by Tina Brown
Since the service preceded Ann Getty’s dinner dance, all the guests were dressed to the nines, each row bursting with taffeta and silk. Aileen Mehle was in her Belle Watling getup of two thousand bows on her head and a giant skirt. The starlet Leigh Taylor-Young was wearing a flouncing salmon tulle ball gown. Reinaldo Herrera, after saying for weeks that he refused to wear a dinner jacket because it made him feel he was in Prizzi’s Honor, gave in and wore one but watched with heavy consternation as the service swerved from High Church to Greek Orthodox, with crowns held aloft over the bride and groom. “What will the psalms be in? Aztec?” muttered Henry Kissinger. Zuckerman trudged up and down the aisle, cracking gags as he performed his usher duties. “I’m available for bar mitzvahs, too,” he hissed at Howard Kaminsky, the Random House publisher and CEO. The tiny figure of Arianna’s old flame from London, the Times columnist Bernard Levin, ambled by, flanked by two taffeta amazons, one of whom was Princess Michael of Kent. Anne Getty looked shapely and unconstrained in a yellow silk dress that looked good with her cloud of abundant titian hair. Barbara Walters carried off her unfortunate lavender bridesmaid dress extremely well. Afterward, a total of nearly eight hundred went on to the reception at the Metropolitan Club. There was a big posse of predinner floaters who seemed not to have seats. Most of these were Arianna’s old friends. The receiving line went on till ten p.m. Harry caught sight of Anna Murdoch, who fled across the room. Rupert was more poised. He broke out of a group he was in and bounded over to greet Harry. They conversed cordially about the state of Fleet Street and the triumph of Rupert breaking the print unions at Times newspapers with his new printing plant at Wapping, a feat Harry genuinely admires and almost forgives the rest of it for. It’s ironic. The union strikes that killed so many brilliant editions of The Sunday Times were the misery that made the Thomson family sell to Rupert in the first place. Perhaps it needed his brutal expediency to end the impasse. [The carnivore liberating the herbivores, as Murdoch later put it.]
At dinner I was at a great table, between Henry Kissinger and William Safire, along with Barbara Walters, Dick Snyder, Lally Weymouth, George Weidenfeld, and Princess Michael. George Weidenfeld spent much of the evening in plump reverie, puffing on his inevitable cigar. I’d love to have got inside his head. He has long been Arianna’s sponsor from the days in London when she and I, as girl-about-town graduates from Cambridge and Oxford, respectively, used to go to his wonderful publishing salons on Cheyne Walk. As a combination of sophisticated cosmopolitan intellect and émigré Viennese huckster, he’s always been a champion of unconventional upward mobility, especially when allied to a beautiful girl. It was his genius idea to have Arianna play the Greek card and write her biography of Callas in 1980 (which Harry extracted on the front page of the Sunday Times Review section, launching her author career). At the wedding he must have been thinking, Look how we’ve pulled it off. Only three years ago Arianna, looking for new horizons, was working the party circuit in New York and George was about to go broke at Weidenfeld and Nicolson. But their two-pronged seduction of Ann Getty means that both he and Arianna have landed in a giant pot of honey; he’s wooed Ann into underwriting his publishing company and become her business partner, and Arianna has an influential new best friend and a new husband oozing with money from Texan oil.
George’s speech was an encomium to Arianna, slightly marred by its strong commercial thrust promoting her forthcoming book on Picasso. Arianna herself gave longest and most profuse thanks to Ann Getty. At one point, according to Marie, Mrs. Huffington was seen pounding down the street away from the Metropolitan Club pursued by a solicitous Mrs. Stassinopoulos, who, after much gesticulating, persuaded her to return to the wedding party. Mrs. Huffington’s umbrage could have been on any number of counts—the placing, the toasts, the cameras. In the receiving line, Arianna broke away to give love to Charlotte Curtis, which will ensure good coverage in The New York Times.
