by Tina Brown
My first issue will be April 1984, so with seven weeks to go to press there is very little time. I was crushed to discover that Dominick Dunne’s account of his daughter’s murder that I urged him to write last summer finally came in six weeks ago, and so is just going to press in the March issue before mine. It’s every bit as brilliant as I hoped. The man is a real writer. I wish I could save it for April instead of having it appear in the last desperate issue of Leo’s, which has twelve ad pages in it and a weird vampy cartoon of a flapper with a cigarette holder on the cover.
I asked Alex for an editorial budget, but he seemed vague about the matter, telling me I had to “do what I must to get it right.” I immediately asked Nick Dunne to come in and talk about a contract. My goal is to hire five or six terrific magazine writers who can become definitive Vanity Fair voices, not keep using all the rented bylines who have gone stale elsewhere. Nick was ecstatic. Like a warm, leaping leprechaun. My first hire!
We need to whip up something fast for April, and there is no time to do anything except a piece that has attitude and voice or buy in something already written. I had a drink with Michael Roberts at the Algonquin. He’s ecstatic I have arrived. Feels VF is desperate for some of Tatler’s humor after the last two months dealing, as he put it, with “all the sad-sack bluestockings,” who are holdovers from the Locke regime.
We brainstormed on what we could do for the April cover. As it’ll be Oscar season, we settled on “Blonde Ambition,” about the current crop of striving starlets, and will get Helmut Newton to photograph them to add some visual edge. The magazine desperately needs a shot of old-style glamour after all the months featuring glowering intellectuals. Perfect subject, too, for Nick Dunne, who can riff on Hollywood glamour of the past as well as the present.
The good thing is that my summer stint gave me so many insights and I know my way around the office. Like attending summer school before the real thing. I want to get everyone out of lurking in their cubicles. I had a features meeting with four of the editors, which was very strange because no one argued. I am used to the rowdy Tatler staff combating everything I say. Here they took assiduous notes, which I found disconcerting. That’s going to have to change.
Friday, January 6, 1984
Staff parade continues. The writer Stephen Schiff is a Locke hire I definitely want to keep. He’s a curly-haired, quietly funny movie critic from The Boston Phoenix, where he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. He said, “Sometimes I’d look around and think I would NEVER be old enough for this magazine. Leo’s editorial policy seemed to be, catch them before they die.” He noted shrewdly re Alex that if you had an idea that was any good, it somehow seemed to find its way not into VF but into Vogue. Schiff has done some very stylish pieces for the mag and is someone who can definitely increase his tempo. Coming from newspapers, he can write at speed. As well as longer movie essays, I am going to give him a back-of-the-book place to do a Short Schiff column with smart bites handicapping good movies. The magazine is all one stately rhythm at the moment, with no short takes and no places to graze at the back and front.
Nick Dunne is already hitting the phones on Blonde Ambition. He’s found a fabulous-sounding new actress called Daryl Hannah who’s making a mermaid comedy.
Next weekend when it’s all quiet I am going to get Ruth Ansel and Charles Churchward to come in and we will start redesigning the mag front to back.
Monday, January 9, 1984
Clay Felker keeps sending me candidates for jobs on the mag. He is being very supportive, if exhausting. In fact, supportive New Yorkers are now one of my biggest hazards. Every time I go out, some media big-shot comes over and stabs me in the chest with a big meaty finger and says,
“What YOU should do is hire Norman Mailer.” “What YOU should do is clear out all those deadbeats under Leo Lerman.” I call it the New York finger. I was invited to lunch by the literary agent Morton Janklow at the Four Seasons yesterday. He has huge headlamp eyes behind intimidating glasses and so wore me out with all the high-octane helpful suggestions and iconic bylines he represents; I wanted to lie down afterward with a compress.
Clay’s latest recommendation is to hire a seasoned ed called John Walsh to be my executive editor. I am so used to effete fashionistas and literary types from Tatler world that I found Walsh a bit startling. He’s a loud, bluff, aging flower child with a sports background, white eyelashes, and a cowboy hat. He obviously has a lot of flair and experience, but was a bit overwhelming. Kept assailing me about what my “vision” of the new VF might be. I felt something of a credibility problem with him. Mine. I realized how insubstantial and British I must seem to him with only Tatler under my belt compared to his bulging résumé. However, by the end of our exchange I had clearly passed some test because he downed his Dubonnet in a gulp (we were at the bar at the Regency) and said, “Hell, now I’m getting excited. The other jobs I have been offered are bigger but this one I could give my whole energy to.” Felt a rush of success when he said that, but still need to ponder if I can handle him.
