How are you?" she asked politely as the elevator doors were closing, and her question sent a chill down my spine. So early in the morning her concern had an existential ring. "How am I doing?" was always the question for anyone working at Conde Nast. "Fine," I said, "but -- not quite awake, perhaps."

Wrong answer. She raised one eyebrow slightly. God forbid you should look sleepy, tired, or weary. Predators are known to attack the weakest animals in the herd. Even if you are sick, you should never admit it -- someone might take advantage of it and move in on your territory. "Try exercising," suggested the Vogue editorial assistant as the door opened on her floor. She waved at me and stepped out briskly, and I took a mental note of the way she wore her Alaia -- with a white tee and a simple row of pearls. Perfectly understated. I had to close my eyes: six months ago I couldn't spell Azzedine Alaia; today I was analyzing and deconstructing his fashion statement at 7:45 in the morning. I had been an eager student. To stay with the pack at Conde Nast one has to be swift, opinionated -- and ruthless.

Much of the learning at 350 Madison Avenue, where Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Self, Vanity Fair, HG, GQ, and Brides are housed, is done while riding the elevators. (The four other properties owned by Conde Nast Publications -- Allure, Details, Gourmet, and Traveler -- are located elsewhere in Manhattan.) In the elevators, the company's vertical campus, employees trade remarks, swap ideas, and steal looks at each other. Celebrated models, smart editors, known writers, occasional movie stars, and some of the cutest photographers in the business are among the passengers. For many people the journey from the lobby to their floor, and vice versa, is a chance to make important eye contacts, check out their inklings about upcoming trends, and record pieces of other people's conversation. For others it can be a journey to the center of some rather unpleasant emotions -- greed and envy, for starters.

Like the arcades, galleries, and passageways of the past in which people met to discuss the affairs of the day, elevator banks today play a major role in the social life of a community -- decisions may be finalized behind closed doors, but a lot of the deliberating is done in transit between floors. Every CNP employee has a favorite elevator story, some innocuous, others quite dramatic. A friend of mine, for example, got fired between the twentieth and the fifteenth floors by his boss, a woman he had known for ten years. "She was going away on a brief vacation," he recalls, "and asked me to help carry her bags to the lobby. So here I am, holding her fancy pieces of luggage and she says, 'Darling, I had a wonderful idea: Why don't you become a contributing editor?' We were alone in the elevator and she was just chatting away. 'I am fired?' I asked. 'Nothing like that, really, dear,' she exclaimed. So I took her to her limo and on the way back up I came across the personnel director in the elevator. 'If you have a minute, follow me into my office,' she suggested. It was perfectly orchestrated."

To get a "private" moment with some very busy people, it is not an uncommon procedure at CNP to ride with them up and down. I have dropped 240 feet with an editor while discussing a layout and holding her Limoges teacup brimful with Earl Grey, milk-please-but-no-sugar. I have seen art directors in Armani suits step in, escorted by photographers wearing fatigues; assistants in Romeo Gigli sent down to the lobby to buy candies. Everyone is on the lookout. Just get in, take a spin, and seen the CNP world.

This constant back-and-fourth, up-and-down, and in-and-out movement is emblematic of the Conde Nast corporate culture, where hiring and firing are both dramatic and sudden. "The seas are often choppy and careers can sink like a stone," wrote The New York Times about CNP in 1989. It is change for the sake of change. Conde Nast management philosophy mirrors the industry it serves, the world of fashion where the only certainty is the knowledge that the present fad will soon be outmoded.

When you cast away last season's favorite, you create a vacuum, a fleeting weightlessness and a sense of expectation that is often more compelling than anything you could imagine in its place. People who understand this principle sooner or later find their way to Conde Nast. One of the most colorful editors-in-chief, Self magazine's Alexandra Penney, used to give away her entire wardrobe once a year -- showing a rare gutsy spirit and manifesting ahead of time that she was suited for the top position. Employees who try to keep a tight hold on their job miss the point and fail to comprehend the reason why they were hired in the first place: to contribute to the molecular activity at the magazine and add a new layer of complexity to the ongoing drama.

