The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  It’s been a heavy lift to edit. Alex is one of those writers who needs to have it pulled from him in what he calls a “vomit draft.” Once something’s on the page, Sharon starts to shape it and it goes back and forth between us three. She often works all night and on the way home runs into Si arriving at four in the morning. Sharon’s taste in writers is so good, it excuses all the tyrannical mayhem she introduces into the closing process. And her rigor is taking us to a new intellectual level. While Wayne is better at sentence polishing, Sharon is particularly good at structure, and when something is missing from a story’s content, she—having been trained by Bob Silvers at The New York Review—obsessively researches new material to drop in. She got Alex to expand his purely naturalist bent to delve into why Fossey traveled so far to live on the edge, how from the days of her lonely childhood she seems to have disliked people as much as she loved animals, and how her rancor toward the poachers was actually deeper than her passion for conservation.

  Shoumatoff is a new kind of writer for us and I am going to make him a contributing ed, listed on the masthead. We need more far-flung narratives, more exploration of topics like the environment, more windows into other cultures. The mag is now surpassing itself each month. It’s like a living thing, competing with itself, straining its own boundaries.

  Saturday, July 19, 1986

  Quogue

  Georgie’s christening was a crazy delight, even though the turf went down literally the night before and we had three solid days of hammering, drilling, and frantic trucks back and forth. Not appreciated by Mum and Dad, whom I had brought out for a quiet rest after the jet lag, or by Georgie for that matter, who was cranky anyway after his TB jab. But it’s all worth it! The new wooden floor on the porch, the lawn leading down to the pool—it looks fantastic!

  The morning of the christening there was another sudden summer storm, which played havoc with the little tables all set up on the porch. It suddenly looked like the deck of the Titanic, lashed with wind and rain. The four-piece band that was supposed to play on the new brick terrace had to be relocated to the dry bit of the porch, a parking lot devised in all the mud. By the time we staggered off to the charming colonial Church of the Ascension with G swathed in his very royal-looking long christening robe, I was fit to be sedated. But sometimes a spontaneous disaster makes an occasion more memorable and that’s what happened. And since it always rains in England for every outdoor event, it felt poignantly like home.

  The Quogue church is 150 years old, shingled and white-fenced and nestled in trees. In the rain it was woody-dark and damp and wonderful smelling. A car from New York disgorged Julie Kavanagh, Sarah Giles, Chris Garrett, and Bob and Victoria Hughes. Then came Dominick Dunne and Harry’s DC friend, the young historian Michael Beschloss. Already in the church were the Clurmans, Miles, Marie, the Victors, the Janklows, the Hoges. The vicar, the Reverend Busler, was all-American and cheery; the service raced along with our chosen very British hymns—“Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” “To Be a Pilgrim.” I held G, who was rapt throughout. Harry took him for the christening. G adores singing and being where the action is; he didn’t cry once. After the rector had baptized him, Harry held him aloft and took him for a walk around the church to reintroduce him to the congregation. Then we all sloshed back to the house. The band bashed out thirties tunes, the champagne flowed, the balloons bobbed, the children ran about the house, and more guests started to arrive who hadn’t got to the ceremony in the weather. With the wind and rain whipping around outside, it really was just like being on a boat.

  When everyone had gone, Mum and I had some much needed mother-daughter time and walked to the beach barefoot in the rain, returning with frizzy hair and backaches but very happy. She has brought G a brilliant new toy he adores, a small plastic octopus with huge eyes (Mum says it looks just like him) and a squeaker. His new fave game is Mum holding it in front of him and then making it leap into the air as she chants, “Oh where, oh where is Octopi? He’s in the sky! Oh where, oh where is Octo-pus! He’s on a bus!” At this G bursts into a loud spontaneous gust of laughter. Life could not be more wonderful than now.

  Sunday, July 20, 1986

  I am in love with our August issue, starting with Herb Ritts’s ultracool cover portrait of Jack Nicholson in a lemon shirt, pushing up his dark glasses, and a great Schiff piece to go with it. Then we have the knockout Imelda story by Nick Dunne, Gregor von Rezzori’s Humbert journey, P. J. O’Rourke on my old taxi friend Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and John Richardson on Cecil Beaton’s memorial service and what he meant as a society photographer. I defy anyone to produce a better combination of writers and subject matter. It’s A-plus and I am madly proud.

