The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  Tuesday, April 16, 1985

  My landlord at 120 Central Park South has turned into a mafia don. First there was the time the water got turned off for two days and he refused to speak to anyone but me with the comment “Tell Tina Brown Jonny Guerrero don’t deal with no intermediaries.” I want to move if I can find someone to take over the lease. Now in a new fit of Queens queeniness, he won’t allow the letting agency, Feathered Nest (and they have sure feathered theirs with their extortionate rates), to show the apartment unless I am personally there. The CPS doorman keeps turning interested viewers away when I can’t get there in time. Jonny G. left this message with my office this morning: “Tell Tina Brown she just gotta sit there and let the parties in. Tell her, yeah, it’s an inconvenience. But she just gotta live with it.” Kiss my ring.

  Wednesday, April 17, 1985

  Leonard Lauder is very different on a business call than over dinner. Gone is the courtly gent reminiscing about spotting me early at Tatler. Now it was all firing circulation and “demo” questions at breakneck speed. (Lunch was over in forty minutes.) His banjo eyes flickered with irritation as our ad director, Doug Johnson, O’Brasky’s freckly deputy, oversold the front-of-book ad position. “What’s your point?” Leonard barked at one point. Doug has logorrhea, is the problem. He means well, but it all just pours out with no punch line. Prospects for ads, I’d say, dubious.

  Miles Chapman has been in England and returned very confused and obviously longing to move back. The AIDS epidemic is truly freaking him out and who can blame him. He calls it the Terror. Photographers, writers, actors, fashion folk are dying every day. He is always at funerals. Having dragged him here to be an editor, I feel responsible for him. He asked me seriously how I thought he was doing at the office. No one writes captions and blurbs and contents pages with the same flair that he does—you have to have been raised like Miles on the British tabloids with all their disreputable energy to understand how critical a four-line blurb or a pull quote is in making a page have a voice. I told him, honestly, that the work was wonderful but he has to dial back the hostility toward everyone else. He listened intensely as if he wanted me to lay it on. It was pouring rain outside and I felt his loneliness. So I asked if he wanted to go to a screening and have dinner. Over dinner he told me the pros and cons of leaving New York. He said he’d consulted the I Ching, which had said, “An evil environment connected with a deep relationship will eventually yield a rebirth,” i.e., tough it out! He’d made a pros and cons list on a scruffy piece of VF paper.

  London pros. “One or two people who love me. Nice flat. Quite rich. A real social life.” Cons. “Dullness, smallness. Sameness.”

  New York. “Horrible flat. Dead broke. AIDS. No friends.”

  I saw with a pang that he is looking older. A kind of weary archness has set in, and a pale, unhappy glare. His knowledge of human nature is so deep and pessimistic, but no one makes me laugh like Miles. I looked at him sideways during the screening we went to and his head was back, his eyes dancing with intelligent scorn, and I felt so much affection. We have been through so much together, from the joyful Tatler days to the harsh foreign terrain. I know why he misses England. Harry and I were paid half as much then as we are now and never talked about money. Now that’s all we seem to talk about. Money here gets into the blood like a disease. An unsettling itch that colors everything.

  Like me, Miles is now caught between two worlds and may never be happy in either. I should probably start accepting and planning for the fact that it will not be long now before he returns to London.

  Thursday, April 18, 1985

  My last night tomorrow at Central Park South. I found a renter.

  Now that the apartment is dismantled I feel a bit wistful. I do love the view of the park, but I’m on too low a floor and it’s horribly noisy, especially on the weekends. The scream of police sirens addles my brain. The street outside is always full of tourists jingling around on those poor carriage horses, and the mafia don constantly raising the rent is sending us broke; so it’s so long, Central Park South.

  Saturday, April 27, 1985

  I love my new apartment! It’s at 300 East Fifty-Sixth Street, modern glass building with doorman and fancy fountain, which is a bit over the top and something I would never have imagined living in, but it’s spacious and full of light and has its own dry cleaner. (Yep, that’s my value system now.) I worked like a slave to get it all ready for when Harry came up from DC and he was thrilled. Mostly because he now doesn’t feel there are tourists from Central Park staring at his naked torso when he walks by that window facing the street. I love having my own writing den, which is an airy half-room off the kitchen.

