Si Newhouse, The Art of The Deal and Roy Cohn
Connecting the Dots
Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker, “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All,” July 18, 2016:
The idea of Trump writing an autobiography didn’t originate with either Trump or Schwartz. It began with Si Newhouse, the media magnate whose company, Advance Publications, owned Random House at the time, and continues to own Condé Nast, the parent company of this magazine. “It was very definitely, and almost uniquely, Si Newhouse’s idea,” Peter Osnos, who edited the book, recalls. GQ, which Condé Nast also owns, had published a cover story on Trump, and Newhouse noticed that newsstand sales had been unusually strong.
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By the time Jane Mayer’s piece appeared, I had been in publishing for more than thirty years and had been responsible, one way or another for more than a thousand books, including Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and many bestsellers, among them Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal”
Now, in the midst of a campaign in which Trump would be elected president, I needed to explain to strangers who would ask — with bafflement — why and how I, of all people, could have been responsible for the book that had elevated Trump from a New York developer and tabloid mainstay to national stature.
A New York Review of Books essay this summer headlined “The Apprentice’s Sorcerer” said that Donald Trump was Si Newhouse’s “most consequential discovery.” The essay was about the new book by Michael M. Grynbaum, “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America” which told the Newhouse-Trump-Cohn story in detail, and in which I have an editorial cameo.
I described working with Trump in The New Yorker and in my book”An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen”, so there is no need to repeat that here. (Spoiler: It was, especially in retrospect, fascinating because everyone has Trump opinions. Mine are based on experience.)
As Mayer’s article disclosed, Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter for “The Art of the Deal”, now had great regrets about what had been an excellent job channeling Trump in the 1980s. My editorial role was, by my standards, relatively modest. I did design the book’s cover and was much involved with the marketing and publicity plans.
My last contact with Trump was in the early 1990s.
(The success of “The Art of the Deal” is enduring. In 2025 it still makes the New York Times’s monthly audio bestseller list.)
There are two aspects of the saga of Trump, Roy Cohn, and the book that I think may be of interest based on what is, after all, my firsthand knowledge:
(1) Just how deeply was Si Newhouse really involved in the book and Trump’s career ascendancy?
(2) What happened when Newhouse suggested to Random House that it publish an autobiography by his close friend Roy Cohn?
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To publish a book with Trump was definitely Newhouse’s idea. And as a recently hired senior editor at the Random House Trade Books imprint, I was designated to join Si and the imprint’s newly named publisher, Howard Kaminsky, at a meeting in Trump’s office in 1985.
I thought of wrapping an epic Russian novel, Vasily Aksyonov’s “Generations of Winter”, in shiny black paper with Trump’s name in gold lettering to show him how his book would look.
In an hour or so, the deal was made: a $500,000 advance payment, with Schwartz receiving half. No lawyer or agent was involved.
As the project progressed, Newhouse never again asked me about it. The book sold a million copies in a matter of months and was a number-one bestseller in the U.S. and in the U.K. as well. Si did join me on the receiving line at the lavish book party in December 1987 at Trump Tower. Kaminsky had been fired, so I stood next to Trump, welcoming guests.
Newhouse’s only other role was to personally offer Trump $2.5 million, over lunch on Trump’s yacht anchored in the East River, for a sequel published in 1990 called “Surviving at the Top”. “The Art of the Deal” had had returns of fewer than 10 percent of unsold copies. The return rate on the sequel, as I recall, was closer to 90 percent, a flop.
So, no praise. And no regrets from Newhouse, ever.
And, finally, I have no idea whether Si and Donald ever discussed their publishing collaboration.
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Roy Cohn had died in 1986, and so he did not live to see Trump’s book-related triumph or his rise to greater prominence thereafter.
But in the summer of 1984, Newhouse had alerted the chairman of Random House Inc., Robert L. Bernstein, that Cohn might be prepared to write a memoir. Grynbaum quotes Bernstein to the effect that, given the provenance, a book by Roy Cohn would be something for Random House to consider seriously.
Bernstein directed the Random House trade imprint’s editorial director, Jason Epstein, to meet with Cohn. Epstein brought me along to a dinner at 21. Seated in an upstairs banquette, we spent a good-natured couple of hours. I do remember that Cohn ate what he said was his usual fare, tuna fish salad on a bed of lettuce.
Subsequently, a book was commissioned, to be ghostwritten by Sidney Zion, a New York Times reporter.
I don’t know how the project developed (I was not involved), except to say that it was not published at Random House. It did appear in January 1988 from Lyle Stuart, a small independent publisher that specialized in splashy titles — preferably those turned down elsewhere, so they were cheap to acquire.
“The Autobiography of Roy Cohn by Sidney Zion” can be had now on Amazon for $76.50, two-day delivery.
Si Newhouse and Roy Cohn were boyhood friends. It was reported that in Cohn’s final years, as he was on trial and disbarred, Newhouse regularly attended the proceedings.
The Newhouse family owned Random House Inc. from 1980 until 1998. I cannot say with certainty that “The Art of the Deal” (and its sequel) was the only book Si himself bought. But if there were others, none had the long-term consequences of that one.
