The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  Afterward I tried to find Michael to talk him through why I had to dump the Dillon cover, but his assistant said he had left—for Paris.

  Wednesday, June 12, 1985

  The Reagan dancing cover continues to sell like crazy. The press has been so phenomenal, it’s putting the magazine at the center of the news cycle.

  Condé Nast president Bob Lapham asked me to lunch, which shows I am on the rise. He’s such an old-fashioned company man of a certain era, the very opposite of bohemian Si. He took me to the stuffy, Frenchified Le Périgord restaurant on Fifty-Second Street again and studied the wine list, girth bulging out of his white cuffed shirt, his big nose shiny with corporate savoir faire.

  Bob told me one story about Si that made me feel a surge of affection for him. (Si, that is.) Apparently one morning Bob went up to see him and “tried to cheer up the little guy by telling him a joke.” Apparently Si looked up from his desk and said, “Lapham, is this a joke?” “Yes,” said Bob. Si went back to his yellow pad. “I haven’t got time,” he replied. That’s the kind of social privilege you only get when you’re worth over a billion dollars.

  Thursday, June 13, 1985

  September issue now in the works is going to be a good one. For the cover we have a toss-up between Dustin Hoffman looking smart and dangerous and an enigmatic Yoko Ono as a whatever-happened-to story. Two notoriously difficult people have both said yes, and now I am going to have to annoy one of them. The big Hollywood agent Mike Ovitz delivered me Hoffman personally when I was last there, and I am probably way more scared of him than I am of Yoko.

  The art department chaos is an ongoing problem. I adore Ruth’s taste, and her depth of visual education. She can talk to photographers better than anyone I know. She spends hours on the phone with them, doing deep dives that enrich their pictures. But she also works entirely according to her own mysterious clock. Charles, on the other hand, on whom she completely depends, is really buttoned up, and I like his attack. He’s great at the first-pass layout at great speed and brings a news edge. There are times when Ruth’s layouts are too grand and stately. Both of them have extremely good copy judgment. For some reason art directors are often better judges of stories than editors are, perhaps because they are reading them with fresh eyes and no agenda. But they constantly feud. And reinforce each other’s dysfunctions. Today they both scheduled for the exterminator to come to each of their apartments at ten a.m. and thus both missed the features meeting. When Ruth arrived in a swirl of pashmina I was fit to explode. Then she showed me her wonderfully elegant layout of the French writer Marguerite Duras’s photos for the profile of her and I found myself melting. Ruth understands how to let a classic picture breathe and own the page. “Do you think anyone will want to read about Duras?” I asked, in a moment of self-doubt. “What, this brilliant little French gnome?” cried Ruth, gazing adoringly at the picture. “Are you kidding? How could you NOT want to read about her?” I would hate to lose her love of quality.

  Sunday, June 16, 1985

  How quickly the summer is flying by. The nursery serenity of Quogue makes me feel calm. Joan Buck came out to stay, looking as chic as ever in Chanel sunglasses and pleated designer chinos. She was full of gallows humor, that huge belly laugh that’s so at odds with her haute couture persona echoing around the porch.

  My brain wave about hiring a student for the summer to cook is proving unbelievably great. It’s bliss arriving on the train on Friday afternoon. The summer weekend begins as soon as we step into the parlor car at Penn Station and board the Long Island Rail Road. Finding Kelly the student already in the Quogue kitchen with delicious hot-bread smells and the radio on is throwback heaven. After dumping all our bags full of books and manuscripts we go straight out to the dune and lean against the wooden balustrade of the steps as the sun sets and gaze at the rolling, mighty Atlantic Ocean. God, how I love it. The evocative wail of the train on its return journey from East Hampton makes me feel I am in the middle of an O. Winston Link photograph, far from the high-rolling madness of my Vanity Fair week.

  Friday, June 28, 1985

  TWA Flight 842, San Francisco to New York

  I am in flight back from another advertising pitch in SF. I think it was pretty successful this time, largely because Dick Shortway came and added his heavyweight silver pompadour and gold ID bracelet to Doug’s low-key presence on the sales calls.