Wednesday, April 23, 1986
Getting to know Pace Gallery’s Arnold Glimcher has yielded dividends. He has acquired a great art scoop (now ours) with the sketchbooks of Picasso, after years of courting the heirs. There are 175 in all, some owned by Paloma, some in private hands. When I expressed instant interest in publishing extracts, he asked me up to the Pace Gallery to view them. I found turning the pages strangely moving and exciting. Their very irregularity of size and shape reflects the inspiration of the moment. My particular fave is number sixty-six, a pocket-sized red moiré volume brought from the Biarritz branch of Mappin and Webb on Picasso’s honeymoon with Olga in 1918. It holds seventeen different studies of her in Cubist undress. In great Alex tradition I am going to give it a twenty-two-page run. And of course have the very best VF writer to go with it in John Richardson, who knew Picasso and has so much knowledge. I found all this especially thrilling because the original VF was one of the first to publish Picasso in America. In a last inspired bit of chance I asked Alex if he had a great Picasso photograph to open and of course he does, from his book, the wondrous Artist in His Studio.
With this as the cultural capstone, the May issue is strong. Cher is on the cover in a great Annie close-up with her hands pressed to the steeple of her long face. Ian Jack’s done a rich profile of Benazir Bhutto, who may be poised to be the leader of Pakistan (incredible to me when I think of how I used to see her hanging around the Oxford Union).
I lunched with John Richardson, who, unsurprisingly, was in full cry about Arianna’s wedding. Michael Huffington, he insisted, is gay and also a born-again Christian—twice. “It’s bad enough to be a born-again Christian once, but twice is too much,” he said. “I dread to think what happened in between.”
Georgie Porgie has caught a cold and every snuffle is like an arrow piercing. I worry so much about his health. We took him to Quogue for the first time last weekend. The alterations are wonderful! A huge farmhouse kitchen replaces the pokey two rooms that existed there before. Georgie’s nursery isn’t ready yet, so I put his crib in my study in front of the window looking out on the dunes, and it was so joyful to see him trying to stand up and look out. Harry sang to him all the way down in the car, to comfort him. I want more babies! Tons of them! A girl called Daisy and yet more!
Friday, April 25, 1986
Today when I woke up at seven I found myself between sleep and waking, thinking about Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, and the irony of her fate, her lifetime of trapped penance for winning the man she loved at the expense of his abdication from the throne. I turned on the TV and a newsflash came up that she has just died. So bizarre. Harry is always saying I am psychic and perhaps I am, because a month ago I reached out to Wallis’s great friend Aline, the Countess of Romanones, whom Reinaldo brought to us, to tee up a piece about the duchess’s last days. Fortuitously it’s just about ready now to crash into the closing June issue with a cover flash. The piece is full of insider details. To me the most telling is the story about the duchess’s sense of being snubbed by the royals yet again, just before the funeral of the Duke of Windsor. Wallis offered the Queen the use of her hairdresser, Alexandre from Paris, and was rejected. The duchess, after all these years, clearly didn’t have a clue. She had no idea how deeply inappropriate such an offer would seem. The Queen would no more want Alexandre to pouf up her changeless, immobile shampoo-and-set than she would consider going to the Palladium with Steve Rubell for a nightcap.
Saturday, April 26, 1986
Park Avenue mores up close—some tips. To convey the precious bonds of friendship: when Reinaldo complains he has a bad back, two aspirins in an envelope dropped off at his town house by Pat Buckley’s driver with a copy of Anita Brookner’s new novel.
To note with regret a friend’s absence from a house party—a half-eaten cake for Mortimer’s owner, Glenn Bernbaum, delivered by Bill Blass’s driver with a note. “We missed you this weekend, here’s your piece. Enjoy.”
Oscar de la Renta is an expert at these small, personal obeisances. So is Jerry Zipkin, of course
. His thank-you presents are a legend of personal curation and inventiveness. A bunch of flowers after a weekend in the country sent by your secretary is not going to pass muster. Everything has to be strenuously personal, or, in the case of Pat Buckley, colorfully offbeat. Jayne Wrightsman, apparently, gave the Kissingers a tractor for Christmas for their house in Connecticut. She also buys four sets of Bulgari earrings at twenty-five thousand dollars a throw for each of her girlfriends. But few are in this league. Oscar, I am sure, is brilliant at not spending a bean. His are all tokens of high-concept creativity whipped up by his design staff.
