On Thursday, former Vogue intern Lisa Denmark ripped into the recently cancelled Condé Nast internship program telling the Post, “I cried myself to sleep” after spending her days performing demeaning tasks like picking up dry cleaning and trekking from Midtown to the Lower East Side for an editor’s juice fix. The piece raised a debate on social media — and the hackles of many former interns with happier stories to tell. Here, former New Yorker intern Iris Smyles recounts her Condé Nast experience and says there was nothing to cry about.
When I read the testimony of that girl (Vogue intern Lisa Denmark) “crying herself to sleep at night,” I couldn’t help but think that maybe she was just no fun . . . The only thing that was humiliating about my experience at Condé Nast was my own ineptitude . . . If anything, when I look back at that time, it is I who took advantage of Condé Nast, and I am grateful that they never took it upon themselves to sue.
I interned in the New Yorker’s cartoon department during the fall of 1999. I applied without even knowing there was an internship available and blindly sent a letter, my cartoons and writing sample simply thinking it would be cool place to hang out. And it would be an interesting alternative to more literature classes. My essay was a drinker’s manifesto on why you should have your drinks straight and not sugarcoat anything. The internship was mine.
When I walked into the office, it was like a small club. People were serious and doing work, but everyone was incredibly social. My boss would ask my opinions about cartoons, and I would have a lot of input as we would go through the submissions. I think a couple of them actually got published.
While I know this was a different era when magazines were flush with cash, they would send me on errands in a town car. Once, my boss asked me to wrap up a piece of artwork and take it to (playwright and staff cartoonist) William Hamilton’s home. “There’s a car waiting for you,” he said. When I met Hamilton, I felt so dizzy — after all I was hung over from karaoke at the Elbow Room with my colleagues.
And there were times that I took the club-like atmosphere a little too far. I guess I was reading a lot of modernist novels, so I thought drinking was very literary. I brought a bottle of Colt 45, transferred it into a paper cup and drank it on the sneak. I was 19 and, in my mind, I was an anti-heroine and thought malt liquor was glamorous. To my amazement, they gave us an electronic key to the office building, which came in handy after I locked myself out of my Hell’s Kitchen apartment. I would crash on the couch in the cartoon lounge.
I mostly interacted with the editorial assistants, and I think they found me to be an amusing distraction because I was invited to their Christmas party and continued to get socials invitations long after I left.
After I graduated from NYU, I took a job teaching at a very rough school in the South Bronx. Gone were the bon vivant days and nights of town cars, cocktail parties and flopping on the office couch. They were replaced with grueling, voice-straining school days where I fielded more threats from students than questions on their homework. Two of my colleagues were even jumped. It was a jarring experience to go from NYU and the New Yorker where you are coddled and told you’re special. That was my year when I cried myself to sleep.
There are jobs where you cry and struggle. But Condé Nast was a soft place to work. If you’re disgruntled about the internship system, it’s not about Condé Nast. It’s the system that exists everywhere.
Iris Smyles is a 35-year-old writer living in Williamsburg. She writes about these experiences in her semi-autobiographical novel, “Iris Has Free Time,” which was released in June.