Tuesday, January 10, 1984
I have loved my first week!
The work ethic and energy here are so different from England. It holds you up with invisible hands and makes you feel buoyant when you get out of bed. I notice the difference especially when I call London to talk to writers and I hear the rain in their voices—“Hull-o,” with a downward intonation. It makes my spirit sag. I called Martin [Amis] today to ask him to do a piece about a new West End play and he said, “Do I have to see it?”
I like many of my inherited staff. Tracy Young is the best surprise. She has a hard, brittle wit. I have asked her to edit the new diary section at the front where her attitude can run free. In three days I’ve tried to allot each staff member to a specific job as most seemed to be just floating around, unsure of what they are supposed to be doing, or sitting in corners, plotting. I am mostly working off instinct of what they can do as I have no real time to find out. I’ve got the literary girl Friday April Bernard off her high horse by giving her the arts section redesign to do. Suzanne Stephens has learned she’s not doing architecture crit anymore. (Criticism per se in a monthly never makes much sense to me. It’s all out of date or striving to be forward-looking without any information.) I read today that the movie director Michael Cimino is doing a remake of The Fountainhead, so I diverted Suzanne into doing a feature on the Howard Roarks of today. I have Horst doing classic VF portraits in black and white of newcomers like Michael Graves and Richard Meier with smart copy by Suzanne. The new VF has to be, above all, great looking, and the photographers Condé Nast has hanging around are so extraordinary that there shouldn’t be a bad page in the magazine. The pictures have got to be allowed at last to breathe without type all over them.
Wayne Lawson seems like the secret weapon to promote. He is very likable with his laconic southern belle act and deliberately colorless facade that masks a wicked sense of humor. He has been negotiating with the Hollywood literary agent Swifty Lazar for Diana Vreeland’s memoirs. Swifty asked for fifty thousand dollars! Harry told me they were only worth ten thousand, and, amazingly, Swifty accepted it. It felt like a victory for the new regime.
Condé Nast has given me a temporary secretary. She’s an industrious mouse with a completely round face and round glasses, like something out of Little Women. She is being worked so hard by me that her glasses mist up and her little cheeks are scarlet as she taps away furiously.
Wednesday, January 11, 1984
Pam Van Zandt’s apartment for me didn’t come through, as Italian Vogue stayed on, so I contacted an agent advertising rentals in the Daily News. I have a rush of desire to live somewhere modern. I had always imagined myself living in a New Yorker–y brownstone walk-up, but I am over old-world touches. I want to be the opposite of who I was in London. I want to live in a glass box with white sofas that looks down on the electric throb of the city. I am so dying to get out of the Algonquin, with its sleepy switchboa
rd and jostling lobby, that I picked the first apartment the agent sent me, a sublet in a black glass tower with curved corners at the Northwest corner of Second Avenue and Sixty-Sixth Street.
Harry came in from London and we met the real estate agent in the lobby of the glass tower on my lunch hour. The agent wore a porkpie hat very straight on his head and a raincoat and said his name was Hershey Schwartz. The sublet he showed us in the Solow Tower (as it’s called) is somewhat preposterous. An overfurnished glitz bowl with ultrasuede pillars and fairy lights in the rubber plants. Two beds, two bathrooms. I have never seen a bedside table crammed with so many speaking alarm clocks and whirring coffee machines and Fabergé pill pots. Still, the selling point for me is the enormous health club on the top floor with a skylit swimming pool surrounded by windows, where you can gaze out on the glamour and the glitter of the spires below. And we only took it for six months.
The owner is a Blanche DuBois blonde called Mrs. de Voff. When she opened the door, she was wearing a negligee, which she kept unbuttoning to show her new silicone breasts.
“I am very proud to be renting your apartment, Mrs. de Voff,” I said.
