The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  “What do you mean?” I said to his profile, which was still gazing out of the window. I realized he was really thinking out loud. “Well,” he said, “the president has no power. Congress can thwart him. And media power … I’m supposed to have media power … but I can’t get arrested!”

  “Of course you have power,” I said, “but you sometimes choose not to exercise it.” “But how could I exercise it?” he said, turning toward me as we cruised toward the building he owns. “Say I wrote a memo to the magazine editors telling them only to plug Random House books … they’d, they’d just take no notice. Or say I gave Random House a list of books by authors I told them to buy … well, it wouldn’t last five minutes.” We were now out of the car, walking past a newsstand stacked with all the magazine titles he owns. He stopped to wait for the elevator. “As for The New Yorker, well, I find it very hard to get William Shawn on the phone.” With that he disappeared with hunched shoulders and creased, reflective face into the express elevator to the fourteenth floor. He is a character out of Thurber, a great antihero.

  The final results came in for the Reagan cover and newsstand sales are up 33.6 percent compared to the same month last year. More important, subs are soaring, from 164,870 in June ’84 to 317,735 in June this year. This is incredible and a relief, as I am so anxious for Si to find his faith rewarded.

  Friday, August 2, 1985

  Just back from London, where I went to report the Princess of Wales story, as we really need a hot cover for October, and Di is coming to Washington at that time for a White House dinner. I stayed at the Ritz and had a wonderful week. Has London changed and become reenergized in the Thatcher revival, or is it that I have a refreshed perspective after a year and a half in the New York combat zone? “Am I the places or the places me?”

  I bounded around all the Di sources I could schedule, racing first to lunch with Mark Boxer, who is still as Byronically handsome as ever with his cricketer’s stride and irreverent drawl. He’s doing wonderfully well as editor of Tatler, though I never expected he’d want to do the job after such an august career as an editor and caricaturist. I still think his greatest talent is his lethal pen-and-ink satires of London society. He gave me great stuff about Charles and Diana. Then it was on to dinner with Derry Moore (photographers always notice the most), lunch with Nigel Dempster, a dress fitting at Bruce Oldfield’s Beauchamp Place boutique that was a disguised gossip download, and (by far the most productive) lunch with Lord Lichfield at San Lorenzo to remind me of the flavor of all Di’s haunts. Ended the trip with a dinner Ed Victor threw for Stephen and Natasha Spender. Stephen Spender was particularly amusing. He has such wonderfully malicious nostrils. “When I went to a bookshop in Houston,” he told me, “I paid with an American Express card, and the man at the till said, ‘Ah, Stephen Spender, I’ve heard of you. Aren’t you a near-celebrity?’” He added as a vague afterthought, “I suppose I half made his day!”

  But what of the poor Princess of Wales? There’s so much gossip. It seems all that shy, youthful exuberance of hers is being transmuted into the stifled feelings of a caged butterfly, entirely unaware of the mechanism of her own extraordinary appeal. She knows how to use it instinctively but is utterly uninterpretive of her life and fate, which is hardly surprising given how young she is. Patrick Lichfield told me that her intense unhappiness is expressing itself in volatile rages that exhaust Prince Charles, and have started to really concern the Queen and Prince Philip. The more she becomes a star on the world stage, the more Charles feels overlooked and withdraws into his melancholy inner life. Now that he doesn’t have to pretend to be the world’s hot bachelor, he is reverting to his real self, a lonely, eccentric figure haunted by self-doubt. He thought he was signing up for a passive, sweet-natured young girl who would produce him the heir and the spare and not interfere in any way with his glum, dutiful life and off-duty pleasures with the blondes of his past, like Lady Tryon and Camilla Parker Bowles, but that’s not how it’s turning out. The world is mad for Di.

