The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  I realize how I am now much more confident as an editor, and now have strong nerves in the job. Not just trusting my instincts more but failing to get hysterically rattled over flak on a story, because I now know I can handle it.

  Came home and read Philip Larkin for soul food. I miss writing but I feel I shouldn’t be competing for space with my own writers. Am very proud of the June issue. Alex Shoumatoff’s Bokassa piece is a tour de force thanks to Sharon’s editing boot camp. He has a wonderful ability to capture the narrative juice, the regional atmosphere and the exotic details that keep you reading (e.g., the discovery of an alligator-infested pool and a collection of lions Bokassa allegedly kept to eat unwanted guests). He even interviewed pygmies who live in the forested part of the country Bokassa’s family came from. It’s an amazing tale of lust and greed and corruption. Plus we really got the pagination in the rest of the issue right. It’s effective to go from the sinister, overpowering visual atmosphere of Bokassa to the crisp and vibrant Liza Minnelli pics by Annie that seem almost three-dimensional.

  Sunday, May 17, 1987

  We stayed in town for the weekend because on Friday night we had to attend a Front Page Awards dinner where Marie Brenner received one for her VF piece on Michele Duvalier. A proud moment for the mag. It’s so different spending a spring weekend in town. Had a wonderful time. Sitting with G on the grass in Central Park in the sun after taking him to lunch at Rumpelmayer’s, flopping in our mellow sitting room at home with the trees flourishing outside the windows. After the Friday awards dinner at the Waldorf, we walked home with Clay Felker and Gail Sheehy, who live three doors up across from us on Fifty-Seventh Street.

  Clay is just about to accept the editorship of Manhattan,inc. He’s been doing Harry’s old job at US News in DC for the last eight months and now is also desperate to escape Mort’s micromanaging. He’s so happy to come back to NYC. Walking through the summery streets after the Waldorf dinner that featured an overpowering band we’d all felt obliged to dance to, H and I felt how civilized our life is now becoming, and how all the hustle and toil and pressure is bringing such great rewards. We are so lucky to be in America! In fact I feel my usual panic about life getting on an even keel. I even find myself daydreaming about taking a course on art at Columbia. (No, no, said Bob Hughes at lunch on Monday. “Just come to previews with me.”)

  We are worried, though, about Georgie’s progress. I asked Anna Wintour if her husband, Dr. David Shaffer, who’s a child psychiatrist, could come over for a drink and meet him. He noted G flaps and waves his hands when he moves his fingers in repose, which could be indicative of developmental issues. He spends hours standing at the window, obsessed with seeing garbage trucks. Nothing will break him away. He has such an amazing memory and the beginnings of a startling vocabulary, but mixing with other kids is hard for him. Shaffer recommended more medical follow-up. Feeling extra protective, I took him into our bed for mammoth cuddles.

  Tuesday, May 19, 1987

  The last two days have been perfect hell at the office with everyone at each other’s throats. Annie brought in her pics of Diane Sawyer on Friday, telling me ahead of time she had grave misgivings because she hated the clothes André brought to the shoot. So I told her to bring the pics in to show me. As I walked into Ruth’s office to look at them with Annie, Ruth and André were already at the light box, with Ruth crooning as we arrived, “Annie, these are spectacular. You really pulled it off!” which pleased Annie, obviously, and she and André then started congratulating each other about how great they turned out after all.

  I looked at them myself and saw immediately that Annie’s first misgivings were right. Low energy, low glamour, a rare flop. But in that atmosphere of festivity, it was now impossible to rain on the parade. Monday morning I arrive and Ruth has all the blowups on the desk. And now she’s telling me Annie was the wrong person for these pictures. How the lighting was horrible. The clothes awful. “So why the hell did you tell Annie and André you loved them?” I said stonily. And Ruth just ignored that question and repeated how she was against it in the first place. Okay, I said, we just have to reshoot and I have to handle André on this one. I don’t want him hearing it from anyone but me. Except it seems that Sarah Giles, the world’s most indiscreet human, was lurking around in earshot. And she promptly went off and told André, who called Jane Sarkin, hysterical, and she came to see me in a total spin because she was the one who had fixed up the whole shoot and feared it was now in jeopardy, so I bawled out Sarah, who of course denied she’d been indiscreet, and she told André, who wrote a cover-your-ass note to me on her behalf, absolving her of any blame. Migraine.

