Dish

by Jeannette Walls

  “Forgive me in advance, Mr. Princeton Man,” Smith noted. “Is this Rand or Nietzsche? A tiny voice makes me think the latter.” Rand and Austen were edited out of the piece and some skepticism was edited in, but even in its toned-down state, the Newsweek profile drooled. “Watching her is like watching a brightly polished red Porsche cruising down the highway at 55 miles an hour,” the article concluded. “Given what she’s got under the bonnet, if she really guns it, no one’s going to catch her.”

  By the time the Newsweek article appeared, Tina Brown had won. She had seduced the media. It was a seduction that had begun long ago.

  White paper bells fluttered in a hot August breeze and a Handel concerto blared out of the shrubbery at Grey Gardens where Ben Bradlee had tucked a tape player. The executive editor of the Washington Post and Sally Quinn, his wife and star writer, were preparing their East Hampton vacation house for a spur-of-the-moment wedding of another May-December media couple: Their good friend, fifty-three-year-old Harold Evans, was marrying his former star writer, twenty-seven-year-old Tina Brown.

  It was Thursday, August 19, 1981, and Harold Evans was the most distinguished journalist in all of England, the editor of the august Times of London, as well as the Sunday Times of London. Tina Brown’s detractors saw the romance as yet another one of her shrewd career moves—not that her professional life needed any boosts. In 1981, Brown was one of the hottest young journalists in London.

  Tina Brown had not always planned to become a writer; she was a gifted mimic and at one point wanted to be an actress. Her father, George Brown, a producer of B-movies, encouraged his precocious daughter’s endeavors. “Who shall we have to dinner to massage the Iranian/Swiss/Belgian money?” he would ask; afterward he would delight in angelic-looking little Tina’s scathing impersonations of the guests. Tina was kicked out of boarding school three times—once for writing that a teacher’s bosoms were “an unidentified flying object.” After one expulsion, George Brown told the headmistress, “How depressing for you to know that you failed with this talented child.” Despite her checkered school record, Tina entered Oxford when she was only sixteen years old.* She tried acting, but her father, who was once married to actress Maureen O’Hara, said that Tina found the endeavor “a rather depressing experience.” Brown once worried that she was “fat and not amusing enough” and she was terribly shy. “I was the token crud at the parties who spent the whole evening reading record covers,” she once confessed, “but then I would go home and write this savage reportage about everybody else’s ludicrousness.” Brown turned her talent for ridiculing people’s foibles into a journalism career. While at Oxford, her boyfriend Stephen Glover, who would go on to help found London’s Independent, had an appointment to interview noted writer Auberon Waugh. Tina insisted on accompanying Glover, inserted herself into the conversation, and charmed Waugh, who invited her to a lunch at Private Eye. Brown wrote a wickedly funny account of the event, which was noticed by Daily Mail gossip columnist Nigel Dempster, who introduced Brown to the top editors of Fleet Street.

  In serious relationships, Brown gravitated toward older, influential men, including Dudley Moore, Kenneth Tynan, and Auberon Waugh, though one of her suitors recalled that she seemed to have mixed feelings about sex: “She always kept her eyes tightly shut,” he said. Brown’s mother, a publicist turned gossip columnist, once joked that Tina’s boyfriends were so much older that her father wondered whether he should call them “Sir.”

  “At parties,” one friend said, “you would always find Tina sitting on the lap of the most important man in the room.” In the 1970s, the most important man in the room was Harold Evans. The son of a railroad engineer from the northern working-class town of Yorkshire, Evans began his journalism career when he was sixteen, eventually taking over both the Sunday Times and the Times of London, the most revered paper in England, if not the world. Evans oversaw such triumphs as groundbreaking exposés of the Thalidomide drug scandal and the Kim Philby spy story. Brown became a writer for the Sunday Times, penning hilarious chronicles of adventures such as hiring a male escort, offering herself up as a centerfold to Playboy, and working as a go-go dancer in Hackensack, New Jersey. (“Put this on and move it,” disco owner Big Ed told Brown as he handed her a G-string and complimented her backside. “No, really—we like our Show Go girls a little full.”) She began dating rich or socially prominent cads and then writing about them under the pseudonym Rosie Boot. “She was so pretty, so funny, young and feminine,”* said one of her editors, “that the men she got to talk never dreamed that she would remember what they said, let alone use it against them in print.” One of Brown’s victims called her description of him “the worst act of betrayal since the massacre at Glencoe.”