  Derry said that what Charles can’t stand is Diana’s total absence of intellectual curiosity and her obsession with clothes. Gone is the spun moonbeam dress and blushing devotion I saw at the American embassy in 1981. Now it’s designer shoulder pads and a frosted bearskin hairdo. Dynasty Di. Nigel said she spends hours studying her press clippings almost as if she’s trying to figure out the secret of her own mystique. Like Jackie O she shops continuously to relieve the tension. When she’s at Balmoral she apparently spends hours cut off on her Sony Walkman, dancing on her own to Dire Straits and Wham! Meanwhile Charles reacts to the public lack of interest in him by depending on a raft of sycophantic gurus like Laurens van der Post and Dr. Miriam Rothschild, an authority on fleas who invented a seed mix of wildflowers known as “farmer’s nightmare,” which Charles has sown around his Highgrove acres. It’s been reported that Diana drove out his trusted private secretary, Edward Adeane, but according to Patrick Lichfield and Derry, Adeane left because he couldn’t stand the motley band of mystics and self-sufficiency freaks acting as the prince’s unofficial advisers.

  No one is more dismayed about this apparently than Diana, who signed up to marry the royal James Bond. And Charles thought he was getting a jolly Sloane Ranger, not a highly strung superstar. Derry told me a lovely anecdote I shall include of a trip Charles apparently made to a friend’s house to study the garden. He complimented the Italian hostess on her perfect English. “My father believed in educating girls,” she said, laughing. “I wish,” said Charles gloomily, “that had been the philosophy in my wife’s family.” Diana is both brilliantly instinctive and dispiritingly dim. She left school at sixteen to become a child’s nanny, which all her set did, and she can hardly be blamed for it. She is a very young twenty-four and he’s a very old thirty-six. It’s no wonder she is turning more and more to café society who live colorfully in between those worlds. Mark Boxer told me about a fund-raiser Diana went to recently on the arm of Bruce Oldfield. When Charlotte Rampling’s cool husband, the musician Jean-Michel Jarre, asked her to dance, Diana lit up. “Everyone within twenty yards got the fallout from her mood that night,” Mark said. “She was suddenly aware of everything she was missing.”

  I have great material here for a cover story. Although bits and pieces have been leaking out of all this, no one has truly put together the parlous state of the Wales marriage, so it was well worth the trip.

  Thursday, August 8, 1985

  I am at Quogue, sitting at the dining room table, working on my Di piece I am going to call “The Mouse that Roared.” Loving being at the typewriter again. The piece is writing itself and going to get some traction, I think.

  The mag is finally getting very good. The California copy has started to come in and some of it is first class, especially David Thompson’s essay on Mulholland Drive. Annie Leibovitz was justifiably pissed about the cover credit on her Dustin Hoffman cover that is now running in November. She said the fashion stylist’s byline was the same size as hers. Given that Dustin is wearing a black polo-neck sweater, the credit STYLED BY SHIVA FRUITMAN is indeed pretty ridiculous. “Who is this asshole Shiva Fruitman anyway?” mumbled Annie. I wish I knew, but Mr. Fruitman has now become the source of much in-house hilarity. “Styled by Shiva Fruitman,” Wayne murmurs when I pass him in the hall.

  I went to Ralph Lauren’s show and was fascinated by the ancient blonde sitting in the best seat on the aisle, wearing clanky spectacles on a chain and a gold lamé shirt. It turned out to be Vogue’s senior fashion editor, Polly Mellen, whose eccentricities I had heard about but never seen. She sits there squawking and clanking and making extraordinary little facial “moues,” every so often giving a tiny round of applause and mouthing “triumph, triumph” when a cashmere cardigan dress sails by. My own clothes are beginning to strain against me as El Bun grows. I don’t know how long I can put off the dread maternity wear.

  Friday, August 23, 1985

  Mum and Dad are here from Spain! They are so thr
illed about the baby and the tension of distance melted away, releasing all kinds of tangled suppressed familial emotion into a happy, uncomplicated stream. It’s been lovely having them in the apartment this week, coming home to find that all kinds of little domestic jobs I have put off doing have been expertly done (the joy it must be to have a stay-at-home wife!), and seeing the pleasure they take in Quogue.

