use our diplomacy and our military and our ideals to solve these problems in the world, chaos that followed the cold war. it was a one off. and in retrospect it was maybe high water mark of the post cold warred it rather than beginning of a new era. >> our man. to watchful even visit our web site. >> a very warm welcome to first lecture of general society labor, literature and landmark lecture series. i am karen taylor program director of the general society. the lek tire are supported in py public funds from new york city

department was cultural affairs. for those who are less familiar, how many you here is this your first visit. okay, a warm welcome. also welcome back to previous attendees. founded in 1785 by 22 artisans, today our 234-year-old organization continues to serve the people of city of new york. we do this through our cultural and educational programs. our lecture series. our general society library. celebrating 200 years next year. your tuition-free mechanics instituted. and john m mofman law collection

up stairs. you find more information on the blue and white post card on your seat. we have such a wonderful start to this year's le lockture seasn -- lecture season. tonight, susan renald, her biography of conde nast. i want to mention. you have an opportunity to purchase this book, it is stunning cover. later, be aware you have this opportunity, i am sure susan would be happy to sign the book for you. i want to mention c-span are also filming this talk tonight.

this program will also be rebroadcast on book tv. and when we do get to the q&a, i want to remind you, if you ask a question, you have an opportunity to be featured on book tv. born and raised in the united states, mrs. renald has lived in england for over 25 years, and come over this week to talk about her book. she is arthur of a dangerous woman. hitler's art thief, heretic queen, the pirate queen, and shakespear's daughter. my ples ire to introduce to you susan ronald. [applause] >> thank you, i just hope our techial problems are at a end. you may see dotteds o bahtses os

on the bottom, i decided to write about conde nast, really iz tend to write about power and greed. all of the people i have written about before, there is another book not on here, have been powerful people, some have been greedy, almost all had some sort of a brush with the law. but after a dangerous woman. about florence gold who was married who youngest son of jay gould. i decided having written about someone who is powerful, and also banker to herman by the end of the war never was tried for her deeds. i needed to cleanse myself. i wanted to write about a really good person. so i told this to my agent, and high publisher they looked at

me, they say you write about lower and greed. my agent suggested that i look at publishing industry. i said are there any good guys in publishing? he was right. i decided i will write a book about one of the most powerful people at the turn was century to world war ii. conde nast. ...

he settled in st. louis and this lovely home. he was married three times and had 15 children. it doesn't go with the term banker, but go with me on this. he left several million dollars to his children. it's currently still on the outskirts mostly as a wedding venue today that his mother only inherited 300,000 by the time the money came down to her. now his grandfather was born in

germany and emigrated to the united states as a teacher but was always a sort of depressing chap, very serious. but he converted and became known as the father german methodism in america. excuse me, north america. his eldest son was a man who wanted to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but the family didn't have any so he decided that he was going to go off to germany as the american console to germany and buy himself a uniform so he could hobnob with all of the royals. his father was absolutely beside himself and william fell on very hard times because he also stole money from american citizens while he was there. he left very quickly under a cloud and took a number of our

jobs and met up with esther in new york city. she was the oldest son and a brother who was a great pianist but he grew up essentially without a father. at the age of three, william decided he was going back to make his fortune, actually like hard work for suckers said he was the man of the family with two younger sisters as well. now for the turn of the 20th century they were extremely independent. things got pretty tough in the end and the only member of the family that stayed close to him

was his younger sister. now franny was actually quite a gal herself and married into money. she loved fine things in this stylish in her own way and consider this picture is taken in the uk and see that she did like to look nice. she married into the family of proctor and gamble said she decided she would marry to get her sons into an american college that would send them on their way.

here he is as he graduated and he was a very handsome young m man. his friend, bob colyer was to head to the library. he went on for a year to europe, england, oxford, came back and his father said i'm going to give you the weekly because of his failing. they had something like a thousand dollars worth of advertising at the time. they went down to accept a 12-dollar a week job, which he did considering he was the man of the family at that point.

