From a New York Times story, by Katherine Rosman, headlined “The Chaos at Conde Nast”:
It’s a high-class but increasingly common problem: being a former magazine editor in a digitized world that cares little about whose name used to be on top of a defunct masthead. . .
At 48, Dan Peres is already an old hand at being a former magazine editor. Condé Nast shut down Details, the men’s glossy that he had been editor of for 15 years, in 2015. Overnight Mr. Peres went from two decades spent as a coveted presence at fashion shows and parties in the world’s capitals to a divorced dad adrift in the ’burbs.
He tried to pivot to digital publications, but quickly learned there is little job security in start-ups. He took on some consulting gigs. He was also jotting down stories from his past life, one not many people knew about. . . .
The result is a memoir, “As Needed for Pain,” which was published this week by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins.
In the book, Mr. Peres reveals an opioid addiction that he tried for years to hide, and which, until he got clean in 2007, had him taking as many as 60 Vicodin pills a day. . . .
Condé Nast, which also then regularly published the magazines Gourmet, Jane, Lucky and Domino, had become famous through shows like HBO’s “Sex and the City.” The company was known for around-the-block Town Cars filled with enigmatic editors who lunched at New York restaurants like the Four Seasons and enjoyed clothing expense accounts and interest-free mortgages provided by their employer.
“It was a privately held company, and they could employ all these really creative, kind of crazy people,” she [Kim France, the founding editor of Lucky magazine] said. “You had André Leon Talley swanning around. There was drama all over the place. It was obviously bad that this culture existed the way it did, but it started because they valued creativity and the kind of people that were creative.” (As it happens, Mr. Talley also has a memoir set to publish, in April, called “The Chiffon Trenches.”) . . .
Mr. Peres tells in his memoir of frequently not making it into the office; when he did, he sneaked occasional naps on his office couch during the heavy drug years. He fell asleep while interviewing a job applicant. He had an assistant plan an unnecessary trip to San Diego, where he rented a car (he doesn’t remember if he or the company paid for it), drove to Tijuana, Mexico, and bought $6,000 worth of drugs to smuggle back across the border and then to New York (in between, he appeared on “Politically Incorrect” with Bill Maher in Los Angeles). . . .
He spent four days “in a plush terry cloth robe” at the Four Seasons in Milan without attending the fashion shows he had traveled there for because he didn’t have sufficient Vicodin to feel like himself. (He then had the front desk send a medico to his room, who wrote him a prescription.) . . .
“Mistakes happen at publications,” Mr. Peres said last week, while acknowledging his yearslong focus on drugs above work and all else. “Surely the magazine would not have been as good as it was if not for my staff. I know anyone who has spent any time around an addict has to spend a lot of time doing a lot of heavy lifting.”
Mr. [Andrew] Essex, the magazine’s former deputy, said it is not fair to portray Mr. Peres as having no involvement with the editorial product known as Details. “He could identify bizarre permutations of male behavior particularly at the epicenter of gay and straight,” Mr. Essex said.
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