Summer 2013
Alumni Profiles
Michael Caruso ’83 Shoots Down Bogeys at Smithsonian Magazine
By Jamie Katz ’72, ’80 Business
As an editorial sapling at Vanity Fair, Michael Caruso ’83 once looked Norman Mailer dead in the eye and asked him to rewrite a major feature story. Caruso knew he was committing literary lèse-majesté. It crossed his mind that the pugnacious Mailer might actually wallop him. “It was one of the scariest moments of my professional career,” Caruso says. “I was virtually hyperventilating.”
Mailer had submitted a typically brilliant meditation on Bret Easton Ellis’ blood-soaked American Psycho. But Caruso felt Mailer’s piece could be more compelling, and he asked him to dig deeper, to make it tougher and more personal. “I wanted him to talk about violence in America, and about his own history of violence.”
Mailer stared back and said nothing.
“He sort of knitted these massive brows that he had, and I waited and waited,” Caruso says. “Finally he started nodding. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I think I know what you want.’ And he went off and wrote it.”
Since that memorable face-off more than 20 years ago, Caruso has led magazines as varied as Details, Los Angeles, Men’s Journal and Maximum Golf, earning an industry-wide reputation as an editor who swings for the fences. “To be the boss you’ve got to get the best work out of people,” says Caruso, 51. “Sometimes that involves being demanding and pushing them. And other times it involves hand-holding and late evenings over drinks.”
Smithsonian magazine Editor-in-Chief Michael Caruso ’83 will do whatever it takes to get the best from his writers, whether it means pushing them beyond their comfort zones or holding their hands and nurturing them. PHOTO: LANDON NORDEMANCaruso now practices those skills at Smithsonian magazine, where he was named editor-in-chief in 2011 following a stint as deputy editor of WSJ. Magazine, The Wall Street Journal’s lifestyle magazine. His current publication reflects the aspirations and scope of its parent, the Smithsonian Institution, which comprises 19 museums and galleries, nine research centers, the National Zoo and 177 affiliate museums. The magazine is a money-maker for the larger entity, which is about 70 percent federally funded, Caruso says. Though the publication is editorially independent, “we certainly have to be responsible to the institution,” he adds. “So it’s like so many things in life — you’re navigating a situation that can be somewhat complicated.” Notably, at a time when general interest magazines have been pummeled by the recession and the digital revolution, Smithsonian has increased its print circulation to more than 2 million. “Sometimes we feel as if we’re the last man standing — and thriving,” says Kathleen M. Burke, a senior editor at the magazine.
Caruso succeeded Carey Winfrey ’63, ’67J, whose version of Smithsonian was deemed America’s “Most Interesting” magazine in a nationwide study conducted by the research firm Affinity in 2011. During the transition, Winfrey encouraged Caruso not to feel beholden to anything the magazine had been doing. “I told him I believed it was time for the magazine to be rethought,” Winfrey says. Caruso has done just that, giving much of Smithsonian a fresh look while developing new departments, revamping existing ones and matching themed issues and topics with the best writers he can corral: Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs as a design genius; Frank Deford on the little-known British roots of the modern Olympics; Ruth Reichl and Mimi Sheraton on food; Paul Theroux on travel. “The ambition,” Caruso says, “is to put Smithsonian on the same level as The New Yorker and The Atlantic and the best magazines in the country.”
Enterprise and creativity come naturally to Caruso, whose father, Jerome, is a renowned industrial engineer (his Sub-Zero refrigerator systems and Wolf cooking appliances set a standard of excellence in kitchen design). “I learned so much from him,” Caruso says. “We do very much the same thing in different mediums. It’s form and function at the same time.”Growing up in suburban Lake Forest, Ill., Caruso was a serious sports fan who watched the Chicago Bears train every year at their nearby practice facility and shared in the frustration of a century of Cubs fans. “It teaches you suffering,” he says of his baseball loyalties. “It teaches you a Zen state of patience and incremental pleasure.”
Lured by the cultural life of New York City, he came to Columbia and buried himself under an enormous courseload — possibly, he thinks, a record (33 credits in his peak semester) — and graduated summa cum laude. His favorite professors were Joseph Bauke ’63 GSAS for Lit Hum; Wallace Gray ’58 GSAS in English; and Karl-Ludwig Selig, with whom he took “five or six” interdisciplinary literature courses. “Everybody should have a professor like that — he was just off the charts,” Caruso says of Selig.
“Michael was probably the smartest student I met at Columbia,” says Caruso’s college buddy, rock musician Dave Giffen ’86, who now is executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York City. “I remember having trouble in one of my English classes where we had to write poetry in the style of Ezra Pound. And that’s just not my scene. I can maybe squeeze out a dirty limerick. Meanwhile, Michael could crank out an Ezra Pound canto off the top of his head. He has an incredibly fast, facile mind. Let me point this out, though: I got a better grade than he did in music theory. That always pissed him off.”
Caruso’s first magazine job after college was at The New Yorker, where he was a messenger. Within a few years, he was executive editor of the Village Voice; at 29, he was recruited to Vanity Fair by Tina Brown, who hired him again when she launched her short-lived Talk magazine in 1999.
The Smithsonian opportunity was enticing enough to pry Caruso out of New York, at least for part of each week. He has been shuttling by train between Washington, D.C., and his Park Slope, Brooklyn, home (a weekly commute that may soon end if he finds the right place closer to work). His wife, Andrea Sheehan, is founder and CEO of Outthink, a digital education startup in partnership with the BBC. They have four children: daughters Asia (“my wife and I fell in love in Asia”) and Jazz (“my favorite music”), and twin boys Dash and Jett (as in Jett Rink, the brooding antihero of Giant, played by James Dean).
Caruso is only the fourth editor in Smithsonian’s 42-year history. His predecessors served for 10, 20 and 10 years, respectively. Whether or not Caruso hangs in that long, it’s clear that he loves his work.
“As an editor-in-chief you feel like you’re a fighter pilot and there are bogeys coming at you left and right. And if you’re in a great groove, you’re shooting ’em down left and right. You’re solving problems, you’re putting out fires, you’re making it all work. This is a really cool job. I’m thrilled to have it.”
Former CCT editor Jamie Katz ’72, ’80 Business is a former senior editor of People magazine and deputy editor of Vibe who has frequently contributed to Smithsonian.