he was an innovator and thought about making it less of a generalized magazine that with him saying we could really sell advertising if we decide that we are going to create special issues. this is the issue that started at the gibson girls going in terms of the magazine. he overpaid gibbous and by the way double of what he would normally get in the ladies home journal so he could have them free period two years and that is something that you learned about oslo. while collier was into navigation, his great friend was orville wright who is on the right side here and together, they set up the first ever

national magazine company that had its own sales network in every city across america. to sell magazines, you have to make sure your customer wanted to read the ad that may be in it and that your advertiser had to feel he wasn't making his money -- wasting his money advertising and the you were ethical. this is the era of the medicines almost every newspaper decided to give something special. i don't think i would want any swamp route, i don't know about you but that's pretty bad. this product claimed that it could kill absolutely anything. so he joined with believe it or not, ladies home journal to stop the medicine advertising.

they believed it was killing americans. this is a few other of the ads of the time you could have your diabetes cured which blow strengtstrengthen the system and decreases sugar and prevents diabetic shock. wonderful. we won't go to these products, now will we. you wouldn't believe it or not but it was with another of the people selling the serials of the medicine. here's to another year of health. while collier decided he was going to sue and he did and he one. so he learned a great deal with his relation ship and not only

that, but bob introduced him. they had their offices for many years but they came across america at the behest of mark e. de la vega at which his friend established the lawyers and clarice was part of the new york 400. by now he was a wealthy man by 1902 when he married her he was earning about $40,000 a year. the only person in america earning more at that time was theodore roosevelt as president. he earned 50,000. so, she decided to she loved collier that he didn't love her so she was a great second for the point of view he wasn't after her money. he understood she held the

handle as far as society was concerned. the only problem is that the society was chained thing. when men were changing, they wanted to become an. after two years of marriage where she had two children, she decided she was going to go off to paris and become a soprano. her three sisters lived there as well. one of them had been supported the artist as a moneymaker.

that isn't very good for a marriage obviously. in 1904 he decided he was going to set up on his own. yes, bob collier was paying him 40,000 a year in those days was close to a million dollars. but essentially, he decided he was going to take a plunge into women's fashion. you might say why women's fashion, he or he had a national magazine and you're starting to go into the markets. he decided women's fashion was going to be the key to the chain being rolled in and. up until now, the fashion in terms of and pattern into distinct shortcomings. all patterns were giveaways and second was even more incredible

in the fact that there was only one size and he decided a new woman has many sizes. i'm going to empower women without money to make their own clothing in all the sizes they come in and they should discard their corsets, enjoying life and be women. and of course he was right. he ended up allowing ladies home journal to own label his home patterns so this was his first company. due to a number of circumstances he ended up leaving in 1906. she decided she wanted to stay on and so they picked up the

children and clarice decided she would come home at 1909 he bought vogue and she disappeared again for six months. nobody in the family knows why, but she did. he was lucky enough. he had set it up very early on and hired a lady at that point as a mail clerk on the left. her name is edna. by the time you see her on the right, she would have been the editor in chief for over 50 years and she kept her on obviously. turner's sister had been the editor and she basically left it for a disagreement over some

money. 1912 he bought into more magazines and put them into one, something called house and garden, i think you've heard about one now. some give you cookies home and garden and by 1914, he decided he would really like to set up an international magazine and hire dedicated to a women and women's fashion. unfortunately there's something called world war i which for america it began in 1917. edna comes up and says i've got this wonderful idea i know we are cut off from the fashions because of war but it will get all of the new york 400 vaults and was very scared to call. if clarice doesn't like working and imagine theimagine them wora

charity fashion show. give me a chance and of course she made it a success. it was a done deal but the only problem was it was arranged to be at the ritz carlton in new york and all of the models for all of the fashions previously were tied to the fashion houses of europe. the models were tied to other places and as you can see

fortunately he was making clothes in different sizes because not all of them were models. so apparently at the new york city public library, and i thought that this would be interesting to see come of this upset another gentleman who just bought harper's bazaar and sent his people out to badmouth him as people that wanted to get rid of european fashion and they were only help to support new te new york clothing designers etc.. what happened is the representative arrived in paris during the war with a big fat check for the seamstresses. he lost the first round but wasn't going to give up. come 1915, two things happened. most important was the lunch

