The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  But boy, it’s a sick scene in the offices of Vanity Fair on the fourth floor. No wonder two bouquets awaited me. One from Alex, one from Leo. The scene is far weirder than I had imagined and Leo is far, far older when sighted at an ideas meeting cupping his ear to hear better and surrounded by a claque of sycophants he’s brought down from Vogue and sullen staffers he’s inherited from Locke. Most of the things he suggested to write about had appeared somewhere else and even I know that.

  Now I understand why they wanted me here so fast. In this month’s New Criterion, the art critic Hilton Kramer, just the kind of name who matters to Alex, has written a killer critique of VF: “Stale, predictable, devoid of charm or enchantment,” he calls it. “From the caricatures of David Levine and the graphics of Andy Warhol to the animadversions of Gore Vidal and the incontinent blather of John Leonard, everything about the new Vanity Fair has the look and sound and feel of something shopworn and secondhand.” Jesus.

  I’ve been given my own office a long way from the main desk pool where I’d rather be. Liberman came down to see me, in his spry persona (“Welcome, my dear!”), then “Confidentially to you, I have cleaned up the art department” (i.e., fired Lloyd Ziff, a gifted, laid-back Californian with a big reputation. He’d been driven out of his mind by Locke’s clueless indecision and Alex redoing all his layouts). “So! We will talk!”

  I caught sight of Alex again later in the day concentrating hard in the art department, with a jeweler’s loupe in his eye, studying pictures. I loved seeing this, as it’s the first time I had viewed him in art-director mode and could sense his happiness and oblivious concentration. So much more interesting than corporate charmer.

  I went over to Lloyd Ziff’s office and found him still there, slumped in a chair. Alex has brought in Ruth Ansel from House & Garden as VF creative director and switched out Lloyd to fill her job. “So,” Lloyd said bitterly, “the boot has now been shuffled to the other foot. Ruth Ansel, a beautiful person who I love, is coming down here—but how can I go from doing the layouts for Vanity Fair to moving pretty pictures of houses around?” I will say for American Condé, they have so many star art directors. Ruth, like Lloyd, has worked with amazing people like Bea Feitler, the famous art director at Rolling Stone (she came to VF and died just before the first issue), and was very close to Diane Arbus.

  Leo looks very pale and waxy. He pants around, giving me sly dead-eye looks as well as the odd shaft of campy warmth. He plays the editorial meetings very grand, with only grand names suggested to do grand pieces. Steven Aronson has a book called Hype coming out and I suggested we do a big piece by VF’s sharpshooter critic, James Wolcott, defenestrating it. Leo recoiled at the idea of the magazine even noticing Aronson’s book, on the basis that Aronson bitched up Diana Trilling and she’s one of the Ladies (and his close friend). I think Wolcott is highbrow enough to take on both Aronson and the rise of hype, but Leo didn’t.

  I was relieved to find a familiar Brit face in the writer Anthony Haden-Guest and bought him a sandwich in the diner nearby. He seemed incurious about what I was doing there, perhaps because so many people have come and gone at VF, or because he’s just one of life’s magazine nomads, peddling his sentences for as long as the gig lasts.

  Wednesday, May 25, 1983

  Depressed. After Leo enthused about my Smart Set front-of-book mock-ups yesterday and suggested I show them to Alex, my appointment with Alex was postponed as Leo had obviously thought about it overnight and decided he wanted to be there, too. It was rescheduled for the three of us on Thursday. Now that I am here, Alex is going to insist I work through Leo, which is right, but only if he’s genuinely collaborating. I spent last night in the hotel listening to the whine of police sirens as I don’t have anyone to see. So far, every writer I have suggested for the magazine, Leo’s said “Fix up lunch for the three of us,” which is a real drag as I’m used to having my own direct relationships with writers. Plus, why lunch? All so slow and heavy. And anyway, his diary seems to be perennially full. It will all take forever and I am used to just getting on the phone. I feel sorry for him. He looks at me with awful suspicion, like a manic, whiskery prawn, convinced I am Alex’s spy. He’s been tortured for so long, I guess now that he’s finally got some power of his own he’s terrified of it being taken away from him. It’s disappointing, though. I thought I was going to be deputed to lead the talent to a promised land for him and he would look good and we’d have fun. I miss Harry! I think of him chained to his word processor in Kent, cranking out the memoir, and wonder how I am going to get through the separation.

