Bookkeeper

By Donald Morrison

THE MAN WHO WAS VOGUE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CONDE NAST by Caroline Seebohm Viking; 390 pages; $18.95

There was an air of mystery about him, a hint of longings and disappointments beneath the veneer of privilege. It may have been the company he kept, a circle that embraced society matrons and jazz musicians but few people he could call friends. It may have been the parties, those lavish buffets for 600 or so at his 30-room Park Avenue penthouse or his vast Long Island estate, functions at which he never seemed quite at ease. During the 1920s and '30s, when his magazines--Vogue, Vanity Fair, House & Garden--were setting standards of taste and fashion for a newly assertive America, Conde Nast was one of the most elegant figures of the age.

As described in this sturdy biography by Caroline Seebohm, a Vogue contributor who was given access to company files, Nast was not quite what he seemed. He was a parvenu from the provinces, raised in St. Louis, the second son of a ne'er-do-well speculator. Through a Georgetown University classmate, he landed a job at Collier's Weekly, and by 1909 had learned enough about publishing to buy an obscure high-society weekly journal. He improved everything--the paper, the fashion drawings, the photography, the writing--and within a decade Vogue became the nation's most influential, and most lucrative, arbiter of fashion. In 1913 Nast launched Vanity Fair, a witty, literary monthly. He hired a succession of bright young women editors (Clare Boothe Luce, Helen Lawrenson, Millicent Fenwick, Marya Marines) and gave them carte blanche.

A wise move. Nast knew almost nothing about fashion. "Until the day he died, he could not tell you why a certain model was good or bad," writes Seebohm. "But he was a connoisseur of women. His respect for them as colleagues was topped only by his appreciation of them as romantic inspiration."

Indeed, Nast sensed before most other men that American women were growing serious about taking care of themselves. (There were no beauty parlors in Muncie, Ind., in 1900, the sociologist Lynds found; by 1928 there were seven.) Nast also hit upon the heretical notion that a publication could prosper by appealing to a small, select audience. If he seemed aloof and distracted as he moved through the shoals and eddies of cafe society, it may have been because he was, at heart, a maker of magazines. He pioneered foreign editions (the British, French and German versions of Vogue, known round the office as Brogue, Frog and Grog), introduced color photography and invented the "bleed" (borderless) page. He spent his idle hours analyzing advertising and circulation figures. Nast once confessed: "I am merely a glorified bookkeeper."

To her credit, Seebohm is informative but not leering about the sadder side of Nast's life (two marriages, two divorces, gossip columns full of pointless trysts), putting her focus on his rise to prominence as a publisher. She also chronicles Nast's fall, in 1929, only 2 1/2 years after he had given up his company's stock to a fabulously successful public offering. In 1930 Conde Nast lost control of his magazines. There followed a twelve-year struggle that broke his spirit and his health --but did not, curiously, diminish his dogged devotion to throwing parties. He was on his way to regaining both firm and fortune. Years after his death in 1942, his surviving magazines were sold to the Newhouse newspaper chain, and they continue to prosper. Vanity Fair, which Nast had folded in 1936, will be relaunched by Newhouse early next year. And Nast's name remains synonymous with quality, style, taste and the enduring lesson he taught a generation of American publishers, and American men generally: what women want is to be taken seriously.

-- By Donald Morrison

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