Bernard Leser’s enviable contacts book and ability to work a room turned him into one of the late 20th-century’s leading magazine publishers.
As the right-hand man of Samuel (“Si”) Newhouse (joint owner with his brother Donald of Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications), Leser was the supreme glad-hander. He was appointed variously as managing director of Condé Nast UK, president of Condé Nast USA, and chairman and managing director of Condé Nast Asia Pacific. His friendships with advertisers generated the money to make Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Glamour and GQ the titles that helped to create today’s celebrity culture.
Always immaculately turned out, Leser tirelessly socialised on the company’s behalf, attending every worthwhile party and relentlessly wining and dining clients. He claimed to know personally the chief executives of three-quarters of Condé Nast’s advertisers, from Burberry and Chanel to Estée Lauder and Max Factor. His bathroom cabinet was filled with their lotions.
In 1990, he reckoned that by Christmas he had taken 65 flights, flown for 311 hours and 53 minutes, and covered 167,365 miles. His long absences from home, however, had repercussions for his family life. Last year “out of love and disappointment for my father,” his son David wrote an agonised biography, To Begin to Know: Walking in the Shadows of my Father.
Despite moving in such a volatile industry, Leser managed to look on the bright side. The 1990s recession was painful for magazine advertising and circulation revenues, but he saw it as a learning experience. “After two or three difficult years, we are more efficient, creative, imaginative and cost-conscious. . . It’s amazing how well Vogue does in periods of recession when people can’t afford what’s on the pages.”
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He made friends easily and valued loyalty above all else — several staff worked with him for decades — yet he also made the occasional bitter enemy. The late Sheila Scotter, the famously acerbic editor of Vogue Australia from 1962 to 1971, said of Leser: “He didn’t have instinctive style. I think it’s extraordinary that he doesn’t credit what we did for him in creating a base for all he’s achieved.”
Towards the end of his time as president of Condé Nast in New York, he clashed with Ron Galotti, a tough-talking advertising executive who launched Condé Nast Traveller. Galotti described Leser as the worst chief executive he ever worked with, adding: “I want to see Bernie Leser walk out of the building and get hit by a bus. I don’t want him killed, just hurt so he has to go back to Australia or New Zealand or wherever the hell he came from.” Leser shrugged off the criticism: “I fired him, so I don’t imagine he had anything good to say about me.”
He was born in Berlin in 1925, but his family fled to Canada, then New Zealand, in 1939 to escape the Nazis. When Leser was 11 his father, Kurt, took him to the 1936 Olympics, where he saw Hitler’s reaction to the victories of the black US sprinter Jesse Owens.
Kurt won the Iron Cross (1st Class) for saving a fellow soldier’s life in Verdun in 1916 — an act of valour that would have profound consequences for him and his family. He became a children’s knitwear-maker in Sondershausen, eastern Germany; by November 1938, the man whose life Kurt had saved was the local Nazi Brownshirts leader. On the eve of Kristallnacht, he met Kurt on a park bench and told him to flee. He duly took his wife, Ellen, and their only son, Bernd (who later anglicised his name), to New Zealand, where they had relatives.
Leser left school aged 15 and studied business at night school before graduating in economics at the University of Auckland. In search of job opportunities, he moved to Sydney with only £5 in 1947 and met Barbara, his future wife, at a party that year. They married in 1952. The daughter of a music publisher, Herbert Davis, and a concert pianist, Hansy Eizenberg, Barbara wrote a music column for the Sydney Jewish News, then joined the music department of ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). She later became a sales manager for a Sydney-based book importing company.
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Their first child, Deborah, works as a fabric designer and art therapist. Their elder son, David, is an author and journalist, and their younger son, Danny, is a photographer.
After a period working for the Sydney department store chain David Jones — first as an analyst, then as a shoe salesman — Leser became an Australian citizen in 1952 and moved to California Productions, which made shoes and sportswear under licence from overseas firms. As he travelled the world looking for new deals, he came to London in 1959 and was asked by Reggie Williams, the head of Condé Nast UK, to launch an Australian edition of Vogue. He returned to Sydney, and the first edition of Vogue Australia appeared in August that year.
The start was shaky: in 1972 Condé Nast sold the Australian operation to Leser and senior executives, taking 5 per cent of sales. They bought it back, however, in two stages — in 1984 and 1989.
By then Leser had proved his worth. In 1976 he had been sent to London to help the ailing local edition of Vogue. While there he bought World of Interiors and Tatler for the company, the latter bringing Tina Brown into the Condé Nast orbit. In 1979 he started the German Vogue.
He ran the London end of the business for 11 years, then moved to New York. While there he helped to launch or buy Details, Allure, Condé Nast Traveller and Architectural Digest. Aged 69, he returned to Australia.
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After retiring, Leser chaired Text Media, an Australian book publisher, from 1998 to 2002. He paid what turned out to be a farewell visit to London ten years ago, aged 80, visiting friends in their old haunts — the Garrick club, Annabel’s and Harry’s Bar — in a punishing round of lunches and dinners.
Bernard Leser, magazine publisher, was born on March 15, 1925. He died on October 12, 2015, aged 90