  The socialite Denise Hale had a dinner for me. I had met her at the apartment of the realtor Alice Mason and she seemed like the right person to ask to host a dinner to drum up our advertising in SF. She’s the wife of the store magnate Prentis Cobb Hale of Carter Hawley Hale and, according to Bob Colacello, has a rich background of Serbian émigré glamour. She came through for me with a dinner for twenty at L’Etoile. Caroline Graham, Dick Shortway, Doug, and I went first for a drink at her house, which drips with Chinese porcelain, silk taffeta curtains, eighteenth-century furniture, and a Degas hanging in the loo. Denise, I started to realize, is a bigger monster perhaps even than the reigning queen of Park Avenue, Nan Kempner. She bangs on in a thick Serbian accent about her dogs and how she must get silver frames for their photographs. She won’t allow any cigarette smoking in the drawing room because the smell will linger in her green velvet walls. Prentis is really heavy furniture, with a dull, calculating mind and rat-trap mouth—clearly the checkbook. She doesn’t have a spare room, she said, because “Prentis is afraid I will invite my friends.” Great. She told stories about how she would do store checks for Prentis in disguise and if one of the salesgirls wasn’t attentive enough, she’d get her fired. Even more delightful.

  After reading the police report on Claus von Bülow and how Daisy Fellowes used to rent his house in Belgravia for ten-day orgies, I am much more alert to the surprising and sometimes sinister secrets of the rich. I got a whiff of something I didn’t like in the Hales’ marriage. I felt light-headed with exhaustion as we set off for L’Etoile, Denise squawking, “Forget about hairdos in this town—your false eyelashes go POOF at the first gust of wind!” Denise explained she always prefers to have dinners for people she hardly knows. “It’s so much less of a strain than worrying about the comfort of friends.”

  As I tottered on my heels along the carpeted corridor to my suite at the Fairmont Hotel at the end of the evening, I heard the music from behind the door of the room next door. It was the mournful clarinet of Acker Bilk, playing the old hit “Stranger on the Shore”—one of Mum’s favorites when I was growing up. I suddenly had an image of our big, beamed living room at Little Marlow with the French windows open in summer. I saw my small, blonde eight-year-old self spying through the door at Mum and Dad, nursing their gin and tonics on the dark green velvet Knole sofa, serenaded by the same clarinet. Mum always amused Dad so much. He loved steering her out of a first-night party with the valedictory cry of “I can’t take her anywhere!” They had a Reagan-like marriage, entirely engrossed in each other for fifty years. Remembering that image of them together now, I felt my heart expand.

  Sunday, June 30, 1985

  Quogue

  The summer’s moving so fast and I clutch at it, longing to make it last forever. On Friday it was Harry’s birthday. I got in from SF at six p.m. and sped from the airport to Quogue minutes before Ed and Carol Victor and Shirley Clurman came to a celebratory supper—delicious clams and chicken cannelloni served by Kelly the cook. I bought Harry a beautiful George Tice photograph of a summer porch and we had a close and loving weekend. Now I am sitting at the pine desk in the living room, listening to the deep pounding of the sea with a contentedly burning face. We have made the roof terrace look delightful with white table and chairs, geraniums, and a blue-and-white-striped umbrella. Harry’s in his den watching baseball. I love to recede into my nursery world and swim backward in time with the waves.

  Saturday, July 6, 1985

  Harry has gone back to DC to be on a panel on libel. US News is proving another Zuckerman quicksand. At Harry’s suggestion the new editor i
s Shelby Coffey, but it’s clear Mort wants to be the editor himself, constantly phoning staff and courting senior executives to put his oar in. Harry, as editorial director, is redesigning the magazine and is supposed to be Shelby’s sounding board, but thanks to Mort, it’s such a muddy chain of command.

  I think Mort likes chaos, but Harry and he seem to have forged some deep brotherly bond that I can’t quite fathom.

  The editor-owner relationship is such a thorny business. I expend so much psychic space, myself, on Si maintenance.