At this point Harry had to rush off to catch a plane to Durham. Once he’d gone, Hershey Schwartz demanded I give him a five-thousand-dollar up-front deposit—in cash. “Anything can happen in New York,” he kept saying. “You could meet a man tomorrow who offers you a fifteen-hundred-dollar three-bed penthouse and you drop me cold.” So I went to the bank on Third Avenue, came back with the cash, and counted out the notes into Schwartz’s porkpie hat.
Thursday, January 12, 1984
It’s snowing! Just got back from an amusing dinner at Dick and Shirley Clurman’s for the New York Times social writer Charlotte Curtis. Dick was chief of foreign correspondents at Time but retired now, and Shirley works for Barbara Walters at ABC. They keep themselves aloft in the New York scene by giving wonderful dinner parties. I found Charlotte Curtis unbearable. What a bogus grandee she is, a coiffed asparagus, exuding second-rate intellectualism. She didn’t ask me one question about VF or any damn thing. Still, I always love hearing Shirley yak on in her cigar-brown voice. She reminds me of Olive Oyl in Popeye. She and Dick have been such loyal friends to us, eternally generous with their support and their connections. Shirley’s always awash with luscious high-powered gossip, and Dick is curiously endearing the way he masks his own shyness by banging a glass at dessert and demanding everyone give up some insight or news. One point of discussion was Henry Kissinger’s reaction when told by phone call, while inspecting the layout of his new house in Connecticut with Oscar de la Renta, that Seymour Hersh had leaked his entire South America report to The New York Times. Henry drove straight back to the city in a murderous rage.
“But you know,” rasped Shirley, “if I had to choose a best friend for a desert island, between Sy and Henry I would choose Sy, even though he’s a killer, because he’s sexy and divine and I just love that juicy, funny little way he has.”
“If Henry heard that,” rumbled Dick, “he’d never speak to you again.”
“I know,” said Shirley. “But let’s face it, how many great minds can one deal with in a busy life?”
Friday, January 13, 1984
Real estate disaster! Fucking Hershey Schwartz, the agent with the porkpie hat, has disappeared! When the rental contract didn’t appear I called the office number on his card only to learn he’s never worked there. He has vanished with my five thousand bucks! Feel so dumb. He cleaned us out! Feel furious, too, that Condé Nast doesn’t look after overseas arrivals better. Harry went ballistic that I was so careless in not checking Hershey out. Big flaming marital row about the porkpie hat transaction just when I was already late leaving for the office.
I called the police station. After much hanging on the phone a laconic voice on the other end made it clear I was a dope to have handed over cash to someone I had never met before. Also that it’s a scam that happens all the time and I should come in and fill out forms. Mrs. de Voff sounded distressed but just referred us back to the agency who said Hershey Singer didn’t work there. I told PVZ, who was coolly sympathetic and got Condé to advance me another—much smaller—deposit. I feel abused and suddenly poor from this rip-off instead of festive and rich on my new salary. Why is everything in New York so fraught?
Saturday, January 14, 1984
I am worried about Michael Roberts, who is now officially our style director. At Tatler he was always in the center of things in the art department and I was in and out working with him all day. Fashion is so much part of Alex’s wheelhouse that I sense Michael is under his scrutiny and so does Michael, who is like a cat with his fur bristling when Alex comes down. I sense Alex finds Michael’s ideas rarefied for America. He hasn’t hit his stride yet. But then he’s only just arrived! I am moving him nearer to me and he’s now working on some Olympic-themed fashion pages for May. My biggest worry right now is the thinness of material in-house for the makeover in April.
Sunday, January 15, 1984
Went into the office when all was quiet to work on the VF redesign with Ruth Ansel and Charles. It was bliss. We started front-to-back throwing out all the clutter and pretentiousness and choosing new typefaces. Created a Vanities section at the front to be a mixture of Talk of the Town–type short literary pieces and Tatler’s front-of-book section with its flavor of social observation. I’ve put a strip I call Night Table Reading in the front, where we ask interesting people to talk about books, and a Flashback page to summon up the old VF for nostalgia freaks. Have mixed sophisticated black ink drawings with photos and added a smart slender black rule between the items.