Unlike everyone else, I really don’t feel charmed by Oscar. Today he came on the phone and yelled at me because of Bob Colacello’s great piece on John Fairchild and his sway over “society” in Women’s Wear Daily and W. Bob wrote that Oscar leaked everything to Women’s Wear to buy himself immunity from bad press. He got this direct from John Fairchild. Oscar, it seems, thought he was going to get special protection in Vanity Fair because he’s such a close friend of Alex. “I am totally furious,” he fumed at me. “I am such a friend of Condé Nast, and I have been treated like dirt. All my friends are calling me to say this piece is totally derogatory.” (Glad they are all reading it.) “On top of which you say that Geoffrey Beene has a turnover of a hundred and seventy-five million and mine is twenty million, which frankly makes you ridiculous. I have nothing against Geoffrey Beene. He is a talented designer. It’s just that his business is not twenty times bigger than mine! Mine is twenty times bigger than his. With my fragrance I am four hundred million! Everyone knows I am bigger than Beene!”
“Look, Oscar,” I said, “if we have printed an incorrect figure, I would very much like to run a correction once we have checked it out. If we have been inaccurate, I can rush the correction into the July issue.”
“What is the point?” he fumed again. (Artfully. He’s not about to give me real figures to print.) “I am telling you, I would be calling Alex but he’s left for Connecticut. And I tell you something else. When I see that cheap little nobody Bob Colacello he better get out of my path because I will knock him down.”
I had a sudden memory frisson at this moment of my first meeting with Oscar four years ago in a freezing New York December when I was editor of Tatler. My mission, of course, was to try to get his advertising. Over lunch I could see Oscar sensed my need, and his amber eyes seemed to slant with cruelty as he deliberately withheld the favor. He has not perceived me as important enough, figuring he has Alex above me all sewn up. At the Saks lunch, I also learned that he is one of the only designers who refuses to let Saks advertise him in VF. (Why would he do that? Some umbrage whose cause is mysterious. Loyalty to Leo? Seems unlikely.) Now he just discovered that in the case of VF, Alex, in fact, does not call the shots.
“You know, Oscar,” I said, “all this grieves me very much because I have always been very friendly toward you. In fact, only this week I killed a photograph of you with Annette Reed at a house party of Ahmet Ertegun that might have embarrassed you. And yet, I never hear from you. Ever since I have been in New York, you have never called me once.” I also reminded him he’s never advertised, and therefore has no leverage. He saw the blunder instantly. “You know, you are totally right,” he said.
“Tina, I like you so much and you know I am always telling Alex what a brilliant thing he did bringing you from England. Somehow, the months flew by, my private life in total disarray…”
Now that I’ve got the conniving bastard where I want him, I am taking him to lunch May twenty-eighth to nail his business. I even followed the fine art of Park Avenue friendship and sent him over a copy of the sketchbooks of Picasso with a florid note inside. This was one of the more enjoyable power plays in NYC. Meanwhile, “I am bigger than Beene!” has become a new office catchphrase to replace “Styled by Shiva Fruitman.”
Sunday, April 27, 1986
The Countess of Romanones called from Acapulco and said she had only just heard about the Duchess of Windsor’s death. She is supposed to escort the duchess’s body to Frogmore—on the grounds near Windsor Castle—on Tuesday. “I can’t get through to the Lord Chamberlain from here, or British Airways,” she said, implausibly. “Can you please send him a telex that I am on my way, and make me a reservation on the Concorde on Tuesday? I would be so terribly grateful. Also, if you wouldn’t mind, can you ask Carolina Herrera if I could borrow a good black outfit for the funeral? Mine has white buttons, which might be all right—it wouldn’t be in Spain, so I am not sure. I’ve got a black straw hat. You can tell Carolina, of course, that I’ll mention that it’s her dress at every appropriate moment.” (I wonder which moments that would be. At the burial site?) When I transferred her over to Sarah Giles to deal with the blather, it became clear why the countess wanted us to do the bookings. She also expected us to pay! I guess the phone line to BA became cloudy when they asked for Aileen’s Amex number. It was a typical response, somehow, from a friend of the Duchess of Windsor. The world’s greatest clotheshorse and freeloader would have understood a dress borrowed from a designer and an air ticket scored from Condé Nast. In fairness, the duchess’s estate had made no arrangements for how the round-trip would be paid, and Buckingham Palace is not exactly famous for picking up bills, especially when it came to Wallis. Still, it seemed shabby not to do so. And made the duchess’s lonely end even more poignant. Is there anyone left who is not hustling? Georgie Frederick Evans, to whom I addressed this question, gave one of his extremely skeptical, nose-wrinkling smiles.