  It was a good idea to make my first ed’s letter a rollicking manifesto on our circulation rise. Harry has been telling me for ages to write about how well we’re doing now since we can’t get anyone else to do it. He made the cunning point that people believe what they see in print even if it happens to be in your own publication. I remember now how the Daily Mail editor David English was always doing that. “Another big win for the Daily Mail! Soaraway success as circulation tops a mill!” etc. And did we ever question it? No! Because we read it in the Daily Mail! I now find with mounting amusement that this indeed turns out to be the case with my editor’s letter. People have been calling me ever since the September issue came out, congratulating me and advising we are now “very likely going to make it.” Weirdly, it even seems to apply to the Newhouses. Si called me at home to say how much he liked the editor’s letter and its message, “so attractively put,” he spluttered. Jonathan Newhouse at The New Yorker told Doug Johnston that Si’s brother, Donald Newhouse, told HIS brother (the Hamster bush telegraph) “that Vanity Fair is a winner.” Since Donald has been, I suspect, a private adversary for a long time, this represents a turnaround indeed.

  Sunday, August 25, 1985

  Last night was Ben Bradlee’s sixty-fourth birthday party at Grey Gardens. Sally freaked me out by demanding, in her witchlike way, “Is that a maternity dress?” of my, I thought, brilliantly ambiguous loose silk Roland Klein sheath. There was a big Hamptons film contingent. I sat between the director George Stevens Jr. and the columnist Ken Auletta, opposite two more directors, Alan Pakula and Sidney Lumet. Harry’s end was the literary group. He sat between Sally Quinn and Nora Ephron with the novelist E. L. Doctorow. We both felt very much part of the Hamptons community now. Everyone is talking about the early leakage of my Di piece and there was a debate about whether I should ever have described Prince Charles as “pussy-whipped from here to eternity.” I took a poll around the party to see how people felt about the term. Auletta thought it was a mistake. Ben said on no account would he ever agree to let the term appear in The Washington Post, a family newspaper. Lumet, however, said, “Why not? It’s as American as apple pie.” We ate Mexican food, and Norman Lear and Peter Stone made funny toasts. I was pleased to see little Quinn cycle by on his tricycle, looking well. I longed for the birth of Menckers, who’s making me extremely sick at the moment.

  Monday, September 2, 1985

  It’s the end of Labor Day weekend and our euphoric summer—makes me melancholy to feel the change in the light and fall in the air. Except on Monday something fantastic happened. The VF piece by Geraldine Fabrikant for The New York Times that has been long in the works finally appeared as the cover of the Business News section! I’d been dreading yet another “rumored to be folding” piece, which would have meant kissing off the slowly building ad pages. (Last week Calvin Klein called from a restaurant and booked a run of six, and Ralph Lauren wants a regular position at the front.) The Times piece ran with a fabulous picture and headline. “New success for magazine. Vanity Fair’s slick new formula”—with charts illustrating the growth in circulation and that ads are up 41 percent through the first nine months of this year. Great quotes from advertisers testifying that VF is now a working success with a new audience. (There was even a positive quote from the usually baleful Clay Felker, saying, “It has found its own glitzy, fashiony cultural niche. It will be a success.”) As soon as I saw the headline I knew it was the single most important thing to happen all year, bona fide turnaround time. The phones were red-hot all day. Last night at Zuckerman’s end-of-summer buffet in East Hampton, the set who have been so skeptical were all over me. Ed Victor told me he went to a dinner and heard Sidney Lumet say, “Oh yeah. Vanity Fair’s turned around. It’s The New Yorker that’s in trouble.” Gotta laugh since I have had eighteen months of people telling me we were going to fold into The New Yorker any minute.

  Knowing this was the week when I was smelling of roses, it seemed the right moment to break the news of the baby to all. First I told Pam McCarthy and Sarah Giles, who told me everyone in the office had guessed a week ago. Both were so genuinely thrilled it touched me. Then I told PVZ, who immediately saw it in corporate terms. “I am delighted a top executive is experiencing pregnancy,” she said. “It gives us a chance to see what we can do for our maternity program.” Then on Wednesday I went up to see Si. He was looking tired and hassled behind his big desk. “Yes, Tina, what is it?” “I find I am expecting a baby,” I said, “but I just want to say it won’t make any difference to my commitment to my job.” He flushed and beamed with the sweetest undisguised pleasure. “I’m very happy for you, Tina,” he said, “I hope you get as much pleasure from the experience as I have from mine.” And he got up and came around the desk awkwardly to shake my hand in a very warm way. Alex, whom I told next, kissed me and cried, “Darling! More brilliance! It’s yet another triumph for you!” Miles was the next big surprise; he was so moved he nearly cried. He dropped everything and kissed me and told me it was the most important thing in life. “It’s the only bad thing about being gay, not being able to,” he said, touchingly. (If it is indeed a boy I will ask him to be godfather, I resolved then.) Nick Dunne came into my office, shut the door, and hissed, “I know your story and I am in heaven! I nearly cried when I heard!” And Marie Brenner sat me down for an in-the-know diatribe on obstetrics, pediatricians, the importance of ignoring all baby manuals, and boycotting exercise classes. So I was walking on air by the end of the week.

