By PETER CARLSON

By PETER CARLSON
WASHINGTON POST
Egomania! Back-stabbing! Temper tantrums! Vicious office politics! Ah, I love stories about the magazine business.
This month, two prominent magazines have published dishy articles about nefarious doings at other prominent magazines: Vanity Fair covers the absurd rise and pathetic fall of Rosie, while GQ covers the reign of terror unleashed by a despotic honcho at the magazines published by the mega-conglomerate now known as AOL Time Warner.
So, let me issue a warning: This is a magazine review about two magazine stories about magazines.
Rosie
Let's start with Judith Newman's Vanity Fair piece about Rosie O'Donnell and her eponymous magazine, which has just published its final issue and laid off 120 staffers amid a flurry of name-calling and a $100 million lawsuit against O'Donnell by Gruner & amp; Jahr, the corporate giant that published Rosie.
Newman begins with a delicious -- or maybe not so delicious -- anecdote about O'Donnell dining in a New York restaurant and ranting so vociferously against G & amp;J that she starts spitting at Newman. Yuck!
In Newman's portrayal, O'Donnell sounds like the magazine editor from hell. She knew zip about magazines. She came to the office so seldom that she felt compelled to hire her girlfriend's stepsister to serve in her absence as "interpreter of Rosie's vision." And when she did show up, she berated underlings so viciously that one staffer asked G & amp;J management to provide a security guard to protect her from O'Donnell.
Conceived in greed
But the failure of Rosie the magazine goes far beyond the myriad personal failings of Rosie the human. The mag was conceived in cynicism and born in naked greed.
"Rosie was not O'Donnell's idea," Newman writes in a paragraph that sums up the whole sorry affair. "It was dreamed up by one of her lawyers, Philip K. Howard, and her business manager, Dan Crimmins, who also happens to be her brother-in-law."
Most of these magazine barons were smart enough to reject this cockamamie proposal. But not Dan Brewster.
Brewster is the CEO of Gruner & amp; Jahr, which is a division of Bertelsmann, the huge German multinational, multimedia conglomerate. G & amp;J publishes Parents, Family Circle and YM and is, in Newman's apt description, "penny-pinching, profitable and utterly vanilla."
In the end, the best description of Rosie comes in an e-mail written by O'Donnell and quoted by Newman: "It lacks definition. It does not take risks. There is not enough controversary (sic) ... "
AOL Time Warner chief
Which is, come to think of it, a pretty good description of most of the 130 magazines published by AOL Time Warner, whose "editorial director" John Huey is eviscerated in a GQ profile by Maximillian Potter.
Since he arrived at the top of the magazine division in July 2001, Huey has presided over an "editorial bloodbath," ousting editors at Sports Illustrated, Money, Fortune, People and Entertainment Weekly and tormenting other editors in various sadistic ways. Huey refused to talk to Potter.
A wonderful moment in the article comes when Huey appears on the Charlie Rose TV show and Rose asks him how he was affected by the tragedy of his second wife's death from cancer. Huey clears his throat with a few quick cliches and then says: "I don't get too worked up about firing people. ... As I always say to myself when I'm doing it, I'm not killing anybody here."
There you have the new corporate magazine honcho -- a man who comes away from his wife's death with a renewed fondness for firing his employees.