with the gentleman that founded the coffeehouse in this buildi building. he was everybody's favorite raconteur and had miles of friends throughout the city. i'm a publisher, not an editor. what do you think i'm getting wrong and he said it's very simple. you have to make it fizzle where every time somebody turns the page, they are actually joining you in a conversation understanding what it is everybody in society where everybody we read about is thinking about. so he decided to hire rank as

the editor for "vanity fair." they had one competitor at the time, hl mencken was the editor, the smart set worth a thousand boneheads. they eventually went out of business, but they had a very friendly rivalry between them. no matter what, it didn't matter. what mattered is talent.

so he hired a girl called dorothy to write captions. the one that caught his eye is brevity is the soul of lingerie. she kept dropping little poems to try to transfer into "vanity fair" and finally he agreed to take her on. he then also wanted to pick on somebody to make the articles more substantial so he brought on a chap in the middle who was one of the funniest people i had read about and i read his own biography and it is absolutely hysterical. he was a harvard graduate and had been the editor and god the job because it was going to be serious. i opened the book with one of the incidents that happened

while they were working there and went on to win an oscar called how to sleep and it is hysterically funny if you can get a hold of it. fresh out of the army in 1919 and came to work he said he was a very good writer. franks wanted to believe him and he had been wounded during the war. he would go on to win for pulitzefourpulitzer prizes and a speechwriter for fdr. so, these were all unknowns but they misbehaved tremendously. and of course ended up getting

fired. it was all because dorothy basically decided she was going to go after broadway producers and ended up rivaling them and so he had wanted to fire her but knew she had to go. he can't export paper from america and decides at the end of the war in 1919 he is going to set up a french vogue said he found the first international magazine publisher in the world. we talked about a few of the staff writers and i'm going to show you a few pictures because of course that is what magazines are all about. his number one photographer is

on the left here and it was 1915 after he lost the first battle. it was a lost only for about ten minutes because he replaced him and it was george who took the first pictures of movement. he was followed by edward and then there was the model turned photographer and during the second world war they come back onto the pictures in a minute.

her daughter who is modeling it and is so small nobody but a child could fit into it. they played with shadows and light in a way that is more akin to what we are used to today but he is the one that predated the celebrity photograph. here we have gloria swanson, charlie chaplin, a dow and fred astaire, who by the way he saved from starvation giving him his first $10 when he came to

america in the 1920s, and this is cecil's specialty. he would make people of a certain weight looks fit in here is how he changed this into somebody quite beautiful. but then again also friendly with the british aristocracy and when it came time for the abdication of edward the eighth he took the pictures and of course asked to be an employee. the only pictures to appear were these taken by lee miller. on the right is what happened

when she walked into. believe it or not, jack dempsey, all these people wrote for him. they wanted something special to get to the reader. this is eduardo, one of his famous covers. they were very light touches for one of the models that he drew. she did some of the more fanciful covers and the other thing that happened with the

photography is you never doubted with any picture was trying to sell you. so here we have modeling a hat. if you want to buy any kind of cosmetics you have to have the gold compact and the jewelry to go with it. it wasn't unusual to see black people on the covers of vogue in the 1930s. you always knew what every issue was going to sell and then there came a fresh face, carl wife as she was known at the time. she arrived and was a complete breath of fresh air.

her only claim to fame is that her brother worked for william randolph hearst. little did she know that would mean something several years later about her husband was very much into sports and she was also very much into the idea that women could do anything and go anywhere and be anything. so the covers became more. you had women doing sports, riding camels, going skiing, doing all kinds of activities but never forgot his core business which was selling clothing. you could look at the cover and know they are trying to sell me jewelry.

