The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

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  To Ed Victor (September 1939–June 2017)

  Champion and beloved friend

  HOW I GOT THERE

  Sunday, April 10, 1983

  I am here in NYC at last, brimming with fear and insecurity. Getting in late last night on British Airways, I suddenly felt the enormousness of New York City, the noise of it, the speed of it, the lonely obliviousness of so many people trying to get ahead. My London bravado began to evaporate. I wished I was with Harry, who I knew would be sitting at his computer in front of his study window, in Kent, furiously pounding away about Rupert Murdoch.

  I am staying at the Royalton Hotel on West Forty-Fourth Street, opposite the Algonquin Hotel. It’s a bit of a fleapit but in walking distance to the Condé Nast HQ at 350 Madison Avenue. The man at the desk seemed half-asleep when I checked in and there was no one around to haul my bag to the elevator. All the way in from JFK in the taxi, a phone-in show was blaring a woman with a rasping German accent talking in excruciating detail about blow jobs. The instructions crackling from the radio to “tek it in the mouth und move it slowly, slowly up und down” got so oppressive I asked the cabdriver what the hell he was listening to. He said it was a sex therapist called Dr. Ruth who apparently gives advice on the radio and has an enormous following.

  As soon as I woke up I rushed to the newsstand on the corner to look for the April issue of Vanity Fair. The second edition is even more baffling than the first one I saw in London in February.

  * * *

  So begin my Vanity Fair diaries, scribbled over the years in blue school exercise books late at night after dinners, or on planes to London, or in a book-lined aerie overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Quogue on Long Island, or in the small hours of the morning when I couldn’t get back to sleep after a midnight bottle feed of one of my two children. When, in 2015, I started to look into the diaries again, my intention was to use them as a refresher for a book I was thinking of about the Crazy Eighties. But the more I read the more I realized I had already written one.

  The writer of a memoir or a history knows from the outset where the story is going and how it will end. The diarist doesn’t have a clue what’s around the corner. All one can know about is the past and, with any luck, the onrushing present. That’s a feature of the form, not a bug. What you lose in omniscience and perspective you gain in heedless immediacy and suspense.

  Opening the volumes I was amazed to rediscover how madcap those days and years were—how chancy, how new, how supercharged. And I found that the recklessness of the telling—so many instant insights as often to be regretted as vindicated—was the way to surf the eighties, at the speed those years were lived.

  Let me forewarn. These were years spent amid the moneyed elite of Manhattan and LA and the Hamptons in the overheated bubble of the world’s glitziest, most glamour-focused magazine publishing company, Condé Nast, during the Reagan era. Please don’t expect ruminations on the sociological fallout of trickle-down economics. My Vanity Fair did its share of investigative reporting on the crimes and cruelties of politics and policy. But as day-to-day, night-to-night experience, this was the gilded, often egregious eighties as lived at the top. Today, when most of the time I yearn to be under my duvet at night bingeing on Netflix’s latest noir heart-pounder, I am blown away by the sheer number of dinners, galas, and cocktail parties I attended as editor in chief of Vanity Fair. The social energy of the eighties in New York was ferocious. When did I sleep? (It turns out to have been an asset that I am allergic to alcohol. Most of these accounts of dinner parties probably wouldn’t have happened if I’d had a glass in my hand.)

  By the time I became editor in chief of Vanity Fair in January 1984, Ronald Reagan was on a glide path to reelection. He had made an improbable journey from radio announcer to midlevel movie star to union leader to television host to two-term governor of California to president of the United States.

  Reagan’s ascent to the White House marked the definitive end of one era—that of the turbulent 1960s and its threadbare seventies endgame—and the supersonic launch of another gilded age. Tax cuts for the wealthy in 1981 unleashed animal spirits on Wall Street. There were new buzzwords like “junk bonds” and “arbitrage.” Go-getters in suspenders, their eyes ablaze with the thrill of winning, thrived in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it when asked to define the eighties, we “borrowed a trillion dollars from the foreigners and used the money to throw a big party.”

  The Reagan White House set the social pace of the most visible stratum of American high life. With her huge coiffed movie-star head and tiny, svelte body in ruby-red Adolfo suits, Nancy Reagan was the reigning star of John Fairchild’s Seventh Avenue and society bible, W, the oversized fashion monthly that was sister of his powerful retail newspaper Women’s Wear Daily. The Reagans filled the East Room and the State Dining Room and the pages of W with A-listers, B-listers, and Hollywood Squares C-listers. Nancy’s devoted gay “walkers”—social escorts from the world of fashion and decorating—always stood ready to ditch their Bel Air and Park Avenue circles for the heady whirl of formal dinners and luncheons in the executive mansion.

  The American media world for which I was headed in the early eighties was enjoying an era of blockbuster confidence. The gatekeepers to what was not yet called “content”—the studio heads, network chiefs, major-label music honchos, Hollywood agents—were stars themselves. In publishing, paying outlets for writers and photographers—cash-cow newspaper chains, prosperous publishing houses, ad-stuffed magazines—were legion. There were twenty-five hundred new magazines launched between 1979 and 1989. To be the editor of Time or Newsweek was to be a demigod.

