The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  Tuesday, September 10, 1985

  So much creativity at work, my head is buzzing like an overheated radio. I had lunch with Reinaldo Herrera to brainstorm an Italian special issue; there is so much to do there in the world of style. He’s a thundering snob but at the same time has huge enthusiasm. His impeccably pressed jeans, Savile Row shirts, and bellowing Venezuelan voice are a useful passport for VF’s nocturnal spy in the drawing rooms of NYC.

  As usual I had to sift through the chaff of his noisy espousals of such bad ideas as photographing famous wine growers, but we did end up with a cool idea to do “Children of la Dolce Vita,” photographed by Toscani, a portfolio of Italian style obsession that he can help set up because he knows them all. Then I had a hall of fame meeting with Jim Wolcott, Sharon DeLano, Ruth Ansel, and Jane Sarkin. Jane is a great new hire. Colacello recommended her from Interview, where she was an assistant. She is small and intense with a passionate work ethic. She also loves the whole ambience of stars and their handlers, who drive me crazy because I have no patience. She got great training in this from Bob and Andy Warhol at Interview. I have put her into the newly formed role of “celebrity wrangler” and have thrown her the whole raft of controlling flacks to run, which hopefully she’ll do without Daphne Davis’s drama.

  We spread Annie’s portraits across the floor of my office to write the captions, and sat there in a sea of chocolate wrappers and Coke cans. Jane had produced two very good last-minute inclusions for Annie to shoot, which greatly classes up the mix of chosen people—Congressman Tip O’Neill and the heart specialist Dr. Jarvik. “Jarvik’s hot,” Ruth said.

  “Is he married?” said Jane. “No,” said Ruth.

  “Jane Jarvik,” murmured Jane. “My mother would love that.”

  Tuesday, September 17, 1985

  Just in from one of the most amusing dinner parties I have ever been to in NYC. Harry’s on his way to London and I so wished he hadn’t missed it. It was the first bash of the fall hosted by Alice Mason, the society realtor and political fund-raiser who made her name in the sixties and seventies getting people not in the social register into Park Avenue co-ops. She’s such an odd duck with her glaucous look and total absence of conversation. But she does have a flair for a guest list. We all were crammed into her rabbit-warren dining room on East Seventy-Second Street and seated at erected card tables. VF’s new success designated me a great seat at Alice’s table next to the aggressive takeover king, Carl Icahn, along with the creamy TV anchor Diane Sawyer, mag magnate Malcolm Forbes, the TV writer Norman Lear, and the gossip columnist Aileen Mehle, aka Suzy. It was like a pop-up book of Reagan-era money. At one point Malcolm said about someone, “He sold the company for maybe sixty million, which was a lot of money in those days.” Icahn and Forbes locked horns about the principle of corporate raids, with Suzy on Malcolm’s side—she’s on the board of Revlon, which is fighting off an assault by the gimlet-eyed Ron Perelman, who, as it happened, was sitting at the next table.

  Icahn is a giant of a man, with a big, humorless nose, very close-together eyes, and a foghorn voice. “Listen, don’t get me wrong,” he honked at Malcolm across the table. “There’s no halo around me. I’m in this game for the money, okay? It’s like a drug. I see the challenge, the fat cats sitting on the assets, and then I get in there and I’m in there to win. After I win, then I get depressed. I tell you, I go in there and I see these blue-ribbon boards, sitting on the assets, mismanaging companies, paying themselves fat-cat salaries with golden parachutes built in, and I just fire ’em all. And you know what, the profits for ACF are up forty percent. I fired a hundred and seventy-five top executives. You know why? Because I couldn’t figure out what they did all day. Have a drink with any of ’em and you’d like ’em a lot. But so what? These CEOs, these blue-ribbon boards, all they got is charm, all they got is politics.”

  “Well,” said Malcolm genially, “with all this dough flying around I feel impelled to mention the Princeton fund, of which I am a paid-up member of the charm school board.” But Icahn charged on.

  “These guys, they can’t manage the companies they’re supposed to oversee. They’re just bleeding it white and they paint me as the villain, when I come in and offer a good price for the shareholders. Why shouldn’t the shareholders vote on whether I get it? They want to sell. They’re only shareholders to make some dough for themselves.”

