by Tina Brown
Wednesday, January 18, 1984
Today Alex came down and startled me by saying, “Tina. Please don’t be offended. But I hear from Si that you dined in the Four Seasons last night.”
“No,” I said, mystified.
“He says you were sitting upstairs,” he said.
“Ah, lunch!” I beamed. “Yes, I was lunching there with Grace Mirabella.”
“And you were upstairs.”
“Yes.” Pause.
“My dear, you were in Siberia,” he said. I stared at him.
He chuckled. “Very much the wrong table. Si was very concerned. He called me first thing this morning. He told me it’s very bad for your image and the magazine’s for you to be seated there. We must find you a social secretary to look after you.”
Thursday, January 19, 1984
The snow continues. I am now trying to put the revamped April magazine together in earnest. It comes out the middle of March and there is not much time before we have to go to press. Alex rattled me by coming down and redoing some layouts when I was at lunch, and that’s something I cannot let him do. It was a feature on the great French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue by Joan Buck. I was in heaven when I found the pictures in the ever-yielding art department drawer last week. I have always adored Lartigue since Harry framed one of his smaller pictures for me as a Valentine’s present (the one of a strolling patrician man in a rakish flat cap arrested midstride on the Normandy sands as he ponders two women in long white dresses; I call it Proust on the beach).
I didn’t even know Lartigue was still alive (and living in Paris, about to be ninety), but VF has these ravishing unseen pictures of the women he has loved, chosen especially for us. The layouts Alex did were actually great but there isn’t the room in the issue to run at this length. So when I came back I cut it down again, and also threw out his overblown type treatment, which I cannot have any more of and was ruining the simplicity of the spreads. I was determined to make a fight of it, aware that right away, early on, I had to send the message loud and clear about who is now editing this magazine.
Alex returned at four o’clock and stood with his hands behind his back, staring down at the layout table. I joined him there. He bristled and looked at me. “I see you have eliminated the best pictures,” he said. There was a gathering silence in the art department. Ruth and Charles said nothing. They had experienced this scene before. I summoned my resolve. “Adding another three spreads of Lartigue is a waste of space,” I said. “I have so much great stuff to get in this issue.”
“But where’s the glory?” he replied with sudden impatience. “My dear, a magazine must know how to waste space. You have no glory in this issue.” He turned to walk away, then pivoted and surprised us all. “Well,” he said with his most opaque black stare, “perhaps you are right. Perhaps these sacred monsters have had their day.” Watched by the still-silent art department, he walked stiffly out.
There was much celebration in the office at this power victory. But oddly, I didn’t feel happy myself. I talked to Harry on the phone. He questioned my instant rejection of the idea. “Lartigue is a photographic scoop. Perhaps it makes more of a statement to run them long. Maybe two extra spreads. Think about it.”
Back home, I made myself a grilled sandwich and took it up to the roof. That view of Manhattan’s lights always fills me with such awe and aspiration; it helps me think. I love Lartigue. Why am I fighting it? The pictures he sent us may be some of the last he chooses, and they are about love. Perhaps Alex is right. Where is the glory in the magazine? I remembered something else he said to me a few days ago when he came and sat in my office for no apparent reason. It was almost plaintive. “I feel I am not being used enough.” Was he asking me to let him bring me his skill, not for power reasons but for real creative contribution? He is so stunningly talented, and yet his gifts are also shapeless. They need to come up against a point of view that disciplines them. He realizes this, I think, especially after the first year of VF when he dominated and failed. And then I also thought about his comment about how a magazine must know how to “waste space.” I am still living in Tatler world, where every page was a budget issue and the pace was more comic-book kinetic. I understood suddenly what he meant. There also needs to be languor sometimes in a glossy magazine, visual theater, the sweep of a great photograph not as illustration but to be savored for its own luxurious sake. He was right. I will give Lartigue another six pages. I can’t wait to tell him tomorrow that I have reversed myself.
