The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  Friday, March 16, 1984

  Oh happy day! Si and Alex have the early copies of April and say they love it. Let’s hope the readers do. What if I have drunk my own Kool-Aid like Richard Locke? I feel sorry for him anew, one puts so much blind love into these pages. My office has been painted peach with a peach carpet and a quotation mark–shaped desk that is so much more what I want than that disgusting coffin-like reliquary Leo hid behind. I saw him today at the Four Seasons, looking like a piece of poisonous pastry. Alex has been away for two weeks but came back looking happy and relaxed. He is obviously pleased because Si is pleased. He’s getting good feedback from his own circle he showed the early copy to.

  There was a nerve-racking moment when Si asked to see the first pass at the May dummy and I had my heart in my mouth over the Garry Wills piece about Rupert Murdoch’s designs on the Chicago Sun-Times. I know Si and Murdoch are friends, but when Si got to the three Chicago spreads deep in the book he stopped and said, “Why’d you put Murdoch so late? Why not open with it? It’s got impact. And I LIKE your doing this. It has great news value.” This made my day.

  Wednesday, March 21, 1984

  I spoke to advertisers at a luncheon at the Four Seasons to pitch them our turnaround. We showed them slides of the new issue as there are not enough copies printed yet to give out. I was B-plus. I should have ad-libbed, not read my speech. I wish I could get better at public speaking. Si was at my table and didn’t say much afterward, which confirmed my sense that I had muffed it. We still have pitifully few ad pages. Their reaction was positive, but still with a “wait and see” attitude that could bury us if they don’t get on board soon.

  Had dinner with Mort Zuckerman. He’s a great gossip and clearly loves the access his real estate wealth gives him to the media world, and who can blame him as it’s a hell of a lot more amusing. He said that Nora Ephron should hand over the screenplay of Heartburn to somebody else and “let her anger with Carl Bernstein go.” I don’t think I agree.

  Thursday, March 29, 1984

  Boca Raton, Florida

  Waiting for Harry to arrive for romantic weekend. Commuter marriages are a strain. We miss each other all week but when we reunite it’s sometimes like the Dorothy Parker short story “The Lovely Leave” and it all blows up into some cranky fight. So we needed this special time.

  The office is gradually becoming the happy club that Tatler was. It’s pleasing to see Miles looking glamorously chiseled in his suspenders and dyed silver hair and being his old snarky self. When I debated having a party to celebrate the revival of the old VF Hall of Fame at the end of the year he suggested, “You could do it in a huge iron lung.”

  He is especially amused by the entertainment editor Daphne Davis I recklessly hired from WWD without consulting anyone. She is a clever, diminutive Minnie Mouse with a tiny little voice. I brought her on in desperation to handle the increasingly aggravating calls from PRs and agents who control the Hollywood stars we need for covers. She is proving quite good at it, or at any rate is the only member of our highfalutin staff who actually likes schmoozing with PRs and setting up photo shoots. But she has her eccentricities. She lies in wait at the elevator to pitch me stories when I go to lunch. Yesterday she leapt out squeaking, “You know I am totally loyal to you. I want to play Chou En-lai to your Mao Tse-tung!” Miles especially loves this story.

  Saturday, March 31, 1984

  The first issue of my VF is on the newsstands at last! I love the way it looks, sexy and strong and clean! First anecdotal reactions—good, very good, especially for the design, but I am rattled by the flood of mail—two-to-one offensive. From Ohio, more in sorrow than in anger: “Why have you trashed this magazine?” From Chicago, “Go back to Britain. This reads as if you have got a stick up your ass.” First media reviews have been mildly positive. All praise the layout changes. Some say it’s too lightweight, which is not unfair. Reporters are calling me with needly questions. One airline-mag blonde who came in opened with “The one thing everyone agrees on is that you’re very tough.” I said, “Thank you.” I keep checking newsstands and surreptitiously moving the mag to the front, but won’t know any sales data for another ten days. Still, Si seems cheerful and that’s the main thing. I have to rush on with the next issue and hope to build momentum.

