Nothing could prepare Kim France, the founding editor of Lucky magazine, for the luxe life of a Condé Nast editor-in-chief.
“The perks were really something,” said France, who launched the publication in 2000 and ran it until 2010. “It was like having your entire life shift into a completely different dimension.”
Among the benefits: weekly flower deliveries, a hefty clothing allowance, a driver at her disposal 24/7, diamonds for the borrowing and — one of France’s favorite perks — a mini fridge in her office that a staffer stocked weekly with her favorite libations and snacks, all on the company tab.
In the glory days, Condé even gifted its top editors interest-free home loans, which sources say had to be paid off within 10 years.
“It was unbelievably generous on Si Newhouse’s part to do that for editors,” said France of the Condé honcho, who passed away in 2017. (His family still owns and oversees the company.). France used a loan from her then-employer to purchase a four-story brownstone in Carroll Gardens. “That changed my life,” she told The Post.
But all good things must come to an end. And with the flush days of glossies going down the drain, so too are editors’ cushy perks. While Anna Wintour, the top editor of Vogue, still revels in the subsidized luxe life — including, reportedly, daily hair and makeup styling at her West Village townhouse — it is far from the norm for the new, younger crop of post-recession EICs.
Instead, they are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars less and get around town in Ubers, or — gasp — even via the subway. (The Post’s Keith Kelly reported that Vanity Fair’s new EIC, Radhika Jones, is commanding a $500,000 salary, while her predecessor, Graydon Carter, earned $2 million.)
It’s all part of a larger print industry collapse that has seen once venerable titles, such as Lucky, Self and Details, fold or move to digital-only. According to a 2017 report, the ad buying firm Magna predicted a print advertising decline of around 13 percent in 2018.
The June/July issue of Glamour is said, according to multiple sources, to have sold around 20,000 newsstand copies; in 2010, Glamour averaged more than half a million monthly. With the industry struggling to stay afloat, publishers are cutting back on the big names, big salaries and big extras.
“It’s all mythology now,” said Lesley Jane Seymour, who was the editor-in-chief of More magazine from 2008 to 2016 and, before that, of Marie Claire.
“I don’t think anyone expects perks of any kind any[more]. The whole thing is over,” Seymour said of magazines’ high times. “It’s a bygone era.”
Back in the 1980s and ’90s and the early aughts, there was no industry more glamorous than the magazine world.
Former Seventeen editor-in-chief Ann Shoket (2007-2014) recalls a story she heard from that publication’s former editor Midge Richardson, who was at the helm from 1975 to 1993.
“She told me she used to take [then-publisher] Walter Annenberg’s private plane to Ibiza for a fitness shoot,” Shoket said, laughing. “Not for a cover shoot. Not for a giant [fashion story]. But for a fitness shoot.”
Tina Brown, the former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor, said when she was first brought to Condé to work at Vanity Fair in 1983, she was encouraged to dine with the rich and fabulous on the company dime.
“The editorial director, Alexander Liberman, called me up and said, ‘My dear, I’m very concerned. I heard you had lunch at the Four Seasons.’ I said, ‘Yes, I did. Is that all right?’ He said, ‘It’s quite all right That’s where you were supposed to go for lunch. But I hear you were having lunch in the upstairs gallery. You can’t possibly think of having lunch in the upstairs gallery! You’ll be in Siberia there. I will call the Four Seasons and make sure that you are always seated in the booth,’ ” she recalled.
One high-profile editor-in-chief, who left her post a few years ago and asked to remain anonymous, said her publishing house gave her a car service plus two car leases (she typically got a BMW or Audi) and spots in a Manhattan parking garage — in addition to a hefty salary and performance bonuses.
Five-figure clothing allowances for top editors and fashion editors were de rigueur, as was company-provided hair and makeup for public events, and even some internal ones.
“At Condé, there was a monthly meeting called ‘print order’ if you were an editor-in-chief. It’s when you showed the entire magazine to all the bosses, page by page,” said France. “It was a big, stressful meeting and everyone always wanted to look their best . . . Every female editor-in-chief [except me] used to get hair and makeup before their print order.”
And perks weren’t just reserved for top-tier employees.
“When I was at Condé [in the ’80s and ’90s], if you ate lunch at your desk — everybody from the lowliest assistants all the way to the top — you could expense it,” said Seymour, who said that policy is long gone. “We used to say we were having lunch on Uncle Si.”
France made sure to spread the wealth during the holidays.
“Everyone on my staff got a $100 gift card from Barney’s at Christmas,” said France. “When my editors had babies, I would give them [each] a Marc by Marc Jacobs diaper bag. They easily cost $500.” All of these gifts were expensed to the company, a practice France said Condé had banished by the time she left in 2010.