Friday, January 20, 1984
Still snowing. I waited for Alex to come down for our eleven a.m. meeting, impatient now to tell him about Lartigue. But he didn’t appear. Finally at two I called his office and they told me he is snowed in in Connecticut. I felt very upset. I suddenly really missed him, I realized, and wanted terribly to share this lightbulb moment. At five p.m. I finally called him at his home and told him he was right about Lartigue. There was a silence. Then the rusty laugh. “Well, my dear. It is your magazine and you must make the decision.”
“I have,” I replied. I felt suddenly tearful. A rite of passage had been navigated between us and I needed to let him know. “I love working with you, Alex,” I said. Another pause.
“Me too, my dear,” he replied. “Me too.”
Monday, January 23, 1984
This afternoon I met with James Wolcott, who’s on the VF writing staff. I was prepared to dislike him since he gave Good Times, Bad Times a perfunctory and negative review. He is pale and raffish with small suspicious eyes and exudes vague, downtown hostility. But after a brief and inconclusive interview in which we cautiously circled each other, I read his parody of Renata Adler’s new book and it is utterly brilliant and hilarious. It reminds me of Jonathan Meades at Tatler; it’s so anarchic and intelligent. He’s clearly capable of something really good. I shall continue his contract and give him a column so he can show off at length. He’s too talented to lose, even if I can’t win him round.
Saturday, January 28, 1984
So happy it’s Saturday. My first quiet day to savor time alone. Harry stayed at Duke this weekend. I am going through piles of VF submissions that have been sitting around for months and I feel like Mrs. Thatcher “doing her boxes.” I’ve always loved the routine aspects of editing, the poised pencil, the swift identification of the lines that have to go, the insert that will make it sing, the rewarding moment when you see that the whole thing should start on page nine and flip the penultimate paragraph to the top of the piece, and all you want to do is call the writer immediately and tell him or her why. The trouble is that as a writer myself I feel obsessed with getting back to people quickly, as I know only too well that after submitting a piece to the editor you sit there waiting for response with curdling hopes. You can tolerate the first day’s wait, even half the second, but by the end of day two there’s a pain in your stomach and by three and four deep misery and rage are setting in. Writers can handle fast rejection. But they cannot stand the slow no. Whenever I receive copy I feel there’s a time bomb in my bag.
The last two days were draining. Anthony Haden-Guest is half out the door to New York magazine to work for Ed Kosner, and I never know if he’s feeding them our ideas. We had a heated exchange when I thanked him for a recommendation and he told me that the Kosners were angry he gave it to me; i.e., he’s discussing what he’s doing for us with New York mag. “It’s all right,” he said, in his strange glaucous way. “They know I am still working for you.”
“So does Si Newhouse know,” I shrieked. “VF is paying your salary!” An unfortunate and crass explosion on my part that I regretted. He stormed out, flushed, and I leaned against the wall in my office with a palpitating heart. I just made an enemy for nothing, but I am tired of people who aren’t all in. There is so much whispering in the corridors from the old Locke gang and everyone in the media seems to want us to fail. I am getting jumpy and overwrought.
Monday, January 30, 1984
Like so many
people in New York publishing, the president of Condé Nast is an outsize figure. He oversees all the publishers and ad sales of Condé titles. Whereas Bernie Leser in London was a tycoon wannabe, Bob Lapham is a big, fat operator on a much more impressive scale, a three-hundred-pound pelican full of salty Madison Avenue asides and loquacious insights into the working and financing of the company. We had lunch in a stuffy French restaurant in midtown, Le Périgord, with much flowery Gallic paraphernalia. But as soon as Lapham got into his favorite subject—the previous year’s catastrophe at Vanity Fair—we both thawed out and I started to find him hilarious.
“Locke said he wanted approval of Vanity Fair’s publisher,” Lapham said, swirling his vodka in a wineglass. “So every candidate I had, I had to run past Locke. So I bring in candidates and soon we’ve gone through Henry, through George, through Jim, until finally I say to Si, ‘I’ve run out of candidates. Locke doesn’t like any of them.’ So Si says, ‘Wait, there was that tall guy.’ I say, ‘Corr?’ He says, ‘Yeah, Corr.’ Now, Joseph Corr was a guy who was rather well read. He knew quite a lot about litter-ature. He just knew nothing about selling advertising! I say, ‘Okay, you have Corr.’ And that’s how we got this goon. Sure, he was an attractive person. He’d been in the US Army. He used to call the sales force ‘my troops.’ And one thing’s for sure. It was Gallipoli every day in there. Whoever heard of an editor with powers to veto the publisher? One guy I hired to be publisher, Locke changed his mind about before his first day, and I had to fire him before he started.”