  Ruth and Charles in the art department can’t get their act together and make decisions. Ruth is so brilliant, but she doesn’t know how to close the circle in a conversation. She goes to lunch with the famous photographer Arnold Newman and comes back with “He’s interested in doing stuff with us.” When Michael Roberts goes to lunch with talent he comes back with two ideas in the bag. It’s tricky because I don’t want the American staff to resent Miles and Michael, who know so much more about how I like to work. Which is CLOSING. I also imported John Heilpern to run the arts pages. Makes me a bit nervous to hire the husband of a friend as good as Joan (and another Brit), but there is no one better as a cultural critic. Plus I had to fire two more of the old guard this week. Duncan Stalker, a talented young editor whom I tried to win over, but he’s always upstairs with Leo, bad-mouthing the new era. There was another I wanted to let go but found she is in the throes of a sex-change op, which seemed bad timing.

  Entertainment Tonight came to film me in the office and I was feeling so glum with all the staff problems and anxiety about the reader reaction to April that I mistakenly ran off at the mouth and now am in terror they will run the damning segment. Usually I bang on about America the Beautiful, but this time I heard myself say, “At first I thought I had to go carefully so as not to offend the aunties in Ohio, but now I feel if they don’t want to read us, too bad.” What was I thinking?

  “Ohio,” John Heilpern said as we sat, with freezing feet from the ice storms raging outside, waiting for the curtain to rise on Death of a Salesman, “is a pretty fucking enormous place to kiss off, Teen. In fact most presidents have found they can’t win an election without it.” We both fell into a depressed silence as Dustin Hoffman did his hopelessly unconvincing Willy Loman, a foregone hit before it reached the boards. Unlike the muted smiles of British audiences at the National Theatre if a play has had good reviews, here if there’s a celebrity actor in the part, the whole audience goes batshit when he or she appears onstage, applauding at every other line and standing up yelling for encores.

  Before the lights even dimmed the man behind me said, “They tore the walls down in Washington.”

  I had a drink with Pam Van Zandt, who continues to fascinate me. “The thing about Si,” she said, “is that he’s eighty percent okay. And then he’ll do something absolutely crazy, totally screwy that you can’t understand.” I thought of how Si’s eyes sometimes slip sideways and he assumes an expression of deep deviousness, like a pensive Hapsburg hanging in the Prado. She is probably right.

  Our publisher at VF, David O’Brasky, took me to the Ogilvy & Mather ad agency on Madison Avenue to do a show-and-tell on the new look of VF. O’Brasky is an ebullient butterball out of The Producers with his Noo Yawk accent and Madison Avenue history, selling ads, it seems, for every magazine that’s ever mattered. Larry Cole, the boss at O & M, picked up VF and flicked through in a matter of seconds, shut it, and said, “Yeah, so what we’re saying is, this is a total revamp, a new magazine, right? What numbers do you have to back up that this is what anyone wants?” O’Brasky did his spiel about demographics and audience polls but Cole looked at him with small, unimpressed eyes. “It looks better,” he told me, “easier to read. My only real criticism is this.” He stabbed his finger at my favorite picture in the Lartigue spreads, a society woman from Saint-Paul-de-Vence in a turban and huge dark glasses. “That”—he stabbed—“is retro. Who cares about this now? She’s what, this lady, eighty now? And who’s interested in somebody almost dead? This”—he pointed at the cover of Daryl Hannah—“I like. It’s contemporary.” To ensure I got the point he did it again. “This”—at Lartigue—“retro, dead, old, I don’t like. This”—Daryl—“to
day, contemporary, I like.” Had I been right to concede to Alex? Yes, no regrets and screw Larry Cole. I still believe the Lartigue brings something wonderful and refined to the pages, especially when combined with the fresh glamour of Now. Cole didn’t seem to understand that blending the two was the whole point of VF’s mix and flavor. I thought again of Wallace Shawn. “America has no memories.”

