James Truman, a Crown Prince in a New Kingdom

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/fashion/james-truman-a-crown-prince-in-a-new-kingdom.html

Version 0 of 1.

Of all the new careers one might expect for a 55-year-old former publishing executive, part-time record producer is not the most likely.

Yet there was James Truman one night last winter, standing in the Boom Boom Room on the top floor of the Standard Hotel, sipping a vodka gimlet as he awaited a performance by Sebastien Leon, the young musician with whom he had been working for 18 months.

The two met in Mustique a couple of years back. Mr. Truman was staying with his friend Bryan Ferry, and went into a restaurant at which Mr. Leon showed up, guitar in hand, to serenade the crowd. They bonded over a love of Serge Gainsbourg, and in short order Mr. Truman booked a studio. There, they recorded a debut album filled with melancholy songs, many about the recent demise of Mr. Leon’s marriage.

Mr. Truman was not entirely confident about embarking on the venture.

In his 20s — before he took over as the editor in chief of Details magazine, before he became the publishing world’s It boy and then Condé Nast’s editorial director at age 35, before he oversaw the debut of Lucky (at that point, the magazine business’s most unapologetic exaltation of capitalism), before the Buddhist retreats and before he finally gave it all up and moved to Spain — Mr. Truman wrote for the British music magazine Melody Maker about bands like the Cure and Talking Heads. “I even went on tour with Gary Glitter,” he said. And throughout, he heard constantly that the next record was “going to be better,” the lyrics were going to be “deeper.”

He hoped never to be a person who would say such a thing. But day after day, he would go home from the studio, and his wife, the illustrator and writer Leanne Shapton, could tell something interesting was happening. “He had so much fun,” she said that night, wearing a shirt that barely covered up her baby bump. (She’s since given birth to the couple’s first child, Tomasina.) The experience, she said, caused him to “blossom” in some way.

Mr. Leon was somewhat surprised it took as long as it did to complete the album, but as he put it after his show, “James is very busy.”

That he is. In just the last eight years, since resigning from his perch at Condé Nast, Mr. Truman has taken on a somewhat surprising array of projects. He is a creative adviser to Francis Ford Coppola on his wine business and growing hotel empire; with the hotelier André Balazs, he has been running an organic farm upstate called Locusts on Hudson, which supplies organic foods to the Standard Hotel; and with Sunny Bates, an entrepreneur involved in the TED Conference, he started a short-lived circus that Ms. Bates described as a “kind of mashed-up TED, Burning Man and the circus coming into town.”

At one event, organized at Mr. Balazs’s farm, parents took their children to work with circus performers and presented what Mr. Truman called a “very New Age-y circus.” There were no animals, so he bought 150 fake fur coats on eBay, the kids became the “wardrobe masters,” and when the performance was to take place, their parents were dressed up like lions or zebras and escorted to a barn where they watched from atop piles of hay.

This is not the career trajectory Mr. Truman expected for himself when he was the crown prince of the publishing world. In fact, as he sees it, he doesn’t have a career at all, just interesting endeavors that keep him engaged and occupied.

But in an era where more and more Americans find themselves cobbling together disparate and often part-time jobs, he has managed to unwittingly stumble on the zeitgeist yet again.

The difference, of course, is that Mr. Truman is the rare person who seems to have chosen to do this while in his prime. And that is mystifying to former colleagues in the publishing industry, who cannot fathom why a man who loved magazines since he was a boy willingly gave up the keys to the kingdom — along with a seven-figure annual salary, a clothing allowance and a driver permanently at the ready.

James Truman has occasionally been characterized as a kind of protoplasm of metrosexuality, a dandyish straight man at home with women and gay men — a perfect fit, essentially, for Condé Nast. There is also about him a kind of amused detachment from the rarefied world he inhabits — which serves him well as a courtier, whether to S. I. Newhouse, Mr. Balazs or Mr. Coppola.

He grew up in Nottingham, England, where his father ran a fancy-car dealership and, eventually, an air-taxi business taking rich people to their summer homes. The main thing Mr. Truman knew was “that I didn’t want to live in Nottingham.”

At 19, he moved to London and found work at The Hampstead and Highgate Express, a weekly newspaper popular with artistic types. “If you wanted a cantankerous quote on something, you’d call Martin Amis or Peter Cook,” he said. “Hampstead was just full of artists and poets. They’d be at the pub at lunchtime, and they’d say anything you wanted them to.”

He came to New York in 1981, earning $50 a month as the American correspondent for The Face, and hung out at Area and Danceteria. He began getting freelance assignments writing for Anna Wintour, who had just taken over British Vogue. When she joined American Vogue as its editor in chief in 1988, Mr. Truman went to work for her as a features editor.

In 1990, after the Newhouse family bought Details, a downtown magazine largely about night life, he was named editor in chief and recreated it as a kind of ambisexual, younger alternative to GQ.

It was a big success. Four years later, when Alexander Liberman retired as the editorial director of Condé Nast, Mr. Truman was selected as his replacement.

During his tenure at Condé Nast, Mr. Liberman had been the most powerful creative force at the company, overseeing each of its magazines and serving as a kind of cultural attaché for Mr. Newhouse.

But a number of the company’s better-known editors were not about to show Mr. Truman, then 35, the same level of respect. “I was younger than all of the people I was overseeing and less experienced,” Mr. Truman said. “And I think I was probably not that sensitive to how people reacted.”