  “That’s nice. You’re in there for the little guy,” Malcolm said with a twinkle. “No,” roared Icahn. “I am in there to collect. But I’m telling you these fat-cat boards got no right to rob their shareholders.” Aileen Mehle was by now the picture of ruffed, bosomy consternation and could no longer contain herself. “Mr. Icahn,” she huffed, “I am on one of your so-called blue-ribbon boards at Revlon and—”

  “Revlon!” shouted Icahn. “I wouldn’t buy one share of it. It’s not even worth the forty-seven bucks a pop that Perelman is offering.”

  Suzy’s cleavage flushed. “And that’s where you are wrong, Mr. Icahn! I happen to know that Revlon is a very fine company, a well-run company, and the shareholders can throw us out at the next shareholder meeting if they don’t think we are doing a good job … but we are elected by them and we know that this Perelman assault must be repelled!”

  “And you are prepared to bankrupt the company to do it!” Icahn jabbed his meaty forefinger. “Take a poison pill! The whole system is nuts!”

  “This is a takeover,” interposed Norman Lear. “I am taking over this table. I am going to take one thought and follow it to the bitter end. Tell us what’s wrong with the system, Carl.”

  “It’s the corporate culture. All these WASPy guys who talk through their teeth. These boards are a threat to the whole country. If the steel industry had had a takeover threat to deal with, there would still be one today.” By this time Suzy was ready to come to blows. Icahn yelled at her, “Don’t patronize me! Okay? Just don’t do it!” It was an uncomfortable moment, a disconcerting glimpse of the psyche of a man who wants not to tease the establishment but annihilate it. At one point he growled, “Listen, there are some good CEOs out there. Like Marty Davis of G and W.”

  “And no one can say he got there on charm,” said Norman Lear, who had watched most of this in fascinated silence. Norman is great company. He described California to me as “paradise without a vocabulary.” Mort Zuckerman joined our table to listen. “What have I missed?”

  Malcolm said, “Mr. Icahn was explaining his motive for corporate takeovers; it seems he is something of a crusader on behalf of vulnerable stockholders,” but having missed the fray, Mort was more interested in making eyes at Diane Sawyer. When we rose for coffee, I collided with Norman Mailer, who was wonderfully warm. “You’ve never been more beautiful,” he said, rocking about like a happy koala bear. “You’ve really hit your look. Stay pregnant. It suits your spacey face.”

  “Spacey!” I exclaimed. “But I am keen-edged and alert!”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s why spacey-face works so well.” I got into the elevator with Helen Gurley Brown and Arianna just in time before the doors closed on us. Helen pressed the button. “We’re all going to Cuba,” she said.

  Monday, September 30, 1985

  Hurricane Gloria hits! The press had been full of the warnings and we had Quogue battened down. We holed up in the city, where the office was closed for the day. It was cozy going to bed and hearing the winds howling and rattling against the windows of the apartment block. I was woken up at six a.m. by the phone ringing. “Hallo, is that Hurricane Tina?” said the Voice.

  “Who is this?” I yawned.

  “It’s Rod from the Daily Mail!” (or rather the Die-ly Mile). “You obviously haven’t seen the papers today.” Turns out my just-out Princess Di piece has exploded all over the tabloids in London. The Daily Mail front page read, “Astonishing attack from American magazine on the Royal marriage.” And then, in true Daily Mail style, went on to plunder my piece for every news angle and recast it as a cause for
Middle England’s outrage. The next day the Mail went on to do a double-page spread about my own marriage in the same terms, casting Harry as “pussy-whipped” like Charles with me as “the Joan Crawford of publishing” like Di. It was pretty clever actually. Made me nostalgic for guffawing British sub editors who expend so much talent on worthless ends. I see David English’s own hand in it, he’s so good at takedowns. The paper also quoted the palace with a furious rebuttal, and as the hurricane raged around Manhattan, I spent Friday morning doing telephone interviews and issuing statements. Today Sarah Giles landed from London, bearing a sheaf of tabloids, and we read them over brunch at Mortimer’s with mounting incredulity and mirth. The royal couple are going on BBC TV to rebut it, which is a first and proves beyond a doubt we got it right. The palace only denies things when they’re true. It’s making big news here, too. I have done a round of TV and it will consolidate us as a news machine. The rule of three—the Reagan kiss, the Claus von Bülow, now this, three stories that have taken us over the top.