the customer and the reader always knew what they were doing. the advertiser newspaper advertising in an issue that meant something to people. and meanwhile they were really like the others that there were rumors. i don't know about frank one way or another but i know that wilson was one of the editors to the "vanity fair" for a very brief period of time. i prefer to call him a confirmed bachelor. on the other hand, he loved women anbymany and was always sa pretty woman on his arm after they split up. in the meantime in the 1920s

she moved to park avenue and their daughter became the hostess many of the famous parties and of course moved to 1040 park as a person that decorated the apartment. that's where the most famous parties took place. you think of her dancing with groucho marx. i can't imagine him dancing but anyway that is the sort of thing anybody who is in the news or a trendsetter was allowed into the party were invited into the party. frequently they didn't even know him to begin with. that was the case with charles lindbergh as an example he returned and she decided to throw a party for his owner and ended up having to rescue him but that is a whole other story.

this is the famous apartment a back drop in "vanity fair." i apologize for the quality of the pictures. it gives you an idea of what it was like. these appeared in various "vanity fair" magazine and guess what happen, suddenly in 1925 and he decides to come up with something called the new yorker so she gets worried about "vanity fair" but it turns out he decided to work with harold and when i say that he was the first to think of a lot of things, he was a pioneer in all new technologies and had the best printing plant in the united states in greenwich connecticut and didn't deal with the new yorker.

it was a very successful relationship for many years. the two magazines were a part of the publications and so as you can see they also had a stylish and this is in 1928, 29 when she was still the hostess. she introduced him to this man on the right who was a white russian who had come over to the states and started out as a runner on wall street and was always very fashionable and insisted you will love this man. he is just like you. he thinks in numbers and sees them as pictures.

he understands how important it is to have a balance sheet that works and all of the covers that work to understand what is attracting people and which ones don't attract people. i promise you he is a great guy. they met but he was thinking of something else. he had fallen in love with a woman the same age as his father did it come daughter, leslie foster is facing us. he was afraid people would make fun of him and she was afraid people would think some of them. they were a generation apart, but at the end of the day, they truly, truly loved each other ld they got married right before the crash. this is a picture of them on honeymoon and he was so nervous

he invited the children to join them on honeymoon. he agreed to hire because he was thinking in terms of the future. i need somebody that is reliable and can take over for me. sorry about this but it is a bad shot i apologize. but as the house they bought together on long island and that is the sun room that overlooks the sound. one of the main people that helped me on this book. these two here they look like bankers. they are. the one on the left some of you may have heard of him and some not. on the right is harrison

williams. owning the largest power generation company in the united states and catchings was the chairman of gordon sacks and together they decided in 1928 that they were going to start telling people whose companies they wanted to acquire once the crash came they should work themselves up with that. you have to trust the experts into these men were his friends and he trusted them and they voted him -- loaded him up with too much debt and he has publications that were actually taken over by them. they tried to get him out of the company and they might have succeeded had it not been for edna because they wanted to make her in charge of the company. not only would she not take the

job that she would quit and make sure all of the staff would quit as well so he was left in place that had to finbut had to find p him out with a debt. they were put on more o one of e little flooding that also said anybody that wants to play this, so i can make a profit. by now, he's really getting upset and approached joe kennedy to buy it. joe said no and asked his good friend everybody in america said no. at the same time, karen l. decided she's going to go back to harper's bazaar which of course was a terrible blow.

he never forgave her and she's the only person who did him wrong who we never forgave but you can see there's a very famous new yorker at harper's bazaar talking to care now and by now her brother is a general manager of the company's as if that were not bad enough he gets prostate cancer and has a heart attack. i will get off of this slide and basically in such poor health he doesn't know what he's going to do and there's a lady that he meets a cocktail party still married to leslie by now he's decided she's trying to decide if he's going to ruin this young woman's life she won't be able to have any more children, he

isn't quite sure what he's going to do about it and then this lady comes into his life. anybody know who she is? at the time she was claire booth brokaw. he met her at a cocktail party at this it is frequently the case that meet mrs. chase so she does. mrs. chase says i'm off to europe for the summer. come back in september and i will see if i can hire you. she did the most amazing things i've ever seen of her. she decided since he was away and since edna was away, she was as she put it, lose her way into vogue. she reported for work and claimed she was the new girl and sodomy of this stuff on her desk and she started and by the time that edna came back it was too

