The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  “Did Andrea come, too?” I asked.

  “Yes, isn’t she frightful?” he replied. “She was wearing the most extraordinary clothes. It must have been a hundred and two degrees and she was in some tight, ruched blouse, jewelry, and stockings. You know, Claus was never a great friend of mine, I just knew him a bit. So when he said he wanted to come for the weekend I didn’t mind. I mean one isn’t going to drop someone when something like this happens. (Pause.) Do you think he did it?”

  “Yes I do,” I said.

  “I wonder,” said Lambton. “When he came to stay I thought I would clear the air. So I said, ‘Look here, Claus.’” (At this he burst into wild laughter.) “‘Look here. If you didn’t kill Sunny, what do you think happened?’ And you know, he didn’t have an answer, which seemed pretty odd after God knows how many years.” (More wild laughter.) “But you know, Claus was always someone one felt a bit sorry for. Before this tragedy he had another one. All his hair fell out when he was quite young, and he had a hair transplant that didn’t quite work and looked exactly like pubic hair. Frightful, poor fellow. And then the joke went around about him that he’d slept with his dead mother.”

  “It’s not very funny, that joke, is it?” I said, increasingly appalled.

  This seemed to amuse Lambton very much and he laughed so much he coughed and choked. “No, it’s not very funny, is it? Not very funny at all.” A cook served us pastrami followed by stuffed peppers. Lambton flipped the pastrami onto his plate with his fingers. Harry decided to try to get him on politics. Lambton was careful to say nothing about Mrs. Thatcher and made no comment when Harry pitched into monetarism and other current canards, no doubt because Tony himself is very much on the right wing of the Tory party. After lunch he took us outside and walked us around the garden, pointing out the drought-devastated olives, the bullet holes on the facade of the house where there was a shootout with the SS in the war. The garden was a tumbling miracle of color and secret arbors. There was such a lovely smell of rosemary. Amazingly, he doesn’t speak a word of Italian—“I’m tone-deaf, you see”—so God knows whom he talks to. He’s up at five every morning working on his novel, about a haunted abbey. Perhaps he wants a novel to match his own sinister appearance.

  Lambton clearly took a shine to me, saw I appreciated his sense of humor. I could see him watching me behind his shades like a horny reptile. The fact that I am pregnant and have my husband with me just added to his perverse interest.

  H and I left him waving gauntly at us amid a sea of frenzied dogs. We spent the afternoon replaying the best bits of the visit as we loafed around among the skinny towers of San Gimignano. It seems that in the fourteenth century a tower was not just a lookout post but a status symbol for the nobles, just as it is in today’s Manhattan. All Donald Trump and Edgar Bronfman require is some boiling oil to repel the takeovers and life would be pretty much unchanged.

  Monday, October 28, 1985

  Walked through the door of the VF office to instant static. Michael Coady from WWD yelling down the phone about what he said was an impending hatchet job I had commissioned about him. “And you know I’ve always defended you. Even using the word ‘pussy-whipped’ in that Diana piece—that was too much. People are saying you are out of control!” But the good news is that the October “Mouse that Roared” issue sold over a hundred thousand on the newsstand, which is fifteen thousand more than September. I guess I have kissed off Princess Di as an ally, if she ever was one. I am so often compared to her in appearance, and yet we couldn’t be more unalike in every other way except we both require absolute control, we both are shopaholics, and we both hide deep passions under chocolate-boxy looks (which I am swiftly losing in my elephantine condition).

  Tuesday, October 29, 1985

  This morning Harry got the unsettling news his Times deputy, Charlie Douglas-Home, died of cancer last night. Harry was very upset, even though Charlie was no friend of his in the Murdoch showdown.

  It’s strange how those calamitous events at The Times remain for me the events not of a career debacle but of a crime. I remember in the days when Rupert’s henchmen were trying to force Harry out I felt I was witnessing a murder with Charlie as an accessory. As the underperformer in an illustrious family, Charlie just wanted to be editor of The Times so much it was easy for Rupert, so brilliant with character deduction, to exploit that weakness. In many ways, Charlie was as much a victim of Murdoch as Harry was. And now, poor Charlie is dead and The Times, with all its political influence, and The Sunday Times, which Harry made a cash cow, is Rupert’s to do with as he will.

