Don't Quote Me

The Boston Phoenix
June 3 - 10, 1999

[Don't Quote Me]

Mogul-jumping

The biographer of magazine magnate S.I. Newhouse Jr. takes on some powerful media icons. Too bad her case is so weak.

by Dan Kennedy
An author whose book has been panned has two choices: sulk or fight back. Carol Felsenthal, the biographer of Condé Nast magazine mogul S.I. "Si" Newhouse Jr., has chosen the latter course. The result is a slowly unfolding controversy involving the editor of the New York Times Book Review, the dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, and -- peripherally -- Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam.
First, some background. Felsenthal is a Chicago-based writer whose best-known earlier work, a 1993 biography of Washington Post executive-committee chairwoman Katharine Graham, received the usual mix of praise and criticism. It also brought a sulfurous response from Graham herself, in the form of a 15-page letter to Felsenthal's then-publisher, Putnam, alleging errors and demanding corrections. Although Felsenthal contends that Graham's complaints were off-base, the damage was done: publicity efforts for The Katharine Graham Story were cut back, sales suffered, and negotiations to turn the book into a made-for-cable movie were canceled.
Nevertheless, the Graham book did manage to attract the attention of Nan Graham (no relation), then an editor at Viking. Graham approached Felsenthal with the idea of writing about Newhouse, the eccentric, soft-spoken hatchetman who owns magazines such as Vanity Fair, Vogue, and, most famously, the New Yorker.
After interviewing more than 400 people (but not Newhouse, who refused to cooperate), Felsenthal turned in her manuscript to Viking. In the meantime, however, Viking had been bought out by -- yes -- Putnam. Nan Graham had left for Scribner. Thus, Felsenthal was not altogether surprised when the Newhouse book was canceled. According to Felsenthal, Penguin Putnam president Phyllis Grann told Felsenthal's agent, "I love this manuscript, but we can't publish it, because there's a friend of mine on every page." After other major publishing houses passed, the book was finally picked up by Seven Stories, a respected small publisher, which put it out late last year under the title Citizen Newhouse: Portrait of a Media Merchant.
The early word was positive, with the trade magazines Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly giving Citizen Newhouse relatively favorable notices. But on December 20, the book was absolutely hammered by the New York Times Book Review, which -- as Felsenthal is quick to note -- helps set the agenda for book editors across the country. Reviewer Tom Goldstein, dean of the prestigious Columbia Journalism School, called Citizen Newhouse "a rather dull hatchet job," speculated that Grann had concocted the friend-on-every-page excuse so as to spare Felsenthal the awful truth, and closed with a withering, "Let this book be the last of its kind."
Goldstein's was hardly the only pan Felsenthal's book received. The Washington Post didn't like it (a consequence, retorts Felsenthal, of bitterness over the Katharine Graham book); the Washington Times, in a combination interview/review, was largely unimpressed; and the New York Observer, where bashing Newhouse and Condé Nast are favorite sports, blasted Citizen Newhouse and compared it unfavorably to Thomas Maier's Newhouse (1994). On the other hand, Felsenthal has gotten some solid thumbs-ups, including praise from both of her hometown dailies, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times.
The trouble is that, in talking with Felsenthal, you realize she sincerely believes that skulking behind all the pans are hidden motives of one sort or another, whereas the praise that comes her way is simply her due. Regarding the Observer, for instance, she speculates that the reviewer, Scott Sherman, may have been trying to please Maier, since Sherman has written for Newsday, where Maier is on staff. That's pretty far-fetched. Yet when I asked whether it was equally plausible that the two Chicago papers praised her because she writes book reviews for both of them, she instantly denied any possibility of impropriety.
Which brings me back to Felsenthal's ongoing battle with the New York Times Book Review.
Recently, Craig Aaron, of the Chicago-based magazine In These Times, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the New York attorney general's office. He learned -- horrors! -- that the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation gave $30,000 to the Columbia Journalism School in both 1996 and '97 (records for 1998 and '99 were not available), and that it gave another $70,000 to sponsor a series of seminars in 1989. In his puffy piece on Felsenthal's plight for the May 30 issue, he cited this money -- as well as the fact that part of Goldstein's job "is to place his students in jobs and internships with Newhouse publications" -- as evidence that Goldstein "should have passed on the assignment" of reviewing Citizen Newhouse, or that he should have at least disclosed his link to Newhouse.
Now, there are genuine conflicts of interest, there are appearances of conflicts, and there are relationships so small and tangential that they are simply not worth mentioning. At worst, Columbia's reliance on a rather insignificant amount of Newhouse money falls somewhere between the appearance of a conflict and an utter irrelevance -- closer to the latter. And Aaron's suggestion that Goldstein needs to suck up to Newhouse in order to find work for his students is too silly to warrant comment.
But Felsenthal has energetically pursued the Columbia-Newhouse connection, demanding that New York Times Book Review editor Charles "Chip" McGrath run an editor's note disclosing Goldstein's alleged conflict. Word of her crusade is beginning to spread: the New York Post ran a substantial item on May 16.
McGrath, who says he didn't know about the Newhouse money before assigning Goldstein to review Felsenthal's book, nevertheless adds that he's untroubled by it. "I just think it's a non-issue," says McGrath, who previously worked for Newhouse as a top editor at the New Yorker, and who was among many current and former Newhouse employees who declined to be interviewed for Citizen Newhouse. (Not that McGrath has any stake in defending Newhouse. It is widely believed that Newhouse fired legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn at least partly because Shawn wanted the solid but buzz-deficient McGrath to be his successor. Yet McGrath stayed on, winning credit for keeping the New Yorker on an even keel even while Tina Brown was doing her thing.)
