Dish

by Jeannette Walls

  Then Robin Williams spoke. The evening, he declared, was really a charity benefit to raise cash for the money-losing New Yorker. “Antiques,” the actor said, “are a terrible thing to waste.” Williams applauded Brown’s Hollywoodization of the New Yorker. “You can’t sell a magazine,” he said, “with just literature and Connecticut haiku.” The actor, who had been reluctant to give interviews since he was burned by People nearly a decade earlier, was the subject of a fawning piece in the New Yorker’s Hollywood issue; it was written by a friend of his wife. “I would like to thank Tina Brown for the puff,” Williams said. “I still have a hard-on.” The audience howled with laughter. “Or, as Jack would say,” Williams said as he adopted a raspy Nicholson voice, “a major chubby.”

  Tina Brown threw back her head and her laughter echoed through the tent. She appeared to be quite amused, quite pleased to be there among the crowd that epitomized Hollywood glitz. But then again, Tina Brown was always a very talented mimic.

  * Some of the criticism may have been fueled by jealousy. Jane Amsterdam, editor of the then-hot Manhattan inc. considered Brown a rival. Amsterdam was married to Jon Larsen, the editor of the Village Voice and a good friend of Harold Evans and Brown, but according to one Manhattan inc. source, Amsterdam was regularly on the phone with Sally Quinn, making jokes about Brown and unkind references to her “udders.”

  * Although this tidbit is repeatedly mentioned in profiles of Brown, an article in the Sunday Times Magazine of London quoted Brown’s classmates who adamantly insisted that she was, in fact, eighteen when she went to Oxford. “I put the point to Tina Brown,” wrote Georgina Howell, “who conceded, ‘Well, I might have been just seventeen.’ ”

  * Brown was third runner-up in the Miss Holiday Princess contest.

  * The comparisons, however, are inevitable, including how Quinn also seduced her married boss with passionate letters. Brown made the comment after her infamous falling out with Quinn. Vanity Fair called Quinn’s novel Regrets Only “cliterature” and “a one-pound beach cutting-board and sun-tan lotion absorber.” Quinn disinvited Brown and Evans from Bradlee’s sixty-fifth birthday party. “As a professional journalist who specializes in hatchet jobs in the Washington Post,” Brown said, “I don’t think she should complain.” Replied Quinn, “Tina’s desperate for success and nothing matters to her except her magazine.” The two have supposedly reconciled, but Quinn maintained that she should have at least been warned about the seemingly unprovoked attack. According to a friend of Brown, it was not unprovoked and in fact was payback for a scathing review of Vanity Fair that ran in the Washington Post in the early days of the magazine—when Brown desperately needed good press. “It is one thing to make fun of soigné fatuities,” Curt Suplee wrote. “It is quite another to wallow in them. And the sheer bulk of banality in much of this magazine suggests not ridicule of vanity, but the glad embracing of it.”

  * Evans sued the magazine at least three times, and in 1983, Evans’s lawyers demanded that the magazine stop writing about him and Brown for at least eighteen months: “We hereby give our solemn pledge that we will never, hereafter, in any circumstances, make any references whatsoever to these two clapped-out old has-beens,” the magazine announced. “Frankly, who wants to hear about them ever again?”

  * Not long after the Reagans were no longer in power, Brown assigned a hatchet job on them.

  * In 1983, when the Reagan camp was worried that the President’s age and health might become an issue in his reelection, political adviser Ed Rollins approached Si Newhouse’s buddy Roy Cohn for help. “I can give you anything the Newhouse papers have,” Cohn told Rollins. The resulting December 4 cover of Newhouse’s Parade magazine, “How to Stay Fit” by Ronald Reagan, effectively quieted the concerns about Reagan’s health.

  † Buckley was so tight with the Reagans that he is said to have pulled strings to help Ron Reagan Jr. get into Yale.

  * Which, at the time, was owned by Brown and Evans’s nemesis, Rupert Murdoch.

