The Coffee House founder FRANK CROWNINSHIELD’s favorite word was “serendipity.” Scion of an affluent family, he was a member of the Knickerbocker and the Union clubs: establishment gathering places for men in New York society. But Crowninshield moved in much wider circles, with actors, artists, journalists and authors—people whom those clubs did not typically welcome, even as guests. He chafed under arcane rules maintained by seemingly inbred cadres of officers, and was appalled that rich men were allowed to run up huge bar and dining tabs and then delay or never even pay those bills. So in 1915 he and a few friends who, likewise, felt uncomfortable in their stuffy old clubs, formed a club of their own.

The Coffee House took its name from the eighteenth century gathering places that actively encouraged the life of the mind. In this new Coffee House, lively discussions would cover anything and everything; intellect would count for more than pedigree; great books for more than bankbooks. From the first, there would always be a piano in the club; but there would be no officers and no formal rules. And while women could not join as members (they were finally allowed to in 1979) they would be welcome as guests. Cliques were discouraged: everyone was expected to eat at a single long table. And there would be no tabs: members had to pay for what they ate and drank before leaving.

Why would Crowninshield make such a departure from the life of leisure that upper-class men enjoyed? Probably because, unlike them—but very much like most other New Yorkers—he put in a full day’s work, every day, for which he drew a salary! He began his career in publishing at the end of the nineteenth century, just as technological advances were fueling the industry’s expansion. Electromechanical typesetting, photoengraving, offset lithography, and the copper-plate rotogravure press enabled magazines to grow larger and more lustrous with huge, colorful pages for both advertising and editorial content. Editing prestigious magazines quickly became Crowninshield’s métier. In 1900 he was editor of Metropolitan; in 1903 he was assistant editor of Munsey’s; and by 1910 he was art editor of The Century. The man who put Crowninshield into the job for which he is best remembered was Condé Nast. Crowninshield did have a little experience as a publisher (of The Bookman magazine for Dodd, Mead & Co.). But Nast was a professional publisher with a knack for making magazines make money.

During the decade when he was advertising manager of Collier’s, yearly ad revenue went up from $5,600 to over $1,000,000, and circulation rose from fewer than 20,000 to more than 568,000 readers. He became publisher of Vogue, which focused on the high end, the designer end of women’s fashions. But Nast, born and raised in the Midwest, saw the American middle class expanding, and women becoming more independent. So Nast’s Vogue began reaching out to cover fashionable clothes women could buy off the rack. When this proved to boost circulation, he collected an object or figure because of anything curious about it, or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen for its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure and plastic values.” He liked to display his latest acquisitions in his office; but his expertise was appreciated more often in the expanding ranks of progressive collectors. In 1913 he arbitrated disputes over what should be exhibited at the first

Armory show, and in 1929 he was among the initial founders and trustees of the Museum of Modern Art.

“CROWNIE” AND ART

“Crownie,” as he liked to be called, was born in 1872 in Paris and grew up in Europe where hisfather was a successful watercolorist, mural painter and stained-glass designer. By the first decades of the twentieth century, as Crownie’s own income grew, he became a collector. The wider art market favored Old Masters, but Crowninshield acquired pictures by the Impressionists. He bought African sculptures too, in an era when they were widely dismissed as curiosities. Crownie disagreed. He was quoted as saying, “I have never turned his attention to another monthly magazine he owned, but which had never found its footing. Vogue had a lock on the couture vibe; The Century dominated the highbrow sphere; Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post were the big dogs in popular fiction. Nast hired Crowninshield to find—or create—a niche in the marketplace and fill it with Vanity Fair. Under Crownie’s blue pencil, Vanity Fair would cover men’s fashion more than women’s. It would not run serials, nor much fiction at all, but it would bring dozens of new writers’ works to public attention. It would review not just books and the theater but the new medium: movies. It would take serious issues seriously and treat lighter subjects with sophisticated humor. It would not be New-York-centric, but national and international in scope. In short, as he later claimed to have told Nast, it would focus on what people all over the country were likely to be talking about. Crowninshield took the editor’s chair in 1913. The Great War soon hobbled the entire publishing industry; but afterward, as the 1920s began, Vanity Fair hit its stride. Crowninshield’s own interests were so broad, his circles of friends and acquaintances so wide-ranging, that the best way to grasp the extent of his influence on the cultural life of the country is to look at Vanity Fair’s serendipitous coverage. Nearly everything in every issue was something he knew and cared about.