Why, I asked him, had Locke exerted such powers over Si?
“They talked books together,” Lapham said. “The two guys”—he nearly said “little guys”—“used to sit in swivel chairs talking about litter-ature.”
Tuesday, January 31, 1984
Had such a fun evening. I got the art department and Assistant Editor April Bernard to stay late and we did a workshop on the new arts pages at the back of the book, designing the spreads first and tailoring the copy to fit, working like a chain gang, cutting, snipping, and pasting. Ruth is disheveled and cosmopolitan and old-world hip, with big shawls and an air of past Italian lovers. Charlie has a slightly crooked chin and short crinkly hair like a 1930s muscle man. He is still in post-traumatic shock over some of Alex’s and Leo’s illustration cover choices before I got there. “Here’s this drawing that looks like an abstract rip-off of the Jolly Green Giant that Alex likes. Here’s this Avedon portrait that’s going to sell on the newsstands. We’re going to mock up both, of course, close our eyes, and choose the wrong one for March. Okay? That’s what it used to be like.”
One regular feature I am introducing adds culture to the middle as well as the back of the book—a spread that shows a painting chosen by a writer who deconstructs it for the reader. It’s great to toss in a classical image in a run of contemporary pages. For the first issue I’ve got Anthony Burgess writing about Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, gloating prettily over their domain, which is a glorious pace changer in a fast mix. Another addition is to break up long-running text spreads with dropped-in single images and a leg of snappy copy, we’re titling Spotlight. The great usefulness of a Spotlight is we can change up the mood of a fatiguing reader with a picture that offers a quick flash of something else. If it’s a long, gray business story, we can stick in an image of drop-dead glamour by Helmut Newton. A big, high-minded art piece with paintings can be pace-changed with a strong black-and-white portrait of some hard-charging business head. And so on.
There was a great spirit when we finally disbanded, leaving scissors and paste and cut-up magazines all over the art table.
It seems to me that half the ill will created against the magazine has been from the overpaid “consulting editors” recruited by either Locke or Leo to be on the alert for good material but who hang around the office, then trash it when they go out to dinner. Jonathan Lieberson is one of these. Very brilliant and sophisticated (he’s the son of the legendary music mogul Goddard Lieberson, whose name means nothing to me but apparently should). He is beloved by the editor of The New York Review of Books, Bob Silvers, but full of condescension about our chances of success. He has a lupine beard, slightly crossed eyes, and a pretentious drawly voice. He immediately started telling me I wouldn’t be allowed to edit the magazine because of Alex and he would like to play the role of “in-house critic,” reading all the copy that comes in and giving me his “considered opinion.” That sounds like being the editor to me but without any responsibility and taking a not insignificant check to go with it. So I thanked him profusely and said I couldn’t wait to start while having no intention of letting him.
I went for a drink at the Algonquin with Wallace Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker’s son, who I have been told wants to write. I loved his creaky voice and twinkly, creased-up eyes. He’s like a small, anxious hippo, so full of quotable insights. “America has no memory,” he explained. “Nothing LEADS to anything in New York.”
Wednesday, February 1, 1984
Mag progressing to my first deadline. I’m on the way back to NYC on the train from DC after going to Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee’s Welcome to America party for me and Harry. Their new house in Georgetown is truly heaven. It is huge and gracious but not excessive, and Sally has done it up with relaxed good taste. Comfortable creamy sofas, salmony walls, a study painted to look like wood. It’s like being in Somerset in the heart of Washington. I felt my spirit ache for a settled home like we had in London, and so did Harry.