  * Soon after Brown arrived at the New Yorker, she assigned Mark Singer to write a scathingly funny dissection of Trump. Trump was furious. “I guess the only good news about your recent story on me is that people don’t seem to be reading the New Yorker,” he wrote in a letter to Brown. “Almost nobody mentioned it to me—unlike two recent covers of People magazine.” Trump also sent a letter to his friend Steve Florio: “Steve, you will never make a profit with Tina Brown editing the New Yorker. She is highly overrated and the magazine is very boring. Best wishes, Donald.” Florio was said to have taken the letter to heart.

  † Brown was almost certainly referring to Ron Perlman, owner of Revlon, a big advertiser in Vanity Fair.

  * Miss Marple in the Agatha Christie films Tina’s father produced.

  * Brown gave Trow’s letter a very public platform. At the New Yorker’s seventieth anniversary party, actor John Lithgow performed the part of Trow. Debra Winger, complete with a clipped British accent, read Brown’s response: “I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.”

  14

  the good old gal and the tycoon

  “This is a lousy time for gossip,” Liz Smith complained. It was early 1990, and Liz Smith was America’s queen of gossip, but she was feeling like an outsider in her own profession. “With all those supermarket tabloids paying for stories, you can’t compete,” she said. “Scandals like Gary Hart and Jim Bakker that used to belong to the columnists are on the front page of the New York Times…. It’s died out. The column isn’t that important because no one is shocked by anything.” A handsome woman with a weary smile and a pageboy haircut that was getting increasingly blonder, Liz Smith was facing her sixty-seventh birthday. Her column wasn’t just her job, it was her life. She would get up every morning at 9 A.M. in the cluttered, two-bedroom high-rise apartment she rented on East Thirty-eighth Street that doubled as her office; she would make coffee, read over the notes from the previous evening, skim ten newspapers, and she and her two long-time assistants, St. Clair Pugh and Denis Ferrara, would field calls from press agents eager to get a mention in her column. “We need a lead!” she would always say. “We need a lead!” By 1 P.M. Liz Smith had filed her column; three times a week she would head over to the Live at Five offices to broadcast her regular segment there. Then, just about every evening, she’d go to some function—sometimes as many as three or four, but she was trying to cut down. She would greet and hug and kiss her “friends,” people like Malcolm Forbes, Madonna, Barbara Walters, Gayfryd Steinberg, Elizabeth Taylor, David and Helen Gurley Brown, Mike Wallace, and Candice Bergen. Many of them, she knew, weren’t really her friends. “Glamour, schlamor,” she said. “It’s all business.” What she was really after was news to fill her column. Still, it wasn’t an entirely bad life. “I am overpaid, overfed, overentertained, overstimulated,” she said. “What’s not to like about being Liz Smith?”

  In early 1990, Liz Smith kept hearing upsetting stories about her friend Donald Trump: That he was cheating on his wife Ivana and their marriage was in trouble. Donald Trump was the most famous of the new celebrity tycoons—a billionaire who was adored by the masses. His name was plastered on his buildings and casinos; tourists gathered in front of his Trump Tower hoping to catch sight of him; his 1987autobiography had been a bestseller. If Liz could get him to talk to her about his marriage problems, it would be a big scoop. Liz thought Donald was a scoundrel, but she liked him anyway. “He was very interesting and entertaining and funny,” she said. “He was always sweeping me up in his arms and saying to everybody standing around, ‘Isn’t she the greatest?’ Of course, he did that to just about everybody.”

  So, in January 1990, Liz Smith picked up the phone and gave Donald Trump a call. His assistant, Norma Foederer, cheerfully greeted Liz and put her right through. “Donald, there is a strong story going around and it just won’t die,” she told the tycoon. “Why don’t you either decide that you’r
e going to talk to me about it and let me print it in a way that won’t be too inflammatory or sensational, or fix the situation so this story ends.” She was concerned for Donald and Ivana, she says. “I thought he at least should know that things were going to explode if he didn’t do something, one way or the other.”

