The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  I felt the warm familial glow of all the vanished bullshit artists of Dad’s world in my teens. Our new LA editor, Caroline Graham, bullied the financier Selim Zilkha and his wife into giving me a dinner at another hilltop dream house in Bel Air. Caroline is a gold-dust hire. I found her at a dinner party at Kay Graham’s house on Martha’s Vineyard (she’s the wife of Kay’s son William) the summer we got married and filed her away for future hire. She’s a gorgeous reedy blonde with a great Rolodex and a wicked social eye. She’s now repping us in LA and she’s proving, like Sarah Giles, A-plus with wrangling because she’s so irresistibly charming. I was seated next to the grizzled screenwriter Robert Towne, who’s a darkly funny guy. Towne said he wants to do a piece on being “serviced,” the concentric rings of agents, business managers, plant doctors, men Fridays who keep the talent from taking responsibility for themselves. He is trapped and bemused by an outrageous custody battle at the moment. “Psychiatrist assholes who’ve never met me keep standing up in court and testifying about whether or not I have the right to see my kid … That’s because my wife is a hostile, whacked-out drunk laying all the weirdness on me she can think of.” The British film director Tony Richardson on my other side looked down at him with a small smile. “It’s your fault, Robert,” he said. “You don’t pay attention. It’s the same when you’re making a movie. You should always be in control. The worst thing that can happen to you is the money people telling you not to worry. That way spells disaster. People telling you not to worry your pretty head about cost. Fastest way to lose control.”

  That spoke to me, I must say, about the way Condé Nast keeps the editors away from the P&L, which seemed great at first but then becomes a source of vulnerability.

  I loved all the cross chat from movie people with the lights of the sprawling city of LA sparkling beyond us, the warmth of the air out on the terrace, and—what you rarely hear at NYC dinner parties—music playing in the back ground. The soundtrack of The Big Chill. (Soundtracks seem to be big in LA. Mozart is the soundtrack to Amadeus.)

  I felt I had been in a dreamy bubble for three days when I got home and immediately felt guilty because Harry had been busy trying to rescue the mortgage on Quogue before the signing day, and the only way to get it on time was to bite the bullet and ask Mort Zuckerman to guarantee a loan, which, bless him, he did. Citibank then gave us a check and we drove like lunatics to the closing on Friday with our lawyer and the vendor, Mrs. Clarholme, to whom we had been posing as affluent upper-class landowners. When we got there we found the plot had thickened unbelievably. Our own lawyer, a red-faced local idiot named Mr. Morgan, had made an offer himself on the house for more money, which is why things had fallen apart! The drunken clown had got greedy when he saw how cheap the house was and delayed all the lease agreements needed for the mortgage approval. But we rumbled his cheesy game and signed.

  After the stress of the day we drove in stunned silence with the keys to 160 Dune Road and entered what is now OUR HOUSE. In the shiplike upstairs living room every dormer window was pink from the sunset. The dune had a lunar look, the grass ruffled by a little breeze. The distant hoot of the Long Island Rail Road car sounded like a ghost train. We walked up the overgrown strip of sand for our first sight of the foaming, frosted waves and were overwhelmed by feelings of happiness and peace.

  I felt a wonderful union with Harry, more perfect than any I have felt before in the tumult of the last few years. It’s funny. When you marry, everything tells you this should be the moment of commitment. But actually in the turmoil of our jostling careers, for me that moment is now. I realize I haven’t really felt married till the day we signed for the house. I have been putting off that moment in the turbulence of the move to America. As we stood on the dune together, looking out at the sea, I knew once and for all that my vivid, loving, courageous husband is the only man I want to share the breadth and hope of this long, white beach with. I want our child to be conceived here, I want this to be our special place where I can be with Harry always. His love has always kept me together and now he has sealed it with a perfect house where I can dream beside him for the rest of our days, no matter what’s happening beyond its four walls.