  I am staying here for the day to write an “editor’s letter” to create an adjacent page at the front that advertisers keep asking for. I hate it. It’s impossible to get the right voice when you have to speak for a publication. Whatever you do it turns into eight hundred chirpy words reeking of clichés about a “telling narrative” or an “insightful profile.” I have made various attempts to reinvent the form, which have defeated me. Writing doesn’t improve by not doing it. I am rusty and dull and uneasy.

  Miles has rented a sweet, tiny apartment by a small marina near us in Westhampton. I was touched to see a glimpse of his life alone. The washing neatly folded in a corner, a copy of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time on the table. He’s put on weight and has started to pad about on pedantic feet. I feel we are all aging. I want to give up the glamour struggle myself and hide under long, loose silk shirts.

  Thursday, July 11, 1985

  Feel very emotional for some reason. Oddly blue and on the edge of tears. Doctor says I am depressed and gave me a pill.

  Going to SF was great for flushing out more Californian contributors. Tonight I had a drink with a new young writer, Bret Easton Ellis, whose novel Less Than Zero I read in galleys and admired for its dialogue and reporting skill. That’s the nicest part of my job. Being able to spirit a fresh face off a dust jacket into the bar at the Algonquin, and have the license to badger him with questions. The supercool brat on the back of the book is actually a thoughtful, sensitive, tender-eyed young man with an attractive vagueness and a head full of ideas. He loved my suggestion to hang out with one of the new so-called brat pack actors and examine how much they have been created by hype and how much by talent. Another good writer, Amy Hempel, came in, eyes shining with luminous commitment, and said she’d like to write about earthquakes. An idea came to me on the West Coast to do a whole issue that is the Pop-Up Book of California, and now all these terrific writers are coming forth and creating it with me. Another of them, David Thompson, came on the phone from SF excited about doing the profile of Robert Towne and a sketch of Mulholland Drive.

  An editor’s job is to make people say yes to something they hadn’t thought they could do. I love getting to know writers and listening to what turns them on, which is often the direct opposite of what we had originally started to talk about. So often what they are actually known for doing doesn’t reflect what they should be doing.

  I’m sick of people writing about the “buzz” I “create” with Vanity Fair. Buzz sounds like something grafted on, something fake and manufactured. It’s a put-down, a dismissal of impact, a way to minimize ability to identify stories people want to read and talk about. They call it “buzz.” I call it engagement. I feel a nagging sense this “buzz” bullshit would not keep being said about a male editor.

  Monday, July 15, 1985

  The Dustin Hoffman cover for September suddenly collapsed as we were about to go to press with everything else. It was supposed to be timed with the release of the CBS TV movie version of Death of a Salesman until we discovered, quite by accident, they have postponed the airing till January. I went into overdrive raiding every drawer in the art dep. I wished I’d gone ahead with Yoko. Now we’ve had to throw together one on Anjelica Huston, who’s sizzling at the moment in Prizzi’s Honor. Fortunately Marie Brenner was on the plane to LA and Annie Leibovitz was about to leave to do a Hall of Fame shoot, and I begged and cajoled them into crashing the new cover story, getting a last-minute five-day production extension. So just when we were getting ahead with the fall, it’s a dive back into mayhem. Still, it’s a very good issue.

  Wednesday, July 17, 1985

  We had the whole Tango Argentino group in today to talk about a photo shoot. The genius of the show is the cast of real, authentic Argentinian tango dancers scoured from local cabarets and TV shows there. The show is touring and I went to see it with Sharon DeLano and am so obsessed by it, went back to see it again. I told Ruth to call Paloma Picasso in Paris and get her and her husband Rafael Lopez-Sanchez, who’s one of the Tango collaborators, to pose together for the opening shots. The entire office has been taken over by babbling Argentinians. In the middle of the bedlam Marie kept getting on the phone, saying she couldn’t get the Anjelica piece done in time because she had said nothing of interest, and I kept telling her Failure Is Not an Option and to think of some angle to frame it, while on the other line from Tuscany was the disgraced Tory peer, Lord Lambton, ostensibly to talk about writing about his exile there for the October Englishman Abroad assignment, but he really just wanted to flirt and waste my time. The British issue, timed with the Washington country house exhibit at the National Gallery [The Treasure Houses of Britain], is now colliding with the California issue and neither of them have covers, unless I can get on a plane and do a big Princess Di piece. I keep hearing from my old London sources that Di and Charles are fighting like cats and dogs and Di has become a crazy diva, but no one has nailed it with anything but nuggets. With the old Tatler Rolodex I can probably do the piece if I go myself (plus I miss writing). In the middle of all this, with nausea still high, I had a sudden shattering thought. What if I’m pregnant?