  Donald was evasive. “When I told him the story, he said he would think about it,” Liz said. “He didn’t deny it.” At that point, Liz had enough to write the story, but she didn’t want to do it without Donald’s approval. That wasn’t her style. She waited to hear back from him, but he never called. During the next few weeks, she heard more tales, including one about a screaming fight between Ivana and the other woman in Aspen. The story was getting around and Liz was eager to lock it up. She figured that a letter to Trump might work better than another phone call so she sat down at her battered Texas Instruments typewriter and banged out a note to him. She warned him that if he didn’t give her the story, “You’re going to be in someplace a lot worse than the Liz Smith column.”

  Again, she waited for a response from him. Again, he didn’t answer. So Liz did nothing. As important as the story was, there was something that was more important: access. Liz had been around the block long enough to know that if you turn on your sources, you lose them. You become a pariah—an enemy of the closely guarded circle of people that you had worked so hard to penetrate. You don’t get invited to their parties and they don’t call you with their stories. She had watched as Walter Winchell, once the most feared and influential columnist in the country, lost it all. “He’d come to El Morocco—this man who had been so powerful—and pass out mimeographed copies of his column as it was appearing out of New York,” she says. “It was so pitiful. No New York paper picked him up because he was too much trouble. He’d made too many enemies.” She’d seen what happened to her former boss Igor Cassini when he’d crossed the crowd he wrote about.

  Liz had almost made the mistake of alienating her sources over a decade earlier. For five years, she had worked on a tell-all book about Jacqueline Onassis. Some of Jackie’s defenders had warned Liz to drop the project, and eventually she had handed over the cartons of research to an ambitious reporter named Kitty Kelley. Thanks to Liz’s material, Kelley’s Jackie Oh! had become a huge best-seller, and the writer had gone on to skewer other powerful subjects. But she had become an enemy of the people Liz wrote about and they—and ultimately, Liz herself—had stopped speaking to Kelley. Going after the rich and powerful made you famous, but it also got you cut off.

  “Access,” Liz says, “is everything.” Her good friend Barbara Walters knew about access. “Barbara Walters’s whole career wasn’t made on her talent,” Liz told reporter Jonathan van Meter. “It was made on her ability to get access. So access was worth millions of dollars to NBC and then to ABC and then to herself.” Liz Smith, unlike so many of the upstart columnists who were trying to make a name for themselves, had a secret weapon: friendship. And it did help her get scoops. When Barbara Walters was getting a divorce, she gave the story to Liz. And when writer Nora Ephron split from Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, she called up her friend Liz and gave her the story. Nora Ephron knew that it would be written in a way that was sympathetic to her.

  When Liz heard that Elizabeth Taylor was getting married to construction worker Larry Fortensky, “I wrote her a letter and told her that after twenty-six years of friendship, I should be at that wedding,” Smith says. She got the invite, and was the only journalist there.

  Some people, especially those in the press, would attack and ridicule Liz, accusing her of being too close to her subjects, and it’s true that she treated her friends well. Sometimes, she was so enamored of the glamorous people whom she wrote about that she was somewhat oblivious of their follies. When Liz Smith got invited to Saul Steinberg’s jaw-droppingly extravagant fiftieth birthday party, she gushed in print over it. “I thought I was doing my job, and I got absolutely blown out of the water for ass-kissing the Steinbergs.” In private, Smith is a little more circumspect about Gayfryd: “She’s a very chic, severe, sort of frightened-looking person. She isn’t terribly friendly. Looks like she could pass for a dominatrix.”

  Liz didn’t believe that you have to write everything you know about people. She knew how it felt to have people hounding you about your private life—stuff that she felt was irrelevant. Staffers from a gay magazine were always threatening to reveal details about her sex life. “I think they’re terrorists,” she once told a reporter. “I think they must be very frightened and desperate people. They’re so hateful and irrational. Talk about not living-and-let-living. I don’t get it. I also think they’re jealous of anybody that they think made it. I mean, what do they want me to be, the great lesbian of the Western world? Forget it! If I was Sandra Bernhard, maybe. But even then I’m not so sure.”