Everyone who works at CNP can look forward to getting in and out of favor as often as one rides up and down the famous elevators -- at least twice a day. "They keep changing the rules on you," explains an editor who was hired for a specific job, promoted twice in a short time, and then suddenly fired. Your job description bears very little resemblance to what's expected of you. There is an implicit commitment to extravagance, and logic is frowned upon. "When they say, 'Let's turn right,'" says an insider, "it doesn't mean they have decided to turn right; it only means that they are talking about turning right. Actually, they probably intend to turn left." This atmosphere creates complex rituals of commitment and sacrifice; the creative process is an act of renouncement and immolation: first you fight for your idea, then you give it up -- and leave it to others to either complete or destroy your project.

War correspondents must feel the way I did the day I arrived from San Francisco in 1989 to become the art director of Self magazine: I was sent to the front -- the corporate suites on the fourteenth floor -- where a classic CNP power struggle was under way. There I met the man known as a mentor and a tormentor, a man many magazine people both respect and fear, Alexander Liberman. For fifty years the creative force behind the Conde Nast Publications group of magazines, Liberman is a monumental figure. Facing him was Anthea Disney, the editor-in-chief who had hired me. Rochelle Udell, considered by some to be CNP chairman S.I. Newhouse's choice as successor to Liberman, was trying to act as a benevolent adviser to Anthea, while at the same time negotiating her own political status. Twelve weeks later, Disney "resigned." She announced her departure the day my furniture arrived from the West Coast; I remember searching through cardboard boxes for a pair of scissors to clip the story in The Wall Street Journal. Disney's departure, the Journal said, was due to her "direct and frequent run-ins with Alexander Liberman . . . [who] wanted to become more involved in the look of the magazine. He started calling the shots."

I figured my days were numbered, but before I left I wanted to experience for myself life under Liberman's notirious editorial command. "Consistency is the sign of a small mind," he told me for openers. "Don't be stylish, you'll be dated," he would then admonish. And he kept after me: "Un peu plus de brutalite, s'il vous plait, ma chere amie" (a little more brutality, please, my dear friend), he insisted when my fashion layouts looked too "nice" to him -- and my heart would sink. I was at the mercy of a man who was so smooth he never made a sound when entering a room.

Contrasting with his cool and civilized demeanor, Alexandra Penney, the new Self editor-in-chief, was boisterous, loud and uninhibited. The author of several best-selling sex books and a TV personality, she was a character out of a Broadway musical. Her corner office, overlooking Forty-fifth Street, was only a stone's throw from Times Square, and she produced there one of the most entertain shows in town. Editorial meetings were her matinee performances. I would sit among the audience -- editors who, like me, had dropped everything just for a chance to attend -- and watch her take the stage. If you liked American culture, you had to like her, and Alex Liberman was no exception. He treated her with deference, the way tourists treat Mickey Mouse when they run into him in the streets of the Magic Kingdom. Soon I realized that Alex and Alexandra, these two unlikely characters, empahtized with each other because they were both performers.

Liberman is not the calculating Machiavellian figure he has been described as: he has no Grand Plan. Rather, he is improvising, playing a role and enjoying it. Almost eighty, he is an impressive actor. Every morning he gets his cues from his secretary, who functions as his booking agent: he is expected at Vanity Fair for a cover problem; he needs to schedule forty-five minutes at Vogue, where a major photo shoot is being edited; around noon he should make an appearance at Self to meet the decorator who is redesigning the reception area; in the meantime, the Mademoiselle editor-in-chief is on hold, calling from Switzerland. As soon as he gets his script he makes the rounds of the magazines and every situation becomes material for his dramatic interpretation. In what has turned out to be a fifty-year engagement -- culminating as editorial director of CNP -- he has never sought publicity for himself. Like the comedian who does not perform for his critics and cares only about his audience, Liberman measures success in newsstand sales figures and lives for the imagined applause of the sound of pages turning.