  Thursday, May 26, 1983

  I am finding it fascinating to see the Leo/Alex relationship at work. When Alex arrives in the afternoon you see Leo stiffen with terror. He is immediately transformed from a cantankerous grand old man into a petulant little boy, while Alex clearly thrives on messing with his head. Today he comes down to Leo’s office and looks at the board of mini layouts of the next issue in silence, then starts shuffling all the little cards around the board, with Leo watching in agony. Glancing sideways at him, Alex says, “Eighteen pages of Paul Theroux to start, Leo?”

  “It’s really a very striking read,” whimpers Leo.

  “But eighteen pages, dear friend? Come, Leo, you know you will have a space problem. We will have to take out the Calvino story!”

  “No,” wails Leo, “not Calvino!”

  “Well, Leo. You will have a space problem.”

  Then Alex turns around and his veiled black eyes bat opaquely at me, head nodding slightly like a sinister marionette. “Let us ask Tina’s point of view!” Sensing danger, I express ignorance of this particular issue and its contents.

  Today we had the meeting to look at the layouts I’d mocked up for the Smart Set idea. Alex didn’t like it. “Americans have no humor,” he explained. “There is no society here. These pages are brilliant but they savor of Diana Vreeland, which was poison to readers. No, I could more readily see these pages appearing in Vogue.” At first I felt paranoid like Leo. Alex is going to take my best ideas back to Vogue! But as I think about what he said, I realize he is right. Here in America people come from nowhere, everywhere, and get to the top. So different from England, where the establishment is everyone who went to either Oxford or Cambridge and the same six schools. I loved the Smart Set name because I was ironically referencing the old Vanity Fair heyday under Frank Crowninshield. But no one will get that except magazine buffs and it will just come over as snobby. It was interesting to hear the legendary Diana Vreeland referred to not as the Goddess but as reader “poison.” Alex, I realize, may have all the cultural sheen of the artist, but he’s very commercial. I felt new respect. I asked him, in front of Leo, if he could confirm what I had raised in our negotiations—that I have a set number of pages I am commissioning (so I don’t have to always go through Leo). He responded in what I am beginning to sense is the Condé Nast way, with the counteroffer of something that sounded very flattering but was both unnecessary and a distraction. “Tina must have an assistant,” he said. Leo started to look agitated again. “Really not necessary,” I said. “Can we count on you, my dear?” Alex said, putting his hand on my shoulder and easing us both out the door.

  Feeling glum, I took a taxi this evening to dinner at Marie Brenner’s apartment on West Twentieth Street in the Chelsea district. So great that I got to know her in London and now have her as a friend here. After the Byzantine politics of 350 Madison Avenue, it was a relief to mix with other journalists on my wavelength.

  Marie’s apartment on a quaint tree-lined block has a London/Islington feeling. Her baby girl, Casey, is sweet and round and happy. Her writer husband, Jonathan Schwartz, is bearish, an expert on Frank Sinatra. The other guests were the WSJ’s David McClintock, who wrote Indecent Exposure, the page-turner about intrigue at Columbia Pictures, and a small, sprightly, silver-haired film producer named Dominick (Nick) Dunne, who is the brother-in-law of Joan Didion. He has a wonderful mellow voice and told fun
ny, observant stories full of juice about Hollywood and Park Avenue. Seems he was a success in movies, then became an alcoholic and lost it all, including his marriage. One feels he could have been a priest.

  By the second course we were firm friends. He’s working on a novel based on a society murder in the Woodward family where the former showgirl shot her husband and a high-powered cover-up stopped it from coming to trial [The Two Mrs. Grenvilles]. I asked if he’d thought about writing for magazines. He said he’d never thought about doing nonfiction before. Marie joined us on the sofa for coffee. The emotion of the night ratcheted up when Dominick suddenly revealed to me something terrible—his daughter, Dominique, was murdered. She got involved with an increasingly controlling man, a chef at LA’s fashionable Ma Maison restaurant. He throttled her. For three days before she died, Dominick sat by her hospital bed, looking at her bruised neck. Now he’s going out to LA for the murder trial. Marie told him he should think about keeping a diary. It might be a solace, a way to process the pain. I said if he did, it’s something I’d love to publish in Vanity Fair. His face lit up as if I’d just thrown him a lifeline. He said he didn’t know how to begin to write an article. I suggested what I always do to encourage first-timers: Just write as if in a letter to me, pour it out and we’ll help knit it together; not to worry about structure. I asked him to come in to meet Wayne Lawson, one of the VF senior editors I inherited from Locke, who worked with him at the NYT Book Review. Wayne is a true craftsman of copyediting, relaxed, ego-free. He has a deceptively colorless appearance down to his horn-rimmed glasses, but I’ve found he has acute sensitivity to a sentence. We have him in the wrong job at the moment, managing things rather than engaging his good literary judgment. Nick promised he’d follow up. He seemed buoyed up when he left the dinner, as if he’d glimpsed some redemption from all his suffering.

