The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  “Take us there!” we cried.

  One-sixty Dune Road. As soon as we saw it we fell in love. A shingled cottage nestling behind the dune with dormer windows and wild beach grass leading down to where the waves pounded. It reminded me of Cornwall at high tide. And Elmer, Elmer, Elmer. I could see my childhood coloring books, hear the kettle whistling on the stove. When we opened the back door and walked up the gray wooden stairs to the big, embracing living room, it felt as if this was our house, waiting for us to claim it. Owned by the same family, the Clarholmes, since it was built in 1928. It had the time-warp feel of a Somerset Maugham play, with card tables set up for a game of backgammon, a Bakelite radio, an old mahogany desk in the corner, a framed gold-prospecting certificate from 1928. To get out on the deck you had to struggle with a small wooden door that opened to a glimpse of ocean on the other side of the dune. There was a maritime feel to the wood-paneled walls trimmed with rope, and a bookish charm to the cozy bedrooms with iron bedsteads and fading lampshades. It is total and utter heaven. When the Piries left the room, Harry and I threw ourselves into an ecstatic embrace and when they returned instantly started negotiating. We found we had competition from another couple who were deciding the next day. So even though it’s a staggering fourteen thousand dollars for the summer, we immediately offered a thousand more, to be FedExed on return to the city. We hurtled back on the Long Island Expressway in the rain, feeling euphoric, as if we were explorers who had truly landed at last. We’ve already started to scheme about how we can raise the money to buy it if it’s for sale.

  Monday, April 23, 1984

  The May issue is out. I feel it’s thin. The Olympic cover of the model in the silver sheath leaning backward into a huge hoop is beautiful but too refined. America needs gutsier. Garry Wills’s piece on Murdoch’s takeover of the Chicago Sun-Times is strong but limited in appeal, and I love Julian Allen’s illustration of Rupert as Al Capone, but the piece doesn’t quite land the plane. It needed a muscly investigative journalist rather than an essayist like Wills. Mailer’s Tough Guys extract is a literary scoop, but I fret for juicier elements. What is good is the sustained strength of the redesign. Alex did an inspired layout for John Cheever’s letters, taking a portrait of Cheever in a group at Yaddo and circling his face with a splashy red circle that’s so eye-catching. Am very proud, too, of the contents page, which delivers in every way we hoped. But after initial interest in our revamp I don’t feel people are talking about it. Literary memoirs and eye-catching contents pages are not enough. New York has checked us out and moved on. We have to make some news.

  I love some of the pieces we have coming in for the June issue. I wheedled Jan Morris, the British writer who had a sex change and used to write for Harry at The Sunday Times as James, to do a piece about Boy George. She has taken the hackneyed “androgyny” idea and writes instead about “intersex,” “the spell of the ultimate chimera, the creature that bridges in its own being that most obvious and unbridgeable of gulfs, the gulf between M and F.” She talks about the day when the “messy and graceless business of coupling to produce children” is done, replaced by “an unnoticeable implant, an untasteable tablet.” And urges us all to “throw off the chains of gender” like Boy George.

  Annie has done a wonderful close-up portrait of Boy holding a carnival mask. Session was a bit fraught. Michael Roberts originally wanted to do him as a June bride, and flew to Toronto for the shoot with a trunk full of wedding veils. Then Boy changed his mind, Annie went ballistic, and Michael ended up siding with Boy. But all came out good. It’s a haunting photograph. They did a portrait of his makeup box too—very effective.

  Thank God Pam McCarthy has arrived, like Mary Poppins, to clean up our production process and crack the whip on the budget. The June issue, though good, needs a big visceral narrative lead. The fashion cover approach is not working. VF needs deep dives into personalities. It’s harder than I thought to get it. I have been consumed with just running the mag day to day and dragging myself to see advertisers with O’Brasky. I’ve had too little time on the creative input and it feels anemic. I have to focus on robust reporting and cultivating strong investigation. Now that Pam’s here I can hand all the management stuff off to her and spend all my time with the writers.