  Maybe it’s all the new nesting, but I realize I am craving a baby. A totally impractical thought. In a family mood, I called Mum over the weekend and asked her to come over from Spain. Time to draw the chairs close to the fire and contract the circle. I feel guilty about neglecting her and Dad. We were always so close and now she has a brittle front with me that is hiding pain. I miss family love, closeness, and impromptu invitations, reflective hours between the magazine’s hard-edged propulsions into limelight.

  Tuesday, April 30, 1985

  Drama. I had to go to the White House to get approval for the shots of the Reagans that we took six weeks ago for the June cover that is now heading to the close. We’d heard nothing from them since the shoot, and no one ever said we’d give them picture approval. We have let a few advertisers take a peek at them to get them juiced up to buy into the otherwise skinny June issue, and maybe one of them tipped off the White House. Suddenly, Nancy Reagan’s office was placing calls to us, saying they needed to see them ASAP. I ignored their requests, natch. Then last night on the way home I got a message to phone the office because Si was at home “awaiting my call.” Sounded ominous and it was … “Tina, I just got a call from Jerry Zipkin.”

  (So Nancy’s wired and nosy walker is the one who heard about the shoot, got her worried, then offered to intervene.) “He says,” Si continued, “that the first lady is very concerned about the photos she did for Vanity Fair and that she has been told by you she can’t approve them. Get them over to her right away.” Huh? Whatever happened to editorial independence? I was staggered. No asking me to think about it, just do it, and said in that tone of voice he has that means don’t argue. I started to tell him that we never do that and that we are about to go to press with no other cover options. But he cut me off. “FedEx those layouts to the White House, NOW. We’ll figure out the production problems later.”

  Fuck.

  I called Pam and told her we had to send the layouts. Then I called her back and said not to. This morning, I put on a precautionary Reagan-red suit with a Chanel bag and got into the office at eight a.m. and went up to see Si with the layouts. I was momentarily startled when I walked in because he looked as if he was about to undress. In fact he was removing the crumpled sweatshirt he wears for his dawn arrivals only to replace it with office attire later on. He removed a wide blue tie from his drawer and proceeded to tie it around his neck. I briefly wondered what it would be like if we did the whole thing backward and he was left standing there naked. Not a happy thought! I told him I was going to take the spreads to the White House this morning myself rather than FedEx them. I said, “Let’s decide now what we will agree to. How about just dropping the center spread where she’s twirling around?”

  “We will drop all of it if necessary,” said Si grimly. “You don’t monkey with the White House.” I tried the commercial angle.

  “We have already shown selective advertisers who are buying into the issue,” I said. “We will look really bad with them if they buy in because of it and we yank them from the issue. Plus a press flak storm.” (Hint: How will this play re The New Yorker vows of independence?)

  He was clearly preparing to go out for a breakfast. He picked up his book bag. “Take all the layouts and make sure she likes it,” he said. “Or drop it.”

 
; “And the June issue, which doesn’t have a cover?” I said sullenly, following him to the elevator. I was, by this time, feeling really disappointed and pissed off with his craven behavior.

  “Right now you have a problem with the White House,” he said. “The June issue is your next problem. And don’t let Mrs. Reagan think there is a time pressure.”

  I raced off to the DC shuttle in the steaming heat. It was even hotter in Washington. When I reached the gates of the White House with that intimidating forest of TV camera crews parked on the lawns and the august, postcard pillars rising up before me like a mirage, a lot of my bravado started to melt away. I sat in the stuffy antechamber to the press office for two hours. What if Nancy really hated the pictures? I guess her husband is the leader of the free world and he doesn’t need the aggravation of some frisky social photo shoot he did in an absent-minded moment for a mere glossy magazine.

  Jennefer Hirshberg, Mrs. R’s press secretary, came out eventually. She was probably still feeling jumpy after the shit storm over the Reagans’ appearance on the anniversary of V-E Day at the cemetery near Bitburg, which turned out to have forty-nine members of the Waffen-SS buried there. (Michael Deaver, usually so brilliant on PR prep work, is still living it down.)