  Tuesday, November 12, 1985

  Princess Di wowed DC, she really did. I got multiple reports of the magic of it all. Her whirl across the dance floor in the East Room of the White House in the arms of John Travolta in the midnight-blue velvet Victor Edelstein dress—epic. She sat between the president and Baryshnikov. Every face-lift from Park Avenue to Bel Air was on the guest list. Misha Baryshnikov told me he was struck by the “extraordinary transparency of her skin against the tight blue dress, the deep blue eyes, so much more beautiful than any photograph or on TV.” It’s always been about the coloring with Di. The pale peach skin, the moonstone eyes. Ballet nut that she is, I am sure she would have much preferred to dance with Misha, but he had a knee injury and couldn’t. It was brilliant of Nancy Reagan therefore to tap Travolta on the shoulder after dinner for an “excuse me” to lead the princess in a dance. Once again the Reagans know how to create the iconic pictures. Those ten minutes on the dance floor were instant history, glamour for the ages. Washington is such a dowdy town, a center of power but not fashion. Senatorial wives trundle around in their Escada suits and sparkly brooches on the lapel. Diana’s combination of refinement, beauty, and youth was the corrective, the lift, a Bel Air White House needs. And for the Waleses, whose marriage seems to be in the tank, this iconography was a global tonic. Chris Hitchens told me that the next day he saw the princess looking “pale and ill,” descending the embassy stairs with Charles as if they had just had a nasty row, but the language of gesture, the images now lighting up every publication in the world, will live so much longer than that.

  Monday, November 25, 1985

  Just in from a soiree for the cabaret pianist Bobby Short. Some diamond-studded socialite crooned at me, “My dear, you have certainly found your audience and it’s me! Vanity Fair is a society movie magazine. You don’t remember what they are, but you’re it.” She’s half-right. But it’s more the VF attitude to fame and the mix of stories that ensnare the reader with juxtaposition. We give intellectuals movie star treatment and movie stars an intellectual sheen and the same is true of the audience. Brainy people in our pages seem more glamorous and movie people seem more substantive. I love putting madcap Princess Gloria von Thurn and Taxis in the same issue as Schiff’s profile of the editor of the National Review. Both of them are hidden stars in their own worlds, but combined in a magazine that has Dustin Hoffman on the cover, they confer fascination on each other. It’s funny how sometimes the mix takes on a life of its own and goes off the cliff. The January issue is suddenly so full of people with bald heads, I had to kill three of them today.

  At dinner I was seated beside Bobby Short, whom I very much enjoyed. His South of France villa is called Villa Manhattan, which I thought was a wonderful title for a play, and he did come up with some great lines in his hoarse, punctilious voice. “Chicago! Well, it seems to have so much. The right clothes, the right jewels, the right food. But in twenty minutes it can turn into a cattle town. Los Angeles, well, I liked Los Angeles. I lived there for eighteen years. But it was a long time between thrills. New York! My God, the opulence. Once upon a time all you had to do to get attention was wear a brown tuxedo—no more!”

  When he talked about how hard he works and how tired he gets of playing and smiling, it felt like the hidden core of him revealed. I remember the film director Marek Kanievska once said to me—just before I left Tatler and was in my between-life
crisis, feeling stressed out about all the demands of an editor—“But you can’t give up now! That daily battle is what makes you you, and me me. I’m a shy person, very inward looking. But I go out on a crowded set with people and cajole and hassle and scream to get it done.” I thought about what Bobby Short said tonight—that I have “arrived.” I know that arriving will never be an option for me.

  Thursday, December 5, 1985

  Now I understand why Frank Crowninshield wrote that famous VF essay “Ten Thousand Nights in a Dinner Coat.” New York’s pace hots up to a burning crescendo this time of year. Exhausted faces with strained eyes and upturned collars hurtle between restaurants, dinner parties, and cocktails. Tonight I dine at the apartment of the department store supremo Geraldine Stutz. Lunch was Denise Hale with twenty-four guests at Le Cirque. The office is wild, stuffed with visiting foreigners and overenthusiastic socialites assailing me with new ideas. Now that I have made half of New York a contributing editor, I am paying the price. The phone lines are burning up with connections from Palm Beach, Tuscany, Los Angeles, and Washington, demanding to speak only to the editor in chief. At Denise’s lunch I commissioned everyone at the table, but then again it was a pretty good lineup. John Richardson, Alex Gregory the publisher and aesthete, the film aficionado Rex Reed. Reinaldo, looking ashen from late nights, was at the next table and clearly wished he was at ours. Richardson has grown a mustache since I last saw him and is as lethal as ever, this time about the Washington National Gallery’s president, J. Carter Brown. “He’s the worst kind of early settler,” said John. “Acquisitive, tight, opportunistic, thrusting, but all with an impeccable overbred manner and that terrible mirthless laugh.” Jesus. I am told and believe that John has a cache of ruthless pen portraits of the likes of Wallis Simpson he will at some point unleash on the world, hopefully in Vanity Fair. He and Alex Gregory engaged in a delicious argument about Braque’s horrible middle period when he only painted still lifes for rich people’s dining rooms, and went on to how Chagall wasn’t any good after 1914.