  Another distraction is I have to do a lot of legend maintenance. Today, at Alex’s prodding, I took the famous old photographer Horst P. Horst out to lunch at the Isle of Capri. He sat in a corner with crab-like posture and tinted glasses and a tight little smile. He seemed still aggrieved that forty years ago Mr. Condé Nast didn’t take him as seriously as Steichen. He’s photographed seven first ladies and complained about how when he did Nancy Reagan recently Grace Mirabella showed up, and Leo also appeared and got in the way and hissed that she was the worst actress ever. “I said, baby, who needs you. I am trying to make a picture here.” Still, out of it I got a glorious portfolio for the September issue of Dietrich in black lace gloves and a killing picture of Janet Flanner examining a New Yorker cover with a lorgnette. I do see that it’s important to keep the legend quotient happy, as long as they are mixed with the young Turks. (This. Old, I don’t like. This. Young, contemporary, I like.) He also asked if he could photograph me. Which would be sort of great to have.

  Tuesday, April 24, 1984

  At O’Brasky’s insistence I had lunch with Leonard Lauder to gin up the Lauder ad buys. He was in a surprisingly frank mood. “I worry,” he said, “that one day I will wake up and be a jar of face cream. Tina, I am so good at what I do, I live every minute of my life in a directed way. Yes, I go skiing and I’m wired into a hundred different worlds in this town. But I’m worried about getting stale. I joined the board of the Aspen Institute because I thought it would refresh me—the life of the mind, writers, thinkers, but then I can only see how badly it’s run. I start to stick my oar in, tell them how they can make a profit. Next thing is I’m organizing everybody.” I told him that what he should do one day is throw a spanner in the works of his schedule, stand everyone up, break appointments. I didn’t say, check into a hotel with the sexiest, most gorgeous woman you know, because I had the sense suddenly of where this declaration of spiritual deadness might possibly all be leading …

  After lunch I took the train to DC to stay with Ben and Sally for Kay Graham’s dinner party for us. Sixty people for sit-down in her dusty-cantaloupe dining room that used to be her children’s playroom. Clare Boothe Luce was there! She went through the May issue with me. She has a perfect straight nose and a silver crown of hair and eyes that are dancing periwinkle blue. She sat on a slipper chair in a creamy pearl-studded dress with a white fur stole, and people came to pay court. I could feel her sharp critical mind as she asked pertinent questions. “What’s this?” “Why this?” I wonder if it made her nostalgic for her own VF glory days, hard to tell. At dinner I was seated next to Kay’s son, Donald Graham, who is big and straightforward and a really good egg. He teased me about not knowing anything about America. “Where’s Arkansas, Tina?”

  “Where’s Stow-on-the-Wold, Donny?” I countered.

  “I don’t have to sell magazines there.” He laughed.

  “Arkansas is not my target audience either,” I replied.

  “So you kissed off Arkansas, eh? Well. That’s a gamble I respect!”

  Clay Felker was at my table, but sadly has become jealous of VF, as he is bound to feel with his own prospects dashed. He kept giving me the needle about what I didn’t know about America, too, but unlike with Donny it wasn’t good-natured. I suddenly got sick of it and shouted across the candles and flower arrangements, “How much weight did you lose at the fat farm, Clay?” It was the right approach. He shut up after that.

  It was lovely afterward with the Bradlees just hanging out. “I drew Justice O’Connor as a dinner partner,” Ben said. “That was a bucket of mirth.” Harry had drawn Pamela Harriman, and Sally was all over him to penetrate the sexual mystique. “She hung on my every word,” was all my clearly hopelessl
y captivated husband could come up with. Sally described the Republican senator she had sat with as “a flaming cavorting asshole.” I kept laughing about that when we went up to our room. “Cavorting” is such a deliciously underused word.

  Thursday, April 26, 1984

  A drink with Martin, who is passing through, made me realize how much I miss Englishness. I had a sudden pang for Oxford days when we lay in the little single bed in my St. Anne’s room in the Woodstock Road, doting on Larkin’s sentences in “The Whitsun Weddings.” I thought of London spread out in the sun / Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat. My ideal place to live would be Transatlantica, an island that combined English irony, country lanes in summer, the National Theatre, and a real pot of tea they never seem to be able to make here, with American openness, lack of class barriers, willingness to give away money to good causes, and the view of Manhattan from the Rainbow Room at the top of Rockefeller Center. I miss the pleasing streak of delinquency in the English character.