In one famous quip, Paige Rense Noland, then the editor of Architectural Digest, told a reporter that if Mr. Truman came anywhere near her magazine, she would bend him over her leg and spank him.

“Paige made no bones about the fact that she detested him,” a former colleague of theirs said. “That didn’t ingratiate her to S. I., but he sort of accepted it.”

Over the next decade, Mr. Truman played a significant role in many of the company’s younger magazines — among them Allure, Glamour, Wired and Gourmet. He started Lucky with Kim France as editor, and for a while, at least, it was a big hit with readers. But by many accounts he had less involvement with The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue, whose editors were better known and had more direct contact with Mr. Newhouse.

In the news media, Mr. Truman was derided for his job overseeing the development of the Condé Nast cafeteria, which was designed by Frank Gehry. To some, it was evidence that the job had diminished in importance — that he was, to quote one Michael Wolff article about Mr. Truman, “Chaunce the Gardener.” And few in this world seemed to know what to make of the time he spent studying Buddhism.

(I was one of those people. I got to know Mr. Truman about a decade ago when I was writing a column about the publishing industry for Women’s Wear Daily. Much of what I published was snarky. One morning, he took me to breakfast and gently suggested that the person I was becoming might not be a person I truly wanted to be. He was right. What I didn’t know was that he seemed to be having the same existential crisis himself.)

“I think S. I. hired James because James made him feel young again, and James felt in some way like he was being sucked dry,” said Katrina Heron, the former editor in chief of Wired and a close friend of Mr. Truman’s for many years.

In 2001, Ms. Heron resigned from her job at the magazine and headed off to consult on various digital ventures in the Bay Area. Over the next three years, she said, Mr. Truman called her to discuss his ambivalence about continuing in the job.

But, she said, he had “a life predicated on having a large income,” with an office that looked like a “modernist palace.” And so each time he called her to say he wanted to leave, Ms. Heron would hear from him again saying that he had reconsidered and was going to stay put, after all.  

Then, in 2002, Mr. Truman began to work with a skeleton staff on a prototype for an art magazine. But with the Internet eating into Condé Nast’s profits, McKinsey & Company came in to help reduce overhead, and there was concern about whether an art magazine could actually amass a circulation substantial enough to make it a viable business for the Newhouses.

Shortly after the magazine was killed, Mr. Truman left the company. “I felt that particularly in the job I had, the future was going to be 10 years of thinking about cost cutting,” Mr. Truman said. “If you’re going to turn to someone for cost cutting, you shouldn’t turn to me. That’s not what I’m good at. I also felt in some fundamental sense that the problems magazines faced didn’t and don’t have editorial solutions. So in a sense, I could bring my very best game, and it wouldn’t make much difference to what inevitably was going to occur when this business for publishers was almost overnight unwound.”

“It is in some fundamental way over,” he added later. “I have an analogy. I think magazines are going to be somewhat like department stores. They’ll stay in business, but you’ll wonder why, since you get everything in them from other places, usually with a better customer experience.”

So, he and Ms. Shapton, whom he’d met when she worked on the prototype for the art magazine, moved to Spain, where he spent a somewhat aimless year living in Andalusia. The relationship was transformative for him. Ms. Shapton has worked at publications (including as an art director for the New York Times Op-Ed page) and is the author of several books that defy categorization, relying on both illustration and written narrative. (One has been optioned for a movie by Brad Pitt.) And, he said, she “has been greatly influential in helping me recalibrate what success is” and has made him “less reliant on being defined by one thing.”

When he returned to New York, there was a brief return to publishing, working for Louise Blouin MacBain, a Canadian businesswoman who had assembled a mini-empire of art magazines.

She had a fortune worth several hundred million dollars and spoke in lofty terms about expanding the human brain and fostering humanity and imagination. But she wasn’t particularly gifted in the basic day-to-day of running a business. Staff members complained to reporters about late payments and meetings with her at which they walked away having no idea what she’d been talking about. “I knew after three days that it wasn’t going to work,” said Mr. Truman, who had been made the company’s chief editorial person. “I quit, and she somehow got me to stay on. I guess I was sort of interested to see what the ride would be even though I knew it wasn’t going to end the optimal way.”

When he left after less than a year under her employ, there turned out to be a lot of people still eager to work with him — like Ms. Bates, who’d collaborated with him on the circus, and Mr. Coppola, who selected Mr. Truman to sit on his board.

At the winery, the two forged a bond beyond good rosé. Mr. Coppola, after all, knows what it is like to want to exit center-stage-right mid-performance. “I’m a guy who left Hollywood and moved to San Francisco to be independent,” Mr. Coppola said in a phone interview. “I can’t imagine what his job at Condé Nast was like, but I think it was extremely high pressure.” Leaving it, Mr. Coppola added, “seemed totally logical to me. I think he was doing it for fun and adventure.”

That’s certainly what he found with Mr. Balazs, an old friend with whom Mr. Truman has been working on the farm — a position that has also given him entry into the organic food movement.

There, he manages a couple of young farmers, attends meetings on what sod to use and occasionally does damage control when animals show signs of unhappiness.

On a recent morning, the biggest crisis of this sort involved a cow named Narcissa, who had been mooing for two days straight because her calf had been taken off to the slaughterhouse.

The solution for this was simpler than some of the schemes Mr. Truman devised to restore order at Condé Nast.

He just went to pet her and waited for the temper tantrum to pass.