publishing the art of the deal --11/3/25

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Today's selection-- from Empire of the Elite by Michael M. Grynbaum. The Ballad of Donald Trump and Si Newhouse.

“In May 1984, the cover of GQ featured a Richard Avedon portrait of a handsome thirty-eight-year-old in a suit, with bushy eyebrows and a mercurial, closed-lip smile. ‘SUCCESS,’ read the headline. ‘How Sweet It Is.’ The man in the photograph was Donald Trump. 

“The author of the accompanying article, a magazine writer named Graydon Carter, zeroed in on Trump's outer-borough tells (‘cuff links: huge mollusks of gold and stone the size of half-dollars’) and outsize vanity, like the Lucite-framed copy of a New York Times profile that he kept on the windowsill in his office. ‘Did you ever pass Trump Tower at night and see the way it glows?’ Trump asks Graydon as they glide down Fifth Avenue in his stretch limo with ‘DJT’ vanity plates. (Trump brags about the TV, radio, and wet bar he's installed in the back seat.) This is the bombastic, barking, dissembling, self-mythologizing Trump that millions of Americans would soon come to know, captured by Graydon like a lepidopterist impaling a monarch. ‘I'm a first-class sort of person,’ Trump says in closing. ‘I only go first class.’ 

“Among the many readers who relished the article was Si Newhouse. 

And not just the writing: Si, who pored over circulation numbers, discovered that the Trump cover had sold much better on newsstands than comparable issues of GQ, an early example of the Trump Bump. As a celebrity, Trump was irresistible, and his unapologetic embrace of 1980s excess resonated with the younger yuppie readers, particularly men, who were flocking to GQ and other Conde publications. Si had acquired Random House, the prestige book publisher, in 1980, and the success of the Trump article prompted an idea. At a Random House sales conference in the Bahamas a few months later, Si instructed his team that securing a Trump book was a priority. ‘This Trump fellow was more than a comer,’ Si told the group. ‘He had arrived.’ Si soon took matters into his own hands: he rang up Trump himself. The whole thing, the book's editor, Peter Osnos, recalled years later, ‘was very definitely, and almost uniquely, Si Newhouse's idea.’

“Trump agreed to take a meeting. Si asked Osnos and Howard Kaminsky, the Random House CEO, to join him at the pitch in the developer's twenty-sixth-floor office at Trump Tower overlooking Central Park, a self-styled shrine to The Donald festooned with his press clippings and magazine covers. To help Trump envision the book's possibilities, the men brought along a prop: a hefty Russian novel dummied up with a dust jacket featuring a photograph of Trump looking triumphant in the Trump Tower atrium, with his surname emblazoned in oversize gold typeface.

“Trump's only suggestion: ‘Please make my name much bigger.’ The Art of the Deal was in motion.

Cover of "The Art of the Deal"

“Si authorized a $500,000 advance, later split between Trump and his ghostwriter, a magazine journalist named Tony Schwartz. The book, released in November 1987, went on to be a smash hit that earned Random House millions and spent forty-eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. It was also a prime example of Si's unseen hand in shaping American culture. The book catapulted Trump into bookstores and airport cafes across the country, morphing a provincial New York personality into a national pop culture product for the first time. He was interviewed by the Today show, Barbara Walters, David Letterman, Phil Donahue, People magazine, and a dozen local TV stations. Tina Brown ran an excerpt in Vanity Fair. Si, who rarely spoke publicly, accompanied Trump to a Memorial Day booksellers' convention in Washington, where he declared he had made two great decisions in his publishing career: buying Random House, and convincing Trump to write a book. At Trump's request, Si even ordered his warehouses to reopen over Christmas week so that a thousand copies could be flown to Aspen during Donald's ski vacation.

“Trump, the avatar of the arriviste eighties, whose obsession with wealth paralleled the driving impulse of Conde's magazines, seemed both a byproduct of, and fuel for, Si's personal ideal of American glamour. Like Si, Trump was an outer-borough scion who outperformed his old man, transcended declasse roots, and remade himself as a Manhattan king. At the black-tie book party, held under the waterfall in the Trump Tower atrium, Trump greeted well-wishers with Si standing by his side.”

author:	Michael M. Grynbaum
title:	Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America
publisher:	Publisher Simon & Schuster
pages:	109-111