  Columbus Day: Monday, October 8, 1984

  The end-of-year issue of VF is going to bed! The Hall of Fame idea has worked a treat. We nominated ten people as the year’s tops with fabulous pictures by Annie (we dumped the idea of casting another ten into oblivion as people these days are so thin-skinned and monthly mags sit around too long with umbrage mounting). The key is not just the choice of person and the portrait but the “nominating” copy that goes with it to explain why they deserve inclusion. “Because he, because she, because because…” It has to be the crispest, most polished house style. Much harder to do than it looks, and I recruited a collaborative wit circle that included Miles, Jim Wolcott, Schiff, John Heilpern (yes, he came back in), and Bob Colacello in brainstorming sessions to get the captions right. Such a fun process. Working with Annie on this made me see what an amazing perfectionist she is. Most hardworking photographer alive. She spends hours in the art department with Ruth, arguing over the picture edit. She will travel halfway around the world to get one more angle she didn’t get at the time. With Annie, the shoot is never over and it’s never good enough. “It would be so much better if he’d taken his shirt off/if she’d slicked back her hair/if I could have shot it in the morning/evening/if we’d done it in the rain.” It leads to irate phone calls, fighting the expenditure or the deadline as she darkly vows, “I will pay for it myself. If I fly through Frankfurt I can get back the same night. I will get an ad to pay for it. Let’s just kill the shoot.” Until one of us (usually me) gives in.

  Harry has been in NYC this week before he goes to DC for the US News editorial director job. (No, he couldn’t resist the siren call of news.) I can see why a man loves to come home to a welcoming wife. It was fun (and sexy) to be the returning husband for a few days. And poignant because it was our last week together before he goes off to DC. It feels so wrong to be separated again now. After an early dinner we snuggled in bed and watched George H. W. Bush murder Geraldine Ferraro in the VP debate. I want to root for a historic woman but it was agony. Her performance reminded me of how I blew my first speech to advertisers; she looked down all the time, wore her reading glasses, and came off like a suburban schoolteacher addressing a parent-teacher meeting.

  We had a dinner party at the apartment that was successful in spite of itself. The ed of Time, Ray Cave, whose wife is the ed of People, Pat Ryan, Lewis Lapham (editor of Harper’s, what a star), Arianna Stassinopoulos, Derry Moore (passing through from London), and the First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams and his wife. At twelve fifteen Ray and Lapham were in full cry arguing about which covers would or wouldn’t go down in Sioux Falls. I saw the chef staring menacingly through the door at us. Slipping quietly into the steamy galley, I asked him what his problem was.

  “My problem is, I wanna go,” he said. “My problem is it’s twelve fifteen and I wanna get my shit out of here. Tell them I have to move my shit.”

  “Your shit,” I squeaked, “will have to wait! That’s the editor of Time magazine sitting in there and you will just have to wait to move your shit!”

  I slunk back to the table, where Mrs. Abrams had just launched into her description of serving in the Israeli air force, with the chef still in my eye line, glaring at me and chewing gum. In the end he burst through with his backpack, slammed the door, and left. They all stopped talking and looked up. But stayed on till two in the morning arguing about the nature of celebrity. (Money in motion, Lewis Lapham called it, which I liked.)

  Monday, October 15, 1984

  I went with H to DC to settle him in and felt like a mother taking her child back to boarding school. I feel very glum because we have become so intertwined living together in New York. I hate him doing this job but recognize he must have something big of his own. I’d love him to have stayed in the publishing gig, but, t
ypically, Mort has lost interest in the book company now that he’s bought US News. I don’t want to return to the lousy commuter marriage we had when H was at Duke. Still, whatever pain it causes me, the pleasure of seeing him back in a news context is gratifying. I suddenly wish I was in DC, too. I had the subversive thought of how nice it would be to get a big fat Condé Nast writing contract and live in one of those sweet Georgetown terrace houses off N Street with gardens and room for cats, instead of battling the wild beast of NYC alone.