  “Jealousy,” Liz says of her media critics. “I think a lot of it is just jealousy that they can’t get invited to these parties. So they bitch and carry on that people who do get invited are all co-opted. But we’re all co-opted by our friends to some extent. I don’t know how you can avoid that.”

  Despite all her efforts to be nice, Liz still made some enemies. “I once had a terrible fight on the phone with Bette Midler, who called me up and said, ‘I don’t want to be in your fucking column.’ ” Mel Gibson and Burt Reynolds wouldn’t speak to her. Sean Connery once got so angry with her that he told her, “I’d like to stick your column up your ass.” Liz laughs: “I told him it was the best offer I had all week.” Frank Sinatra was the cruelest. Liz knew better than to carry on a feud with the well-connected crooner; she and Sinatra later had lunch and she never mentioned his unkind comments. “It’s like walking a tightrope,” she explained. “If you disagree, in print, with anyone, they go nuts and try to kill you! Why do people get so inflamed abut being mentioned in a mere gossip column?”

  Nearly a month had passed since Liz Smith first called Donald about his marriage. It was early February 1990, and she was working in her office, trying to make her 1 P.M. deadline when her assistant St. Clair Pugh told her that Ivana Trump was on the phone. “She knew,” says Liz. “I heard she was a basket case over this whole thing. She wanted to have a private meeting.” Donald was in Japan at the Mike Tyson fight so they could meet in the Trumps’ Fifth Avenue apartment—the marble and mural-covered condo on the top three floors of the Trump Tower. Ivana answered the door herself, and Liz was shocked at the state she was in. She was nearly hysterical, tears streamed down her face and her nose and eyes were red and puffy. “She cried and wept and sobbed through the whole thing,” says Liz. “She was in such a state of shock.”

  Ivana had accidentally discovered that Donald was seeing another woman. “I did find out first time on the telephone,” Ivana recalled. “When I did pick up the phone in the living room and Donald picked up the phone in the bedroom. In Aspen. And—he spoke to a mutual friend of ours. And he was talking about Mula and I really didn’t understand. I never heard a name like that in my life. And I came to Donald—I said who is Mula? And he said, well, that’s a girl who is going after me for the last two years. And I said, Is that serious? And he said, Oh, she’s just going after me.”

  Ivana, a one-time model and an alternate on the Czechoslovakian Olympic ski team, had immigrated to Canada in the early 1970s and married Trump in 1977 when he was just another brash real estate developer. She worked with Donald on some of his properties, especially the Plaza, and was the quintessential 1980s socialite: she loved to lunch at places like Le Cirque and enjoyed wearing flashy jewels and designer clothes. “I don’t ever intend to look a day over twenty-eight,” she once joked. “And it’s going to cost Donald a lot of money.”

  Liz Smith liked Ivana. “She’s a nice woman,” said Liz, though she was, to put it kindly, “not a rocket scientist.” For years, there had been rumors linking Donald with high-profile women—the reports were often denied by the women—including ice skater Peggy Fleming, Mike Tyson’s wi
fe Robin Givens, socialite Georgette Mosbacher, and Dynasty star Catherine Oxenberg. Not long before, Ivana had returned from a trip looking so dramatically different that some friends didn’t recognize her. She denied that she’d gone under the knife, but the word among her crowd was that she’d visited Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon, Steven Hoefflin, and had her face done to resemble Catherine Oxenberg’s.

  Ivana was distraught by the news that yet another woman was going after her Donald. The next day in Aspen, Ivana confided in a friend, who pointed out someone who knew this Maria. “I saw [Maria’s friend] in the line—in the food line [at a restaurant called Bonnie’s]—and I said, Will you give her the message that I love my husband very much. And that was it. And I walk outside. And I didn’t know this Maria was standing behind the girl in line because I never met her, I had no idea. And then Maria just charged right behind me and she said—in front of my children—‘I love Donald. Do you?’ And Donald was just looking up like nothing happen or so … I said—I said—I really said—I said, ‘Get lost. I love my husband very much.’ It was very unladylike, but it was as much as I really could—I—I—that was as much as I really—as harsh as maybe I could be.”