  “My theory is that no one was any good after 1914,” said Rex Reed, which was a good try but he knew he was outclassed as the three art mavens swept on.

  Mort Zuckerman showed up and we had a long chat. I told him he should move US News to NYC as he clearly hates the travel (and I would get Harry back!). He said he was going to do that eventually, so I said, “What’s wrong with now? You have three empty skyscrapers and you’re sick of commuting.” He proceeded to enthuse feverishly about the idea, but then one of the enjoyable things about Mort is that you can get him excited about anything or anybody for five minutes. He went on and on about Harry’s brilliant redesign of US News that has transformed the look of it but never says it to Harry himself. Ultimately, it’s not going to work for Harry there unless there is some clarity of command.

  With the baby coming I’m trying to finish February and prepare March and April and May at the same time, and all the cover stories keep going down like ninepins. I nearly screamed when Javier Arroyo came into the office to discuss his “politics of couture” piece and wanted to engage in social small talk. I cut him off at the pass. “Javier, I want you to go to Cadaqués in January instead and do ‘The Last Days of Salvador Dalí,’” I said briskly.

  “You know,” mused Javier, “I saw a peecture of Dalí in Espanish paper last week with three pipes up his nose and I thought of you immediately.” (How nice to know I have that effect on people!)

  “Dalí, he wait to die until he sees Halley’s Comet,” continued Javier, confirming to me he knows so much good detail I want him to WRITE THE GODDAMN PIECE. And I will get him to do so. At lunch John Richardson said it was the best art story that hasn’t been done, so if Javier doesn’t do it I will try to twist John’s arm to do some real reporting. (“Arianna should do that story,” said John, “instead of trying to write about Picasso, about which she knows so much less than me.”)

  One welcome visitor in all this was dear Gabé from London. She’s going to leave Tatler and work at British Vogue for Anna Wintour, which is great for both of them. I felt a twinge of regret. I should have brought her to NYC for us instead. I took her to dinner at Mortimer’s with Miles and Jane Sarkin. Jane has some of Gabé’s qualities—tough, loyal, tiny, huge sense of humor, and the courage of a lion under pressure. I wanted to hug Gabé when she said in her demure little voice, “T, did you know that Lord Dufferin’s bum collapses once a month now and he has to have it sewn up?”

  Last night was the hyperglamorous Costume Institute party at the Metropolitan Museum. Condé Nast takes four tables and I was seated next to Si. That morning he called me up to his office and gave me a fourteen-thousand-dollar raise, a strangely arbitrary amount. I didn’t have the courage to say I thought the turnaround warranted more. He glowed at me, beatific behind his overlarge desk. “What you’ve done is nothing short of a miracle,” he said with shy warmth. “It’s just amazing.”

  I took Nick Dunne with me to the Met because Harry was in Washington and fashion isn’t his scene anyway. Nick was the perfect commentator escort. “Wanna talk to Irene Selznick for three hours?” he asked when her familiar irate face under a pageboy haircut hoved into view.

  I borrowed a silver velvet evening coat from Jackie Rogers to wear over a thin black silk full-length evening sack she made me to hide the bulge. A professional makeup artist came to do my face, which I didn’t much like, but it made me feel suitably glam. I loved the excess and finery and ostentation of it all, teetering past Egyptian mummies and fading frescoes in our silly heels, herding into an elevator in a clash of perfumes and rustle of silks, disembarking into the darkened Costumes of Royal India show to oohs and aahs over outsize gold mannequins swathed in glittering silks and jewel-encrusted turbans, with the appreciative murmur of visiting Indian high society and the excited chatter of Gayfryd Steinberg and her posse. The walkers were out in force—the mincing gait of socialite Peter Schub with Lynn Wyatt on one arm and bouffante Judy Peabody on the other. Reinaldo Herrera in a tux has the inverted A waist of the society man par excellence, escorting on his left hand his lofty, expensively coiffed mother, on his right, Carolina, his Eva Peron–like wife. After dinner we wandered into the Temple of Dendur, where Peter Duchin was pounding the piano and a million candles lit the drafty spaces where the B group, who didn’t get seated, sparkled and networked and hustled. As Nick said, the bravery. This is what I appreciate most about the city at night, the life force of New York aspiration, wanting, wanting to be seen. The erratic flames of the myriad glowworms—the striving fashion assistants, makeup artists, art gallery gofers, photography apprentices, gossip stringers, all the glamour wannabes dressed up with their “looks” in place. How they danced. How they gestured and waved and admired one another’s glad rags, cutting like flamboyant tugs through the sea of jaded vessels such as the SS Jerry Zipkin and the SS Barbara Walters. This is the moment when the social energy of the city—in Diller’s word—metastasizes, when individual crassness and need are absorbed into the bedazzled, glory-seeking hum of “Look at me! I’m alive!”

