The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  1986

  WE ARE THREE

  Monday, January 27, 1986

  Oh my God! I am a mother!

  George Frederick Evans, named after my dad and Harry’s, was born two months early at two o’clock on Sunday morning. I am so not ready for this and in my cocky, breezy, I-am-superwoman way, I never dreamed anything bad could happen with our baby. I am humbled by the awful swift cycle of events and feel there is an admonition in it. This is life. This could have been death. I have only seen my son for five minutes in the incubator. He is four and a half pounds. Trying to conjure up a maternal bond but actually feeling as if I have been in a car crash. But then, this morning, shuffling slowly in my gown with an IV attached, I went to visit him in the preemie unit with Harry.

  He is so perfect and pink with a serious round head and crinkly nose and his little chest fluttering up and down like a frightened robin. He has a respiratory infection, which they say will improve. I felt the stirrings of longing then. The worst of this whole experience has been the sense of being cheated of the natural path of motherhood, the time to adjust.

  It started on Saturday evening at ten o’clock. Mum and Dad were here. Another lucky thing. We had spent a freezing-cold morning out looking at nursery furniture and then afterward went to the movies to see Out of Africa. In the afternoon I felt tired and heavy but put it down to the flu. We ordered in Chinese food and were all watching TV in my bedroom when I felt a gush of blood between my legs. I was hemorrhaging badly. Harry rushed and phoned Dr. Sullum. He said, “Get to Mount Sinai Hospital and I’ll meet you there.” Harry called the ambulance and, when that failed to show, a limo. Both arrived at once. But the ambulance driver said he wouldn’t take me to Mount Sinai, it was beyond his jurisdiction. It was New York–Presbyterian or nothing. By this time I was so distraught, terrified of losing the baby. An argument raged back and forth between the ambulance driver and Harry as I continued to bleed. Harry decided I better go to New York–Presbyterian even without Dr. Sullum to meet me, as Sullum has no affiliation there. We then hurtled off in a manic convoy, me in the ambulance, Harry and the parents in the limo, and were disgorged all at the same time at the neonatal unit of New York–Presbyterian. I was rushed in on a stretcher. Sullum had recommended a high-risk obstetrician but omitted to say that she lives in New Jersey. They put me on a sedative and warned me that if the placenta separated it would be an instant Caesarian. Harry sat beside me, holding my hand, trying not to cry. My doctor, a sturdy black lady with a big, confident smile, finally arrived. She looked at the monitors and immediately decided to operate. The next time I saw her she was in her cap and gown. They shot me up. When I came to in a hospital room I could see outside the window that it was all white, a snowstorm in the night. I looked up at the TV screen suspended from the ceiling and saw a space shuttle, the Challenger, in position for a flight. A nurse came in and said, “You have a baby boy.”

  It was all so unreal, so utterly unlike what I had hoped for or planned. Now we wait and pray that the fluttering creature in the warm light box will make it and be the sturdy little boy, the little Harry of our dreams. Please, God, please let him be all right.

  Thursday, January 30, 1986

  My life seems to have drained away. My darling baby had two days of getting steadily worse till yesterday, when his oxygen needs began to decrease. Then he got jaundice and I couldn’t bear to see more tubes and plasters all over his tiny, struggling body in the incubator. But today, the improvements continued and I felt so shattered by the emotion of it all, I just sat in front of his glass container in the preemie unit and cried. This evening, to my joy, he is breathing on his own and he took my breast milk through a tube and sucked on a pacifier. With some of the tubes and bandages off him I could take a good look and I know now that he’s really beautiful and distinctive. He has nice small ears and Harry’s purposeful mouth and chin, a long, athletic torso and legs, as if he may become tall. Tonight, I opened the porthole and sang to him and he opened his eyes for the first time and looked me full in the face with intense blue eyes. Then he gave a sweet smile. I go over the last few weeks again and again, remembering how I broke my resolution to slow down and got tense and overtired. I can hardly bear to think what might have happened if he had been born in St. Martin. Or if the hemorrhage had happened when Harry was in DC and I was on my own. As it is, God was watching over me. In the end, to be brought to New York–Presbyterian was the best possible mistake. The neonatal is the best in the city and my obstetrician, whom I met for the first time in the emergency room and whom I would likely never have found on my own, turns out to be the very type of obstetrician I was looking for. I consulted a series of patronizing, inattentive, desultory male doctors. She is, by contrast, strong, practical, commanding, and punctilious. I feel total confidence in her. So although we are not out of the woods yet, I know George Frederick, my little Hanoverian prince, is in good hands.