  Wednesday July 23, 1986

  London, InterContinental hotel

  Am in London to cover Prince Andrew and Fergie’s wedding for the Today show. I was on with Di’s brother, Viscount Althorp, who has a pretty, sly face, a bit like Diana in drag.

  I did my segment on the fearsome Fergie, who represents the Dunkirk spirit to such a degree that she has been able to triumph over her naughty-knickers past. England, it seems, has turned itself into a giant theme park. The wedding coverage of Andrew and Sarah Ferguson is markedly more showbiz than it was for Diana five years ago. Now the images of beefeaters and ye olde taverns are slapped on every artifact, and on the air I almost get the sense that it’s irrelevant if what I say is fact or fiction.

  Saw Bron Waugh for lunch and he was oddly difficult. Then in the taxi he grabbed my hand and kissed my hair and got very emotional. I think he feels he has lost me now to America and kept talking about how London must seem to me “an inconsequential village.” It’s amazing to think that it’s only thirteen years since I was the English lit student at Oxford he sponsored and mentored and fell in love with. He’s changed very little, but I feel that his sense of his own limitations (and his awful marriage to the dread Theresa) are more oppressive than before. He is such a talent, such a voice, but so locked in his idea of what a Waugh should be. My picture of Georgie made him look so miserable that I put it quickly away.

  The wedding was beautiful and flawless. The palace always manages to pull it off. The royal family are so much better dressed than they used to be. Not wishing to be outshone by Diana, they’ve all smartened up their act. Ironically, it was only Diana who didn’t look so good. Maybe she’s pregnant. Or more likely this wedding brought back memories of her own at St. Paul’s and that made her sad because it’s all been such a bitter disappointment. I don’t believe the jealousy theory that’s started to get traction. In fact, I think Fergie’s presence in the royal family makes Diana feel less lonely. (I hear she said to the ballet dancer Wayne Sleep, “Fergie lightens the load.”) Fergie is the perfect visual foil to Diana—the buxom figure, the hit-or-miss wardrobe, the exploding hair. If Diana wants to upstage Fergie, it’s very easy to do so just by turning up at Ascot in a head-turning new outfit.

  Susan Barrantes, Fergie’s mum, was (as predicted by VF) the star of the show, looking ravishingly elegant. Like Diana’s mother, she left home when Fergie was an overweight thirteen to go and live with her lover, the Argentinian polo player Hector Barrantes, on the other side of the world. That’s another thing the two royal wives have in common—breathtakingly selfish mothers. Fergie, like Diana, was left to her own devices but without the Spencer grandeur, relegated to the care of neglectful housekeepers and tepid, low-caliber boarding schools in the shires.

  One thing that has always fascinated me about upper-class Englishwomen is how, when required, they can effortlessly make the transition from dowdy old-shoe to staggering elegance. They are Cinderella artists, going from drab hair, shrunken cardigan, and beat-up brogues to tight, shining chignons, well-placed diamonds, and long racehorse legs. Even the Queen looked a treat in delphinium blue, and Princess Anne in vibrant yellow.

  Fergie and Andrew were on TV last night. She, I predict, will fast get out of control and talk too mu
ch and lose the plot. And blonde sphinx Diana, currently her best friend, will become icy and have to remind her who’s the star.

  My cultural transplant to America has begun to take and I’m turned off by much about England now. I get an unsettling sense of malevolent claustrophobia, of a society obsessed with self-denigration. (How long will the Fergie honeymoon last? Not long before the trashing starts, I suspect.) On the subway it feels so weirdly homogenous, everyone white unlike in polyglot New York. I feel England is decadent, insular, with the tabloid press a baying pack tearing itself and everyone else apart. But then at Sally Emerson’s lovely house in North London I wandered with her on Highbury Fields and felt a whiff of longing to come home. It’s wonderful how our friendship survives. I miss her spiritual wisdom in NYC.