  Meanwhile, pop culture was all about the shiny surface—high voltage, high volume. Even porn became high gloss. On television, Dynasty was big: big hair, big money, big ratings. The slick tire-squealer Miami Vice, whose heroes drove Ferraris in sequences spliced with rock video montages and were unafraid to wear pastel tees with white linen suits, made its debut on September 16, 1984. “Material Girl,” the monster hit song in which Madonna celebrates affluence and scorns romance, came out a few months later. In the video, her hard-edged Marilyn Monroe impersonation has the unapologetic ersatz fabulousness that defined female glamour in the eighties. In New York, the decade’s biggest signifier would turn out to be a building, not a person: Trump Tower, the very definition of ersatz with its fool’s-gold facade, its flashy internal waterfall, its dodgy financing.

  More broadly, these were the years when America began lurching toward serious economic inequality. Those big tax cuts for the rich combined with big cuts in social spending squeezed America’s vaunted middle class at both ends.

  In the New York of 1984, it was either the sedan or the sidewalk. Martin Amis’s Money was published in January 1984, and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City in August, and both captured the moo
d—doomy, self-destructive, even hopeless, but at the same time soaringly ambitious. The big artists were Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf: graffiti-making urchins who were plucked from the streets like fairy-tale paupers and made princes of the galleries and salons. And as the sidewalks were filling with the homeless, the adjacent streets were filling with stretch limos—a moment that would be nicely captured, as so many were, by Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, which came out in 1987, right after the October stock market crash of that year. Oscillating between these worlds, New York City often felt on the brink. My diaries are full of moments when the uneasy sense of precariousness intrudes.

  In April 1983 when the entries begin, I was professionally listless after four years as a successful magazine editor in London.

  To recap, I was twenty-five in 1979 when I was invited to edit Tatler, a famous (if fading) monthly in London. This was an outlandish break for someone who had never edited anything, much less a magazine that trailed clouds of glory with a 270-year pedigree that included contributors such as Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels. By 1979, however, Tatler had become a skinny, shiny sheet, its circulation barely ten thousand. Its new owner, Gary Bogard, an Australian real estate entrepreneur unknown to London’s intelligentsia, had offered the job of resuscitation to pretty much every credible editor in town, without success.

  At the time I was a freelance writer contributing frisky commentary to the leftish weekly New Statesman, which, under its great editor, the squash-faced Anthony Howard—known as “Fetus Features” by my fellow contributor Christopher Hitchens—was an older, more droll British cousin to The Nation or The New Republic. Howard had recruited me when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, and his literary stable also included Julian Barnes, James Fenton, and Martin Amis, whose pieces often ran under a pseudonym, Bruno Holbrooke.

  In addition to the New Statesman (or the Staggers, as we called it), I was writing for The Telegraph Sunday Magazine, mostly light stuff about London social trends. I also wrote for Punch, the venerable humor magazine, which at one point assigned me to dance for a set on a tabletop in a G-string at a bar in Hackensack, New Jersey, and tell the magazine’s aging readers what the life of a go-go dancer was like. That was when I began to reflect on how great it would be to be the one assigning the pieces instead of being assigned.

  In the spring of 1979 Nigel Dempster, the influential Daily Mail gossip columnist and wag who was now advising Gary Bogard in his ambitions to turn the waning Tatler into a bona fide glossy, noticed my pieces. He told Bogard to forget about established names and go for youth.

  It didn’t take long for me to discover that I loved being an editor.

  As a movie producer’s daughter, I’d inherited a feel for what it takes to wrangle a story. My father, George H. Brown, was one of a happy, now vanished breed of Gentleman Film Producers who worked on contract for the Rank Organization at Pinewood Studios—the hub of the British film industry, headquartered in a converted country house estate twenty miles west of central London at Iver Heath. The Gentleman Producer prided himself on the high-low mix of his oeuvre: a broad comedy today, a costume drama tomorrow, a refined detective story the day after.

  Dad produced over thirty feature films in his fifty-year career, from vintage dramas such as Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948), Hotel Sahara (1951), and Desperate Moment (1953) to light comedies such as School for Secrets (1946), Vice Versa (1948, with his best friend, Peter Ustinov), and The Chiltern Hundreds (1949) to character pieces such as the BAFTA-winning Guns at Batasi (1964, starring Richard Attenborough and the ingenue Mia Farrow, recruited at the last moment when the original star, Britt Ekland, ran off with Peter Sellers).

  Large, blond, and ebullient in his well-tailored suits, my father filled a room with his commanding height and broken nose. At Pinewood he met Bettina Kohr, the exotic-looking brunette who became my mother. She had worked as the assistant to Laurence Olivier on his adaptations of Henry V (1944) and Hamlet (1948, the first British film to win Hollywood’s Best Picture Oscar). She was a hilarious wit and a voracious reader. They stayed married for fifty years.

  Throughout my childhood the Brown family lived in the idyllic Buckinghamshire hamlet of Little Marlow. Our brick-fronted Georgian house had large bay windows, like Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop. There was a tumbledown apple orchard at the back, and purple blooms of wisteria flourished around the windows and doors. Opposite the house was a broad meadow circled by majestic lime trees, where the yell of soccer and the plop of cricket provided the metronome of passing time.

