The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  Sarah Giles just called from France to say just when she and Marie had given up waiting and were packing their bags, Michele Duvalier’s emissary showed up at the hotel! Another scoop in the bag for the Holiday issue of Vanity Fair.

  Saturday, September 27, 1986

  Still sick and didn’t go to the fancy wedding of John Fairchild’s daughter. Instead, G and I danced solemnly together to Whitney Houston on the radio, as I inhaled the milk-and-honey sweetness of his hair. When I was feeding him Marie phoned, back from the Duvalier scoop. G lay across my lap and looked at me with a deep, peaceful sweetness as I absorbed her news. Jerry Zipkin called to give me the download on the Fairchild wedding and left a message on my service. “You chose the wrong night to be ill.” I had a brief fear-of-missing-out pang. Should I have forced myself into the high heels and gone?

  I bought a huge quilt in Westhampton and am currently snuggled under it in my den in Quogue, listening uncharacteristically to Mozart’s horn concerto, G asleep next door. The green check curtains I had made in a whirlwind of activity to distract me after G was born are hung, the central heating is on, a steaming cup of tea next to the bed, with Chips Channon’s diary from 1939 to dip into. The New York carnival seems very far away. Together Harry and I throw out so much energy we sometimes wear each other out as well as everyone else. The thought of the city gives me herpes of the brain. The hairdressing! The breakneck showers. The seething limo rides! The shouting over noisy restaurants! The ceaseless clamor of thirsty egos! The umbrage and dudgeon and fencing and foiling. And yet I know that if I left all I’d want is to get it back.

  Thursday, October 9, 1986

  Took Harry to Alice Mason’s, where he has never been, and it was fun to see it again this time through his eyes. He was fascinated by so many finger-jabbing takeover guys and their striving trophy wives under one roof. I had never noticed how bad the food was before—potted shrimps followed by a platter of German sausages and sauerkraut followed by a sherbet swan laced with Cointreau and topped off with Irish coffee. Horrendous. I was at Alice’s table between Abe Rosenthal and NBC’s Thornton Bradshaw. Then there was a babel of foreigners—a Mexican ambassador, a bejeweled brunette whose father, she said, founded Lebanon, some frenetic Italian, I guess all real estate prospects for Alice. The tables all packed in so close, the noise incredible with the hyperactive publisher of Avenue, Judy Price, screaming into the small ears of Leonard Stern, who recently bought The Village Voice, all watched by an enigmatic Philip Johnson and eye-rolling Linda Janklow. Through this tumult, like a parody of the Marietta Tree–era hostess who actually knew how to deftly promote general conversation, came the urgent scream of Alice herself:

  “Abe! Come on! You know about current affairs! Get some general conversation going. Let’s not talk to one another, Abe, let’s make it general!” And Abe, with his rueful, cynical look, would cup his hand over his ears and howl, “I can’t, Alice! The noise! The noise!” Defeated by the effort to wrangle a common-denominator topic, guests began to talk to themselves. Abe talked about his love for Shirley Lord, for whom he is getting divorced, Thornton Bradshaw ground on about NBC ratings, the Lebanese woman talked about Beirut (“Home of my ruined hopes! Now I am truly an orphan!”). The Mexican occasionally blew me a kiss and mouthed, “My hearty con-gratulations on your rebista Banity Fair! Iss truly fantastic!” while Gayfryd waxed on about her education initiative for underprivileged kids to which she’s giving money: “You see, Abe, if I can pick out the hundred and fifty motivated kids, the one who will go to violin practice, that’s all I can deal with,” and also her conversion to Judaism to please Saul. We stumbled out of there at midnight, vibrating from German sausage.

  Tuesday, October 21, 1986

  Holiday issue gonna be great with Madonna on the cover photographed by Herb Ritts. He’s done her with en brosse white-silver hair and heavy dark brows, skin gleaming with limelight. Compelling. For reporting juice there’s Marie Brenner’s Michele Duvalier–in exile scoop. She interviewed her at one of the Khashoggi villas in Mougins near Cannes, lured out of recalcitrance because, trapped in her gated villa, she had a cold and was bored. Otherwise she wasn’t that eager to discuss how her corrupt, horrible husband has managed to steal between a hundred and five hundred million bucks from the luckless, poverty-stricken Haitian people. She told Marie every fifteen days she “gives Jean-Claude a manicure for his beautiful hands.” Such a decadent little scene. What is it about dictators’ wives that makes them so convinced the world is wrong, that they were saving their people from catastrophe, and are beloved by them even now that they have been chased and excoriated into exile? Duvalier told Marie her heroine is Eva Peron, who was so “liberal-minded and socially aware.”