  Monday, July 28, 1986

  NYC

  Today there was a fairly ludicrous scene with Si, Doug Johnston, and the circulation director, Peter Armour. Doug hates the new VF TV commercial, which makes us look too cheap but happens to be working. I don’t much like it either, but don’t feel quite as exercised about it as Doug does, because I am increasingly browbeaten by how crass things have to be here to reach any kind of scale. Anyway, Si kept saying, “But it’s working, Doug. I tried a classy commercial for Gourmet that actually described what the magazine did, as you want to do, and it bombed. Now we have to go back to what the audience likes—shots of big ice-cream desserts and people looking happy doing the dishes afterward.” He started to giggle, which Doug didn’t seem to notice as he suggested shots of readers calling each other up and saying, “Have YOU read Vanity Fair this month?” Sensing Si’s boredom with this conversation, I said, probably unhelpfully but also with rising mirth, “Or maybe we could see a lot of museum directors calling each other up saying, “Have you read this month’s culturally stimulating issue of Vanity Fair?” Si laughed so much he started to splutter. I felt treacherous to have said it.

  Sometimes, though, Si can be very hard to get through to. He gets idées fixes and then is so hard to dissuade. Though he actually has very refined sensibilities himself, he bristles if he thinks you are appealing to them. He wants to be seen as a tough, crass businessman like his father, so the only way to win a point, I find, is to make those refined instincts of his think what they are hearing is a very pragmatic and commercial idea. It’s a hard dance.

  Monday, August 11, 1986

  Excited about a half-edited piece by Barbara Goldsmith, who wrote the bestseller about Gloria Vanderbilt, Little Gloria … Happy at Last. It’s about the rancorous probate battle between the children of J. Seward Johnson of Johnson & Johnson fame and his widow, Basia, a former Polish maid who moved in with the horrible Seward and wound up with a fortune of $350 million outright.

  I have been coaxing along this delicious rags-to-riches melodrama for months. Barbara Goldsmith is high maintenance. But she has both great access and a doggedness about breaking down doors. In a stunning interview with J. Seward’s daughter, Mary Lea, Barbara learned she had been sexually abused by her father between the ages of nine and fifteen! By the end of her account we have learned not only that Seward was the great villain of this story, but also how he got that way. It turns the press’s received gold-digger wisdom on its head and you can’t help but cheer for Basia, who got the money. I am going to run it in two parts to give it room to breathe and have taken the risk of putting Basia’s picture by Harry Benson on the cover. She sits coiffed and bejeweled under the headline “Dark Inheritance.” Miles and I hammed up the cover lines: “A Widow’s Spoils. A Father’s Sins. The Children’s Curse. Barbara Goldsmith investigates the Johnson & Johnson secrets and finds a billion dollars’ worth of pain.” Try not reading that, newsstand browsers!

  Tuesday, August 12, 1986

  Just got in from seeing Pam McCarthy’s baby, Win. What a doll! It’s wonderful how she and I have this new maternal complicity. The magazine has been so central to our life and partnership, but now we also have this tacit understanding that as mothers, too, we will have each other’s back. Harry’s had enough of US News and World Report. My forebodings about Mort’s volatility were right. He is wound up by the last person who speaks to him and gives mixed messages that create havoc with staff. I’d love to know what happened in his childhood to make him so untrusting. It’s as if he only feels secure when everyone else around him isn’t. For the sake of their friendship it’s better if Harry doesn’t work for him.

  Now Si, in his mysterious and abrupt way, solved the problem by asking Harry to create a new travel magazine for Condé Nast! At first we both thought, travel? Harry, the consummate news guy? But then we both realized that news can be applied to any topic, even travel, and doing it brings him back to New York with us, which is a reason right there to say yes. Now, with all that’s happened with Georgie, we just want to be together. I need him here with me so much.

  Saturday, August 16, 1986

  Reinaldo Herrera just called from Caracas. “Fearless Leader”—his new nickname for me—“I have got you Salvador Dalí!” For months since John Richardson planted it I’ve had Reinaldo negotiating with friends in the Spanish art world to get us an interview with Dalí at his home in Figueres, the Catalan town where he was born and has now returned to die. It’s such a scoop. Dalí hasn’t really been seen since he set fire to his bedroom in the castle at Púbol. Most people have assumed him to be senile or comatose.

  Helmut Newton has now got the pictures and is thrilled beyond measure with the results, which I won’t see till next week. I told Reinaldo to start working to get Marie in to see Michele Duvalier, Baby Doc’s wife. When it comes to art legends and kleptocrats, Reinaldo is really paying off in spades.