  On Thursday night Harry and I went to a drinks party for John Mack Carter of Hearst and Si gave me a little pat as he went out and said, “I am so pleased about you.” “About the Times piece?” “No,” he replied sotto voce, “about the baby.” And I realized I was seeing what a strong believer in family he is and how he sees me now as part of it. Somehow America does seem much freer and more relaxed about pregnant women in the workplace, or maybe it’s that babies make a woman less intimidating. I realize already what extra strength and solidity a child will give me, what a different connection to other women with kids. Babies show the best of us. I was enchanted at a Diane von Furstenberg dinner last night when a handsome furniture designer called Dakota Johnson whipped out a picture of his baby and the director Paul Schrader did the same. Dick Snyder’s wife, Joni Evans, told me Dick believes women with children are unemployable. Nice. I feel guilty about my irritation with Marie and Caroline Graham when they have to bail out of work to be with their children. I understand now how important it is to enable women to both work and have a child. All my endless planning (wait till thirty-four, then give up the job and have a baby) was ridiculous. I will never be happy unless I can do both.

  Meanwhile, the repercussions of journalistic edge keep confronting me with the furious profile subjects I run into at dinner. Arnold Glimcher, the art dealer, aggressed me at the Victors for what he called “an anti-Semite tone to the Julian Schnabel piece.” (Wha?) And I forgot when I merrily started to chat with Paul Schrader at DVF’s dinner that Stephen Schiff had just trashed him in the current issue. With temporary amnesia I said, “I think we just did something about you in the mag, Paul.” “Shall I refresh your memory?” he said. “Basically it described how I am a piece of shit who should never have got behind a camera. Shall I go on or do you remember it now?” “C’est la vie, Paul,” said DVF sleepily, adding with seductive mischief, “There are plenty of people who agree with that anyway.” It was one of the last dinners in her palatial apartment before the set is struck and she goes off to Paris with her debonair Italian lover, Alain Elkann.

  One surprise yesterday morning was a fu
rious, unsolicited call from the editor of Women’s Wear Daily, Michael Coady. “You are out of control! Out of control!” he screamed. “Your Diana piece is a fucking disgrace! Pussy-whipped! How could you even think of using that word in a magazine!” How very strange Americans can be.

  Anna Wintour got the job at British Vogue. Must be the best news Grace Mirabella’s heard all year.

  Tuesday, September 3, 1985

  The baby news has been a wonderful thing for my relationship with Mum and Dad, opening up channels of tenderness. I felt blue when they left for the airport today, as always three hours before they needed to because of Dad’s obsession with punctuality, insisting on three passport checks and a label on everything in sight. Seeing him standing in the bedroom in his underpants and doing all the packing, wrapping things in tissue and swathing shoes in vests and bras, made me feel full of nostalgic affection.

  Thursday, September 5, 1985

  Bob Colacello took me downtown to see the Azzedine Alaia show at Palladium on Fourteenth Street, Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell’s hot new venue redesigned by Arata Isozaki. I had never been to Palladium before so I wanted to check it out.

  Maybe my pregnancy made me just not in the mood, but I always see these avant garde outings as the emperor’s new clothes. We herded through the ear-splitting noise and gloom, falling down ill-lit steps and jostling through paint-daubed house of horror sets seething with ragged-haired glitter people in vermilion lipstick. It all felt to me like the charnel house of the damned, with lost souls milling about under outsize chandeliers that used to hang at Studio 54, surrounded by in-your-face canvases by Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The show was just a load of itchy oversized sweaters worn as miniskirts, rip-off Moroccan robes, bruise-colored leggings, menstrual-red chiffon skirts. I didn’t reveal to Bob how much I hated it but I felt sorry for the haggard crowd who feel obliged to be wearing this stuff soon.