Unlike the younger art directors who collaborate with him and want to show that they are on the cutting edge of graphic design, Liberman knows how to underplay stylishness for the benefit of style and emphasize immediacy rather than fads. I have seen him pick a second-rate photograph for its unexpected grace and sneer at slick pictures because they were devoid of "charm." Photographers sometimes called his layouts sadistic -- he would not hesitate to crop half of a perfectly good picture if he thought it would add energy to the page, and he loved to create typographic havoc between images and text just to surprise his audience. He may shock readers, but he never intimidates them -- and that is his great talent.

Much to my surprise, I survived in this reckless universe more than a couple of months. I attributed my staying power to the fact that, being French, I shared some of Liberman's points of reference -- he left Paris for the States the year I was born there. It helps when two people can enumerate the same metro stops. But there was a limit to how much mileage I could get out of our common heritage. It all started, typically, with an editor incident. My niece from Seattle was in town and, like every teen in America, she was dying to visit the Mademoiselle office. I couldn't arrange that, because fraternizing between magazines is not encouraged at CNP, but I have her a grand tour of Self instead. A cheerleader and a basketball star, she was everything the Conde Nast editor crowd is not: naive, fresh, and trusting. And then there was her hair, long, curly, and layered -- all wrong, of course. As I took her back to the editor landing, we bumped into Liberman. She kissed me on both cheeks, called me "Auntie," and, as I watched in horror, she got into the elevator with him. "Howdoyoudo?" I heard her ask as the doors were closing. I just stood there while all the blood in my body descended to my feet, following my mind into the depth of my fear -- and at the moment I knew I soon would be fired.

I remember going back to my office and putting my head on the desk, with the cool Formica right against my cheek. I guess I was tired. The charade was over for me. I kept seeing my innocent niece -- Conde Nast prototypical reader -- standing next to Alexander Liberman, and I felt my life in the last twelve months had been a parody. That night she asked me who the stern gentleman in the editor was, adding that he looked very unhappy. A couple of weeks later I was fired -- "We are moving into the next phase," I was told -- and joined the ranks of ex-staffers who are nevertheless thriving in New York City.

The impressive roster of women who had the honor of being terminated by CNP turned out to be an intriguing and glamorous crowd. I have traced the lineage as far back as 1920, to Dorothy Parker, who got the ax from Frank Crowninshield, the founding editor of Vanity Fair, for her blunt theater reviews that alienated the pretty actresses who were guests at the publisher's celebrates social gatherings. Then I discovered Clare Booth Brokaw, who in 1931 submitted to her boss, Conde Nast, the prototype of a weekly picture magazine she thought should be called Life -- a concept he did not understand and categorically rejected. Yet both women remained good friends of Nast until his death in 1942.

Getting fired from CNP became a painful experience only in later years, when, under the Newhouse ownership, the company lost some of its class pretension and social polish. The first highly publicized unelegant removal took place in 1972, when Vogue's brilliant editor-in-chief, Diana Vreeland, was replaced by Grace Mirabella. In 1980, Edith Raymond Locke, who had been editor of Mademoiselle for nine years, was sent packing. In 1987, Louis Oliver Gropp, House & Garden's editor-in-chief, learned that he had been replaced by Anna Wintour during his vacation, when he called the office from a pay phone. Under Mirabella's direction, Vogue's readership tripled, but when her time was up, in 1988, she learned that she had been fired from a friend who heard it on TV. In the late eighties, the competition was fierce; powerful editors and art directors came and went -- not just Disney, but also Lloyd Ziff, Valerie Weaver, Ruth Ansel, Guillaume Bruneau, and many, many more. The marketplace was flooded with bright, able, and enterprising magazine professionals with stories to tell -- yet, strangely enough, not willing to talk about their experience. "I would rather not think about it," typically said a former CNP art director when I asked him how he left the company. "I've got better things to do -- don't you?" No one I spoke to wanted to be mentioned by name. "I learned a lot from Conde Nast, and in the end it was a positive experience," said an editor who was fired a couple of weeks after I was, "so I want to leave it alone -- and be a lady."