Former Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Kate White, who headed that mag from 1998 to 2012, said she’d thank hard-working staffers with nice dinners.
“When we wanted to reward people’s great efforts, we would treat them to dinner with their significant others,” White recalled.
Brandon Holley, another former editor-in-chief of Lucky (2010 to 2013), started out at Condé in the late ’90s as a senior editor at GQ. She recalled the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Art Cooper, presenting her with a pair of Manolo Blahnik heels and a Prada bag — on Condé’s tab.
“It was because I had done a good story,” Holley said.
Seymour added that Hearst, which publishes such magazines as Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire and Seventeen, would often give female editors high-end jewelry as gifts.
“You would get earrings — usually precious stones,” she said. “Looking back, it was inappropriate. No man would have taken it. They would have said, ‘Give me $5,000 and I’ll put it away and send my kid to college or put it in my 401k,’ and the girls were like, ‘Oh, you love me, it’s so great.’
“It got Hearst off cheaply because if they gave you that instead of a raise, they didn’t have to give you more money the next year.”
Editors interviewed for this story said that the publishing companies’ generosity could sometimes be taken advantage of.
“There was something called the ‘scouting trip’ and that was something that could be interpreted very loosely,” said France.
“You could say you were going to London just to . . . look at clothes and the street style and figure out story ideas” — and basically use it as a free vacation. “I was not so abusive, but I know people were,” she added.
The anonymous editor-in-chief recalls an extremely high catering bill for a photo shoot produced by her team.
“It turned out, as part of the catering, the photographer had ordered a carving station,” she said. “There was an attitude of: ‘Hey, I can spend money this way because the company spends money this way.’ ”
Indeed, most every editor interviewed said their expenses were never denied.
“I paid for my own dry cleaning, but I probably could have gotten away with not paying for it,” said France. “If expenses came through from an editor-in-chief, they were very rarely questioned.”
For European fashion shows, when Seymour was EIC of Marie Claire, Hearst would put her and other editors up at the fanciest of hotels.
“We all stayed at the Four Seasons, the Bulgari, and got the top rooms,” she said.
Within Condé, there seemed to be at least two tiers of editors, with those at the top — likely Wintour and Carter — outranking those at smaller magazines.
While editors like Carter famously had their town cars idling outside of the office at all hours, France said her hired driver took other jobs in between her scheduled rides: “It wasn’t like I had him on retainer.”
But the fact that she had a private driver, in and of itself, was vital, as much for convenience as image.
“It was all competitive. You couldn’t run a fancy magazine and not stay at a fancy hotel. It was all the snobbery,” Seymour said. “It was stupid. [But] that’s what the fashion business is all about — it’s keeping up.”
Seymour added that Condé even paid for top editors’ children and nannies to travel with them for the international shows.
“It was a culture that really prized families,” said one former Condé editor-in-chief who asked to remain anonymous, adding that those with children would be given higher pay. “Si, when he determined an editor-in-chief’s salary, he considered if they had children. In a way, there was coverage of [private school and childcare].”
Nowadays, few editors remain from the golden era: only Anna Wintour, Glenda Bailey at Harper’s Bazaar and the New Yorker’s David Remnick. In recent years, some of the industry’s most influential, including Graydon Carter, Glamour’s Cindi Leive, Allure’s Linda Wells and Elle’s Robbie Myers, have all been replaced by younger — and cheaper — talent.
Remarkably, Glamour was turned over to Samantha Barry, 37, the former head of social media for CNN who had never even worked at a magazine before being named EIC in January.
“The publishers are hiring editors who are less experienced. They are kids [who] don’t expect much. [Publishers] are giving them tiny salaries . . . [The EIC position] doesn’t come with the visibility or authority [of the past]. I don’t even know who’s running Vanity Fair now,” said Seymour of Jones, 45, a former New York Times staffer who took over Vanity Fair from Carter in December.
One insider said the home loans of yesteryear were “a Si thing” and no longer part of the Condé package. Another well-placed source said publishing houses are “studying Travel & Entertainment expenses a lot more closely than they used to,” adding that some editors-in-chief are even losing their multiple assistants and plush offices.
“The cars we would rent [to get around during photo] shoots would be convertible BMWs,” said style expert Mary Alice Stephenson, who worked at Vogue and as Harper’s Bazaar’s fashion director in the ’90s and 2000s. “Whereas today, they would be Honda Civics.”
Current magazine staffers may look longingly to the decadent days of years past, but editors say the benefits were more than well-deserved.
“The perks sound fantastical, but I don’t think it was all that different than men and women who run massive companies,” said Holley. “We weren’t little fashion editors . . . Most of us were really hard-working executives in really high heels.”
Read an expanded version of this story at NYPost.com