  On Wednesday Sharon, Ruth, Jane, Charles, and I tramped off for a screening of Sid and Nancy, the movie about Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen’s murder-suicide, to see if they belonged in this year’s Hall of Fame portfolio. It was hateful but brilliant. My instinct is to hold off and do Gary Oldman, who plays Sid, till March when he’s cast as Joe Orton. I spent the weekend reading the Orton diaries, brilliantly edited by John Lahr. They’re extraordinary, and through all the pre-AIDS promiscuity Orton’s voice comes across as hard, cold, spare, honest, and so blackly funny that I laughed out loud. I found the lover Kenneth Halliwell’s appearances so profoundly touching. One can hear his cries for help in the diaries getting louder and more desperate, offstage as it were. The brutality of the sex, knowing as we do it will end in Orton’s murder, is chilling.

  Monday, August 18, 1986

  Bob Calacello told me Jonathan Lieberson has AIDS. I am extremely upset by this. Even though I have never liked him, I recognize his originality, his wit, his subversive energy. In conversation he always seemed antigay, which was confusing because I often suspected he was in the closet. I assumed if so he just had the odd affair, but now John Richardson tells me Jonathan used to hang out in hustler bars. It seemed painful and demeaning somehow for this cultured, refined man to have to go to these lengths to have a secret gay life. Now he’s shut up in his mother’s home in Connecticut, dying.

  It’s a plague, seeping through creative people. Way Bandy, the makeup artist we often used at VF shoots, died yesterday. I think of this lighthearted, truly talented, amiably gaudy individual, his love of celebrities, his dedication to making them look beautiful, and it’s so sad he should have died so horribly, so young. I pray that Miles will be all right, and oh so many others we love and work with. It’s not just the talents we are losing, but the people who enable and appreciate their gifts. Decoding the Times obituaries for cause of death has become a somber breakfast acrostic.

  Tuesday, August 26, 1986

  Scarcely has one’s social nerves settled down after the Allegra Mostyn Owen–Boris Johnson ambush when I receive by Federal Express a postcard from Sally Quinn, disinviting me from Ben Bradlee’s birthday party in East Hampton on Saturday because of Christopher Buckley’s book review in the August Vanity Fair, describing her new novel Regrets Only as
“cliterature.” I have to say when I assigned this piece I did not regard it as an act of war, which she seemed to consider it to be (I just saw Chris as a great social eye), nor did I think the piece itself was a hatchet job. But that may be a cultural disconnect, because in England we are so much more iconoclastic in book reviews.

  And even if I did, I couldn’t have held it out of the magazine because of my friendship with her, or I would have no editorial credibility with writers. It’s the downside of being an editor. Perhaps if I had seen it as negatively as she did, I would have taken the precaution of preparing her for it, but she’s such a sharpshooter journalist herself, it didn’t occur to me she would take it this way. That was clearly a mistake on my part. Anyway, she is wild with fury, apparently. I hope we can patch it up.

  I fear the next flak attack is Bob Colacello’s piece in the new issue about John-Roger, the new-age guru Arianna seems to have some weird partnership with. It’s pretty hairy when the best stories right now are attached to a group I also socialize with. Perhaps I shouldn’t. Bob Hughes just called and said the piece was a “major service to bullshit reduction.” Wrestling with all this when Jim Wolcott announced that the next column he has just finished is about Gloria Steinem. Holy moly. All we need to add to my troubles is hatchet jobs of Barbara Walters and Lally Weymouth and I will have a full complement of furies lined up against me. Time to focus on captains of business or icons of archaeology (as long as none are Iris Love).

  In nanny hell today, as a temp standing in for Juanita on vacation got another job, so I had to work from home when Georgie napped, and then when she came back I had to go in and process the whole November issue in one demonic day. I hurled pieces in and out, cut them or expanded them to the length they deserved, and reshaped the lackluster Vanities pages. Helmut’s Salvador Dalí pics are sensational and outrageous and going to blow us out of the water with accusations of bad taste. He photographed Dalí posed in eye-rolling outrage, with the oxygen tube dangling out of his nose over his iconic mustache, and dressed in a flowing white satin robe, which Dalí had designed himself for the occasion. It’s a great visual scoop. “One must never conceal the truth,” Dalí told Helmut, wanting the world to see him as he is now, so diminished. John Richardson came in to write extended captions, which are therefore superb.