LOUISE T. Blouin MacBain, the wealthy Canadian behind artsy LTB Media, officially lost her second top-shelf executive this month when her chief money man said he was following defecting CEO James Truman out the door.
Speculation that her former Chief Financial Officer James Conley was coming back to the fold were shot down yesterday as delicate negotiations with the high-powered Blouin MacBain apparently hit a snag.
“As of today, I am not going back to the company,” Conley told Media Ink.
He had started at the company in May, shortly after Truman moved the publishing headquarters to New York from London. He was the third CFO in a year, and quit Oct. 8.
Truman, a longtime editorial director of Condé Nast, also resigned from LTB late last week, flying to Blouin MacBain’s mansion in London to deliver the news in person.
He was upset that Blouin MacBain’s attention to the publications was waning and that he could not convince her to invest enough to properly fund startups such as the new Culture & Travel magazine.
Woman’s Wear Daily said that Blouin MacBain also had a penchant for making calls to Truman in the middle of the night.
“She was just a pain in the butt to work for,” said one source. A friend of Truman’s told Media Ink she was also extremely tight with cash for the magazines.
“She cheaped out on him every inch of the way,” said a friend of Truman’s.
Conley was the group chief financial officer for the media company that publishes Art & Auction, Gallery Guides and the new Culture & Travel magazine as well as for her philanthropic organization, Louise T. Blouin Foundation, and parent company LTB Holdings.
The foundation is the driving force behind the new Louise T. Blouin Institute on the west side of London, an art exhibit space complete with a 250-seat auditorium, which opened last week.
Blouin MacBain has used the social cachet she gained from her buyout of Art & Auction and other titles in 2003, as well as a well endowed foundation, to gain access to high society in Manhattan and London.
She was even romantically linked to Prince Andrew, according to the British tabloids, and in New York serves on the board of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Despite her guise as an upper-crust Brit, her roots are actually middle-class Canadian, as she hails from Montreal.
She apparently has a penchant for burning through husbands as well as high-level executives at her companies.
Her fortune comes from a classified ad empire she founded with her former husband John MacBain. It advertised used cars and boats.
When she sold out her 22 percent stake after the divorce, it secured her hundreds of millions of dollars and paved her way to high society.
At the moment, the financial matters in her companies are being split among financial types including Jerry Garcia at the media company and Dhiresh Ladva and David Sisam in London.
Blouin MacBain has rarely visited the New York magazine offices.
Earlier this week, she spoke to staffers via conference call from her mansion in London to try to quell the unrest after Truman’s departure was announced. Next week, she is slated to make what one source said will be her second visit ever to the publishing offices.
Most of the time when she is in New York, she prefers to spend time at her fabulous $20 million Charles Street duplex overlooking New York Harbor or at her Gin Lane home in Southampton.
Weill deal
There’s more to the flap between Sandy Weill and veteran Wall Street reporter Charlie Gasparino over Weill’s recently published memoir, “The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy.”
As The Post’s Suzanne Kapner reported yesterday, Gasparino has argued in a letter to the book’s publisher, Hachette Book Group, that certain of Weill’s statements border on defamation.
It seems the Financial Times may have thought so, too.
When the FT ran an excerpt of the book earlier this month, it omitted a phrase in which Weill accused Gasparino of “manipulating incomplete information and half-truths.”
Apparently the FT felt the statement was too inflammatory and possibly defamatory. A call to the FT was not returned. Gasparino, now at CNBC, is still unhappy that the excerpt ran and has penned a letter to the FT protesting the paper’s decision to run it without contacting him for comment.
“If you are going to challenge my reporting, you should either back it up – which Weill didn’t do – or give me a chance to comment,” said Gasparino. “That’s what the FT didn’t do and what Mr. Weill didn’t do in his book.”