late to fire her so she went from bath to become the managing director of "vanity fair" eventually, but all within three years. there were a lot of rumors that he was enamored with her and was going to leave his wife for her and everything else and she would never have married him anyway. but conde besides very painfully to tell his wife, leslie, she has to go and marry somebody else. he had arranged for her to meet a gentleman who was a banker in england and they did fall in love and they did get married but as rex's children said to me, leslie and conde remained entirely devoted to each other for the rest of his life. they had two children together and of course they were very happy.

conde kept leslie in new york within so she could go to an american school. ultimately it was very difficult for big leslie as they called her in the family, to keep leslie in england at the time. meanwhile, claire decides she's going to marry henry luce, beneath the picture was before the picture on the right it wasn't a happy unit. i put this in for the fun of it because dorothy parker was such a breath of fresh air. invariably kind to her, dorothy said where does she find them. a gentleman in england who owned

a variety of women's magazines and at the time, the daily telegraph. the deal that they did was a handshake deal. nobody was to know the cameras have bailed them out. he still stayed in charge of all of his magazines. i don't know anywhere today that that would happen. so now she's in charge of "vanity fair" and was a staunch republican as some of you may recall. she decides as the election is coming up, she's going to prune fdr because that's the deal is a terrible thing and he is a terrible man. that didn't really play out very well because naturally, fdr was very popular with the people and so the subscription started to

fall off, people were not buying it as much on the newsstand and this continued through 1936. finally what happened, helen morgan took over very briefly is the managing director and he had a brief affair with her and she wrote about him in the buck and it would have been upset to find out she was publicizing their sex life because it is a very quiet and very shy man and he didn't want his private life to be talked about in public. this is the last issue of "vanity fair" in 1936. helen brown went on to write a love folot for esquire and becaa sort of biographer.

they were both broken. it was their love affair with his work that had created "vanity fair" and they were so upset that they were never going to be the same. the prediction for what they were going to be doing to europe and the world were entirely wrong and hitler invades the west in 1939 and by june of 1940 they have taken over paris. conde is now an old man in many ways. his heart has been broken trying to save his company. he had several heart attacks but he's kept secret.

nobody knew anything except his secretary and his daughter and his butler. on where all theow he's faced people he hired in france, many of whom are close friends were now a danger. he brought as many of them to safety as he could. on the right-hand side, he brought over the editor at vogue and there he is pictured with lee miller and the fashion editor put into a french concentration camp and there is a lot in the book about how she desperately tried to save people and how he'd spent any hash that he had in sending care packages to the british as well including

at that point to his wife. he buys in 1942 of heart failure essentially and there is a very touching story had not wrote about the last days within which i do include in the book. he died virtually without any money. his first wife had an apartment on east 72nd street which he bought for her outright they worked together for the benefit of the grandchildren and he was always wonderful to her and very generous. he was the only member of the team who came out on top and sold his shares on the eve of the eighth right before the stock market crash. so, here we have the furniture,

personal affects up for auction and very sadly even the family had an option they were not allowed. who i mentioned before as the new chief executive of the magazine empire he was very active in hollywood and here he is pictured on the left with some of his good friend. you've got james stewart and eventually cut he married in 1963 and they stayed. he was cut from the same cloth and whenever he hired people that he felt were right for the job as opposed to famous but she

realized she had to sell the magazine empire. he was given the opportunity to find an american buyer and opted for the newhouse family so of course they are still in charge and he brings forward alex lieberman and of course the coach to get back on. now hear that two of them look very happy and i think this picture characterizes the relationship. of course after this, we have tina brown who came into effect this week resurrects "vanity fair" and 84 and did a great job until 1992. of course the lady on the right

needs no introduction to new york even though she is british. the one who really made "vanity fair" every song to sing was definitely carter. he again made "vanity fair" what it had been originally, in other words it wasn't that he would invite stars to the party at the outskirts. it's that they have to be at the party or they were not stars. it's a big difference in anybody that red "vanity fair" was about to go into that world. they wrote a fabulous article about the collection that i wrote about. david important journalism and any different ways.

that's what "vanity fair" was all about. he was a very shy man with fairly modest beginnings who brought business ethics to america and the can-do attitude to europe and european style to new york. ' ladies and gentlemen please wait for the microphone to get to you if you ask your questions we can record it. speak clearly and directly into the microphone. thank you.

