by Tina Brown
Gossip is a kind of addiction like overeating or drinking. His need for new, stinging nuggets of human trivia is unassuageable, the motor that propels him. What does it say about Nancy Reagan that he’s her best friend? Insecurity perhaps about her California-ness and about not being Hollywood royalty like many of her friends. She could have any fascinating writer or artist or Nobel laureate as a confidant in the White House, but that would only add to her self-doubt. It must be a soothing diversion to hear this river of small, hilarious defamations collected each day especially for her. Plus she must glean a ton of usable information about donors and deals that she takes back to Ronnie.
By the second course he was spewing on about Mort Zuckerman, “I don’t see his point.”
“He’s a very brilliant man,” I reply. “He made all his own fortune at a pretty young age.”
“Oh, I am sick of hearing about money,” said Zipkin, who talks about nothing else. “Who’s got it and who hasn’t. SO WHAT! We are all rich. It’s just that some of us are richer than others.”
Bob turned the talk at his end to a story he’s currently writing on another social queen bee, Marylou Whitney, and the Kentucky Derby. It’s part of our new oral history–style series called “Voices,” which is actually turning out well, as Bob is great at getting telling quotes. They all confide in him and he gets newsy stuff.
“Don’t sell Marylou short!” Zipkin shouted. “Don’t sell her short! That should be the title of your piece, Bob. She has to be ready to pick up at a moment’s notice wherever Sonny Whitney wants to be, and get the cooks and the butlers and houses ALL working for their arrival. There’s the HUGE place at St. Augustine. Another HUGE place at Saratoga, and then there’s the apartment and I don’t mean some dinky little pied-à-terre, this has terraces and the whole nine yards, then there’s the HUGE place in Mallorca and the HUGE place in the Adirondacks. And when they entertain, it’s dinner for 150, and at ten p.m. you turn over your card and there’s ANOTHER TABLE NUMBER for a second course. Think of it! Make no mistake, Marylou has a tough time! Sonny wants everything JUST SO.”
William F. Buckley, on my other side, turning to this outburst late, commented sleepily, “Sonny Whitney is senile now. But he was senile at Yale.” The cake came out and everyone sang “Happy Birthday” to Bob.
I reeled out of there at eleven with a headache, dying to regale Harry in DC. Still, I am glad I went for Bob, of whom I am now deeply fond. Mixing with totally pretentious people all the time, he actually has no pretensions himself. I will never forget the day he responded to a snotty put-down about one of his pieces by Jonathan Lieberson: “Jonathan, I never said I was Flaubert.”
Friday, May 31, 1985
My heart nearly stopped.
Vanity Fair has had a near-death experience …
I was leaving the office for the ABA book fair in San Francisco, followed by a West Coast ad swing, when Pam McCarthy told me she was very worried because HR is continually stalling on our junior staff replacements. I called PVZ, and given the good relationship we have forged, I hoped she would be frank with me about VF’s future, but she was evasive. “Pam, we need to hire these people,” I said. There was a pause. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable about anyone giving notice to join Vanity Fair right now,” she said. “What do you mean?” I said, though I did know what she meant. “I don’t know, Tina, I just think you should seek an interview with Si when you get back.”
Bombshell. But it all made horrible sense. He has been unusually absent from calling me in the last couple of weeks. And now it was Memorial Day weekend and I couldn’t call Si or anyone to confirm or deny it. I left for SF feeling ill. The June issue with the Reagans on the cover has been a triumph—flying off the newsstand and reproduced in every paper. Seventy thousand on the newsstand so far, up 10,000 over last month. The kiss pic all over the morning shows. Just as I predicted and more so. After the ABA I am supposed to be going on The Merv Griffin Show to talk about it. We are just picking up steam, and now Si is going to fold us? And what’s worse is we have the incredible other pieces in the works that could maintain momentum.
With all of this racing through my head, I now called Doug Johnston, our ad director, who was still in NYC. To my horror he told me that on Friday Steve Florio, the president of The New Yorker, had called him to offer a job there, at Si’s suggestion. Why the hell didn’t he tell me? Doug apparently had asked Si what this meant re Vanity Fair and Si, the steely bastard, replied, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“Doug,” I said. “You’re there, I’m here. You’ve got to go in at six tomorrow when Si’s in his office undefended and get in his face and do the sales pitch of your life! You keep telling me the ads are coming. Convince him of that!” In reply Doug started telling me all the brands that are about to say yes to buy pages, his messianic zeal rising as he began to see he might also be able to grab David O’Brasky’s publisher job off him if Si gave us a reprieve. “Don’t tell me, Doug,” I screamed. “I KNOW we can win. It’s Si you have to sell!” At the very least I wanted to trouble Si’s luxuriously empty dawn with the realities of the street, not to mention the jobs of all our staff that are about to go south. I then called the old cavalier servante of Condé Nast ad sales, Dick Shortway, to enlist his help. I have continued to try to befriend him as I know he has sway with Si, since he’s been at Condé for God knows how long. I woke him up, forgetting it was three hours later in NYC, but told him this was a crisis I needed his help to solve. “Tina,” he wheezed, “I am going to get in there at crack of dawn and confront him head-on.” Finally I woke up the art department. I asked Charles Churchward to ready the paste-ups of Helmut Newton’s brilliant pics of Claus von Bülow and, for contrast, the wonderful Mary Ellen Mark photo spreads in the next issue with the Jay McInerney piece on the writer Paul Bowles living in literary exile in Tangier. Such quality surely has to find an audience soon! Then I booked a return flight home first thing in the morning, and was in agony all through the flight back.
