Condé Nast needed to marry an heiress.
The 29-year-old magazine exec was still a few years away from founding his influential eponymous publishing company. But by 1902, he was riding high after making a fortune managing the once-sleepy newsweekly Collier’s. As a Midwestern boy from a poor background, however, he couldn’t quite break into the upper echelons of New York society.
Enter Clarisse Coudert. Then 24, she came from a family of French aristocrats and seemed the perfect bride for the future fashion-magazine mogul. Clarisse rubbed shoulders with the Astors and Vanderbilts. She was tall and thin and carried herself with enviable hauteur — even if her bulging brown eyes looked, as Vogue editor Edna Woolman Chase put it, like a “dead fish’s.”
But it turned out the first Mrs. Condé Nast had other plans beyond being a perfect wife. She was set on becoming a famous soprano, or decorating houses, or hobnobbing with Debussy and Rodin in Paris.
“She didn’t care about Condé,” Susan Ronald, author of the new biography “Condé Nast: The Man and His Empire,” (St. Martin’s Press, out Sept. 3) told The Post. “She cared about Clarisse — and that [attitude] extended on to their children, too.”
Clarisse is often the most fun part Ronald’s book, out Tuesday. Her pettiness, dilettance and selfishness provide a delicious antidote to the responsible, upright Condé — a man so hell-bent on correctness that he was once thrown out of a costume party for arriving in black tie.
Clarisse, by contrast, was a Gilded Age “Real Housewife.”
“She is definitely like an Edith Wharton character,” said Ronald, referring to the early-20th-century novelist’s flawed antiheroines.
Jeanne Clarisse Coudert was born in 1878, the youngest of seven children. Her grandfather was a French aristocrat who had followed the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington’s pal, to the US. Her father was a renowned lawyer.
‘She no longer fit into the mold she had been educated to uphold . . . but would not take anyone’s advice as to how to fit in’
Clarisse, meanwhile, was known her unconventional fashion sense, swanning about in avant-garde pleated silk Fortuny gowns, which highlighted her naturally slim, corset-less figure.
“I’ve spoken to [Condé’s] family, and they all believed that he loved her,” said Ronald.
Yet, for both their sakes, Clarisse would only say “I do” if she could get her future hubby a spot on the Social Register: Condé needed the contacts and the prestige, while Clarisse could not be seen as marrying someone “beneath her.”
“There was a bit of haggling [between Clarisse and the keepers of the Social Register] over which members of his family would be acceptable and which wouldn’t be,” said Ronald. “But she did get him on there.”
The couple married in 1902 and by 1905 had two children, Charles and Natica. (Fun fact: Clarisse doctored Natica’s baptismal certificate so she could give her daughter a non-Christian name.) Still, Condé was thrown for a loop when in 1906, Clarisse announced she was moving to Paris to become a soprano.
“She was very willful,” said Ronald. Unfortunately, “She wasn’t that good a singer.”
After finding out from Clarisse’s doctor that his wife suffered from a “phantom instability,” Condé hired a nurse to watch the kids while the aspiring chanteuse flitted about Europe with her socialite sisters. When Clarisse finally came home, two years later, she promptly fired the caretaker.
“It was a case of ‘I don’t want to do this but I don’t want you to do it better,’ ” said Ronald.
Clarisse, bitter about her failed singing career but not completely undeterred, took up other hobbies. For a time she consulted the actress Mary Pickford on her wardrobe, and Condé — after he bought Vogue in 1909 — allowed her to redecorate the magazine’s offices, much to the chagrin of editor Edna Woolman Chase, who found the boss’s wife tacky.
Then there was the time that Clarisse just flat-out disappeared for six months.
“The family didn’t know what happened — she just wasn’t there,” Ronald said. “I think, frankly, Condé breathed a sigh of relief.”
Clarisse, it seems, was struggling to break through the conventions of society and redefine herself as a modern woman.
“The most important thing about Clarisse was that she lived at a time when women of her social standing were becoming active in politics and activities such as work — and she no longer fit into the mold she had been educated to uphold,” said Ronald. “She was clever enough to realize that she needed to change, but would not take anyone’s advice as to how to fit in.”
By 1921, the Nasts were officially living in different Park Avenue apartments; Condé was shacked up with his best friend — and rumored sometimes gay lover — Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair. Still, Nast was largely seen as a ladies-man-about-town.
“He was always with a beautiful woman,” said Ronald.
Clarisse, meanwhile, lashed out in creative ways.
When Condé told her he was planning on taking Natica to England to help launch British Vogue, Clarisse had him give her an astonishing amount of money to buy their daughter a new wardrobe. But when Natica arrived, her trunk was filled with ugly outfits that would not do in polite London society.
“She took no prisoners,” said Ronald.
It was Clarisse who finally filed for divorce in 1925, after 23 years of marriage. She had fallen in love with a dashing Wall Street stockbroker named José Victor Onativia III, who was 10 years her junior.
In 1928, Condé, age 55, married a woman just 20 years old. They split four years later.
And while Condé lost much of his wealth in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Clarisse ended up unscathed. Even after she split from Onativia — who was also hit hard by the Great Depression — she continued to live in a lavish Upper East Side apartment, paid for by Condé, until her death in 1955, at the age of 76.
“She had gotten used to being her own person. Her children were grown, she spent money and enjoyed herself,” Ronald said of her last days. “She wasn’t lonely. She wasn’t lonely at all.”
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