Wednesday, May 7, 1986
Robert Hughes was in noisy form about Arianna’s wedding press. “It’s frightening to think of George Weidenfeld fashioning this broad-shouldered Excocet beauty and aiming her at the bowels of Manhattan,” he roared over lunch at the Four Seasons. He talked about the new book he’s writing on the history of Australia called The Fatal Shore and asked me how I feel Americans see Australia. I said they see it as a more uncouth Texas. “It’s so unlike Texas,” Bob said. “The optimistic view of space that America has is completely untrue of Australia. Here, people feel the further west you went, the freer you were. In Australia, the further west you went, the deadlier it was. Space didn’t mean freedom. It meant huge, invisible prison walls that separated you more from England. The distances in Australia are so … discouraging. But what I do still love about the place is the absence of euphemism. They’ve remained impervious to psychobabble and bullshit and jargon in a way I still find deeply refreshing. The concept of public relations is still comparatively new.” It was so good to talk to Bob after two days of Fashion Week.
Ralph Lauren’s show this morning was all about the marketing of a WASP daydream, an unabashed homage to Savile Row. He is a genius, I have decided, especially when you see him come out to take his bow, a small work fanatic from the Bronx, born Ralph Lifshitz, who made his way up from the tie counter at Brooks Brothers, driven by his fantasy of American blondness. And the blondes on his runway were amazing indeed—tousled Amazons in tweeds, all-American Sloane Rangers with a Hollywood gloss, snarling haughtily in their towering heels. The crowd was a clashing babble of the best people. Moving through it, inexorably, were the only people who really matter—the sober, taciturn figures of the men from Saks and the other stores, rotating from show to show with expressionless faces, looking out for the dress that will move units.
I have come to love this frivolous week in spring when creativity and commerce come together. In fact, I realize more and more, I love New York City, period. London seems to get smaller and smaller to me, as if it had swallowed Alice’s “Eat-me” cake. I am beginning to feel that the vision of England I want to return to is increasingly the American vision. And I can create the best of both places here. Maybe Ralph Lauren is shrewder than he even knows. And what does my darling Georgie say to this? I will go wherever he wants and thrives! Today I bought him a wonderful feather duster to tickle his tummy on the changing table.
Sunday, May 18, 1986
&
nbsp; Quogue
I am sitting in my brand-new den in front of the big window looking out on the dune. To enhance this working paradise I ordered a fabulous pine desk I saw at Marie Brenner’s house from a warehouse in New Orleans. It’s a six-and-a-half-feet-wide kitchen table with drawers, so I can spread right across instead of never having anywhere to put my overflow papers. In my extravagant way, I ordered two, one for here and one for New York, and they arrived in an enormous truck (like those days as a child when I kept ordering things from mail-order catalogs that showed up in huge containers at Little Marlowe, to Mum and Dad’s consternation).
This afternoon when I crept in to look at G napping, he looked so beautiful and happy it made me cry. The quality of his childhood sleep reminded me of my own. In my best memories of then, it was always summer nights like this. My favorite time was the dusk of seven o’clock, when I’d run about the lawn with Christopher, barefoot. Walking along the Quogue shore and seeing the two-year-olds with their buckets and spades made me proud and excited about Georgie’s own happy life to come. But also anxious, anxious for him to turn out to be okay after all he’s been through. The pediatrician says he is slow to lift his head from the crib and we are taking him to physical therapy. Harry sings him special songs and talks to him long and seriously, which he loves. I wish I could put the clock back to six months before his birth and change the outcome. I wish I knew if he will be all right.
Monday, May 19, 1986
I had a drink with Warren Beatty at the Ritz-Carlton. It was set up by Caroline Graham. She seems to know everybody, either through her school connections, her Kay Graham daughter-in-law connections, or her hot girl with David Frost in the seventies connections. She told me Warren was curious about me. I’ve never tried to meet him before, but now we’re anxious to get a cover done for his new movie, Ishtar. The joy of being so far ahead on covers is that it gives us time to chase and negotiate.