  What will my baby become? Will he become the joy of my life and mine of his? I like to think of him hanging tough in his container, working up the muscles he needs to pull through. If it had been a girl, I think I would have fallen apart altogether, feeling she was more vulnerable even than he is now.

  Now Harry needs almost as much looking after as Georgie. He is wrecked by the experience, remembering all the pain of the premature son he lost in his first marriage to Enid. Tonight he’s gone back to DC, which is as well, to take his mind off it. I want to enter a new period of calm in which all the energy goes into loving Georgie. The world is upside down. When I opened my eyes on Tuesday morning, I saw the Challenger shuttle explode before our eyes on TV. The crew had become so real to me. I cried and cried.

  Sunday, February 16, 1986

  Home, East Fifty-Sixth Street

  Two weeks or more has passed and my baby is still in the hospital. But he’s graduated to the last room and is in an open bassinet, thank God. We have been through so much anxiety I feel as if life is pallid limbo. I work from home, using the phone from my bed, as stitches in my stomach from the Caesarian are still extremely painful. The editors come over for meetings. But between these visits I don’t think of VF much. I’ve discovered the complete irrelevance of the office. I see the folly of having not checked out of work much sooner. At four thirty every day I go back to the hospital and help the nurses feed G or let the nurses help me. There is now only one important fact in my life, whether or not the scrappy, warm bundle will burp after his bottle, or whether like a snuffling puppy he will prefer to snuggle against my chest, making squeaking noises and failing to get rid of his wind. Motherhood is the only surefire head emptier I have yet encountered. My deep depression in the hospital has given way to manic anxiety mixed with the flutterings of desperate hope. Bradycardia has kept G in the hospital, and episodes of apnea when he horrified us with spells of going dusky blue in my inept arms. Before he moved, he was in a horrible room with sixteen babies to three nurses, glaring lights, banging pedal trash cans, and one nasty militant nurse who poisoned the atmosphere by constantly moaning about how much she hated working in the unit. Night after night, she banged around the poor sleeping babies, waking them up, addressing the fraught backs of their parents in their yellow gowns with her rantings. I wanted to fucking kill her. “I’m sorry, am I in your way?” Mum asked her witheringly when she pushed against the back of her chair. “Yes, you’re in my way,” she replied sulfurously, but there is nothing we can do because all the power to make life difficult is hers. A friend of Marie’s, Barbara Liberman, sent me a premature-baby book and it’s been a huge solace, as well as a revelation that I cannot kid myself about. There could be complications. Eyes and ears are at risk. Problems with motor skills. Developmental delays. I am so lucky he doesn’t have cerebral palsy. He may turn blue again and I have to know what to do. It’s likely, I have to accept, that he may not be 100 percent okay. But I am now just grasping how lucky we are that he’s as good as he is. His weight is now five pounds, and the occasional bradycardia happen
ing with more and more time in between.

  With my neurotic moralizing streak I see what’s happened as a punishment for a surfeit of thoughtless success. So you think you’re going to romp through motherhood, too, huh? Try this on for size! Remember pain and grief and failure? Here’s a refresher course.

  My love for Harry has flowered into a desperate need for him. And he seems to feel the same way. We cling to each other like greedy castaways. I realize how much this baby is an expression of my love for him. And we lie together and cry and cry because we’d so hoped for it to happen in a different way.