I reached Doug when I landed at JFK. He sounded buoyant. He had spent forty minutes pitching our impending success story and told Si there was no way he wanted the New Yorker job because VF was the place to be. He said Si listened and nodded and listened and nodded. And then after pausing said, “Stay with it, Doug.”
Bull’s-eye! Freckle-faced Doug Johnston is the General Patton of the hour. Dick Shortway was also full of genial self-congratulatory chuckles about what he claimed was his own critical role in staving off the death blow. Good old Shortway. But I didn’t believe it until I saw Si myself.
I went straight to the office from the red-eye and called upstairs to say that I wanted to come see him. Sitting behind his desk, he looked up and smiled and came around to my side of the desk to sit down, which is always a good sign. “I’m going to give you a new publisher, Tina,” he said. (Sacrebleu! O’Brasky out! Just as Doug hoped…) “And a specific time frame of two years. That should be enough to see whether the enthusiasm of readers can be converted into revenue.”
I phoned O’Brasky and he sounded dejected but was very noble, saying the more important thing was to save VF. I hope he got a huge check.
Doug told me later that Si told O’Brasky, “David, I have decided to make a long-term commitment to Vanity Fair.” “Fabulous, I am thrilled,” said O’Brasky. “You haven’t heard the second part of the story. You’re not part of it. I want your resignation.” O’Brasky was in and out of there in six minutes (and probably right on to a waiting PVZ with her “conversation” and her “package”). Poor O’Brasky. He fought valiantly for VF in his own way. His whole stock-in-trade is the Mel Brooks–like ebullience, the short, plump legs in the business suit pumping along Madison Avenue. But he was also a throwback to an era of martini lunches and backslapping that seems a thing of the past when so many clients are high-toned fashion emperors with Japanese girls at reception wearing silent ballet slippers. I don’t think Doug is exactly Pierre Bergé, but he’s not as hopelessly
miscast as David O.
I asked Si if he would have lunch with me soon out of the office and not at the Four Seasons. He looked shy. But I wanted to make him say yes to ensure I could really keep him on track, that this was not some impetuous Band-Aid. Because when Si says two years he always means six months.
Tuesday, June 4, 1985
Rotten, miserable day. When I had my weekly meeting with Si today in his office he wasn’t particularly warm. In fact he was awkward and standoffish and it hardly felt like renewed commitment. Not at all the burst of enthusiasm about the future I had expected. He looked nervous and hot and pale, probably already regretting being railroaded into giving VF a second chance. I looked deeply into that asymmetrical face that can be so charming when the shy smile lights up. I am getting sick of the Condé Nast atmosphere of an insecure royal court. It struck me not for the first time as I returned his shifty gaze that he’s untrustworthy. Yesterday’s unthinkable becomes tomorrow’s action plan with him.
Alex, ever the courtier who reflects the king’s mood, wasn’t friendly either … I detected little darts of malice in our usual healthy creative tension. I think he is annoyed that he was left out of last week’s drama and I didn’t enlist his aid. Maybe that’s why Si suddenly went cold about it all. Alex had sowed doubts about his decision as payback. He dismissed Michael Roberts’s very strong Matt Dillon cover on which he’s holding a Hamlet-like skull as “poison.” Alex always hates Michael’s stuff. But I decided to take no notice of him. Fuck it, if we are going to get closed down, I may as well follow my own instincts. I finished writing some rollicking display type on the Gloria von Thurn und Taxis story with Miles and we did a sizzling contents page together.