In January of 1923, with the post-war economy booming, Vanity Fair was 104 pages thick. Single copies sold for thirty-five cents; a year’s subscription cost three dollars. Readers found whole sections for “The Theatrical Call Board” (reviews and previews), “The Financial Situation,” “Books of the Month,” and “The World of Art.” Walter Lippman profiled President Harding; and P.G. Wodehouse asked “Should Ocean Liners be Abolished?” (Answer: No, because “The real trouble is the passengers.”) There were photographs of Paul Manship’s latest sculptures; woodcut prints by Raoul Dufy accompanied by Guillaume Apollinaire’s French verses; a fantasy “Drama for the Deaf” by Edna St. Vincent Millay; photos and drawings from the New York and Paris exhibitions of new automobiles; and a column on strategies for Crowninshield’s favorite card game, Bridge. Nast must surely have been happy with the ad revenue his editor was attracting. That issue had scores of classified and small display ads in “Shoppers’ and Buyers’ Guides.” Listerine and Campbell’s Soup bought full-page ads. And seven full-page/four-color ads promoted Crane and Standard bathroom fixtures, Jordan and Ruby motor cars, Heinz pickles, Ampico pianos, and the Prudential Insurance Company. By June of 1925, with the Roaring Twenties in full roar, Vanity Fair gave readers 128 pages for thirty-five cents. Crownie ran poetry from the Harlem Renaissance by Countée Cullen. He gave Aldous Huxley ink to complain about “the horrors of society [and] the diversions of the leisure classes.” Virgil Thompson got a platform from which to bemoan “The Cult of Jazz” and take a dim view of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” There were whole sections on Golf, on New Cars, and on Men’s Fashion (where, in one ad, Alexander Woollcott endorsed neckties from Cruger’s haberdashery). That issue boasted nine full-page/four-color ads, four of them for automobiles, and one each for Listerine, Simmons (beds), Nairn (linoleum), US Royal Balloon Cords (tires), and Knothe Brothers’ “The Club” line of men’s garters. But as we know, that era of prosperity did not last. The November 1932 issue, declaring itself on the masthead “The Kaleidoscopic Review of Modern Life,” was down to 72 pages. And though single copies were still thirty-five cents, a full-page house ad offered two-year subscriptions for four dollars. New subscribers would thereby “join the Vanity Fair Club of 90,000 readers,” and receive “the latest tidings of the world of sport—the spectacles of Manhattan—the news of the arts. Vanity Fair,” it said, “is the one periodical wide-awake men and women cannot afford to be without, least of all in these parlous times.” Circulation never topped 90,000. And the times were indeed parlous. That issue’s cover art by Paolo Garretto showed Hitler on the upper arm of a black swastika. Preparing readers for the US presidential election that month, Vanity Fair ran Lippman assuring readers that there would be “No Armageddon This Year,” and historian Milton S. Mayor focusing on past presidential elections. There was a side-by-side tally of FDR’s political “credits and debits.” And after a serious report on the merits and shortcomings of taking “straw polls,” the editors took one themselves, asking celebrities for whom they planned to vote. (FYI: Nast went for Hoover, H.L. Mencken for Roosevelt, Woollcott for the Socialist Norman Thomas, and Theodore Dreiser for the Communist William Z. Foster.)

Regular features still appeared, including the Bridge column, and nominations to the “Hall of Fame” which, that month, included “Princess Elizabeth of England.” But there were only three full-page/four-color ads: for Lincoln automobiles, the Italian Line of steamships, and Chesterfield cigarettes. At that time, Claire Boothe Brocaw (later, Luce) was Crowninshield’s assistant editor. She would subsequently call him “the most thoughtful, punctilious and at the same time wittiest man who ever lived.” His social life included many women who, like her, could count on him for intelligent conversation about women’s issues. He had unrequited crushes on several famous actresses. And he was notorious among his secretaries and typists as a shameless flirt. But he never married.

As the country’s fortunes slowly improved, Vanity Fair’s enjoyed a slight uptick. The June 1935 issue, though still only 72 pages, remained true to Crowninshield’s breadth of vision. It offered a lengthy illustrated feature about Hollywood’s new Technicolor process, a deeply researched analysis of lynching in America, an essay predicting that “the next war will be fought, to a large extent, in the air,” a profile by Paul Gallico of heavy-weight boxing champions, and a page of photos from a MoMA exhibition headlined “African Art Captures New York.” Ads were more plentiful, and almost as diverse as the editorial content. Seven full-page/four-color ads promoted the Italian Line, Jarman “Friendly” Shoes, Goodyear tires, Lucky Strike and Chesterfield cigarettes (the latter featuring a comely Petty girl), Old Overhalt Rye, Seagram’s Bottled-in-Bond Whiskies, and White Rock water. But Crownie’s crowning achievement could not be sustained. In 1936, just as Henry Luce was launching Life magazine, Nast folded Vanity Fair into Vogue. Crowninshield took it in stride, becoming the merged magazine’s fine arts editor. In the 1940s he continued to be a well-dressed bon vivant in New York,but spent more and more time at his summer place in the Berkshires. Likely for the first time feeling his age, he began in earnest to sell pictures and sculptures from his collection. He donated pieces to auctions raising funds for health- and hospital-related causes, and wrote letters urging fellow collectors to do likewise. He died at 75, shortly after Christmas in 1947. A few weeks later New Yorker staffer Geoffrey T. Hellman, who’d done a two-part profile of Crowninshield in 1942, penned a retrospective piece in which he declared that Crowninshield’s favorite word was “serendipity.” To prove it he quoted from a letter Crownie sent to a prospective biographer a few years after Vanity Fair lost its independence. “I like an immense number of things,” he wrote, “which society, money and position bring in their train: paintings, tapestries, rare books, smart dresses, gardens, country houses, correct cuisine, and pretty women.” That letter concluded with this: “I have been thinking of [my] weaknesses, failures and vulnerable points. The first, I suppose, would be snobbery—a too great interest in the world of high (and rich) society. Second, my failure to establish, firmly, any business, periodical, literary agency, etc. Third, a perhaps preposterous liking for the new as against the old in painting, music, architecture, night clubs, dances, food, and women.” Crowninshield numbered “fourth,” among his shortcomings “my almost inhuman avoidance of alcohol.” A teetotaler from childhood on, he never drank from the glasses with which he made innumerable toasts at banquets and ceremonies. But he always served French wine at dinner parties in his East Sixties penthouse (where, incidentally, he lived with two cats). Crowninshield ended his self-deprecatory letter this way: “Perhaps also there is a certain superficiality in my knowledge; reading, as I do, a little hurriedly and not studying profoundly any subject in particular.” That’s true, I suppose. But did he need profundity? Look at how the wide extent of his friendship circles drew so many creative people into the Coffee House; and at how deeply his “superficiality” enriched the cultural life of America.

--Hal Glatzer, September 2025

Mr. Glatzer is a writer based in New York.

He has been a member of the Coffee House since 1993