  Hirshberg asked me to unveil the layouts. I did a lot of schmoozing and flattery and presell before doing so. About how they showed the wonderful warmth of an iconic marriage that made them so accessible to Middle America, etc., which is nothing but the truth. It’s hard to persuade people who are smart to do something that’s really against their own interests, but these pictures, I do firmly believe, are fantastic PR for the Reagans. So I ignored Si’s admonitions about not saying there was a time issue and told her it was on its way to the printer so we could of course only make small adjustments, but if only we had known they wished to see them earlier, of course, that would not have been so!

  She scrutinized the layouts with a pained, doubtful look. I had laid a lot of flattering dummy copy on the top because they only said picture approval, right? We have Christopher Buckley’s piece to go with it in copy-editing. It’s funny and sly and gorgeous as he always is, but you never know if they will like it. At the deep-kiss cover shot Jennefer Hirshberg drew in her breath sharply, then gasped at the dancing, leg-kicking sequence inside. Clutching the spreads, she vanished into the first lady’s office for one hour. As the minutes ticked by I was becoming resigned and thinking glumly of what else we could scratch up for the cover. She returned finally, still looking gloomy, sat down, and started to criticize the display type’s “tone” and ask for changes. That was funny because the display type was all fake! I “reluctantly” agreed. “Mrs. Reagan is very disappointed,” she told me. Which really blew my mind, frankly. The pictures are so joyous and wonderful, Harry Benson at his most inspired. They celebrate what is maybe the ONLY thing everyone can agree is good about the Reagans, which is the genuine love between them as a couple. Could Nancy really be disappointed? She’s an old Hollywood showgirl who knows what’s appealing and what isn’t to an audience. She looks wonderful in the pictures and she loves showing the world the president of the United States is her adoring slave. I suspect that Jennefer Hirshberg was just trying to save face, and the whole incident was probably instigated by Zipkin, to show he can whisper in the first lady’s ear. Since the cover image of the kiss was what seemed to grieve Hirshberg the most, I decided to be diplomatic and offer a switch with the inside picture. The kiss was wonderful for newsstand but the leg-kick cover is pretty great, too, and it means people will have to buy it to see the smooch. Plus, it gave Hirshberg a win that would make her feel happier. Sighing and shaking her head, she finally agreed to all.

  I called Si from the phone booth at the airport. He was benign and chuckling now and I probably got points for decisively getting a problem off his back. Alex was even happier. “Darling, you are a genius! Your charm has worked yet again.”

  I am so happy the magazine has what I think will be a winning cover that could help turn our fortunes around. But I also felt good about triumphing over the mischief of the odious Jerry Zipkin, an important message to send. Had he seen he could go over my head to Si and get results, he would become the go-to person to kill every controversial social story, which would be lethal. Si, however, has totally dived in my estimation. In a moment of challenge, he had no balls at all.

  Wednesday, May 1, 1985

  Last night was a fascinating insight into how New York fund-raising is done at a certain level. We Brits are a nation of freeloaders and tightwads compared to the US. At Tatler, I got so sick of stately homeowners always pretending to have no money, a flinty tradition adopted first during the French Revolution to avoid the fate of their too-ostentatious peer group across the channel. Unlike in NYC, there isn’t enough new money sloshing around in London to foment significant or lasting philanthropic influence. Asking for money is such an un-British thing. It goes with so much demurring and apologizing and polite coughing that the results are minimal. Most people seem to see donating to a cause as something someone else should do, a bit like going to (increasingly empty) church. “Charity events” are mostly just a luxury brand temporarily cozying up to a cause that might win a photo op with Princess Di.

  I find it excruciatingly embarrassing myself to ask people for money, but clearly, now that I am a New Yorker I have to get over it. Norman Mailer has been on me to help him fund-raise for PEN, the literary organization that supports free speech. Since I will do anything for Norman, I had to say yes and the cause is certainly something I care about.

  I love the way Norman is such a man of the arena. He’s a grizzled, unabashed action junkie, so responsive and alive to the crosscurrents of news. He makes everything he touches important just because he is part of it. Most writers are hermetic and self-involved. Norman is self-involved, too, but it’s on such a grand, noisy scale that he sweeps all before him. I feel I want to write down everything that comes out of his mouth. He needs a Boswell to follow him around. When we were extracting Tough Guys Don’t Dance in the mag last year he barreled into my office, sat down with legs akimbo, and announced—perhaps because this was his train of thought as he advanced with his battered book bag down the editorial aisle toward my open door—“I’ve never met a beautiful woman who wasn’t angry.” We passed a happy hour discussing why.