  Monday, December 16, 1985

  I just hosted the VF office holiday party in the apartment. Seventy festive staff members streamed in from every department, everyone enjoying everyone else without a deadline hanging over them. But at the end I felt blue. Everyone made plans and went merrily off into the night at eight thirty. But with Harry in DC as usual I was left alone. I am so fed up with him being there instead of here with me. A healthy reminder, I suppose, of why a profession, however fulfilling, should never be mistaken for a life. And also how happy I am to have the beating heart of this baby in me, who will in three months be every cure for loneliness.

  Sunday, December 29, 1985

  Back from our Christmas break at La Samanna in St. Martin. It was a too-short week in the low-key solace offered by the seaside cottages. Richard Avedon was there, as was Peter Ustinov, who reminisced about working with Dad, and Bill Murray and Sam Spiegel, yet I
didn’t feel socially invaded. Just sat around in all my pregnant enormity with my hair in a wet knot, which was so rare for me. At night the candlelit dark was soft and the food good, we both wound down. The big mistake was to come home via Palm Beach, where I wanted to meet Nick Dunne and Helmut Newton, who had teamed up to do a Palm Beach social story. As soon as we walked into the Breakers it was a hideous reversal of the past week. Ghastly pachyderm people milling around the pretentious spaces doshed up in observance of a strict dress code, great impersonal outdoor canteens staffed with sullen hamburger chefs, a pokey bedroom suite with a TV spewing out hotel entertainment to match the brain rot milling around in the overbearing lobby. Harry bought a bottle of whiskey and proceeded to down it in misery. Helmut’s ironic despair was almost as great as mine, except he will do pictures that reflect it. I do love Helmut. Sitting in the Breakers bar in his linen “jecket,” red tie, and white pants, he was absurdly, effortlessly chic. He talked of fleeing Nazi Germany at seventeen, heading for China and Australia, and of his life in Monaco: “You know there is no one to talk to but I like my terrace.” I was struck all over again at the huge displacement of the émigré Jews and how much it has influenced their outsider powers of observation. Somewhere beneath the mystery and sexual irony of Helmut’s work one senses a bleak soul searching for an explanation. There’s an almost cosmic indifference to his shrug.

  I think of him now, courtly, contrary, rigorously demanding to the point of bullying when he doesn’t get his own way, gazing around the Breakers bar with a look of glinting intent.

  Tuesday, December 31, 1985

  New Year’s Eve alone in my apartment. The office closed at one. Harry back in DC, so I wandered home. Got into my old sweatpants and wound down into morose self-communion about what I want from the year ahead. My fascination with New York success is beginning to pall. I look out of my Venetian blinds at the lighted irregular egg cartons of the apartment blocks across the street. I think with affection and a certain maternal protectiveness of my Vanity Fair staff alone in their own small apartments before whatever festivities they have in mind, or possibly, as with me, none. I see boyish Charles in his art director–ish minimal space, waiting for the coffee to brew, Ruth in a shapeless smock, staring around her tasteful apartment, still unfinished because she can never decide on the colors and fabrics, Sharon downtown in Chelsea, reading under a bedspread with a glass of wine, Miles watching reruns of Masterpiece Theatre on PBS, Wayne’s thin shoulders bent over a corner desk, giving one last read to a piece, Elisabeth Biondi, our new picture editor from Germany, still shaken up after her mugging on Christmas Eve, restlessly trying one cassette then another. All of us wondering what the New Year will hold after so many months of joined, excited effort. There will always be something magical to me in creative collaboration and the bonds it forges. I silently wish them all Happy New Year.