  The change of the seasons from brutal cold to sudden heat made me think of the sweet decorum of our London patio in the spring, the rhododendron bushes drowsy with raindrops. I long for the English countryside in ways I never did when I lived there. I suddenly see the great country houses that gave us so much irreverent copy at Tatler as a rich national resource, custodians of passing time. Here, time is to be spent, like money; time is to be killed, time is to be forgotten. Everything is a race against time. Trying to beat it is the pressure at your throat. I dream of London’s manageable scale, its compactness, its conversation. America is too big, too rich, too driven. America needs editing.

  Last night I had an hour in my office with Schiff explaining to me why he hasn’t written anything after trips to London, Paris, and Hollywood for VF, because he’s still “thinking the piece through.” Sometimes it’s hard to give writers the love.

  The real agony of editing is not the bad piece versus the good piece. That’s easy—kill one and publish the other. It’s the borderline piece that is the source of woe. The piece that’s perfectly good, inoffensively unexceptional, just okay, usually written by someone who’s an almost friend or an iconic name or a writer who just didn’t give their best this time but might well in the future. I have no fear of rejecting the bad and prefer to do it fast. But borderline pieces bring out the worst in me. Out of weakness I sometimes first assent, then think better of it, then am tormented by something I truly want to put in its place, then, as more of the really good surges in, ultimately eject it, making an enemy forever and wishing I’d had the discipline to just let it hide there among the good stuff as an investment in the future.

  I went to see the Shirley MacLaine show with Daphne Davis as my date. “Why doesn’t Tracy Young think more positive?” she piped as we stood in line for the tickets. “Why doesn’t she get out of that 1968 butch costume and get herself into a skirt? Why doesn’t she move on in life? Can’t she understand this is a business? I did my boot camp at Women’s Wear Daily! I know what life in this town means!”

  Alex took me to La Grenouille to lunch. I always feel this is his natural habitat; surrounded by freshly cut flowers, French-speaking waiters he converses with as if he’d known them for many years, and film stars still of the vintage to wear dark glasses to lunch. Now that I have come to love him I felt the pleasure of his pleasure and the poignancy when he said, “Tatiana loves it here. It is sort of like second family, we have come here for so long.” I had hoped, once again, to draw him out about his fascinating émigré past, which he never speaks about, but as always I was disappointed. Alex lives determinedly in the present. The great legends who have been his friends rarely pass his lips. He’s the opposite of a name dropper, unlike so many around him who knew no one very interesting but drop their names all the time. When I put my hand on his shoulder I was startled by how thin it felt. Only his ramrod posture keeps the aging process from shrinking him. “How is Leo?” I said. “He is wearing thin,” he said with his usual impeccable visual accuracy. “There was never much, you know, just froth. But now that, too…”

  I used to imagine the Chekhovian end of them locked together and this is indeed what is happening, but it has more pathos than in my forward projection a year ago. They are wearing thin together, the indomitable silver fox and his court jester.

  Tuesday, May 1, 1984

  I have been horribly sick. Nausea, dizziness, the doctor says it’s stress. That crazy round of advertising meetings was a killer. I feel a kind of delayed drop after taking the job in such a whirlwind and leaving London without any backward look and now it’s catching up to me. I am spending an early evening in bed. My new curtains go up on Thursday, but meantime the early summer dusk behind the sheer net Mum put up to block onlookers reminds me of early summer nights watching the gentle rippling of the net curtains in my childhood bedroom at Little Marlow. I can see the trees of Central Park turning green behind them.

  Harry has accepted Zuckerman’s job offer of president of Atlantic Monthly Press, which is based half in NYC and half in Boston. It will be good for him to have his own creative outlet again. It’s been two years since we lived in the same place for any length of time. I really feel I need him with me now and can’t wait. But also am apprehensive about the force of his personality in this small space. I have forged a lot of independence here and have paid for all of it with my own money. Will he like being in my town? And will I like having him here?

