This morning, New York editor Adam Moss lost deputy editor Hugo Lindgren to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. He's certainly not the only magazine-world EIC to have a trusted confidante on staff. But they're a dying breed.
Radar's Chris Tennant's forthcoming book, the Official Filthy Rich Handbook, cheekily offers advice for "the best zip codes" and "majordomos vs. butlers," etc. Well, it's been a few years since the hipster and preppy handbooks came out, and The Hollywood Assistants Handbook just landed on our desk, so it looks like the market is right for handbooks right now! (People like being told what to do.) Tom Wolfe blurbs, rather ostentatiously, that "Tennant seems to know la dolce vita Americana billionara, every sweet morsel of it." Yet he chose a nice Midwestern girl to model the part of "the Heiress" inside the book—none other than Star talking head Julia Allison. She's not filthy rich (she makes only six figures a year), nor is she an heiress. But the book isn't meant for the growing class of newly rich, obviously, but to the aspirational and slack-jawed yokels among us. So in that case, maybe the choice of Allison is entirely appropriate. Click the image to gawk.
It's the end of one of the great magazine marriages: deputy editor Chris Tennant, right-hand viper to Radar's Maer Roshan, is leaving the magazine. The move isn't entirely surprising. Tennant (whose brain is an encyclopedia of who's fucked whom, literally and metaphorically) has lasted longer than any other veteran of the long-suffering magazine. (In the photo, Tennant is to the right.)
The significance of holding last night's party to celebrate the New York Observer and its new website at the Four Seasons restaurant was intentional, obvious, and not at all lost on anyone. Despite its recent Frank Bruni demotion to two New York Times stars, the restaurant remains the symbolic and probably actual center of New York old-guard media power. After so many years of playing gadfly to the media, politics, and real estate elite of this city, the Observer and its boy-owner and his advisers chose to make a very specific sort of statement.
The author needed to meet some very important person from the world of publishing, and his tightly-wound editor let him know it by waving frantically and then physically dragging him over to the corner of the bar. Dana Vachon had been born wealthy and healthy and handsome and he was right to view himself as entirely blessed, especially considering that his first novel, Mergers & Acquisitions had already gone to a second printing that very day. No one wore costumes on the night of his book party at Felix, that Eurotrash magnet on West Broadway, but there was no need for costumes to have a masque ball. Everyone knew their role and played it.
Say what you will about Radar impresario Maer Roshan (and we have!), but the man knows how to put together a staff. In fact, one of the hallmarks of the three incarnations of his magazine has been the strength of the writers and editors he convinces to join him on his magical mystical journey through magazine-dom. But just who comprises this motley crew? From whence did they spring? And what in their varied backgrounds could have prepared them for the GREATEST MAGAZINE RE-RE-LAUNCH EVER? Come, let's examine their biographies together!