In fact, nobody seems to understand the impulse to keep quit on the subject of dismissal better than Liberman himself, who has been fired at least three times in his life, including once by Mehemed Fehmy Agha -- alias Dr. Agha -- his predecessor at Vogue. The legendary Turkish art director canned the young Russian graphic artist one fateful Friday fifty years ago, after the newcomer had spent only one week on the job. The following Monday Liberman was scheduled to meet Nast, and he boldly decided to keep the appointment. During the conversation with the aging publisher, he talked about his experience in Paris and the awards he had won during his already brilliant career, but never saw fit to mention that he had already been hired -- and fired -- by the irascible Dr. Agha.

"Well," concluded Nast at the end of the interview, "a man like you must work at Vogue." Apparently neither Agha nor Liberman ever talked about the incident again, but a showdown was inevitable, and two years later the efficient young man replaced his boss.

Although unique by contemporary standards, Liberman's consuming sense of style was not uncommon half a century ago. In fact, he had a role model in the person of Frank Crowninshield, whose influence on the Conde Nast culture can still be felt. Like Liberman a man of great charm and education, he inadvertently defined the editorial tone for all CNP magazines when he explained that he wanted Vanity Fair to be a publication "that is read by the people you meet a lunches and dinners." (Nast was more explicit; he once wrote about Vogue, "[We] must conspire not only to get all [our] readers from the one particular class to which the magazine is dedicated, but also rigorously exclude all others.") Crowninshield was so taken with stylistic concerns that, according to a 1942 profile of him in The New Yorker, "he . . . edits his incoming mail punctiliously before throwing it in the wastebasket."

Liberman's editorial direction is better understood in conjunction with his art. He has managed to become, in his spare time, an artist of international fame, whose monumental sculptures can be seen on campuses and urban plazas. A respected painter as well, he knows how to take chances with colors, textures, and shapes. He manipulates the elements of the magazine page -- the headlines, the blurbs, the text, and the photographs -- in the same way he utilizes the huge scraps of steel or the buckets of paint out of which he creates his art. Copy for him is a plastic medium, and words are as evocative as colors; to run a big quote across a page is like applying a thick slab of paint on a canvas.

By posterizing words, playing with them as if they were pictures, the Liberman look trivializes the purpose of language; and this is perhaps the reason he has brought so many editors to grief. I remember Anthea Disney's last confrontation with him. We had driven out to Warren, Connecticut, his summer retreat, to get his approval of the latest Self magazine layouts. He received us in his painting studio, a whitewashed loft carved out of an old barn. With the light streaming down from the skylights, the canvases leaning against the paint spattered walls, and the smell of linseed oil and turpentine in the air, the place was evocative of an artist's atelier in some provincial town in the south of France, where, as a child, I used to spend my summer vacations. Imprinted as I was by Proust, Montaigne, and Cezanne, I was overwhelmed by a kind of nostalgia. But Anthea remained focused and alert as she watched Alex study the work we had spread out on the table between sketch pads and bundles of paint brushes.

"This is not acceptable," I remember him saying about a modest layout for an article exploring the predicaments of ethnic women in the workplace. "It's too static, there is not enough energy," he said. He was looking back and forth at Anthea and me, waiting for one of us to agree with him and pledge our support with a promise to jazz things up. But doing so would have meant violating the spirit of the story. "Can't you do something?" he said, turning violently toward me. "Don't you understand what I am talking about?" I took one last look at Anthea, who stood eloquently still. "Yes," I said at last. "I understand. I know what you mean. I'll fix it."

But I couldn't really fix it. At CNP you don't ever fix things. You throw them away.

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