I am particularly proud of the Contents page. I brought it much further to the front as there’s nothing more annoying than searching through ads (when we finally get some) while looking for what’s in the magazine. A Contents page has to immediately establish a magazine’s voice and attitude and mix, but so often it’s just treated as a humdrum info list rather than the reader’s first experience of the tone.
Next to the articles list I chose thumbnails of the great photos inside, with three striking small images to run down the side. These three picture choices also show off at a glance the mix of lightness, substance, and surprise that defines (or will) the overall magazine. I had Miles, who’s in from London so I can introduce him to PVZ and hire him, run up dummy pages to get the feel right. It enabled Ruth to design with real copy to see if it really worked in the space. The copy describing each story will be written run-on style with boldface breakout words that allow Miles to do fun, allusive things with the phrasing; e.g., for a snippet about screenwriter hell in Hollywood, “Muse, get me rewrite.” Finally, we slapped a big, bold APRIL over the top of the page.
After Contents and the Vanities section, the feature pages now follow in a racy, unbroken run with strong, clean type and crisp, uncluttered use of the pictures. Looks so much braver. We had joyous fun, only stopping to gorge on pizza.
With the office quiet on Sunday I could ransack the art department drawers. I had come to suspect they might be filled with treasures I haven’t been shown. And lo, what did I find? An astonishing portfolio of pictures of the new American comedians by Annie Leibovitz, who has a VF contract I now learn. It has, apparently, been sitting around for months. Pee-wee Herman with a pair of underpants on his head! Eric Bogosian distorted longwise in a fun house mirror! Gilbert Gottfried hanging with head invisible under a lampshade in a Hollywood hotel room. They are absolutely glorious and I will rush them into the April issue with the perfect headline of “April Fools”! (It was gratifying to see Miles’s Cheshire cat smile at this.) For wonderful counterpoint I also found a moody Deborah Turbeville portfolio of crumbling Roman villas in Capri I can run with a piece that Bruce Chatwin has offered on Capri’s literary exiles, Axel Munthe and Curzio Malaparte. These two features feel immediately right for the mix I want to waste no time in showing—edgy modernity and pop culture from Annie combined with dreamy l
iterary excellence from Bruce. The missing component is news, but we will get there.
Now I am back home in my new whirring, blinking apartment. I went up to the roof tonight just to gaze at the electric power of Manhattan’s skyline. My new home.
I am in bed with a cup of tea, slogging through a pile of manuscripts. Harry has gone to Duke. He called to say his first lecture was SRO, and he sounded happy. I miss him, but also feel content.
Tuesday, January 17, 1984
Wow! Tonight was the launch of Good Times, Bad Times in New York and the wonderful Clurmans threw Harry a book party at Mortimer’s restaurant on the Upper East Side. It was so high powered the energy threatened to lift the lid off the restaurant. Shirley had ordered huge white balloons with “Good Times, Bad Times” printed on them and at the end of the party we released them over Manhattan and watched them float away into the freezing night.
* * *
There was an incredible media turnout—from The New York Times especially. The editor, Abe Rosenthal, was much grittier than I expected, but seemed to have huge respect for Harry. So did the chairman, Punch Sulzberger, who was more grave and reserved. Si turned up in bashful chipmunk mode, accompanied by a young chipmunk clone who is apparently a cousin who edits one of Donald Newhouse’s newspapers. Alex came early and was a little aloof because this is not his crowd. I was astonished at the outsize panache of Pat Buckley, a close friend of Shirley’s, a great American goddess with big white shoulders, voluminous blonde hair, and dancing diamond earrings. Bill Buckley did a pale, sexy, contact-lens stare at me. What a fascinating, magnetic phenomenon they are. Shirley Clurman was in overdrive, hurling us at every new face. “This is Norman Podhoretz. The bravest man in the United States. This is Mr. Blustein, whose first name I always forget. Harry, he may be hustling you, on the other hand, he could have money. Tina, dear, you should meet Iris Love … Irene Selznick … Marietta Tree. Harry, be nice to Aileen Mehle, who will write about this party in her Suzy column. Morley Safer. Harry, this is definitely A-list. Punch Sulzberger never goes to book parties.” And on and on. In all the ego fest I didn’t find a cozy mooring except with Marie Brenner, now separated from Jonathan Schwartz with a new doctor boyfriend.