  It was so hard to switch into mummy gear when I got home. I was so wired that all I could do was make incendiary phone calls to everyone, making it worse, while G screamed in the background.

  To cap it off, just as we are going to press with Gail’s great Giuliani story, New York mag comes out with their own Giuliani cover and scoops us to death. So much for my crowing over Kosner. Chapeau, Ed. Another boomerang from hubris.

  Wednesday, May 20, 1987

  Ruth went to see Alex and he offered her a job at Vogue. We have to make the change because the art department confusion has become impossible. For Ruth, this could be the best and most dignified thing. This morning she called me, sounding very clearheaded and strong, and said she’d decided to accept the Vogue offer. Now that it’s over I feel sad as well as relieved. Her sensibility is superb and she has certainly helped to raise my sights, visually. Better it end before it deteriorates. Charles is so good, and very excited to now lead. I hope his orderliness doesn’t lack her magic.

  Thursday, May 21, 1987

  Quogue

  Feel better after all the drama. The sun came out, and bicycling into Quogue village with G riding in a baby seat behind, wrinkling his nose to sniff the spring flowers and newly mown grass, was pretty nice, and so was sitting outside at the Quogue stationery, breakfasting on poached eggs. H and I walked along the beach, dissecting our week, with G snoozing on Harry’s back. We came into that lovely seaside feeling of papers fluttering on the porch.

  Bernie and Barbara Leser were out here staying with friends for the weekend. Very pleasant. After tea we walked them back. It was a mind-blowing scene change. A gargantuan house on stilts with a hotel-sized swimming pool. The hosts, he some noisy guy in retail, had a family house party of twenty. Enormous bespectacled uncles wearing shorts with baggy crotches hinting at pendulous genitalia, overweight daughters shoveling onion crisps, beefy sons-in-law crashing around at a pool table. The wife kept dipping her huge mitt into troughs of Ritz Crackers and smearing them with caviar and chives. Collapsed on a recliner for the rest of the afternoon with social PTSD.

  Tuesday, June 2, 1987

  Jane Amsterdam, now out at Manhattan,inc., and John Larsen asked us out to dinner. Jane is going through what Harry went through after leaving The Times. The syndrome he used to call Let’sHaveLunch, where everyone courts you but no one offers you anything. She said she’s sent numerous messages to Bob Gottlieb about joining The New Yorker and he never calls back. He is crazy! She’s an amazing editor. This is just another example of how he’s not grasping the nettle! When he took over I thought he was a formidable choice, but now when I hear things like this, I wonder. He seems totally unresponsive to the pulse of the news. What is the point of The New Yorker’s weekly frequency if it doesn’t respond? They should be able to do the ultimate profile of Ivan Boesky with all the deep texture of the era that other magazines don’t have the talent pool to do. Or explain the Ollie North phenomenon with Iran-Contra. Of course it takes time to get good pieces, but we have shown it doesn’t matter if it’s late if it’s full of new revelation, which is supposed to be The New Yorker’s mantra anyway. Still, if it doesn’t work with Gottlieb, Si will give him a very long time to fail. Maybe one day I will read a piece about TNY folding into VF, instead of the other way around as I did in the past. But no doubt I will be long gone by
then.

  Took Reinaldo Herrera to lunch at Le Cirque, and he regressed into man-about-town mode and kept insisting on trying to pitch me a piece on Prince Michael of Greece, even though the prince is the most boring man in Athens. “Reinaldo,” I said patiently, “can you suggest an angle on Prince Michael that would have, um, wider appeal for an American audience?” “You mean, which one of the family is on drugs, which one is facing financial ruin?” he said testily. (Well, it would help.)

  Peter Duchin was at the next table. “Malcolm Forbes’s party was a total bore,” Reinaldo told him.

  “I didn’t play at it so it must have been,” said Duchin.