  She began lurking in the corridors around Harold Evans’s office. “She stalked him,” said a friend. She bombarded him with passionate letters—”a love correspondence really,” said Evans. “Her letters were so marvelous I fell in love.” The smitten Evans began a gradual transformation; one day staffers noticed that his glasses were replaced with contact lenses, he later appeared with his combed-back hair restyled into a modish, brushed-forward do, then he began arriving at work on a black BMW motorcycle. In 1978, he dumped his wife of twenty-five years and Tina Brown moved in. “It was very much a midlife crisis when Tina came along,” said London Times features editor Anthony Holden. After co-workers complained that Brown was getting preferential treatment from her live-in lover editor, she left and took over Tatler magazine when she was twenty-five-years old. “I refused to be another Sally Quinn,” she later explained.* One day, while visiting Quinn and Bradlee in America, Evans proposed. By lunchtime the next day, Brown had Evans at the altar.

  Writer Marie Brenner, one of Brown’s closest friends in America, arrived at Grey Gardens three minutes before the ceremony. “I’m upset!” Brown declared. Brenner began to apologize for not arriving earlier when she realized that Brown’s aggravation had nothing to do with the wedding. “I’m trying to do the photo spread for the October issue of Tatler,” Brown said, “and I’m having trouble getting the right photographer.”

  Grabbing a bouquet of flowers plucked from Bradlee’s garden and wearing a floral print dress she’d bought in a department store the day before, Tina headed to the makeshift altar. Her parents didn’t have time to fly in for the wedding, so Brown was given away by Times feature editor Anthony Holden. Anna Blundy, the eleven-year-old daughter of one of Evans’s foreign correspondents, was recruited minutes before the ceremony to be the sole bridesmaid. Bradlee was a rather nervous best man. The Honorable Judge Sheppard Frood—who was pulled off from the golf course that morning and proudly announced to the guests that he went round in seventy-nine—officiated over the five-minute ceremony wearing mirrored sunglasses.

  Shortly after the vows were exchanged, Evans and Brown left for Manhattan, where Brown hopped on a flight to London to devote her attention to Tatler; Evans stayed behind and spent the wedding night at the Algonquin Hotel, chatting with an old buddy from the Sunday Times, discussing his glory days as a journalist.

  Three years later, Tina Brown was no longer married to the most important journalist in England.

  Life had, at that point, turned somewhat sour for Britain’s hottest media couple. Rupert Murdoch had bought the Times of London, and Evans, after losing a power struggle with the new owner, was forced to resign. Evans and Brown had also become the target of ridicule in certain circles. Private Eye relentlessly lampooned Evans, calling him “Dame Harold Evans” or “small but perfectly formed.” His wife was dubbed “titillating Tina” or “the lusty, busty Tina Brown.”* Harry Evans sometimes referred to his wife as “Tina Evans,” but the name didn’t stick. By 1982, Brown’s star was already beginning to eclipse Evans’s. She nearly tripled the circulation of Tatler from 11,000 to 30,000, and the once-fusty magazine attracted so much attention that in 1982, American billionaire publisher Si Newhouse bought it. Except for a short, embarrassing stint as a t
elevision host on a show called Film ‘82, Tina Brown seemed incapable of failure.

  When Newhouse resurrected Vanity Fair in 1983, Tina Brown became a consultant and contributed an article, “Kiss Kiss Kissinger” on hers and Harry’s friend, Henry Kissinger. Evans had helped the former Secretary of State with his memoirs and Kissinger counseled and consoled Evans when he was battling Murdoch. Kissinger invited Tina to his exclusive sixtieth birthday party at the swank River House. “Nancy Kissinger glimmered like a moon through layers of black lace,” Brown wrote under the pseudonymous byline “Ubiquitous.” “Yet the more unreal the ambience, the more real Dr. Kissinger himself became, his precision-machine mind honed and ready to engage on any required level.”