  Monday, May 30, 1983

  The office seems such a cauldron of politics. I volunteered to write what Leo likes to call a feuilleton, about Henry Kissinger’s series of sixtieth-birthday parties. Stayed back at the hotel to write it up, reminding me what toil it is to write anything. Harry came in like a visiting whirlwind for the weekend, which was such a relief, and he showed me some of his latest pages of Good Times, Bad Times. The book has great narrative pace. The undercurrent of class warfare between the old guard at the Times and Harry’s meritocratic energy that jostled them makes for great drama.

  Henry K has been superfriendly to Harry since he edited his memoirs, ostentatiously supportive during the Murdoch horrors (while, of course, playing both sides and staying equally close to Murdoch). Even though Henry K is a rumbling old Machiavelli, I can’t help admiring his incredibly sharp wit and the fertile insights he tosses out. The birthday parties were an amazing parade of international power players. I was the youngest by thirty years and would never have been asked without Harry. The most interesting of them was Henry and Nancy’s own reception in their soberly distinguished apartment at the River House, where Henry seemed truly the person he really is, the foreign policy superwonk surrounded by academics and foreign-affairs buffs and banking nerds. It was a total contrast to the money-and-froth fest upstairs hosted by the Wall Street tycoon John Gutfreund and his over-the-top trophy wife, Susan. The Gutfreunds’ apartment is a minimalist sky lab over a 360-degree vista of glittering skyline. When we walked in there was a Brazilian millionaire and his arm-candy wife, Mrs. Johnny Carson, and little Stavros Niarchos, who was squiring a very tall German princess in silver shoes. When short of conversation we admired the aquatic Monets sprinkled around. After Susan Gutfreund did her florid toast, Henry returned it with: “Those of you who came to lunch today must realize that it was held in the slum quarters of River House, though we have applied for a grant under an urban renewal scheme. Huh. Huh. Huh…” It’s taken me three days to write a thousand words about all this, which is absurd. Have been wrestling to find an idea to knit my observations together and stop it from being just a social piece. Today I finally came up with the concept of applying shuttle diplomacy to Henry’s different social identities—i.e., commuting between Park Avenue high life, Washington power, and academia. Hope Leo likes it. He seems to resent me as an editor, but perhaps if I write for him we can recover some of the old rapport we had when he was at Vogue.

  Wednesday, June 1, 1983

  I had lunch with the writer Emily Prager and liked her so much. I read her excellent new book A Visit from the Footbinder and thought she ought to be writing for VF. She has a sweet, tough little face and dazzling smile.

  New York women are so much more confident than we are in London. They really are ahead of us in what they expect, what they assume, what they aspire to do. They seem so much better on their feet and in meetings. American girls’ schools, I think, are much better at teaching girls how to speak in public and handle themselves in a public setting. I am terrified of speaking in public, still. I agonize too much. I dread it when American hosts and hostesses bang the glass and start going round the table soliciting instant insights, the way they do. I always feel as if I am dreading the teacher coming to me next and yet when others are talking I often think—I had something so much better I could have offered up. So why didn’t I?

  Emily talked a lot about how hard it is for writers to get on TV. She said when her book came out Simon & Schuster’s PR said, “TV is for experts. Don’t talk about the novel itself, be an expert on Chinese foot-binding.” She did it so well, apparently, some viewers thought she was doing a how-to presentation and wanted to try it. She was dear-departed Tatler writer Henry Post’s great friend and told me how awful it was watching him weakened and devoured by AIDS. I told her Henry’s death was the first time I ever heard of the disease, when it was still called GRID.

  Everything in the magazine Leo is producing at the moment is so irrelevant and precious. I raised the notion of an AIDS story with him but he seemed terrified to touch it.

  This evening I went to a dinner party for the Brit socialite Jane Bonham-Carter at the investigative journalist Ed Epstein’s Upper East Side apartment. I find the cityscape at night so thrillingly materialistic. And yet a dinner like this with Ed and his friends can be cozy. When I mix like this with writers and journalists I start to think I could be perfectly happy living here as long as I could escape the city on the weekend. In London we felt we’d explode unless we went to the woods and fields of Brasted on the weekend. But to the frantic pace of New York, London is a millpond.