"To believe that anything was amiss," McGrath adds, "you'd have to believe that Tom Goldstein was afraid that if he didn't write a certain type of review, the Newhouse Foundation would come in and take his money away. It's insane."
McGrath does offer one small concession. Though he has no plans to publish the editor's note Felsenthal has requested, he does say that if he had it to do over again, he probably would have published a disclosure at the time the review ran. "I suppose now, in retrospect, having seen all the flap, I would have thought about it," McGrath says. "I would have made the assignment again. Would I have made the disclosure? Maybe. It would have saved some headaches."
Goldstein, for his part, discusses In These Times' FOIA request with a combination of bemusement and irritation. "If they'd called me, I would have told them. We try to lead a pretty transparent operation," he says of the Newhouse Foundation money -- which, he adds, funds a business-reporting fellowship that's not even under Goldstein's immediate control. (Aaron's In These Times piece states that "Goldstein was unavailable for comment." Goldstein acknowledges that someone from In These Times did indeed try to call him, but that the message was not forwarded to him.)
"Before I was dean, I was a press critic," Goldstein says. "I continue, as dean, to be a press critic. If I had thought differently of the book, I would have said so directly. I review a lot of books, I comment a lot. Oftentimes I am criticizing the very people I wish would give us money. And that's what I've got to do, because if you start pulling your punches you lose credibility."
Felsenthal isn't the first person to accuse the New York Times Book Review of having a conflict. In fact, she's not even the first Newhouse biographer to make that charge. When Times staff writer Walter Goodman panned Maier's Newhouse in 1994, Maier wrote that Goodman had a conflict, since Maier's book made an unkind reference to Goodman. Goodman responded that the reference was so obscure he hadn't even recognized it until Maier pointed it out.
More recently, Alex Beam, in his Globe column of April 23, reported that McGrath had killed a nasty review by Helena Cronin of Woman: An Intimate Geography, allegedly because the book's author, Natalie Angier, is a Times science writer. McGrath told Beam he canceled the review because it was "too snarky" and "failed to address the whole range of the book," but denied that he was trying to protect a Times staffer. In its place, McGrath ran a favorable review of Angier's book by Abraham Verghese, a Texas Tech University medical professor who is the author of The Tennis Partner: A Doctor's Story of Friendship and Love. Asked how frequently he kills reviews, McGrath told the Phoenix: "It happens a couple of times a year. If you do it in a high-profile situation, there's usually hell to pay, just of this sort. If it happens all the time, then you're doing something wrong, and if it never happens, you're probably doing something wrong, too."
In a related development, the daily Times ran its own review of Angier's book -- a rave by Marilyn Yalom that resulted, on May 20, in an embarrassing editor's note. The reason, as Beam had reported earlier: Angier had praised Yalom's A History of the Breast in 1997. (McGrath does not oversee reviews in the daily Times.)
Felsenthal cites Beam's column to bolster her case against McGrath and Goldstein. And yes, Beam appears to have unearthed a bit of unseemliness that should have received more attention than it did. "I'll tell you, somewhat injudiciously, that I've been a little surprised," says Beam. "To use what is a very tired phrase, where is the outrage? I'm talking about the Times spiking a negative review of one of its own writers' books." (Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz wrote about the issue on Monday, crediting the Globe.)
But if the Times and its Book Review acted outrageously, to borrow Beam's term, in regard to Angier's book, it's also outrageous for Felsenthal to try to glom onto that in an attempt to bolster her own weak case.
It's not that Citizen Newhouse is a bad book. Quite the contrary; Felsenthal turned in a workmanlike effort, and I think Goldstein was far too dismissive. But there are obvious limits to how much a biographer can do with a not-very-interesting subject who refuses to cooperate and who intimidates many others into withholding their cooperation as well. Felsenthal does a good job of explicating the difference between Sam Newhouse, the hard-charging, bottom-line-obsessed patriarch, and Si, the awkward son who collects magazines the way he collects artwork (that is, for social status). But her passages on the New Yorker, which were of the most interest to me, offer nothing new. And I share Scott Sherman's queasiness over Felsenthal's indulging rumors of Newhouse's homosexuality under the guise of shooting them down.
In an interview, Felsenthal doesn't retreat an inch in her quest to expose what she sees as Goldstein's conflict of interest and thus vindicate her book. "I don't think $30,000 is a piddling amount," she says of the Newhouse Foundation money. She accuses McGrath of striking an "arrogant tone" in an exchange of e-mails with her (I would call them courteous but firm, based on the copies she sent along). And she makes it clear that she's way past keeping quiet.
"I'm 50 years old, I'm in the mid-part of my career, and I think some of these things are wrong and they need to be talked about," she says. "I'm through being polite."
Felsenthal appears convinced that she's fighting the good fight. But she's leveled a serious allegation against Tom Goldstein that doesn't hold up, and she's making demands of Chip McGrath that simply aren't warranted based on her scanty evidence.
Given what happened with her Katharine Graham biography and the difficulties she had in finding a publisher for Citizen Newhouse, Felsenthal's defensiveness is understandable. But she should consider the possibility that sometimes a bad review is just a bad review.

Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com

Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here