  Monday, November 3, 1986

  I had to fire Juanita tonight. Things had got very irritable because she gave G a cold, even though I told her not to come in sick. When G started to sneeze I said what a pity it was she came back early and she didn’t speak to me for two days. Tonight, after a successful meeting with the 455 co-op board for the new apartment, I came back early and heard her on the phone in her room talking about me. Pausing at the door, what I heard appalled me. “I hate her. Georgie hates her. He loves me. She gave him a cold and then she accuses me. I want to choke her.” It was scary. I have felt more and more concerned she’s the wrong person for G lately, and at the physical therapy session last week, the therapist, Frances Sterne, took me aside and told me she thought he needed a change of nanny, that she keeps him too “inert” instead of moving and exercising his limbs. He is behind on his motor skills and still isn’t crawling.

  It’s my fault. I kept her on too long. He needed more stimulation and cheeriness around him. I was just so insecure as a mother after his prematurity I depended on her “baby nurse” creds. But when I heard this torrent of bile, all my buried qualms about her rushed to the surface and I just wanted her OUT. I wrote a severance check, opened her door, and said, “Put down that phone, Juanita. Pack your bags and go,” and handed her the envelope. She stared at me crazily for a moment. Then suppressed resentment gushed out and she started screaming at me, “I hate you. I hate working here. Georgie loves me more. You’re awful, he hates you!” I called the doorman to come up with a cart and wait an hour while she packed, as she looked so nutty I didn’t want a nail file between the eyes. She stuffed everything into paper bags, muttering and cursing. The funny thing was that G watched all this from his crib, shaking the bars and laughing and dancing around. Did he understand what was going on and wished her good riddance, too? I took him into my bed and we snuggled all night. I feel liberated! Even though now I need a new nanny, fast.

  Saturday, November 8, 1986

  Depressed week. I came down from the agitation of firing Juanita and felt a lot of guilt that I hadn’t got her out of here before. I have found a jolly, plump American girl called Joanne to replace her temporarily. It’s such a huge responsibility to pick the person who is going to be with your child all day.

  Last night we went to Si’s birthday party at their temporary new apartment. He was fifty-nine. The other guests were Donald and Sue, his two children, Sam and Pam, and their spouses, Alex and Tatiana, Leo and Gray, the Kaminskys, and a painter friend of Si’s. I have grown enormously fond of Victoria. I like the tentative unfolding of her personality as she gradually surrenders her trust. When she finally decides in your favor it is, one feels, a commitment for life. Si was pink with happiness as he looked around the room.

  I sat next to Alex after dinner on the sofa and we talked about Marlene Dietrich—there’s a new film out about her by Maximilian Schell. He and Tatiana knew her well. He said her daughter resents her terribly because Marlene was always too caught up in her love affairs to pay her attention. “But you know,” said Alex, “in the thirties, in Paris, people were really consumed by their erotic adventures. Children didn’t count. I remember my own mother was always caught up with her lovers and abandoned me for months at a time. I didn’t mind
particularly. I understood the situation, which was always complicated. Francine, I know, has enormous resentments about a lack of attention from her mother, but you know, her mother was a sensation, an extraordinary vibrant creature, and really it was unrealistic to expect she could ever give more time to Francine than she did. Everything”—he paused to savor it—“was so much sexier at that time. Even Condé Nast himself was a great Lothario. Patcevitch [Iva Patcevitch, his fellow Russian who was once president of Condé Nast in the old days] worked his way through every beautiful woman at Vogue. The magazine was chockablock with ravishing women like Babe Paley and Millicent Fenwick. Now, with yuppies and AIDS, I think New York is the unsexiest place on earth.” And of course, he is entirely right.

  Tonight I went to see the Dietrich film with Miles. It was an irritating piece of work and she is clearly a harrowingly, impregnable old Valkyrie today. But oh, how beautiful in her prime! I understand why she doesn’t want to look at her old films. (Alex is the same, of course, and Tatiana, too, speaks in exactly the same vein about the past. Who cares? It’s over and done with.) But for such a great beauty as Dietrich used to be, it must be agony to be reminded of what you were.

  Thursday, November 27, 1986

  November is the vibrant month when everyone hits town and the restaurants are decibels higher, with festive foghorn account executives blowing up their expense accounts.