  Tonight Harry and I went off to the Manhattan,inc. party. I like the editor, Jane Amsterdam, a lot. She’s kicking ass with her mag. She’s also tremendously elegant and real at the same time. I thoroughly approved of her black velvet Saint Laurent suit with diamanté buttons and diamanté bag and shoes. The chicks are winning! In her mag she’s handling hotter stories and exposing more dirt in the business sector than most of her male contemporaries. Good for her! In this era of conspicuous consumption, Wall Street CEOs and media moguls are getting the kind of play previously afforded rock stars and Jane knows how to take ’em down.

  I am now the size of a tank. How can it be that also pregnant Anna Wintour seems to have only a neat couture bulge under a long Chanel jacket while I am now the size of a helium balloon? She’s due two months before me, too—in January! She says she’s going off to do the Vogue job in London in February, almost as soon as she drops the baby. I told her she should hire Gabé to be her right hand in Features. Gabé is bored out of her mind at Tat even though she loves Mark Boxer.

  Tuesday, October 1, 1985

  I had a dinner at Café des Artistes for Sarah Giles with the hoary mag writers Carl Bernstein and Jon Bradshaw. Carl and Bradshaw were really condescending about VF, comparing it to their old grand journalism days. I let them have it, telling them they were both self-satisfied oldsters who don’t get out and hustle anymore, and are always telling me what’s a great idea but then have no energy to report it. Maybe I am getting my revenge for all those months of everybody patronizing me, especially lofty male media heavies.

  André Leon Talley has signed on to VF as style editor. Michael Roberts, it seems, is back at Tatler working for Mark Boxer. It would certainly be hard to miss André Leon Talley if he also disappeared. He is a six-foot six-inch black fashion plate in TV frame Chanel sunglasses and usually swathed in long cashmere shawls. His daily uniform is a gray cavalry twill Chanel jacket with gold buttons, specially made for him by Karl Lagerfeld, he claims. It looks so witty when writ as large as he is. As does the oversized burgundy box calf Hermès Kelly bag (these are all André’s words, he’s a human fashion caption) that he carries around with God knows what in it. Apparently he was raised in North Carolina by a grandmother who taught him how to appreciate luxury. He’s already transformed his end of the office. The fashion department has no cubicles, but he’s marked his end with a tiny teetering gilt and pastel-velvet boudoir chair that I haven’t seen him, or anyone else, sitting on yet.

  He has some great fashion ideas. Fiftieth anniversary of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women coming up and he wants to re-create their immaculate wardrobes and maquillage as modern fashion spreads by Herb Ritts.

  Wednesday October 9, 1985

  The pages of Vanity Fair came alive with the Broadway opening of Tango Argentino last night. I am so happy we noticed it early on its bright, blazing summer tour. The show was sublime, still with its cast of real, unglamorous Argentinian tango dancers, ravaged women with hectic rouge, crumpled gigolos, and portly middle-aged husbands with magic feet. It was like being in the thick of a smoky nightclub in Buenos Aires where the dancing just happens to be extraordinary.

  The cosmopolitan flavor continued at the VF office the next day. Marie-Paule Pellé, the House & Garden design editor who has been brought in from Paris by Alex as heir apparent to the editor Louis Gropp, came in jabbering in French; Beatrice Monti, wife of Gregor von Rezzori, showed up and jabbered in Italian; and the Tango Argentino crew jabbered in Spanish. Paloma’s husband Rafael Lopez-Sanchez and their writer friend, Javier Arroyo, who co-wrote the piece for VF about the show’s genesis, appeared flushed with first night success. Javier is part of the Paloma/Rafael circle in Paris that also includes the two original creators of the show, Hector Orezzoli and Claudio Segovia. I felt I had spent the day at a foreign airport without ever reaching my destination.

  Tuesday, October 15, 1985

  San Michele, Tuscany

  Harry spirits me away! I am sitting at the writing desk of our room at San Michele. The hotel is even more delicious than I’d hoped—an old monastery with a Michelangelo facade, Etruscan sarcophagus in the hallway, the cloisters transformed into a long dining area with open archways looking down over Florence. I love the terra cotta walls and sailcloth blinds and lampshades, the armchairs patterned with roses. I want this color scheme everywhere I live!