  The baby nurse, Juanita, has moved in to await G’s homecoming. She came from the Fox Agency, where I stipulated that I wanted a warm, experienced middle-aged lady, not some posh Brit Norland nanny, or an on-the-make au pair. Mum interviewed her and said she thought she would be right. Very quiet, kind, and efficient Filipina. Able to look after me, too, when Mum goes home and H is in DC. She has to share the room with Georgie. When I started preparing the nursery today I felt glimmers of maternal excitement.

  On Friday Marie Brenner, Jim Hoge’s wife, Sharon, and Shirley Clurman gave a “surprise” shower for me at Mortimer’s on the same date it had always been planned for, except of course, the surprise was the early birth, not the party. They had assembled a great bunch of girlfriends: Annie Leibovitz, Sarah Giles, Ruth and Pam from the office, Adele Guare, Kathleen Tynan, Norris Mailer, and Liz Smith, whom I now adore. Perversely, our dust-up seemed to win her over. Glenn Bernbaum did a long table festooned with chocolate hearts since it was Valentine’s Day, and they all brought the sweetest little romper sets and blankets and quilts. Four of them bought me a glorious crib, which is being delivered tomorrow.

  In fact, with all the flowers arriving and warm messages I am feeling at last the big beating heart of New York City that lies beneath its harsh exterior. There was so much kindness and affection in the room, and it felt personal, not professional for a change. I feel as if childbirth is a secret society. It seemed as if every woman there had a story of something that had gone wrong. The “have it all” propaganda in “woman’s page” journalism has excessively played down the hazards of getting and being pregnant. A story in that, I am sure.

  Georgie is now much better after a day on the new feed, alert when we arrived and deliciously pink. My little snow pig! I put him to my breast for the first time and he flailed around, sucking everything in sight, then took a strong nibble and looked so happy and animated. Then, when there wasn’t enough milk I moved him to his new formula and he glugged all that down and did a huge burp, smacking his chops and gazing happily around. I told him a story of how he’s a Quogue baby, and how all Quogue babies arrive two months early so they can be big in time for summer and be carried out to the Magic Dune. He smiled sagely and drifted off to sleep to the sound of his musical pillow. I love him so much and feel a surge of excitement at the fun he’s going to be; now I can glimpse that jolly little person struggling to emerge.

  Tuesday, February 25, 1986

  Georgie’s coming home tomorrow! I went to the hospital to start getting briefed on it all. There are so many medical issues to attend to, I am glad I have a professional baby nurse. I am a little afraid of his homecoming in case he has a relapse and there are no doctors there to help.

  Harry and I went out to our last dinner as childless parents, or so it felt, with Jane Amsterdam and John Larsen, a pure fun foursome after all the tension. We rolled in at eleven, still laughing and blaspheming about the cast of characters we’d been talking about, when Harry suddenly remembered that Juanita was in the nursery for tomorrow’s baby homecoming. “Shh!!” H said. “Don’t forget you’re a mummy now.”

  Wednesday, March 5, 1986

  Today the pediatrician weighed Georgie in at six pounds, eight ounces. Over a pound in a week! The little champ is pulling through. It’s beautiful and strange having him home. The worst of preemie birth is how it interferes with mother-baby bonding. I feel a kind of unrequited love when I peer into his crib and see his pink, open face. My favorite face of all is his prefeed face, when he works his mouth like a little bird searching for worms. Then, when his bib is tied around his neck he looks about him with an expression of happy anticipation. Pure, guileless trust that makes me want to squeeze him to death. After his feed I rest his sweet, hay-smelling head against my chest and rub his back. Having Juanita to help has been wonderful, she is so professional, but I am now also finding that she saps my confidence as a mother a bit, always better than me at the careful doses of Mylanta he needs at intervals through the day and night. I can’t do nights if I am to continue working from home, but it makes me jealous of their intimacy. After so long in the hospital, will he just think I am another nurse? Since he has fed from a bottle since birth, he and I are now both pretty useless at breastfeeding. I wanted the cozy closeness of breastfeeding. I get the closeness in other ways. I love to hold him on my chest or stomach and let him fall asleep, calmed by my breathing. Juanita says I am setting up trouble for myself, that he will be too hard to deal with when I cuddle him at night, but I am ignoring her. The pediatrician said I must look into his face and talk to him a lot, when I really just want to hold him. I still feel almost shy with him, convinced he doesn’t understand I am his mother.

