Newhouse.

• Author: McElwaine, Sandra

For media junkies, Richard Maier's unauthorized biography of the secretive, enigmatic publishing tycoon S.I. Newhouse, Jr. is a titillating read. Filled with glitz and glitter, it is a rags-to-riches saga that offers a rare glimpse into the country's wealthiest and most influential communications empire, one which includes two dozen newspapers; 40 Conde Nast magazines, including the glamorous Vanity Fair and The New Yorker; Parade, the massive Sunday supplement; the nation's largest publishing group, including Random House, Crown, and Ballantine; and a variety of lucrative broadcast properties.

It is also a story about the tumultuous life and career of an obsessively shy, awkward man who suffered under a domineering father, but doggedly expanded his enterprise into a $13 billion privately owned company. Maier describes how, over the years, S.I., Jr., known as Si, transformed himself from a recluse into a powerful executive, an arbiter of taste and a potent force in the worlds of politics, journalism, fashion, literature, and art. (His modern art collection alone is valued at $100 million.)

Carefully researched and crammed with details (sometimes excessively so), Maier, a former reporter for New York Newsday, paints an intriguing portrait of the ambitious Newhouse clan and their rise from poverty in the early 1900s to the pinnacle of the New York jet-set society in the seventies. (Their acquisition of Conde Nast with its stable of hip, slick magazines like Vogue, Glamour, and House and Garden definitely added to their appeal.) Their ascent began in 1922 when Sam Newhouse, Sr. purchased a failing Staten Island newspaper to form the base of what was to become his mammoth Advance Publications. It reached its zenith with the hostile takeover of the prestigious New Yorker in the go-go years of the eighties.

Aspiring to be masters of the media universe, the Newhouses gained a reputation as masters of the bottom line, so ruthless in their pursuit of newspaper profits that they left a trail of fear and havoc in their wake. Working behind the scenes was the notorious Roy Cohn, Si's best childhood friend. Cohn, who bore the title of special counsel to the family and served as a political fixer, influenced various editorial policies. In the early sixties, JFK, over the strong objections of Bobby Kennedy, used Cohn to plant a favorable editorial about Congressman Hale Boggs, who was in political trouble, in his hometown paper, the New Orleans...