>> somebody must have a question. the gentlemen here. >> who currently has the apartment at 1040? on long island and the apartment at 1040 martin, do you know? >> i asked leslie who owns the house now and she didn't know that i can tell you what happened it's a very sad story. it was an apartment with an enclosed balcony all around, magnificent. it couldn't be sold. after five years of the 1948, it

was divided into three separate apartments and no longer duplex. she used to go there often with her father to paint because of the fantastic lighting and her daughter used to dance or ballet on the dance floor. the best part is also in the book but it didn't remain. who owns those at the village or was it a private property? >> i believe the town asked them to remain in place and they have taken over the care and maintenance.

the printing plant was the most extraordinary place i think 400 acres originally that had been and they were printing for about 25 of america's most important magazines at the time. it was sold after the newhouse was boss -- bought. it would have been "vanity fair" if it hadn't gone that way already, but i am almost certain that it's the city of greenwich that owns them. >> what does one of the stories that you heard that most surprised you in your research for the book?

>> i think it was a story about leslie and conde and why they decided to divorce. i had a bizarre connection with this side of the family that worked for many years and we gave up banking by the way in 2005 so we were not part of that. i knew that he was this character. unfortunately, what was so good is that the half-brothers leslie and david gave me access to their father's binary about when he had met leslie and how he was

afraid he was falling in love with a married woman and she was afraid she might be falling in love with him, but they hadn't actually realized that he had sent her to england to meet him on purpose. they always say if you love somebody a lot you have to be willing to let them go. in conde's case he wasn't only willing to let her go, but he felt that was the only way she could have a life. he was afraid if she married an old man com man, yes they love h other but frankly, it wasn't a good life for her. and it was his selflessness on top of the fact that he was this ethical person that made me say i wish that i had known him. there are so few people around like this.

this lady here in the front. can you tell us about the houses and what they are doing? >> did everybody here the question? she asked if i could tell about the new houses and what they are doing. the very short answer is no simply because when i was being vetted and asked whether or not i was a fifth person to go into their archives, they asked me one question, who are you writing about and i 67. are you going to be writing about anybody that is living and at the time, newhouse was still alive and i said i like writing about people. [laughter] so i specifically state away

from the new houses because people didn't just wanted to end with the fact of conde dieting. you understood in the book of the empire there are an awful lot of changes at all of the publications. obviously the world is spinning at such a greaup such a great rt the print magazines are for people to make any kind of a profit on. but, when you are a privately held company like the advanced publications, it is hard for anybody outside to understand.

to keep all of the magazines in print whether they will succeed, i don't know. it is a bewildering world of the media right now and i think that if conde were alive today, he would be totally beside himself. does that help? okay, good. >> at the peak of the empire, what was the publication? in terms of the readership and buying. >> at the peak of the empire it was probably around 5 million. but you have to understand that in that, you have to officers

that have been out on the tables when people are in the waiting rooms and what have you. so you probably multiply that by five. thank you. thank you, everybody. [applause] >> [inaudible] on occasion like this we like to

makthey liketo make a presentatn introduces the executive director. thank you for your very thorough research. for the participation in the general society, labor, literature and landmark lecture series. [applause]

i'm sure you will find somethi something. somebody else also known in america i've gone back to the dark side. sorry. [laughter] it's called the ambassador and it's about joseph kennedy, ambassador to britain in 1938 to 1940. i want to remind you of the book is for sale and i hope you will also join us for a glass of wine and i'm sure susan will be happy to answer more questions.

author and political columnist michele offers her thoughts on u.s. immigration policy.