Nothing's Gotta Give

American Magazine | Summer 2005

http://www.american.edu/weekly/summer05_shanken.html

The Finer Things
Alumnus Marvin Shanken’s publishing dynasty is focused on things he knows and loves best
BY mike unger

The sweet aroma from Marvin Shanken’s 15-year-old Cuban cigar wafts through his eighth-story corner office, the smoke dancing in front of windows looking out onto New York’s Park Avenue South.

Sporting his favored suspenders, the bearded, bespectacled publisher of Wine Spectator, Cigar Aficionado, and a handful of other wildly successful periodicals, sits back and puffs from the 7-inch Dom Perignon he currently is enjoying to its fullest. One gets the feeling that this man would look almost unnatural without a cigar wedged between his lips.

Shanken ’68 has dedicated his career to the finer things in life. Now, having worked tirelessly for decades transforming Spectator from a virtually extinct, nearly bankrupt niche publication into one of the world’s foremost authorities on wine, with readership topping 2 million, he has vowed to downshift just a bit, to treasure nightly dinners at home with his wife, Hazel, and their 17-year-old daughter, Jessica, savor every sip of Cabernet, relish the taste of each rich cigar.

“I’ve been a workaholic,” Shanken, 61, says. “You have to work hard and be committed and passionate to build something of substance. In the last five or six years, I’ve made it my business to balance my private life with my business. Now that I have a business that’s doing OK, I’m able to take time off to enjoy the fruits of my labor. I don’t want to go through life and at my funeral have people say, ‘Wow, this guy was great. Look what he built and look how hard he worked.’ I want them to say, ‘Look what he built and look at how he enjoyed life while he was here.’”

The perimeter of Shanken’s office is crammed with autographed pictures of him with, well, everyone. There’s Marvin and buddy Rudy Giuliani. Here he is with Bill Clinton. Marvin and the cast of The Sopranos. Fuggetaboutit!

But in reality, more than just the rich and famous find their way into Shanken’s world. To a certain degree, anyone who’s ever read Spectator or Aficionado knows Shanken. The magazines are an embodiment of his passions, pleasures, and beliefs.

“It’s really just giving people what you think they would want and appreciate, and being committed to it,” he says. “It’s a reflection of my interests. Gambling, drinking, traveling, golf. That’s what it’s all about.”

Just where Shanken’s taste for the good life originated is a bit mysterious. He grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of Oscar and Evelyn, neither of whom indulged in spirits or tobacco. They did, however, instill in him values he has drawn on throughout his life.

“From my mother I learned to think creatively, and from my father I learned about honesty, integrity, and values,” he says.

In an industry known for turnover, Shanken has inspired startling loyalty among his staff. Many of the key players at M. Shanken Communications have been with him for more than 20 years.

“He treats people with respect and dignity,” says Steven Florio, vice chairman of Advance Magazine Group, which publishes Vogue and GQ, among others. “He’s a very decent human being. A lot of times people who are at the head of million-dollar companies get very detached from the real world. Marvin, as much as he loves to sit down with some great vintage wine or some cigar that’s 45 years old, that level of sophistication, he’s also the same guy that you can go to a ball game with and eat hot dogs and drink beer. He’s really a renaissance man.”

Anxious to flee the harsh New England winters, Shanken flew south after high school to the University of Miami, where he developed an interest in real estate—and cigars.

“I smoked a little bit during college, but it was cheap, wooden-tipped cigars,” he says.

After earning a business degree, Shanken applied to AU’s School of Business Administration, one of only a handful of universities that offered an MBA in real estate appraisal.

He was rejected.

“It had a great program, so I went anyway and started taking classes at night,” Shanken says. “I tried to prove that I could handle the curriculum. I got pretty good grades, and after the first year, they let me in.”

When Shanken first arrived in Washington, he opened the Yellow Pages to the real estate appraising section, focused on the letter “A,” and began hunting for a job. After dialing just one phone number, to the offices of the American Real Estate Appraisal Company, he had a bite.

“They invited me in for an interview, and they offered me a job at a buck and a half an hour,” Shanken says.

After earning his MBA, Shanken went to work on Wall Street, frequently utilizing the fundamentals he absorbed in graduate school.

“AU was very important because they had the case-study approach,” he says. “I learned a lot about the challenges of businesses and how to analyze businesses that I had never known before. It was very helpful in terms of introducing me to a lot of concepts, words, ideas that are a part of the business vocabulary. Then you go out into the real world and you really learn.”

Shanken’s oenophilia blossomed as he began brokering Northern California real estate deals involving vineyards.

“I was fascinated with the world of wine,” he says. “I needed to know more about it because at the end of the day, when you’re putting people into real estate investments in vineyards, what they’re doing is selling grapes. You need to know the economics of the business. I wanted to be able to understand it so when I talked to investors, I could explain to them the nuances of why it was a good investment.”

As he recalls times more than three decades past, pausing to draw from his cigar, it becomes evident when the seeds of his overriding magazine philosophy—that of educating people on life’s luxuries—were planted.