The guests were a great many forceful and effusive DC power women, and chiseled anchor people from Sunday morning TV shows I don’t yet watch. I liked meeting Ted Kennedy, who looked gaunt and lean after a season drying out, and also a very droll, intelligent Ivy League guy, Michael Kinsley, who swears he was at Oxford with me (must ask Sally) and who got kicked out of Harper’s. Mort Zuckerman, the fast-talking Boston real estate tycoon and owner of The Atlantic mag, who was always trying to hire Harry to edit it when we were in London, came with his new girlfriend, Amanda Burden. She’s a charming sparrow-faced blonde who clearly longs to be looked after, which assuredly Mort will never do. The nicest part was afterward, when we went out with Ben and Sally to a local steakhouse for supper. I love Ben. There is truly something big and beautiful about his spirit wrapped up in the macho persona. He gave me a torrent of great ideas about VF. I was stunned to find he is related to Frank Crowninshield (he is Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee!) and knew him when he was thirteen. “It was impossible to overestimate the man,” he said. “He had taste, he had discernment. He was never afraid of hiring the best people.”
Thursday, February 2, 1984
Back in NYC and shattered to find that Clay Felker’s new weekly newspaper the East Side Express has folded! It was a wonderful, snappy, vibrant thing, and his backer—some guy who manufactures pet food (Leonard Stern of Hartz) abruptly pulled the rug out from under him yesterday lunchtime. Today the bailiffs were in and everyone got fired. I phoned the three brightest and offered them jobs. The awfulness of this event brought back the memories of Murdoch and The Times. I think of the pale emptiness of Clay’s eyes in the summer over dinner, and I think of the pleasant hopeful warmth in him when we lunched at the Algonquin over a month ago, talking about his frisky new paper. This latest failure is his spiritual death.
John Heilpern said he went to the office and Clay had shut himself in his room to hide from the TV cameras. Gail Sheehy showed up begging him to fight on, just as I had done with Harry versus Murdoch, and perhaps as wives and girlfriends always do. Clay, John said, was slumped, expressionless, unable to speak. He didn’t return my call. It’s so awful because the paper was full of vitality and risk and great ideas. Clay could make a shopping list compelling.
Newspapers and magazines take time. It’s hopeless to go into business with amateurs instead of people who understand publishing. Clay keeps putting his trust in soulless rich people who throw him under the bus, but bona fide publishing compani
es find him too threatening to hire. It’s very difficult to lose your power perch midlife. You rack up enemies and baggage, and threaten the mediocrities mostly running the media companies who could give you what you want. So you are left with a mercurial money man like Mr. Pet Food, who probably thinks it will bring him power and social cachet but isn’t willing to pay for it … I am so glad Harry has never done that. He’s lucky to have his writing and teaching. He’s very happy at Duke, which Clay would never be. What can Clay do now? New York is so pitiless, it has kissed him off: “Clay’s toast.” “He bombed.” I remembered Wallace Shawn. “America has no memory. Nothing LEADS to anything in New York.” VF has a miserable twenty ad pages for April! Will I also soon be toast?
Michael called from LA. He and Helmut and Nick Dunne are on the Blonde Ambition shoots. He said it’s pissing with rain and the first blonde didn’t go well. Michelle Pfeiffer turned up at the restaurant with brown hair! We had all assumed she looked like she does in Scarface.
Friday, February 10, 1984
Two weeks to press day. Thanks to Marie Brenner I have a fantastic new PA, Sarah Lewis, stolen from Ed Kosner. She is subtle, gamine in appearance, with a quiet intelligence and organizing skills that are making an impact already. She will help smooth troubled waters, too, with office relationships. I have one problematic relic of the ancient regime, Linda Rice, the production editor who still sees Alex as her real boss and has been complaining to him about our deadline crunches. I went ballistic and said if she had a problem she should bring it to me. This created frost between me and Alex, with whom I now have such a collaborative amity. “I find we have a Richard Locke situation developing,” he told me in a chilly phone call, “where I am not allowed to speak to your staff.” I soothed him down but the day was soured and it made me unhappy. I feel terribly lacking a managing number two who can pull all the thousand details of the new sections and staff problems together for me. I was so ratty all day, disaffected groups started to gather in corners.
