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Condé Nast was not born to fashion. He was born in New York of a French mother and German father, grew up in St. Louis, went to Georgetown University, where he managed the baseball team. Classmate Robert Collier hired him to write advertising for Collier's. Nine years later, age 35, risen to business manager, he had built up the magazine's circulation, fattened its skinny advertising, and was making $50,000 a year. That was when he quit to go on his own.
He made dress patterns for Ladies Home Journal, until, for practically nothing at all, he picked up a tottering, 24-page fashion and socialite magazine. That was Vogue, which "had no friends outside the lonesome office of its advertising manager"—then. A decade later it had plenty of friends of just the right kind. It ranked second to Satevepost in ads, had sister editions in Paris, London and Buenos Aires. It also had a sophisticated brother, Vanity Fair, the editing of which Condé Nast turned over to Frank Crowninshield, the town's wittiest connoisseur of art and letters. They were a team. Nast built a 30-acre printing plant at Greenwich, Conn. In the boom he also went into the stock-market.* And just when he was ready to retire, he went broke. His last decade showed his qualities of honest pride and courage. Working seven days a week, he restored his personal and corporate fortunes, piloted Vogue through the '305 without making a single concession in its standards of smartness or excellence.
Always a keen student of the news. Condé Nast the man was strongly anti-Nazi and interventionist before Pearl Harbor. When the U.S. went to war, Nast the publisher took the lead in showing how patriotism can be smart and smartness patriotic. None could do it with so sure a touch.
* When a friend asked him later why he did it he replied: "I have asked myself that. I wish I knew."