  The new, swaggery Texan editor of Newsweek, William Broyles, was at the dinner with his wife, Sybil, who was his art director at Texas Monthly. They are a sexy alpha pair. Broyles is going through at Newsweek what Harry went through at the Times. The thousand and one old-guard pessimists who try to block his ideas all the time on one side, and on the other, the restless, tetchy owner, Katharine Graham, who’s obviously falling out of love with him but can’t afford to sack another editor after she just got rid of her last one, Ed Kosner, who happened to be very good. Harry says she plainly had a crush on Broyles, who has a bit of the Ben Bradlee he-man appeal, but not Ben’s sophisticated political skills in handling Kay. Bill would have made a wonderful editor for Vanity Fair. I wonder why they never thought of him. Too virile perhaps. Sybil said they both didn’t realize how great their team was in Texas until they left it. (Like me at Tatler.)

  Ed Epstein told me that two weeks ago at a dinner party, Si Newhouse said the new editor of Vanity Fair was Tina Brown and someone called Renata Adler as well. (A novelist, I am told.)

  It shows that (a) Si doesn’t know what the fuck is going on on the VF floor and (b) no wonder Leo is paranoid.

  Thursday, June 9, 1983

  I took Emily Prager in to see Leo and get a piece from her. Much to my embarrassment he treated me and my guest the way Bea Miller treats the succession of mortified matrons who run her features department at British Vogue when they wheel in some social nonentity to meet her and be a contributor. He took very little notice of poor Emily, ta
king calls continuously, cross-talking crassly with his ET-like assistant, and made Emily go over all her ideas again rather than the one we were there to talk about. He kept squawking, “We must have more names in it!” as if the point of the piece was the names she would drop rather than the fact she was writing it. I felt extremely pissed off, as she was clearly not happy, and I feel I have burned a contact I was trying to encourage. Still, he liked my Kissinger squib. I asked for the byline to be anonymous as I feel if I write something it ought to be more substantial.

  Now I am on the way to the American Booksellers Association convention to scout Vanity Fair serial extracts (I think Leo wanted me out of the office) and meet up with the wonderful, exuberant literary agent Ed Victor, who is in from London. He’s American but lives there and is such a big bear of a man his friendship will be a welcome relief. I also loved the notion of going to Dallas and seeing a bit more of the United States rather than just the hothouse of Condé Nast.

  The oven-breath of Texas heat hit me so hard I gasped when I got off the plane. The enormous black-windowed limo Condé Nast uses seemed to take forever to get to the hotel, and when I stepped into the big glitzy conference lobby the temperature changed to meat-locker cold. The lobby was seething with publishing folks with badges. A woman from Harlequin Books in a huge floppy white hat was saying, “So I said to Pocket Books, they can shove it!”

  Ed Victor is in his element, leaping around his hotel room in a T-shirt that says “My lawyer can beat your lawyer.”

  Saturday, June 11, 1983

  America is so wildly foreign. This ABA event could put a writer off writing books forever. Ed Victor took me to what was touted as an A-list publishing party hosted by Pocket Books for the old forties movie star Lana Turner at the Adolphus Hotel. “All the crowned heads of publishing will be there,” said Ed, my Virgil through this whole experience. “There is no way we’re going out to that ranch for the New York Review of Books party.” The big publishing star of the moment seems to be Dick Snyder, the CEO of Simon & Schuster. Ed told me that Snyder’s secretary, Nancy, once told an agent, “Mr. Snyder doesn’t wish you bad. And he doesn’t wish you good. He just wishes you don’t call him no more.” He arrived fashionably late surrounded by a praetorian guard of glamorous editors and PR people. Snyder is very short, with tiny legs, a flushed, scowly face, and a mouth that appears to be on a rubber band. He talks in rattling absolutes. Ed told him Harry is writing a book about Rupert Murdoch. “You can’t interest me,” fired back Snyder. “Nobody gives a shit about Murdoch in this town. He’s just the purveyor of bad journalism and nobody cares about that either.” It’s amazing to me how low the credibility of Leo’s Vanity Fair has sunk. Editors and publishers roll their eyes or make snotty comments or handicap the odds of it closing. A lesbian publicist buttonholed me for some time with a story of despair about the death of the woman’s movement. Certainly Gloria Steinem doesn’t seem very full of crusading zeal anymore. I caught sight of her willowy figure and aviator glasses at the party. In a group of other women who surrounded her I heard her say, “We must become the men we wanted to marry.” I loved that.