  I was born in 1953, five years after my brother, Christopher. An extremely nervous fair-haired little girl—known then as Cristina—I was desperately shy, wailing for my mother at other children’s parties.

  Mum had chosen to become a full-time wife, devoted to her husband’s life and business and to us. Christopher and I would have hated losing her exclusive involvement in our happy world. She was our partner in crime, the divine muse and clever mimic who dreamed up stories, saw through phonies, and headed off bores. Every morning of lower school she drove me to Rupert House in Henley-on-Thames, crammed into her bright red three-wheel bubble car. I was proud of how different she looked from the other mums waiting outside for their charges at four o’clock. Next to all their careful bouffants and boringly decorous pearls she was statuesque and striking, with her raven hair pulled back in a bun and her dangly turquoise earrings. Her diva looks radiated dangerous glamour.

  In our house at Little Marlow there was a wild love of stories and a passion to find, hear, read, see, and tell them. My father was always in search of a “cracking good yarn” to bring to the screen. The Sunday papers were a story quarry. So was the pile of books and scripts we took on family vacations. While we were at school Mum would be at her portable typewriter, pounding out potential film “treatments” for Dad, sparked by the novels that arrived in a box once a week from the Harrods lending library, culled from her perusal of Books and Bookmen and The Listener. As soon as I was a sentient being I was included in the discussions of how to get a story “done”—the chase, the seduction, the patient persistence required to carve vivid characters and narrative lines from a writer’s original material and bring it to the screen. My father did a lot of that. When he was on deadline, locked in the dining room with a screenwriter, Christopher (himself a future film producer) and I knew better than to interrupt.

  And then there were the parties. Our parents loved playing host. Propinquity to Pinewood made our Buckinghamshire home into the unlikely soundstage for their rolling postproduction festivities, with a cast of rising starlets, operatic art directors, tragic comediennes, moody directors, on-the-make leading men, the odd literary lion, and whichever squat Turkish financier had put up 20 percent of the production money. They would roll up in their Bentleys and Jags for the wrap parties in our big, beamed living room with French windows that opened out onto the lawn. During the holiday season you could spot the latest James Bond or the star of a Carry On comedy lying contentedly inebriated under the Christmas tree. Like the ingredients of my father’s lovingly concocted summer sangria, the social mix was full of interesting flavors. I once watched my mother introduce the elderly literary legend Dame Rebecca West—a neighbor who shared Mum’s passion for murder investigations—to the double entendre specialist TV comedian Benny Hill. The great lady of letters bent down and examined him as if he were a vivisected newt.

  My parents, like their peers in the Bucks Beverly Hills, had one foot in show business and the other in the local squirearchy, reflected in their choice of our schools. I attended a series of turreted academies with horsey debs and Country Life Camillas. My shyness faded by middle school and I became a ringleader. I’d usually do well for a year or two, garnering alphas in English and history and spending long hours in my huge owl spectacles, transcribing Shakespeare’s sonnets into my journal with an Osmiroid italic-nibbed fountain pen. Then I’d suddenly stage a rebellion.

  My crimes
were never then-cool modern subversions like smoking hash or hiding copies of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl. They were always crimes of attitude. I was bounced from Godstowe, a frowning single-sex day school on a Buckinghamshire hill, for writing an end-of-term play in which Godstowe was blown up and replaced by a public lavatory. I was bounced, too, from Oakdene, a starchy boarding establishment in Beaconsfield I was sent to next for two brief but eventful semesters.

  My parents were always magnificent in these disciplinary altercations. They showed up looking confident and serene, and listened with wonder to the tale of their daughter’s unrecognizable delinquencies. “How very sad it must be for you to have failed with this unusual girl,” my father gently told the mono-bosomed headmistress, Miss Havard, before loading up the car with my trunk and speeding us off to the refuge of Little Marlow, my mother staring proudly ahead.

  My final foray was Hampden House, an exclusive girls’ school in Great Missenden. Somehow, in a considerable feat, my parents got me a place there without admitting I had been expelled from Oakdene for calling Miss Havard’s bosom in a discovered diary an “unidentified flying object.”

  At most boarding schools of the era, few of the 250-girl school population, many of them daughters of earls and honorables, attempted to go on to university. Most chose instead to learn china mending at Sotheby’s or attend finishing school in Switzerland. But what Hampden House, once the family home of John Hampden, a Roundhead hero of the English Civil War, lacked in academics it made up for in atmosphere, stimulating my passion for history and drama. This time the play I wrote—and produced and directed—was about Henry VIII and his six wives.

  True to form, I quickly found a way to blow the temporary acclaim. One of Hampden House’s odder regulations decreed that we had to wear two pairs of underwear: one of white cotton and, over it, a voluminous pair of gray flannel overknickers. Plus, we were forbidden to change our underpants more than three times a week. The year was 1968, and one cold spring afternoon, I led fifty marching girls across the lacrosse field, waving placards that read END KNICKER MADNESS and chanting “Knickers out out out! Knickers in in in!”