Wednesday, June 5, 1985
It was pouring rain today, which I always love. It reminds me of the English summers of my childhood. All those school trips to Wimbledon in soaking uniforms. Excursions to Eton to the fourth of June celebrations with languid cricket when I was lusting after Julian Summer in sixth form, and we ended up eating the chicken and champagne picnic with his parents out of the back of the car under sodden umbrellas when the clouds burst, as they always did …
I got caught in the downpour with Ed Victor, who was in town from London. We ran from the Algonquin to the nearby coffee shop, then spent a lovely hour catching up on London lit gossip over fattening muffins. Back at the office I went into overdrive in a features meeting about fall stories and then had lunch at the Four Seasons with Anna Wintour, whom I have only seen sporadically in the last year. She can come off as chilly but when the dark glasses come off she’s candid and confiding. She’s clearly bored with being the second chair at Vogue, waiting for the sainted Grace Mirabella to go, and is hungry to run her own show. She said she’d love to do the editor in chief job at British Vogue. Bea Miller’s headed for retirement after twenty years and Anna is full of ideas for how she could shake it up. Will be hard to follow Bea. She’s such an icon. Discovered Grace Coddington and David Bailey and Bruce Weber and so many and came up with a strong copy background as well as fashion, whereas Anna’s background is all visuals. Anna would find British Condé very damp and debby after New York. But she’d bring some American drive to the building and to the mag which now looks tired. I asked how her husband David would feel about her going and she said he’s okay with commuting to London as long as it’s only a couple of years. It’s a smart strategy. Right now her talents here are enabling Grace to keep her job, whereas in London she can show off her flair and prove executive chops.
Just before I went to lunch, one of Si’s notes came down on yellow legal paper in his wobbly madman’s scrawl. It featured—a joke, which is most unusual in Hamsterland. It must have been an olive branch, as he’s extended once before when he made up with a small gesture. It was a letter from some friend of Roy Cohn’s offering us via Si a short story about the sex life of gay sailors. Si’s note said, “Be warned. If VF doesn’t want this, then it’s sure to run in The New Yorker.” I said not only would I publish it, but I wanted the movie rights and asked him if he wanted to come to my toast for Doug Johnston’s appointment as publisher at home tonight. He came on the phone immediately, very giggly, not able to come but full of warm cheer. It was a big relief after yesterday’s treatment and a very festive evening at our apartment for Doug, with all the VF staff, who of course knew nothing about the fact that we’d been on the verge of folding.
The editors are getting to be tight-knit. David Kuhn, the new arts ed, has an incredibly keen instinct for a story. He’s a Harvard boy who came from editing a little magazine for a nonprofit called American Council for the Arts. I decided to hire him immediately when I met him. He has great high energy, which is welcome after Heilpern’s British rain clouds in the job, and I’ve got tired of people who were the cogs at big places. When you run a small magazine with no budget you have to do everything, which means much more resourcefulness, much more scrappy attack. I have given Kuhn the whole back of the book to run and told him to get a new section ready in two weeks. It didn’t seem to daunt him at all.
Sarah Giles is doing really well transplanted here. None of the editors who work on copy can understand what she does, but glossy magazines always need at least one editor who goes out and brings things back, who hears what’s happening, what’s opening, what people are talking about in different worlds. Sarah isn’t literary per se, but she has very good relationships with writers. She hangs out with talents like Bruce Chatwin and the urbane, bitchy old taste baron John Richardson and gets them to work for us. And she’s insanely competitive on behalf of the mag. Nothing makes her upper-class nose twitch more than the sense that someone else might get the story first. I also think being new to town like me, she is more fascinated by the mores of America than Americans themselves are. She was in great form tonight, bounding around with her shrieking laugh, chain-smoking, and knocking back the white wine.
PVZ came, which was great of her, and we exchanged conspiratorial glances about the averted disaster. Nick Dunne burst in with his usual opening line, “Have I got news for you!” (in this case a new tip from the ongoing trial of Claus von Bülow). Helmut Newton’s pictures of Claus dressed in black leather are extraordinary. News is a departure for Helmut. I could see he was getting bored out of his mind doing fashion photography for Vogue. He doesn’t know it, but he’s a natural journalist—sees and hears and understands everything and has an opinion about all of it. Plus his celebrity is another access card in certain circles, and sinister, suave von Bülow absolutely plays to Helmut’s fascination with society kinkiness.
Nick’s writing in this story has exhilarating energy that’s fueled by his deep hatred of lawyered-up “jury pleasers” who remind him of the murderer of his daughter. He captures not just Claus and the divided family and the intricacies of the case, with fantastic direct quotes from all, but the whole seedy, rich Newport world Claus and Sunny inhabited. And only Helmut could persuade a man on trial for murder to look in his closet and choose an S and M–flavored black zip-up leather jacket. He looks positively satanic. Teaming him and Nick produces something wonderfully sexy—the magazine piece as movie of the week—fast paced literary journalism from Nick and noirish visual flair from Helmut.
Very happy Jim Wolcott came to the party. He was wary of me in the first days of the mag, but I can feel the thaw and I love it when he comes in and hangs out in my office in his grungy leather jacket, free-associating about the books and movies he’s read and seen. He’s got such an extraordinary critical brain. Am going to give him a column, Mixed Media, that spans all his compulsive cultural food tasting. Went out to dinner with Miles and felt happy to walk up Second Avenue with him, to the small funky restaurant Les Sans Culottes. He looks much better. He’s cut his hair. He loves working on the main features with me instead of just the front-of-book Vanities section, where he felt marginalized. He’s proud of himself, I think, for toughing it out here and I am proud of him, too.
Tuesday, June 11, 1985
