at 10:30 a.m. today, James Truman introduced a new man to the staff of Details magazine: Michael Caruso, a 35-year-old swashbuckler with a deep tan who stepped in to fill the warm boots of Joe Dolce, the previous editor-in-chief who had been ousted only a few weeks before.

As editorial director of Condé Nast, Truman oversees such magazines as Vanity Fair, GQ and Vogue, but the trendy bachelor has always been the spiritual father of Details. It was Truman whom Si Newhouse hired as the first editor of Details in the early 1990s, giving Truman, then an unknown British music writer, complete license to gut the staff and remake the book in his image. In the twinkle of an eye, Details became the hot book for the young, the slacking and the goateed: the antidote to such stuffy rags as Esquire and GQ.

When Truman left Details for Condé Nast headquarters on Madison Avenue, his first replacement was John Leland, a music writer for Newsweek, who was followed within a year by Joe Dolce. Dolce put more celebrities on the cover, but the fact that Dolce is openly gay rubbed some corporate types the wrong way. Recently, word came down that Condé Nast wants Details to be more conservative, more hetero, more like ... well, Esquire.

Enter Caruso, who was employed as editor in chief of Los Angeles magazine until he was precipitously fired in March after little more than a year. (The conventional wisdom is that the firing had nothing to do with performance; the editors wanted fashion and service, while Caruso was going for an edge.) Caruso began his career as an editor and writer at the Village Voice and went on to become a senior editor at Vanity Fair (where his constant flirtation with Tina Brown during meetings left everyone else in the room blushing). His career took a downturn when former Spy editor Graydon Carter took over Vanity Fair. According to staffers, Caruso sulked a lot, openly disagreed with many of Carter's decisions and was finally pushed out in a swirl of bad karma.

Caruso is renowned for his heavy boasting, his Hemingway-esque love of boxing and poker and his attempts to seduce female writers in midnight editing sessions. "That man is positively Venetian," said a source who asked not to be named. "He's the kind of guy you associate with stilettos and poison rings and people being thrown in canals." Over the years, whenever an editor-in-chief opening was announced, his name would appear on the short list -- often placed there himself, some believe. "He's self-confident, that's for sure," says Truman.

Carping aside, those who have worked with Caruso in an editorial capacity give him a unanimous thumbs up. "On a one-to-one basis, I always found him to be smart, focused, willing to work longer hours to make a story better," says one New York writer. Others remember him delaying a close while he sat in his office reading the prose out loud with the writer. As Truman says of his new hire, "He has a great balance of strong journalistic feature-writing background and also great confidence in the area of pop and style." In L.A., Caruso is said to have sported around town in a black Mercedes 560 convertible. But will he be parking it on lower Broadway when he reports to work at Details on June 9?
May 15, 1997

Cynthia Cotts is a New York writer who has written widely about media and drug policy.