Memoir installment #26

A look back at the Conde Nast holiday lunch

Dear readers: My brain stopped working at some point Tuesday night, and is only now beginning to sputter back to life, so I’m sharing a piece a wrote a while back that maybe you haven’t read. I hope today is a better day for all of us.

---

Back in my former, fancy life as the editor in chief of a Conde Nast fashion magazine, I spent a lot of time putting in command performances. Mostly they had to do with advertisers: lunching with them, accompanying them to black ties at the Waldorf (always the Waldorf), meeting with their offspring to discuss internships, which were always theirs for the asking. But there was one event, this one in-house, that loomed so far above the rest in terms of importance that it wasn’t even fair to put it in a league with the others. You would not dare claim a scheduling conflict: heavy stock save-the-date cards went out via interoffice mail months in advance. Editors whose magazines were based on the west coast flew in for it. I cannot imagine a circumstance, barring labor or death of an immediate family member, that would have prevented anyone on the guest list from showing up. The holiday lunch was that important.

The holiday lunch was held, as it had been for years, at the Four Seasons, in a private dining room off the pool room, right before Si Newhouse, the company’s chairman, flew off to Europe to begin his winter vacation (in Vienna, always, for the opera). Many of the company’s senior executives attended, but it was most notable for being the only time all the editors-in-chief and publishers were in the same room at the same time the entire year, and was therefore employed as an opportunity to let the seating arrangement speak to one’s — and one’s title’s — current standing in the company.

This rendered the event the subject of a great deal of anticipation and fascination — not only among those of us in the room as we all strained to see how we’d made out in comparison to our rivals (and how others had made out in comparison to their rivals) but by the New York media world at large. The Post’s media columnist would always run a postmortem the next day that included enough surprisingly accurate details about what was said and done there to assume that at least one person in attendance had to be leaking choice bits. (At least I always assumed the leaks were multiple — everyone had an interest in making sure Keith Kelly shined his light kindly upon them, and sharing information about the lunch was a pretty low-stakes risk.) Still, the paper always managed to botch the seating chart, so one year, Conde Nast’s PR department started just sending it over so they’d get it right. Which only made sense, really. No other publishing company had a ritual that incited nearly so much fascination and chatter among media watchers.

Lip service would be paid each year by the bosses as to how irrelevant seating at the lunch was, but everyone knew better. How could that be when the boldface editors never failed to get prime spots? And why would there be a large poster board erected at the entrance to the room — comically, I always thought, as there was a place card table rendering it redundant not three yards away — with a diagram of all the tables and its exact seating configuration, if we were we not supposed to take more than passing note of it? In fact, it was tough not to stand there and openly study it, as one might an oversize copy of one’s Oscars office pool.