  Whatever else might be said about “Kiss Kiss Kissinger,” it was, at least, lively and gossipy, which made it an exception in the resuscitated Vanity Fair. The magazine was pretentious and ponderous—with its grim, black-and-white cover photos of writers like Philip Roth and Susan Sontag. It was a commercial and critical flop. The financial drain wasn’t what upset Newhouse; he could afford to support the magazine with the family’s profitable but unglamorous chain of newspapers. Newhouse wanted Vanity Fair for status; instead it was the laughingstock of the publishing world. “This is a disaster,” he told one employee.

  Tina Brown and Harry Evans were spending Christmas 1983 in Barbados when Si Newhouse called and offered Tina the editorship of Vanity Fair. Brown, who had just turned thirty years old, accepted on the spot. “Well, I’m going to New York,” she told Evans. “What about you?”

  Brown had complained that she was “sick to death” of England, but her notion of life in New York was based on fantasy. “I dreamed of huge white lofts in Manhattan,” she noted, “sparsely populated with graffiti and trapezoid fifties furniture.” Instead, Brown at first lived in a characterless white brick building just off Second Avenue in an unchic area of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “I dreaded going home to the tacky apartment I had rented, with disgusting leopard-skin sofas,” she once confessed. Harry got jobs teaching one course a semester at Duke University and being editorial director of U.S. News & World Report, which was owned by their friend, Mort Zuckerman. Harry often stayed with Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn in Washington and saw Tina on weekends.

  Tina Brown was repulsed by New York. “It’s too money-fixated and hysterically competitive,” she complained not long after arriving. “New York is obsessed with status and power and it’s a very tough place. It accepts talent with open arms, but if you don’t deliver the goods, you’re utterly rejected.”

  Brown also discovered that the caustic wit that had served her so effectively in Britain didn’t play as well in the United States. “In America,” she complained, “I have to keep my irony in check.” It wasn’t easy. Hollywood glamour was reemerging with such a vengeance that it begged to be parodied. Wall Street had turned boorish traders into tycoons and the recently minted billionaires, with their borough accents and overdressed wives, were ripe for ridicule. “Here, it takes three years for a beer-can millionaire to become the equivalent of the Astors,” Brown said. “It’s something that would take four generations in England. That makes New Yorkers insecure. They do not want to be mocked for it.”

  She even looked down on American magazines and newspapers, which she called “the bland leading the bland.” Americans watched so much television, Brown scoffed, that they weren’t interested in reading and didn’t know how to write. “It’s inane what we have to read here,” Brown told a British reporter. “I had to bring my own state-of-the-art sub editor, Miles Chapman, from England, who taught everyone in the office how to write a caption.”

  Brown’s dislike for America was inflamed during her first year in New York by the continued dismal performance of Vanity Fair. The buzz on the magazine was so bad, she recalled, that people greeted her by saying, “I hear you’re right down the toilet.” In July 1984, six months after she arrived, Vanity Fair carried only 14 pages of ads, down from 168 for the first issue—then a record for a magazine launch. Brown developed a Yuppie flulike condition—”some strange fantasy virus, like an emotional collapse,” she said—but she continued to search for a formula for editorial success, quizzing people who worked for the most popular personality magazines—especially People. At the time, the magazine had a circulation of 3 million, a celebrity-friendly approach, and virtually unlimited access to Hollywood stars. “She invited me to tea on the pretext of interviewing me for a job at Vanity Fair,” said a top People editor. “After a while it became obvious that she was more interested in People than she was in me. She was debriefing me about what works on the covers, what people are interested in reading, how we get stars to cooperate, what sells at the newsstands, real nuts-and-bolts stuff.” The People staffer told her that American readers couldn’t get enough of stories on British royalty, and that Princess Diana was the magazine’s most popular subject. Brown was a bit of a Diana expert—in her repertoire of impersonations, the one of Diana was said to be the best. Brown started working on a Vanity Fair cover story on Princess Diana.