  Saturday, April 7, 1984

  The promotion marathon for the new issue keeps going. Some people are waiting to say they like the new VF until someone else does. I am getting good feedback from writers and editors who seem to understand the combination of high-low culture (that Clay said he loved) but there’s also a sense of puzzlement. I realize my approach to editing is much more European. The New York Times clearly thinks serious equals self-important, that it has to earn its gravitas in subject matter rather than in treatment and point of view. Compared to the London quality papers it’s visually dull and devoid of surprise. One TV interview I did spent the whole air time trying to discover if the new VF was a fashion magazine, a movie magazine, or a literary magazine. I told them it was a mix of all of them. I did an interview every day last week and saw an advertiser for dinner with O’Brasky every night. I am getting fond of his thick-skinned enthusiasm and rubbery, unrejectable face. There is something touching about him, reinforced by the fact I learned that at Yale he had always wanted to write for the college magazine, but they kept on making him sell ads. Eventually he accepted his lot, but he still feels the buzz of editorial and wants to be a part of it. CBS news came to film me at the VF office in my new Ted Lapidus suit. Jane Pauley aggressed me on the NBC Today show about why I thought the new VF would work. I looked wan in a washed-out beige dress I will never wear on the air again. They showed clips of the royal wedding coverage I did with Pauley in 1981 in London. I was astonished at how old-fashioned my Camilla Parker Bowles electric-rollered waves looked and at how uninhibited I was calling Diana “Hey Big Spencer” because of her height. It all seemed light-years away.

  Alex has been coming down again more, which I love. He was amused by Daphne Davis, who got overexcited when he started laying out some Drew Barrymore spreads. “You look just like John Barrymore but with more class, Mr. Liberman!” she squealed. “Douglas Fairbanks Jr., actually,” he said. Then turning to me, asked, “Who is this small, charming person, Tina?” He seems in a good mood when he sails in, back erect like a ballet master.

  As part of the pitch tour, O’Brasky made me have dinner with the founder of one of the major ad agencies whose accounts we don’t have, Backer Spielvogel Bates. Carl Spielvogel and his wife, Barbaralee Diamonstein (seriously, you can’t make it up), looked as if they had been married forever but it transpired it was only three years. I got a clue when she said, “Carl is the best in the world at copy lines, squash, and S-E-X.” She, I realized immediately, was the key to the account, but I also realized with a sinking heart it might be a price too high to pay, since she has writing aspirations. She looks like an avid, bejeweled soufflé with great acquisitive black eyes darting around the table. “Barbaralee doesn’t miss a deal,” Carl said, dotingly, his hairline glowing amber from its recent roots retouch. “You know something?” he said, turning his sage nose toward me, “twenty years ago I used to know the name of every doorman, every parking garage guy on my block. Now I don’t know any of them. You know why? It doesn’t matter anymore.” Barbara’s a big fan of Arianna’s and kept saying Mort Zuckerman should marry her. He certainly couldn’t find anyone smarter or more amusing in his circle. I couldn’t wait to crawl home to bed.

  As soon as the rest of my furniture arrives I guess I am going to have to start having dinner parties. I realize new things about New York all the time. You have to be seen to be social. And if you don’t go out, you have to be KNOWN for not going out. I saw this when I had lunch with Bob Gottlieb, the editor in chief of Knopf, who is such a legendary literary figure around town. He has made himself Famous for Never Having Lunch. So I went to his office for the revered sandwich. I found him, as everyone describes, a taller version of Woody Allen, self-consciously idiosyncratic (he sat on the floor), as if he is working overtime on being famously eccentric. Everything in New York is about personal marketing.

  Monday, April 9, 1984

  It was bliss having lunch with Norman Mailer today. His big, warm, wide face and profligate brilliance filled up my heart all afternoon. We talked about politics—“Jesse Jackson! What a jive-ass!”—and prison, where his old nemesis Jack Henry Abbott is still incarcerated in a federal penitentiary. Norman and Jason Epstein and George Plimpton campaigned for Abbott’s release in the early eighties on the basis of the book he wrote, In the Belly of the Beast, only for Abbott to immediately stab a bartender once he was out. Norman said that Abbott is like a cat who’s been so badly treated it scratches, bites, and rejects until all you want to do is kill it, then suddenly rolls over and is so cute you love it. He said he adored being photographed swimming by Annie Leibovitz last summer because the picture gave him “tits.” He talked about the days he and Arthur Miller had shared the same brownstone in New York, when Mailer was writing An American Dream and Miller Death of a Salesman. “I must say when I saw the play I was amazed at how good it was for such a dull guy.” Norman and Bob Hughes are the two most charismatic men in America, the big alpha boys they don’t make anymore.