“I fell in love with wine,” he says. “All I wanted to do was be a wine writer. I hated Wall Street. I was very idealistic, and I didn’t like what I was experiencing and seeing. I wanted to abandon real estate and finance and business. I heard about a newsletter that was for sale. They were going to close it down, because it was very unsuccessful. They only had 200 subscribers. It was very inexpensive. I bought it for $5,000, and henceforth I was a publisher.”

Shanken was 29 when in 1972 he purchased the wine industry newsletter Impact, which remains in his publications portfolio to this day.

Three years later Shanken took a leap of faith and left Wall Street to begin publishing Impact full time.

“I didn’t know what I was doing or how to do it,” he says. “It was a sign of insanity.”

Yet it worked. In 1979, Shanken paid $40,000 for a 12-page, tabloid-sized newspaper that had caught his attention a few years earlier, Wine Spectator.

“The guy wanted to give it to me, but he was a friend of mine, so I wouldn’t take it for nothing,” Shaken says. “I didn’t have the $40,000, so I paid for it over
five years.”

The magazine now has a circulation of 380,000, and its influence among the wine-drinking public is unmistakably powerful.

“Certainly, he’s introduced for consumers a level [of] comfort for understanding wines,” says Dan Leese, president of Beringer Blass Wine Estates and a longtime Shanken friend. “That drives some people crazy because it makes [Spectator] the overall authority of wine, but I think it’s necessary in a confusing industry.”

The magazine’s story, however, is not one of overnight success.

“It was many years before it broke even,” Shanken says. “It’s being committed to try to give the reader what I thought they wanted to read. The truth. Giving them news and entertainment and information so that they too could appreciate and learn about wine. I’ve always said I’m not in the publishing business, I’m in the education business, and all of my magazines tend to educate the reader regarding the subject that we’re covering.

“To drink wine and learn about wine is to learn about life, is to learn about agriculture, is to learn about geography, is to learn about chemistry, is to learn about craft and tradition,” he says. “When you discover all the different grape varieties, all the different flavors and tastes, it’s a complete kaleidoscope and rainbow of possibilities. Every year there’s new wines and new tastes, so it’s a never-ending journey of discovery.”

In 1991 that journey took Shanken to Cuba to research a Spectator cover story on Cuban cigars.

“When I was there, I was so taken by the country that I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to die without starting a cigar magazine,’” he says. “I made a commitment to myself that I was going to do it.”

Reaction in the publishing industry was frosty. At the time, cigar sales were stale, and smoking them certainly was not in vogue.

“All of my friends and people in the business told me I had lost my mind,” Shanken says. “I didn’t do it knowing it was going to work; I did it because I wanted to do it. I was hoping there’d be 20,000 people out there who wanted to read something to learn about cigars. Originally it was going to be a newsletter, but as more and more people told me I was crazy and I was going to lose money and destroy my reputation as a budding publisher, the more obsessed I became and I kept raising the bar.”

Today, 1.6 million people read bimonthly issues of Aficionado. Celebrities from Sharon Stone to Fidel Castro (Shanken is one of only a few North American journalists to have interviewed the Cuban president) have graced its cover, and it is widely credited with sparking the cigar boom of the 1990s.

“When you smoke a cigar, it’s a very relaxing, pleasurable experience,” he says, commenting on the allure of cigars. “Whenever I have a thorny business problem, if I smoke a cigar and step back, it will expand my mind and allow me to come up with a solution, an option that enhances what I’m trying to do in thinking about what’s correct for business. It’s a great relaxing vice.”

Asked how many cigars he smokes in a typical day, Shanken grins devilishly and says only, “I do enjoy a good cigar.”

Visitors walking into the lobby of M. Shanken Communications are greeted by a floor-to-ceiling, glass-enclosed wine cellar display that holds about 2,000 bottles. Like a proud papa, Shanken takes a guest into the conference room, where humidors once owned by the “world’s greatest cigar smokers” sit on display.

Castro’s mahogany box autographed “To Marvin” rests beside the walnut humidor Milton Berle gave John F. Kennedy on his inauguration day in 1961. Shanken paid $574,500 for it during the 1996 Sotheby’s auction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s estate. Across the room is the majestic humidor the Cuban government gave to Winston Churchill in 1941. On the front of the humidor, which the Cubans had packed with 5,000 cigars, is a carving of Churchill; inside, an engraved message reads, “To the honorable Winston S. Churchill, prime minister of Great Britain, from the Democracy of Cuba.”

“More and more executives of communication companies, instead of going with their heart, they rely too much on the consultants and the accountants and the lawyers to take the vanilla road,” says Florio. “Marvin is an editor that knows his subject, lives his subject, and has great passion for it. He’s walked away from hundreds of millions of dollars in buyout money because it’s his. You’d have better success trying to buy one of his kids than trying to get that company away from him.”

Shanken’s daughters from a previous marriage, Samantha and Allison, work beside him every day, so it’s a safe bet that neither his children nor his company are going anywhere anytime soon.

“I had this vision of something that would be extraordinary, which in many respects has been achieved,” Shanken says, and with a wry smile leans back, puffs on his cigar and adds, “Life’s been OK.”