, to his two sons. "I'm very hardboiled about the boys," Newhouse says. "I've built this thing up and I'm not going to let it go to pieces."
That at least seems certain. A chronic insomniac, who props his head on three down pillows, Newhouse spends the dark hours looking back over 40 years and ahead to however many years are left. "I just toss and wonder what paper I'll buy tomorrow," he says. "I'm not tired. But the nights are awfully long."
*Second biggest deal: in 1959, Chicago Sun-Times Publisher Marshall Field Jr. paid $24,064,650 for the Chicago Daily News. Newhouse actually paid $43,500,000 for New Orleans ($1,500,000 in brokers' fees), but since the deal included $10,500,000 in negotiable U.S. Government securities owned by the papers, his net cost was $33 million.
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