  Looking at the other babies, I was aghast at their raucous prizefighter faces. In his white wool cardigan and knitted bonnet Georgie was like a Victorian Christmas card. This Friday is his real due date, so his weight is just what it ought to be if he’d come to full term.

  Harry is wonderful with him. He sings him songs from his own past I have never heard before. Childbirth pulls so much from unconscious memory. Like me, he most loves “Happy Face” before he feeds, and “Mournful Face” when he can’t burp.

  Tuesday, March 11, 1986

  I love working from home now, not having to contort myself into a high-heeled hellion. An interview with me in The Sunday Telegraph arrived, written by a smart, beady Oxford journalist, and I was depressed by its depiction of me in my suit and pearls with hair like a “tossed salad” and a “newsreader’s smile.” Ugh. Why do I work so hard and spend so much money to create this wholly fallacious picture of myself? Being at home and out of the insane materialism of the New York social scene has been so refreshing. Tonight is the tenth anniversary of Mortimer’s, and the world and her walker are out knocking back champagne and shrieking their insincerities even as I write, while I have dined alone on a lamb chop and spent the evening trying to find out if Georgie preferred his Humpty-Dumpty mobile or his musical elephant. I feel so happy.

  On Sunday I had a row with Juanita. I can’t stand the way she always, always tells me I am doing something wrong when I am with G. I am a hopeless cook and a hopeless housewife, but it really hurts me to have her constantly implying I am incompetent as a mother, too. Her role is to help me be one, not compete with me for Georgie’s approval. I now want to kill her every time I hear her playing his musical elephant, which has been our special toy. I told her to back off and she then went and cried for two hours in the bathroom. Then I heard her listening to tapes of the last baby she worked with screaming and babbling, probably as some kind of consolation, but it also felt weird and creepy. I think I need someone less invasive, but don’t want in any way to disrupt G.

  Doug Johnston came over for an office update. It jostled my bliss. The June ads now coming in are six pages fewer than last year, largely, I suspect, because some of his sales staff are dropping the ball. He’s bizarrely unconcerned for some reason, telling me he has “two years to turn it around.” Why on earth does he believe that? “Doug,” I said, “Richard Locke was told he had two years. So were Joe Corr, David O’Brasky, and Leo Lerman. Don’t you think that’s an unwise assumption?” Anyone who trusts Si to be patient is crazy.

  Wednesday April 9, 1986

  The world is gearing up for Arianna Stassinopoulos’s wedding next week to Michael Huffington, a Texas oil guy. The bridesmaids are Barbara Walter
s, Lucky Roosevelt, and Ann Getty. Mort Zuckerman is an usher. It’s a writer’s field day. Jackie Rogers is making me a skinny black top and long white skirt.

  Georgie is increasingly delicious. He is now doing strenuous push-ups in his crib. Harry’s Elgar trick is his best pacifier. G’s round eyes go even rounder, his breathing becomes concentrated, his face assumes a rapt look as Harry waltzes him around the room in his snuggly to The Enigma Variations. So far there are no more signs of problems from the early birth, God bless him.

  Sunday, April 13, 1986

  Arianna’s wedding [on Saturday, April 12] was a diary classic. The whole world seemed to have assembled at St. Bart’s Church as if for a royal occasion. The bride and groom were preceded down the aisle by a sound boom (which Harry at first thought was a cross) held aloft by a prancing sound man. Arianna herself looked amazing, a cross between Callas and Queen Alexandra. Galanos had made her a skintight, high-throated white lace gown with a coronet of orchids, and her hair was scraped back to reveal the regal nose. She was anorexically slim. To get to this size she must have lived on nothing but communion wafers for a month. The groom is a mystery really. A tall glass of water with a weak smile.