  Saturday, July 20, 1985

  As soon as I wrote the words above I knew it was true and marvel at how dopey I could be not to understand the weird symptoms I have been having lately. How daft of the doctor, too, to give me antidepressants without ascertaining that first. It’s amazing how calmly and naturally this news has overtaken me. Moments of truth come slowly. I think my subconscious has known, accepted, and nurtured this fact for some weeks.

  I AM SO HAPPY. My first panicked worry was that I could never handle motherhood and the mag in current mode. But now that I know it’s going to happen, I suddenly see it as THE PERFECT TIME. A rash of new appointments is cleaning out the leftover doldrums of transition people. The sullen picture editor was the last person who needed to go, and that I achieved yesterday when I couldn’t stand her resentful stare anymore. I called Mum in Spain about the baby and she was totally freaked out. “I am coming immediately!” she yelled. “Immediately!” I could tell she was as confused as I was by the implications but also thrilled, and convinced I couldn’t possibly have a baby in America with her in Spain. Yesterday, Harry arrived from DC to drive out to Quogue, and when I told him he stopped the car and showered me with kisses. He was ecstatic, unambiguously so, unlike me, and then we drove out to the beach in a kind of stunned silence, trying to reconfigure a picture of the future. He has immediately decided it will be a boy who will turn out to be H. L. Mencken, and now my still-invisible news is referred to by Harry’s new nickname of “Menckers.”

  Walking along the beach at my paradise, I felt more serene than I have for years. “Cow-like and floral,” as Sylvia Plath once wrote about pregnancy. Symbolically, my writer’s block disappeared and after lunch I sat down at my typewriter and rewrote my editor’s letter in an hour, in a personal voice, discarding the corporate crap I had been laboring on. I feel a burst of confidence, as if Menckers had fortified me with a surge of tiny life.

  Wednesday, July 24, 1985

  Bloody difficult few days, exacerbated by the morning sickness. After all the aggro to get the alternative cover done with Anjelica, CBS called to say that Salesman with Dustin Hoffman was now back on for late August, i.e., the September issue. I decided I now preferred the Anjelica cover, so to hell with them and we proceeded with high speed.

  On top of this Michael Roberts seems t
o have drifted off for good. He’ll probably suddenly magically reappear as he used to do at Tatler, but meantime I need a style editor or covers will look like crap. Spoke to Alex and he said he might give us André Leon Talley, who has been working with Grace at Vogue.

  Yesterday was my lunch with Si at the Four Seasons. He talked about his inability to find someone to edit British Vogue. He asked me if I would help with the search. What about Anna? I said. It would be a new playground for her while she waits for Grace to leave here. He looked thoughtful at that. Sometimes the obvious solution is under your nose. I guess Alex is not pushing her because he doesn’t want to lose her from Vogue here. Si was in a friendly and relaxed mood, exuding baffled good nature. I always love hearing his offbeat take on things. He hated Prizzi’s Honor, found it shallow and tiresome. He talked about William Shawn at The New Yorker, how “seductive” he is, full of “unexpected insights.” I told him how much I liked his son Wallace, how strange he looks, how full of original observations. “Where do they come from,” mused Si, screwing up his funny little hamster face, “these funny little people?” It was, in itself, a New Yorker cartoon.

  As we drove back to the office in his limo, he looked out the window and we talked about Oxford and Cambridge, how they still provide the network of the ruling class in Britain. He said there was no such network in the US. (Not Harvard and Yale?) “You know,” he said, “there’s no such thing as real power in America.”