  Thursday, October 18, 1984

  There was a fiftieth birthday party for David O’Brasky at La Reserve. I wish I could have set it to music. An all-cast song with the title “Hot Book.” Because that was the refrain of all the toasts—that David was the king of the Hot Book, the man who had worked in the best places at the time when it was good. Most of the Condé publishers and ad sales men were there. I ran into one of ours, Tom Florio, who I see every morning sliding out of the elevator wearing mirrored shades, looking like one of the Sharks out to kill a Jet. Tonight he was dapper in a suit. “I’m a guy in a hurry,” he said to me, which felt even more like a line from a musical. O’Brasky was so pleased with all the attention that his face swelled up like a Halloween pumpkin. His friends had done up a huge board titled “The Days of David O’Brasky,” comprised of all the magazines he’s worked for—Esquire, New York, Prime Time, VF—with his name circled at the top of the mastheads. Looking at the great covers of the magazines he has worshipped from the wrong side, I felt the undertow of heroism (and pathos) that went into all the effort and mistakes. For me it was an American magazine education, hearing the Madison Avenue war stories from the bashed and boozy faces who had made the rounds selling space for Harold Hayes and Clay Felker and Arnold Gingrich, singing their ballad of the Hot Book.

  Monday, October 22, 1984

  Holed up in bed last night and watched the second and final presidential debate between Reagan and Mondale.

  Reagan improved on his doddering performance in the first debate, but he still has cascades of wrinkly melted plastic neck and that maddening oldster vagueness. In his closing statement he wandered off into an endless, rambling, baffling soliloquy about how he was once asked to write a letter to be put in a time capsule to be opened a hundred years from now and how he was driving down the California coast on the Pacific Highway and wondering what people would think a hundred years from now and how we have terrible weapons that can destroy civilization but maybe we won’t and how we have a rendezvous with destiny and how George Bush is the finest vice president ever and … Finally the moderator was merciful enough to interrupt gently and say time was up.

  Mondale seems a decent, intelligent, slightly boring fellow who would make an excellent prime minister of Norway. Needless to say, his command of the details of policy is clearly superior, but he “lost” anyway. All it took for Reagan to win the debate was a one-liner, obviously prepared in advance and delivered with movie-star panache. When one of the panel of journalists predictably brought up the fact that Reagan is already the oldest president in history and might not have the stamina to do the job in a crisis, he did one of his genial head shakes and said, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” That’s the only thing anyone will remember about this debate. All Mondale could do was laugh helplessly along with everybody else. He knew it was over.

  Thursday, October 25, 1984

  Closed my first VF Christmas issue. Huge sweat but I love it. We’ve done a great back-of-the-book holiday reading section with pieces by William Styron, Jerome Robbins, Sidney Lumet, Jessica Mitford, and Jim Wolcott. The Hall of Fame is fantastic. Copy we slaved over a bit arch but I still like it. “It was a year when America checked out of the Betty Ford Center and was proud, proud, proud. Aging was hip (Bardot, Steinem, Loren, and MacLaine turned fifty) but aged was hipper (Vreeland, Eudora Welty, and Ronald Reagan). And though the president said that the country wasn’t hungry, Texaco ate Getty, Chevron ate Gulf, Mobil ate Superior, and the Arabs ate crow.” Best Annie pics are of Aaron Spelling in bed, Springsteen against a sheath of fire, and the black-and-white-attired decorator Andrée Putman against a wall of checkered tiles. Also the sulky, Elvisy Donald Trump “because he’s a brass act. And he owns his own football team. And he thinks he should negotiate arms control agreements with the Soviet Union.”

  Had a drama with the Joan Collins Dynasty cover, which featured her with a gun at her head and a line saying, “But darling you know I am bulletproof.” Unfortunately her boyfriend Jon-Erik Hexum blew his brains out on the set of a soap opera with a pistol that was loaded with blanks. Thankfully we hadn’t gone to press—memo to self, gun covers are a lousy idea anyway—and instead we went with something much better. “She Rhymes with Rich,” after Barbara Bush’s great comment about Geraldine Ferraro. Stephen Schiff has done a sparkling essay about the Dynasty era to go with it. Plenty of mags would put Joan on the cover, but not with Schiff’s smart deconstruction of what Dynasty says about America. I think readers are now understanding the mix can include anyone we happen to find interesting, high or low, and any topic that illuminates the zeitgeist. The unevenness of content is beginning to settle down into something fully baked, glamorous but substantial. What unites it is the voice and the clear visual identity.

  I hate Harry being in DC! I feel rage that he has jeopardized our lovely intimacy. But I can’t blame him as I always choose career, too, and then regret it. I’m less noble about dealing with it than he is. Zuckerman loaned us his DC town house on Volta Place for the weekend. On Sunday we had breakfast in the garden there in the glorious fall sunshine and it felt just like Ponsonby Terrace in the old days and made us both feel mopey. Contact with the rich is ineffably spoiling. One night on Volta Place and I was longing for the same big fluffy towels and membrane-thin fluttering white sheets and the cook on hand to do a delicious dinner.