  Yesterday we went into Florence on the bus and saw the museum of the Duomo and the Uffizi Palace and lunched on mouthwatering pizza and salad at a café in the square, reading our books. (I brought a cache of cultural cramming: Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists, Clark’s Civilisation, which I haven’t read since I was fifteen.) Also been reading a fascinating book, Royal Feud, about the Duchess of Windsor and the Queen Mother. It tells the story of their intense thirty-year enmity over Edward VIII’s abdication and confirms all my suspicions of the sainted Queen Mum. She really is an intractable old battle-ax, ruthless, narrow, and a cruel snob. She should have been grateful that Edward’s obsession with Wallis saved England from a Nazi sympathizer (as Edward was) on the throne. Not to acknowledge the duchess even at the end was such a malicious act. It also seems to me, reading this, that the Queen Mother’s craving for the limelight (which is what it was and is) has all been to compensate for a private life of utter sterility. When I last saw Colin Tennant he told me that she had been in love with his father and he jilted her.

  “Why did you like him?” Colin asked her. “He bullied me,” she replied. Here was a strong, sexually driven woman who never met her match and then had to subdue the fire to marry the fairly pathetic stammering Bertie, and did everything she then could to kick him up the ladder to the throne. (I never believed her supposed “chagrin” that he would endure the stress of being king. She was desperate for it.) Intuitive history is a very amusing game. I’d like to do a biography someday. Maybe of her.

  Friday, October 18, 1985

  We drove to Cetinale near Siena and had lunch with Lord Lambton, who’s written a piece for us on his wonderful house. Have long been fascinated by Lambton, the reprobate peer who had to resign from the Heath government in 1973—he was secretary of defense—after being photographed in bed with two hookers smoking cannabis. Always seemed so Byronic and dark.

  Pulling up to the house, which is four hundred years old and once belonged to Pope Alexander VI, I was reminded, if I needed to be, about the delightful access a magazine provides. It gives you a license to satisfy curiosity without the rent of social obligation.

  Cetinale dominates a hill seven miles west of Siena. A large golden rectangle with a long, straight avenue of cypress trees at the back. Six dogs rushed out to bark at us followed by a shy Italian girl with a baby. Then Lord Lambton appeared at a top window and we waited for him to come down.

  He was much taller and older than I had expected. His face all cracked and craggy, scarecrow frame slightly stooped, languid voice. Eyes full of malicious fun behind dark-tinted glasses, a strong, sa
rcastic mouth. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know, all right.

  The shabby comfort that Lambton wrote about in his October VF piece has, in real life, overtones of seediness like himself. The entrance hall, with a sofa shoved against the family portrait, is cluttered and dark, the sitting room—my favorite detail is the fat stone cherub slung on a messy table—is slightly dirty. The shades are all askew on the lamps, and ancient copies of the Daily Mail lie heaped on a table along with books of horror stories. The full ashtrays are the relics of his after-lunch cigars. No sign of his aristocratic mistress, “Mrs. Ward,” as he calls her. He slumped down in the sofa, very civil and friendly, occasionally drifting off behind his dark tinted glasses in moments of deep introspection. “Frightfully efficient, your magazine,” he said. “Never come across so much professional courtesy in my life.” I told him about the flap over my Diana story in case he missed it.

  “Mrs. Ward read it before the rumpus,” he said, “and found it very interesting and sympathetic. Trouble was it was probably rather too well informed.” He’d also read Royal Feud and picked up on what a shit Mountbatten was.

  “I am planning a book about him myself,” he said. “He’s actually a man I rather admire but he was quite incapable of telling the truth. He lied about everything all the time, and you know, once you start it’s frightfully difficult to stop. My theory is, he was obsessed by his illegitimacy and invented all kinds of rubbish about himself to cover it up.” We had lunch in a conservatory painted from top to toe with a faded mural. His secretary joined us, a pretty, silent blonde girl with whom he probably enjoys recreational humiliation. I asked him what he had thought of our Claus von Bülow piece. “Very, very good,” he said. “He brought it with him, you know, when he came to stay in July.” (Really?)