  It wasn’t hard for him to rope me into this reception for PEN. It was held at the vast Park Avenue apartment of his latest conquests, the megarich Reliance Insurance tycoon Saul Steinberg and his trophy wife, a slim brunette bombshell called Gayfryd. The apartment is a thirty-room palace, flaunting Louvre-standard old masters every time you turn a corner. Am used to seeing apartment art that’s aggressively abstract and minimalist, but clearly Saul wants to make a statement that he’s a Park Avenue Medici, because everything is oversized and over the top. It’s like a set for Valhalla. The huge dining chairs had ruffled backs. Gayfryd (what’s that Viking name about?) Steinberg is what Nick Dunne would call a cupcake, but she seems determined to show she is now a literary salonista. Saul is a stout, genial guy, a savvy Fred Flintstone whom she clearly didn’t choose for his looks but who has redeeming intellectual ebullience. The two of them are now the center, it seems, of the new eighties money. “Saul likes his art very strong,” Gayfryd told me, with her intense stare, as I gazed at the walls. In the sixteenth-century feast scene, there is a man throwing up. In the Renaissance courtyard, a dog is cocking its leg, and in the Dutch master it’s a scene of rape and pillage. Is this a metaphor for the aggression of Saul’s business tactics or just a fuck-you to his fancy friends?

  Saul kept gesturing and mouthing to guests across the room as Norman stood center stage, stout chested, legs planted firmly apart, thumbs stuck in his pants, speaking brilliantly and extemporaneously about free speech and writers locked up for defending it.

  When Norman was done, Saul came into his own. Preening like a ringmaster, he surveyed the circle of high-roller guests and decl
ared: “Okay, my friends, who’s going to buy some tickets to these great literary evenings?” A business face from the back yelled, “For you, Saul, ten K.” Claudia Cohen, whose family owns Hudson News, lip-glossed into the ear of her glistening new husband, Ronald Perelman, and he burst out, “And Saul, ten K from me!” Within ten minutes Saul had raised a hundred thousand dollars for something he surely cares not a whit about, and the bidders care less. The assembled guests then dispersed into the chambers and antechambers and porticos and parterres of the apartment to knock back their drinks. Considering many of them were writers of the most deadly kind—John Gregory Dunne, Gay Talese, John Irving, Kathleen Tynan, and Mailer himself—it was pretty trusting of Saul to let them loose in his inner sanctum. He clearly has no idea that writers are the most disloyal, gossiping, satirical crowd of any and will dine out on the absurdity of his apartment for weeks to come, not to mention write about it mercilessly. But writers, of course, are also always ready to sell out for a free drink, and thus more than happy to show up and down his champagne. “I can raise up to a million in an hour,” Saul told me cheerily, “more than that, it gets a little tougher.”

  Wednesday, May 8, 1985

  Jerry Zipkin’s face up close is like a huge inflated rubber dinghy, balanced on top of a short, Humpty-Dumpty body. Bob Colacello sat me next to him at his birthday dinner at Mortimer’s, hoping to broker a rapprochement, I suppose. Zipkin’s famous “wit” is mostly about combining outrage with theatrical emphasis. “Do I like him?” he wails in answer to a question about some mutual acquaintance. “No! I don’t like him.” (Heavy pause.) “I ADORE HIM. Which planet have you been living on? Hello? Don’t you KNOW I am the godfather of his oldest girl?” etc. The rest of his conversation is mostly free-associating names and anecdotes that have no punch line except another name and another anecdote. Over the course of the evening, he trashed Lally Weymouth, Francine du Plessix Gray, and Diana Vreeland. He had swollen gums from some dental problem, so occasionally he stopped in full flood to give a small cry of pain when hot chicken paillard connected with a sensitive point. He said he also has an allergy that has made his cheeks swell. I had an image of the rubber-dinghy face blowing up to the point that only his sharp little teeth remain. He launched into how Alex Liberman had been unfairly blamed for driving Diana Vreeland out of Vogue a few years back. “He had to do it! It came down from on high! You should have seen the way she ran through the cash! The limo was a thousand dollars a day! The suite at the Plaza Athénée in Paris! The red velvet tablecloths! I screamed it whenever I heard her phony version of how she was canned … Hello? Tina, she deserved to go!”