  Tuesday, November 6, 1984

  Reagan won reelection. Landslide and no surprise. It’s a TV era and Mondale had zero performance skills. People who can’t communicate should not even contemplate going into politics. Most of Reagan’s voters would probably be better off under a President Mondale, but that didn’t matter. I had Marie watching the returns at the Georgetown house of Averell and Pamela Harriman, with Democratic old guarders Ed Muskie, Evangeline Bruce, and co so she could record the rout of the liberal establishment close up. It was a death watch, she said, as if the make-the-world-better–ites sitting watching the returns under the van Gogh painting of white gardenias had just been mown down all at once by flashing new Buicks.

  Tuesday, November 13, 1984

  Social energy even more ramped up by the Reagan reelection. The White House calls the shots of what’s in and what’s out. Time magazine has done a cover story on the new concern with “civility.” Credits the new mood to all the mink coats at the inauguration and the $210,000 new chinaware at the White House.

  We are seeing the invasion of DC by California and Park Avenue, the fusion of Women’s Wear Daily values with Washington Post power watching, a cast of characters who see everything through the lens of Hollywood and Le Cirque. It’s perfect fodder for a magazine called Vanity Fair. I have been experiencing the endless round of black-tie dinners and openings as a trivial sidebar to the main event. But now it seems at this moment they are the main event, central to understanding how the money moves around and why. It could all collapse and we will see it as some fin de siècle gallery of grotesques and wish we had been more attentive.

  This evening I attended Mica Ertegun’s black-tie dinner in honor of the opera singer Beverly Sills at the Metropolitan Club. Hosted by Ungaro and some new perfume. The Metropolitan Club was so baroque, glittering with gilded ceilings, great heavy knotted gold chairs, and enormous flower arrangements fit for the death of a Hapsburg monarch. And the clothes! The gleaming swaths of pearls, the peacock-blue taffeta winged shoulders, the frothy stand
-up collars. I found myself nose to nose with Betsy Bloomingdale, flat as an ironing board in a scarlet and cobalt velvet harlequin dress, her crinkly eyes betraying nothing of her recent Vicki Morgan travails or of Nick’s searing piece. Bianca Jagger is still more beautiful than anyone. Ahmet Ertegun wheezed away about some S and M bar in Manhattan he enjoys where no one is dressed from the waist downward. Mica, with her lacquered hair and perfect neat mouth, seems to have made a career out of the enigma of their marriage. It’s all too fascinating to ignore and we need it to come alive in our pages. Norman Mailer was there, swashbuckling away about how journalism becomes daunting as you fear your ability to see, hear, and react freshly is replaced by a desire to shore up, consolidate, and plumb deeper. Is this another way of saying “selling out”? Wouldn’t the young Mailer have defenestrated this dinner? Easy to be sucked in.

  On the way out, my eyes met the glassy stare of Leo Lerman on the way in and I stared right back.

  1985

  TEN THOUSAND NIGHTS IN A COCKTAIL DRESS

  Thursday, January 10, 1985

  A new year, new determined goals. I am discontented with the next issue. British whimsy like Michael’s fashion feature on the rise of the “Urban Turban” is fun, but it’s feeling all dessert, no entrée. AND I WILL SOLVE THIS.

  I have a platonic ideal of what the mix in VF should be—that sweet spot between aspiration and news hunger—but achieving it is a crapshoot. To add beef I assigned a macho literary essay on the anniversary of the fall of Saigon to Pete Hamill, but it somehow feels like a refugee from an old Esquire.

  My lodestar for a great mag is big, tall Nova (the British monthly glossy of the seventies edited by the excitable Yorkshireman Dennis Hackett). Its clean, fierce graphic design and its confrontational covers were masterpieces of editorial point of view, with “talking headlines” splashed over images that grabbed you as you passed the newsstand. I still remember the one of a gurgling baby centered under the logo with harsh black lettering beneath: “The Perfect Baby or the Biggest Threat Since the Atom Bomb?”