  Brown lived in constant fear that she would be fired. Si Newhouse’s dismissals were notoriously abrupt and ruthless; Annie Flanders, the founding editor of Details, had what she thought was a delightful, reassuring lunch with Newhouse, only to get fired within a month. Margaret Case, a Vogue editor who had been with the magazine for forty-five years, walked into her office one day in the early 1970s to find workers removing her desk. Soon afterward, her shattered but neatly dressed body was found on the ground under the window of her high-rise apartment. Newhouse dumped Vanity Fair founding editor Richard Locke after only three issues. His replacement, former Vogue features editor L«o Lerman, lasted nine months. When Newhouse bought the New Yorker in 1985, there was widespread talk that he planned to fold Vanity Fair into it. Brown repeatedly asked Si about the rumors of her demise, but he always denied them. Then, in May 1985, while Brown was in Hollywood trying to woo film industry heavyweights, she heard the rumors again. Brown caught the redeye to New York and confronted her boss. This time, Newhouse told Brown that the rumors were true. “This hasn’t worked,” he told her. “I’m going to send you back to England.” Newhouse told Brown that he was going to make her editor of British Vogue, the position previously held by her rival British import, Anna Wintour. The announcement would be made after Memorial Day.

  “Please, just give us a few more issues,” Brown begged Newhouse. She was on the verge of tears. She couldn’t go back to London in disgrace. Brown promised Newhouse that she had a few blockbusters in the works, including the Diana profile. “I know we can turn this around.” Eventually, Newhouse granted Brown a temporary stay of execution. Just in case, she devised an alternative plan. “I thought the magazine was going to fold,” Brown later admitted. “I got pregnant so it would be something to do.”

  Brown had decided that the key to her magazine’s—and her own—success was to ingratiate herself with the powerful, and she pursued this goal with what Evans once described as “a certain ratlike cunning.” She befriended Newhouse’s good friends David Geffen and Roy Cohn. She courted media lynchpins like Liz Smith and Barbara Walters. An early article she wrote herself was a paean to billionaire trophy wife Gayfryd Steinberg, the “fresh blood on Park Avenue,” who Brown called a “heroine who seems to embody the new money, the new flash, and the new feminism.” The editor made no apologies for the magazine’s ingratiating tone. “For us, to be anti-rich would be dumb,” Brown said. “One’s betrayals here have to be rather more subtle.”

  The couple that to Brown epitomized American excess, glitz, and power was Nancy and Ronald Reagan. Privately, Brown had no particular affection for the Reagans.* When asked if Nancy Reagan was like royalty, Brown was amused. “Nancy Reagan could never be queen of England,” Brown said. “She could not stand the food at Windsor Castle and would want to put central heating into Buckingham Palace.”

  Although Newhouse publications had a history
of being kind to the Reagans,* the White House was initially reluctant to cooperate because the Reagans were suspicious of New York’s media. They also didn’t see the value in spending much time with this fledgling magazine. Brown let the Reagans know that the profile would be written by their longtime friend and political ally, William F. Buckley, whom she knew because Buckley had helped Evans on Henry Kissinger’s memoirs.† Brown even offered the Reagans “an early opportunity to approve the photo and the text.” No interview was granted, but Vanity Fair was given “a few minutes” at the White House to take pictures of the first couple in a brief time slot Reagan had before he was scheduled to dine with the president of Argentina. Brown selected photographer Harry Benson, who had shot many of People magazine’s more memorable photographs, and personally accompanied him to Washington for the shoot. At the White House, they were ushered into the map room, which—with its fusty charts and diagrams—would make an appropriately presidential backdrop. It was not, however, the glamour shot that Brown wanted.

  As soon as the presidential handlers left, Benson pulled out a seamless white backdrop, set up his lights, and transformed the map room into a studio. When Nancy and Ronald Reagan appeared—he in a tux and she in a glittering black floor-length dress and a five-strand pearl choker—Benson popped in a Frank Sinatra tape and “Nancy with the Laughing Face” began to play. Reagan’s handlers were clearly unhappy with the way Benson and Brown had manipulated the situation. The President himself was flummoxed; he didn’t want to be photographed dancing, but the first lady knew a good photo op when she saw one, and she insisted. Before long, the Reagans were fox-trotting for Benson, while the Argentinean president was left to study the table settings.