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Let Si Get ThisThe Condé Nast economy—all expenses paid, all the time.

By David PlotzPosted Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2009, at 10:46 AM ET

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Newhouse expense stories are a staple of New York literary-journalistic conversation. Stories about the $10,000 in expenses that a New Yorker editor billed for a single month. About the interior-decorating costs for the fashion-magazine editor who likes to have her office photographs rearranged every few months. About the hotel tab for the big-name New York writer who spent three weeks in Washington's Hay-Adams (basic room: $285 a night) researching a Vanity Fair story that will never run. About the Vogue editor who has furnished her summer house from items purchased for fashion shoots—beautiful furniture, designer pillows, coffee-table books. Vogue assistants have nicknamed the house "Petty Cash Junction."

None of the 39 past and present Newhouse employees I spoke to for this story would talk on the record, for obvious reasons. And the nature of the subject makes it hard to separate apocrypha from the truth. Did Condé Nast pay, as sources insist it did, hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes on behalf of an editor who didn't bother to file tax forms? Did an editor really expense $20,000 in a weeklong trip to Paris? The people who pay the bills are not talking. But every example of excess cited here was told to me by at least one source (and usually more than one) in a position to know.

Need a facial? Treat yourself and bill it to Si. This is what is called "scouting." It is also a great way to get free haircuts. To be fair, Si doesn't pay for all such treats. There is also a much-honored tradition of accepting tribute from companies that Condé Nast magazines cover. One magazine exec reportedly got so much loot last Christmas—Cuban cigars, "crates of wine," designer suits ("It was like a Spanish galleon")—that he needed three cars to cart it home. At yuletide, even midlevel fashion-mag writers and editors are inundated with "cashmere sweaters, Versace pillows, coats ...," recalls one ex-Vogue staffer wistfully.

At the top of the masthead, the perks are perkier. His Si-ness (their joke, not mine) does not expect his editors in chief to actually live on their seven-figure salaries. He also gives them clothing allowances (up to $50,000 a year). He buys them cars of their choice and hires chauffeurs to drive them. He offers them low- or no-interest home loans. GQ editor Art Cooper reportedly received two $1-million loans, one for a Manhattan apartment, the other for a Connecticut farm. Tina Brown and her husband, Harold Evans, former president of Random House, reportedly just took a $2 million boost to buy a $3.7 million Manhattan house.

Si's favorite courtiers lead lives of jaw-dropping privilege. When she was editor of British Vogue, Wintour commuted between London and New York—on the Concorde. Another Si confidant decided his office didn't feel right, so he hired one of the grandmasters of feng shui to rearrange it. Some editors prepare for trips by Federal Expressing their luggage to their destination. Why? "So you don't have to carry your bags. No one would be caught dead carrying a bag."

Condé Nast has also created a class of mandarin journalists, writers who live much better than they ever could if they wrote only for normal magazines. One freelancer tells of building much of a summer traveling with her husband in the West and Europe around a couple of Condé Nast assignments. Last summer, The New Yorker sent a staffer to Venice to cover the Venice Film Festival. The weeklong trip, which must have cost thousands, resulted in a short piece.

Writers, of course, are nowhere near as profligate as photographers. Stories of wasteful shoots abound: the matching seaweed that had to be flown from California to the Caribbean for a fashion photo; the Annie Liebovitz Vanity Fair cover shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger that reportedly cost $100,000; the Vogue shoot in Africa in which, an ex-Vogue editor claims, the photographer and his huge entourage wined and dined to the tune of "hundreds of thousands of dollars."

And then there are the parties. Last month The New Yorker spent—and this is not a joke—$500,000 on a two-day "Next Conference" at the Disney Institute in Florida, in connection with a special issue on the same theme. In order to get Vice President Gore, who was traveling in California at the time, The New Yorker paid for him and his entourage to fly Air Force Two from California to Florida and back. And vice presidents are not the only things that Condé Nast flies in for parties. The New Yorker once shipped silverware from New York to Chicago for a dinner. ("What, they don't have silverware in Chicago?" asks a New Yorker staffer.) Vanity Fair toted food from New York to Washington for this year's party on the night of the White House Correspondents Dinner. (What, they don't have food in Washington?)