  Tuesday, April 10, 1984

  O’Brasky has been pushing me to my limits, meeting with stone-faced advertisers. I am sick of being distracted from editorial by the endless quest to get ads. Newsstand report came in. April sales are up, thank God, not hugely, but 8 percent over March. Everyone seems to love the visual clarity and Nick Dunne’s Blondes cover story with its insidery, laid-back voice. I feel the lack of hard news edge, but am working to get it. The movie Splash is a hit, so even if Daryl Hannah’s blindfolded, we had the right cover star, a zeitgeist omen I hope. May issue has now gone to press and I am not sure about it.

  We had lunch with Calvin Klein, whose ad pages we desperately want. He was another pretend low-key person, very soft-spoken, saying he was just interested in the creative direction when you know he makes all the commercial decisions. He’s very anti the new GQ now that Alex has gone in the opposite direction of Colacello and hired a bearded he-man and former Penthouse ed, Art Cooper, to make it straight. Calvin didn’t reveal his hand about what he thought about VF now. I can see he’s going to make me work for it.

  I preferred his archrival Ralph Lauren, who was at lunch the next day. He was also low-key but more watchful and shrewd. He said he thought Condé Nast made a terrible mistake under Locke, stuffing the doomed launch issue with too much of the wrong kind of advertising (i.e., Calvin Klein underpants), implying this was another reason he had pulled his ads out before I got there. O’Brasky during all this was at his most hopelessly ingratiating and getting it all wrong. Ralph looked at him with slow, blank eyes when he asked him how he was running his Seder this Passover. “Wild West style, Ralph, I’d guess?” O’Brasky beamed. “Mine, I run like a sales conference.” When he went to the bathroom, Ralph asked me, “How did you get stuck with him?” The good news, however, was that he was enthusiastic about the new direction and committed to buying pages from the August issue onward, which was a real victory.

  Thursday, April 19, 1984

  We have been trying to find a summer rental in the Hamptons and think we have discovered something wonderful.

  The more I live here the more I have a childlike longing for the crash of waves on the beach. I love New York, but its brutal onslaught never lets up. I asked Sarah Lewis what the nearest Hampton was to the city and she suggested a quiet village east of Westhampton. I called the broker to make some appointments, and H and I rented a car and drove out in torrential rain to view them. As soon as we were on the road I felt so happy. As we approached the outskirts of Quogue I was taken back to my childhood weekends with Mum at granny’s house at Elmer Beach in Sussex, the jubilant barefoot walks in
the rain, stopping to throw stones in the stormy, gray Atlantic, coming into our tiny flat on top of the roof, where we kicked off our wet, sandy shoes and brewed the tea. So consoling. So secretive. So unadorned.

  We disembarked at a fusty little broker’s run by the Piries, a mother-and-daughter team. I loved Quogue village immediately as there is very little there, just clusters of white clapboard and cedar-shingled houses, a charming colonial Presbyterian church, a ribbon of road over a bridge to the beach lined with wind-tossed oak and maple trees. The broker kept saying it all looked so much better in the sunshine, but to me it was perfect that it rained, like England.

  We parked our car and got in the Piries’ beat-up Ford. The houses and condos they showed us were all disappointingly contemporary, with pointy roofs and sharp-angled frames and interiors full of things we’d never want, like “wet bars” and billiard tables. There was one just about okay on the bay and we were about to take it when old Mrs. Pirie said, “There is this other house I haven’t shown you, I doubt you’ll like. Very old-fashioned.” Our ears immediately pricked up. “Not in good shape, but it’s on Dune Road on the beach. The washing machine,” she added dubiously, “may very well have to be replaced.”