  “No, I mean, really a BORE,” boomed Reinaldo, making the word so rich and reverberative it made people at other tables look our way. “Everyone was a tycoon or a CEO. It was the biggest BORE since the signing of the Constitution!”

  “I didn’t play at that one either,” said Duchin.

  Feeling antsy, or perhaps just wanting attention, I asked Si this morning what he would feel about my writing a book about the turnaround of VF. He look startled and discomfited. “That would be a bit like writing a biography of my grandchild,” he said. “Don’t you think a bit too soon?”

  Wednesday, June 3, 1987

  I flew on a bumpy Pan Am flight to Miami to talk to the Knight Ridder newspaper group about how to improve their Lifestyle sections. As I rattled on from the stage about the need to splash pictures, go after the big story of the day, cultivate writers with voice, I sensed I irritated all the Lifestyle section editors who made comments afterward to me like, “Of course, Tina here is not concerned with such pedestrian matters as service in her magazine,” and one went as far as “Not that honesty and accuracy are the first thing on Vanity Fair’s agenda.” Meow!

  John Mack Carter, the brilliant editor of Good Housekeeping, stole the show with a preview of his new Hearst mag, Victoria. Without any market research he has crystallized the current longing for tradition and what he describes as the “lack of loveliness in the rootless, unbeautiful lives of the modern American woman who knows that deep down all the running is leading every day to a lesser life.” Wow. How right he is about that and it’s certainly what I feel myself every time I pause to take a breath. How interesting, though, that it has taken a man to articulate it.

  Monday, June 8, 1987

  I was Calvin Klein’s date at the Fashion Institute of Technology benefit for Marvin Traub at the Waldorf. This made us coconspirators and put me next to Bloomingdale CEO Marvin Traub, whose ads we are still unable to get. Calvin is so much nicer when his guard is down. He is endearingly flaky, losing his keys, forgetting people’s names, and desperate to get away from all the people hustling him for his business. I really liked his man Friday and PR guy, Paul Wilmot, impossibly stylish—greased-back blond hair and pale lemon dinner jacket, and yet relaxed and ironically funny about being Calvin’s slave. He wasn’t seated with us at dinner. “Where was I sitting?” he asked rhetorically later. “Table nineteen. Right in the toilet with Patricia Quelque Chose, who designs horribly tacky costumes and kept telling me to put out my cigarette.”

  Calvin was incredulous that Marvin Feldman, the head of FIT, asked him if he could honor him for his ad campaign. “Doesn’t he understand I wouldn’t want to be honored for that!” (It was indeed a crass move that betrayed Feldman’s real intent. “Let me honor you for your marketing budget!”)

  “Don’t you decline, I’ll handle it,” said Paul, snapping his fingers to retrieve our limo from the line of others outside the Waldorf, and effortlessly getting Calvin ahead of everyone else. One could see in Calvin, whatever he said, how much he really loved the buzz and thrust of all those retailers paying court to him, how they now need him as much as he needs them.

  I felt in the center of the humming commercial bazaar of the city. Skidding through the rain with Wilmot in the front seat drolly unpicking the evening, Calvin’s lanky legs stretched out next to me with his feet shiny in patent shoes, along with Etta Froio, W’s fashion editor, who also got a ride, sharing retail gossip learned from her own end of the Waldorf ballroom, I felt happy to be on the inside of the city of hard surfaces.

  Sunday, June 21, 1987

  On Monday morning Si called me in and said, “Interview, Tina. What’s your response?” My heart sank. Clearly the rumors are true. “You are considering buying it?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the question is not whether you should buy it, but who would you have edit it?”

  “You,” he replied, giving me a look of intensity that said “checkmate.” This was undoubtedly his way of saying, “If you have time on your hands to write a book, allow me to fill it.” Serves me right for opening my big mouth last week. It felt a bit like when I made trouble at school and they’d try (at first) to move me up a class.

  “Two magazines to run instead of one,” he repeated firmly. I wonder if this has some of Alex’s Machiavellian stamp on it. They clearly don’t want a VF book written, and throwing me a new challenge is a good way to stop it. I said immediately that I foresaw only conflicts in having to do two titles at once. I counseled him not to get involved. “Fred Hughes is making such a mess of it there probably won’t be an Interview in six months’ time…”

  “Think about it,” he said implacably.