  The fall of Ivan Boesky has been the best sideshow anyone could hope for. The megamillionaire greenmailer has been busted for insider trading, and one by one his ilk will go down. I have felt as long as I have been here that the balloon had to burst eventually. I don’t remember ever coming across Boesky, although I feel I must have in the shadowy crush of Alice Mason’s drawing room. His slippery, avaricious face fascinates me, as do the reports of his insane working hours, his thirty telephones, his royal-sized estate in Connecticut stuffed with old masters. What we have been witnessing is money as cocaine. I long to know what Boesky is thinking and feeling now, a frenzy of lawyers bailing him out. And what does he say to his equally intriguing wife, Seema? Did she know? Does she hate him for the life he makes her lead? Or is greed her ruling passion, too? I want to know the answers to all these questions and hope to get a piece that does so for VF.

  At a less sophisticated, nickel-dime level, Stanley Friedman, the Bronx Democratic leader, was convicted yesterday of running a squalid scheme to loot the NYC parking bureau. It’s an old-time Boss Tweed–style corruption scandal and Friedman could be looking at decades in the big house. Meanwhile in Washington it looks like the era of Reagan excess is finally curdling. A scandal broke this week about secretly selling arms to Iran, of all places, and putting $30 million in a Swiss bank account for the Contras. Remains to be seen if Ronnie was complicit or just clueless. I’m betting on clueless, but then I’ve developed a soft spot for him since the Harry Benson jaunt. Not his politics, just his disarming geniality and devotion to Nancy.

  Meanwhile, I got into a ludicrous PR flak attack when I found Herb Ritts’s cover picture of Debra Winger unacceptably dull and depressing. Ritts shot her for the February cover in a white terry bathrobe, looking morose. Since the shoot had gone quite well—only two hours late is a feat for her, I am told—we asked if we could do a second shoot to get a really good cover out of it. At this, Pat Kingsley, yes, the hypermanic, power-crazed PR from PMK, threw a tantrum. She called Jane Sarkin an “asshole” and a “fuckup” and suggested VF go screw itself. She’d probably spent a morning chewing the carpet at the feet of Winger and now felt she had to work off the humiliation on Jane. I was so furious I then wrote letters to all the people around Winger and the movie, saying that while we, in good faith, had tried to do a great cover, PMK was sabotaging our efforts to do so, demanding we kill the feature inside if it wasn’t going to be the cover story. This created even more aggravation, including a call from Pat’s lawyer claiming that I had slandered Winger and that if I wrote any more letters like that, she would sue me.

  We pulled out our backup, an Annie picture of the hot Manhattan nightclub owner Nell, who looked exactly right for VF style. But let’s face it, also unknown, and I knew with a sinking heart that Nell is not likely to be a circulation success. So we looked again at Winger in the beastly bathrobe. I said to the glum assembled staff, “Maybe we could save it with a clever cover line like we did with Joan Collins ‘She Rhymes with Rich’?” From the back of the art room, Sharon’s cynical voice pronounced, “How about she rhymes with punt?” I showed both covers to Alex, who, not having been involved in any of the manic ramifications, said immediately, “Winger has much more appeal. Who the hell is Nell?” Then he instructed that we blow up Winger further and load the image up with creative typeface. I knew he was probably right and that for the good of the mag it was my turn to eat crow and put her on the cover despite all our threats, which would be game, set, match for Pat Kingsley. So instead of calling Pat I called Larry Marks, producer of Winger’s movie called, appropriately, Black Widow, and said, “Good news. We have turned up a more acceptable picture.” To which he replied, “Well, I have to say you are a class act,” but he probably thought, This is why I pay Kingsley the big bucks.

  In the middle of all this, we closed on the new apartment at 455 East Fifty-Seventh Street. Tuesday, the decorator Chester Cleaver is moving in with his merry men. At the apartment closing, aside from our lawyer, Jimmy Goodale, all the other legal eagles were women in their thirties. The realtor, an abrasive blonde, dealt and redealt the forms like a croupier for us to sign. Occasionally she went out and returned with Xeroxed copies of each document, and once chewed out the vendors’ dude-like, macho lawyer for presenting a document that was wrongly dated. When he laughed nervously she snapped, “Stop turning this into a circus,” which was hardly fair. Looking at all these tense New York women, a little frayed, a little underpaid, enough to keep them hooked on their career path but not enough to finance escape, I felt they are the new prisoners of the American dream, always working harder than the guys and dealing and redealing the paperwork.