  Monday, May 14, 1984

  I took advice from Walter Anderson, the editor of Parade, who has been incredibly supportive, and assigned Gail Sheehy a series of profiles of the political candidates. I like her psychological approach and her obsessive shoe-leather reporting. Her first piece is of the Colorado senator Gary Hart, and it’s going to make news. She gets into his born-again background and repressed nature and reveals his long relationship with a Native American spiritual adviser, Marilyn Youngbird. No one is writing about candidates in the personal way that Gail can for us. I think she could carve out a new direction on political profiles. Pam McCarthy has really got stuck in as managing editor and is saving my life and everyone else’s. I have a strong sense of her control to fall back on and it allows me to be creative with discipline behind me.

  Bob Colacello had a birthday dinner hosted by the oil magnate’s wife, São Schlumberger. Guests were Barry Diller, who said he loved Vanity Fair because he only reads magazines in taxis, the novelist Jerzy Kosinski, the retailer Gerry Stutz, Bill Buckley, and Steve Rubell, who used to own the disco Studio 54 until he was caught not paying taxes and was sent to prison, from where he’s just emerged. He has an ingratiating people-pleaser grin and is the best imaginable dinner partner since he combines the two most fascinating topics in the world for any magazine editor, high society and prison. He told me how inside he violated a cardinal behind-bars rule when he leaned over and switched off a TV channel in the rec room. The next thing he knew he was hanging ten feet from the ground on a door hook. He was there so long without anyone finding him that the search sirens went off. “At first I used to phone all my famous friends outside,” he said, “then I found I couldn’t cope. The only way I could make it work for me was to cut off the outside world and make prison my world. Then I was okay. Except for needing air. I had to get on the roof and have air whenever I could. Even if my lawyer was there waiting for me and it clashed with my time on the roof I’d have to get up there.” Now he and his partner Ian Schrager have bought the Royalton Hotel (“I had a lot of cash”), which sure needs a face-lift, as I can testify, and they are going into the “boutique hotel” business, which he says is the next big thing. Wonder if it will work. He seems such a kinetic creature of the night to me.

  Even though he’s so genial, I felt an edge of resentment about those who had come through for him and those who had not. “I protected a lot of people,” he said. I could feel a raw killer instinct beneath the charm. He said Halston had “gone under from self-indulgence,” perhaps one of those who
melted away. I remember Halston’s black turtleneck sweater surging ahead of me at Diana Vreeland’s opening at the Costume Institute at the Met when I was at Tatler. Halston was king of the world then. He would be a good story I must assign now, seen as instant history before anyone else defines his rise and fall.

  Friday, May 18, 1984

  June issue is out and getting a mildly appreciative reaction. People seem to feel VF keeps improving. But it’s not enough. Feel we are still cruising on the design improvements and the photographs. We need the muscle of revelation I am in overdrive trying to get. An interesting sighting on Tuesday in Le Cirque where Shirley Clurman took me to lunch. (She was in great form dissecting the Kissingers. “Have you noticed their dining room is an exact replica of the State Department’s?”) Richard Nixon was there at a corner table for six. On his left an immaculate blonde in a pink Bill Blass suit and a big white Ascot hat. She was applying fresh lip gloss as her husband and the other wives hung on Nixon’s every word. Nixon’s felonious rubber nose looked almost endearing after its long respite from cartoon life. It’s fascinating and oddly cheering about American democracy that the passage of years allows anyone to resurface, no matter how vilified (the upside of No Memory). I have never been to Le Cirque before and hadn’t realized what full-blown musical theater it is—all the ladies who lunch in red capes and big, gleaming earrings eating pink fish. Syrio, the maître d’ with the creased smile, unfurls a crisp white napkin like a bullfighter. I was so struck with the scene that I asked Ruth Ansel to assign an artist to re-create it for the August issue, and she assigned Julian Allen, who has captured it beautifully. I wrote up the text tonight to run unsigned alongside it.