  I spent Monday in a turmoil of angst. I suppose I should see it as an extension of the Condé Nast power base. I undoubtedly would if I were single, but all I could think was that it would add to the stress of spending enough time with G, who needs me more and more. Harry also saw complications of editorial conflict, as I do.

  I decided to pitch Si the idea of folding the Warhol broadsheet into a VF supplement, and when I presented this notion he got excited, and brought in the circulation director, Peter Armour (who was totally confused, as he had been modeling out circulation figures for a sister publication), and barking “Get me Fred Hughes” on the phone to his assistant, Lillian.

  I left him at it and went down to ask Doug Johnston what he thought. He told me to slow down and start thinking of how Interview could be a spin-off publication. He could sell it to advertisers as a dual package, and pointed out that a fold-in supplement might, in fact, have definite disadvantages to our more conservative advertisers, who would feel our own upscale image had been trivialized. Certainly, when I consider our meeting with the IBM account exec last week, Doug is probably right. Mr. IBM had spent a long time explaining to me why the company had fled VF in 1983. “It was the color spread on a bohemian theater group called Pina Bausch,” he said somberly, as I dimly recalled the Helmut Newton pic of a huge red tongue in the ear of a horrific puppet in one of Leo’s last issues, when he was trying to be avant garde. Mr. IBM said that although he liked VF, he “feared its element of surprise, its sudden flights into questionable taste” (i.e., the reason why people are buying it). I was about to urge him to in no way put his job on the line by buying into our magazine when he concluded, “So if we come back as I would like to, I need your assurance that we will be forewarned if someone like Claus von Bülow is on the cover.” HOORAY! In other words, we are getting the IBM business, simply because they need to be present.

  Anyway, coming off that success, I began to see that Doug might be right and ponder how Interview could somehow function as VF’s downtown sister, a place where the hip kids like Joe McKenna and Angela Janklow—the brilliant daughter of Mort and Linda, who’s joined us—could spill over and seed a new farm team and we could operate it with a shared core production staff and an editorial leader like Gabé. I got quite excited and called Si to tell him so.

  “Fred Hughes just called me,” he said, sounding deflated. “He told me he doesn’t want to sell for a year. So put your thoughts on paper.” Which I have just done.

  It all unsettled me and made me a bad mother all week.

  Tuesday, June 23, 1987

  Horrible few days. G is starting to hate my going to the office and it breaks my heart w
hen he cries and says “ma ma ma” as I walk out the door. I want to be home with my baby! Our house is too turbulent for him. He needs a steadier environment. Knowing this makes me guilty.

  I gave a good-bye dinner at home for Ruth and invited all the staff and some of her favorite photographers and contributors and friends. It was very jolly and convivial. Alex came early just for a drink before he left, as always, to look after Tatiana. He sat erect and composed on our sofa, observing the scene and radiating intelligence and precision. I felt huge affection, too, for Lloyd Ziff who seems to adore being Harry’s art director at Traveler. Lloyd seems battered, though. So many are losing their friends to AIDS. When the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe appeared at the door looking so ravaged and thin, I had a renewed stab of anxiety about all my other gay friends. Miles is looking tired, too, and I pray he will be safe. There are times, and this is one of them, when I find the people I work with enormously touching. There’s a tall, silent girl in the art department called Holland who’s leaving VF after three years for a bigger job at European Travel and Life. Harry told me that yesterday Murdoch, who owns it, called Si in the morning and offered to sell the magazine to Condé Nast, who would then fold it into Traveler and absorb the subscription list and advertising base. They are meeting on it this morning. As Holland spoke with excitement of her new job and how she was only taking one day off in between, when she would be accompanying her niece to the Bronx Zoo as a treat, I thought how sad for her it will be if Si does indeed buy her new job prospect and fold it just as she arrives. How crushing and careless these takeovers are. The big shots at the top never give any thought at all to the lives of the people caught up in them.