  Sunday, November 30, 1986

  Quogue

  Tonight we went for a drink with the Steinbergs. Saul was in a celebratory mood, buoyed up by the collapse of Ivan Boesky. He was offstage when we arrived but he soon entered in designer leisure wear, glowing pink after tennis. Immediately the volume was turned up—Saul plunges everything into quadraphonic sound. Of course I wanted to get him on Boesky and he repaid dividends. “Ivan,” he honked, “was always a bad guy. You know, he collects brass bulls. And a few years back Jacob Rothschild thought Ivan was the son of God and was going to make him millions. So to make nice to Ivan, he called him and told him about a great bronze bull he’d seen at some auction. Ivan says, terrific. Buy it. So Jacob lays out fifty thousand bucks for this bull and ships it. He hears nothing and calls me. Says, ‘Saul, I haven’t heard from Ivan and he ignores the bills for the bull. What shall I do?’ I said, ‘Jacob, get on the phone to Ivan and tell him he’s got to pay.’ So he gets through to Ivan and Ivan says, ‘Sorry, I didn’t like the bull, Jacob. It’s too big.’ And Jacob calls me and says, ‘Can you believe what I just heard?’ I said, ‘Look, Jacob, I’ll buy the bull.’ And I did because I knew Ivan was never going to pay. It’s fucking huge by the way—I put it in the conference room at Reliance.” He also said that the first Seema Boesky knew of the crash was what she read in the papers. Also that Ivan has a boyfriend. Also, that despite what you read in the papers, he will in fact be ruined. “He’ll be litigated to death. He’ll be left with three mi-yun tops. He’s going to be sued by everyone he’s ever done business with. His legal fees will be forty mi-yun dollars! He’ll go to jail for five years.” Why do I find the Boesky story so compelling? Fear of falling is so central to the currents of New York life. I could see on Gayfryd’s face the concern that must come from a private anxiety that Saul could somehow lose his own footing, not for something he’s done, but for something unforeseen that could blow up their own h
igh-rolling way of life. She went through it with her first husband, and I bet it worries her now. They all fly so fast and furious there has to be a fall.

  We turned to Reagan and the arms-to-Iran scandal. “He should fire everybody,” said Saul. “Only way he can get out of this now. Particularly Don Regan—he should have gone a long time ago, anyway. He should say, bye-bye, it’s been great,” and he whistled and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “What I can’t understand is why they didn’t check with the lawyers. In business we do that all the time. It’s a discipline, you know. I say it automatically. Hey, boys, sounds cute, but are we breaking the law?” Maybe so, but isn’t the White House crawling with lawyers?

  Sunday, December 21, 1986

  In flight, New York to London

  The year is over and we’re off to London with our Georgie, his first Christmas! As I write he snoozes in his bassinet on the bulkhead tray. He was flashing huge cheesy grins at all the BA personnel as we boarded. Miles brought him a wonderful Christmas gift—a baby rocking horse with strapped seat. G rocked furiously all Saturday afternoon, waving a stick of celery in the air like a crop.

  It was a cheery year’s end at Vanity Fair. I spent time being Santa to all. Si’s pug, Nero, is going with them to Vienna to be mated, so I sent him a prenup basket of treats, including a piece of blue velvet “in case things get a little wild.” Around the office there was a spirit of warmth and achievement. I promoted Jane Sarkin to features editor and her delight was tangible. Even with the great curmudgeon, Sharon, there was a sense of esprit de corps. I love them all, my comrades in arms. After the office holiday party, a noise-intensive stand-up at Le Bilboquet, I brought Ruth, Charles, Miles, Jane, and poor Sarah Giles—her face still black and blue from being mugged last week—to Mortimer’s for dinner and we made even more noise. Joan Buck was dining at a corner table with the critic Walter Clemons. Abe Rosenthal was at the bar with Times colleague Arthur Gelb. It all felt jolly and hectic as Christmas should. I want to savor the unfolding of next year instead of gulping it in fast bites. I met Chester in the new apartment, where he greeted me with two bags of chicly wrapped gifts and a little sack of swatches to “show my folks.” I’ve decided he’s like a marmalade cat with his ginger-blond hair and smiley face. The black and white kitchen tiles are down, the closets made, and the glass doors in the dining room installed to let the room breathe. It is all beautiful beyond my wildest hopes and I pray such happiness can last.