The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

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  I had dinner on Thursday with Nigel Dempster, visiting from London. Took him to Le Périgord with Sarah Giles and Christopher Sykes and had a riotous evening. He looks as dapper and pin-striped as ever. He told me a great story about how he had dinner here with Anthony Haden-Guest at Mortimer’s, and Anthony was so liquored up he fell spread-eagled across the next-door table, where the historian Arthur Schlesinger, the grande dame Marietta Tree, and Lady Bird Johnson were having a quiet dinner. As he reared up with veal paillard pinned to his lapel, Anthony apparently said to the astonished Arthur Schlesinger, “I think somewhere along the line we are distantly related.” This has to be the perfect transatlantic anecdote. Englishmen always feel that conjuring up class cousinage will get them through any crisis at home or abroad.

  Wednesday, September 23, 1987

  On Sunday night David and Patsy Puttnam came over for dinner to unload the backstory of his resignation from Columbia Pictures, where his tenure as CEO has been a disaster. His appointment from London as the incoming Mr. Class who produced Chariots of Fire (though he’s actually a North London boy who was seen as the quintessential upstart in the sixties) created mayhem almost immediately and ended in disaster with his abrupt firing after only fifteen months. I have been bombarding David with telegrams and letters, requesting that he give us an exclusive as he hasn’t talked yet. I want to write this one myself, as I have known him so long and understand all the people he went up against, especially the lethally powerful producer Ray Stark, who still calls the shots in Columbia Pictures politics and blesses or destroys any newcomer who comes to town. Stark’s charisma derives not just from having produced hits such as West Side Story and Funny Girl and having discovered Barbra Streisand, but also because his mother-in-law was Fanny Brice and he is as loaded as he is legended. Puttnam needlessly offended him from the get-go. It’s a classic tale of innocence abroad. Puttnam thought he was a swashbuckling Hollywood reformer, but turned out he was a babe in the woods when it came to the corporate Kabuki required to manage the brass at the Coca-Cola Company, who were his new bosses at Columbia. On the other side were the hostile tribal leaders of Hollywood self-interest led by Stark. As a British transplant into alien bear traps myself, I can’t help but identify a bit.

  Unsurprisingly, Ray phoned me Friday night and started sounding off about Puttnam. “Your compatriot, darling,” he said in his soft, sinister voice, “is an asshole on a grand scale. He took over something that had everything going for it and royally fucked it up. That’s the trouble, excuse me, darling, of English intellectuals. Puttnam should have been a professor, not a studio head.” That’s funny. I’ve heard Puttnam called a lot of things but never a professor! I guess in LA his British accent makes him “an intellectual.”

  “I’ll talk to you, darling, and tell you everything,” said Ray. “As long as you don’t play ‘Rule, Britannia’ in the background.” That’s wonderful. If Ray gives me all the access to the corporates at Coca-Cola who own Columbia—and other players—thinking I’m “his girl,” that will be great copy. So I was full of anxiety to nail Puttnam when he rang the doorbell.

  He looked white, taut, and red-eyed, as Harry was when he was in his Times crisis, and he kept plucking nervously at his two-tone beard. Patsy was, as always, the feisty sixties cockney, full of pent-up anger about how her man has been treated by Coca-Cola. “I tell you what,” she said as she sagged down on the sofa, “I’ve got a new f-word, ‘family.’ The Coca-Cola family we were supposed to have joined at Columbia Pictures. I never want to hear that word again in my life.” David said when he went to Atlanta for meetings with the Coke suits, it was all stroking and blandness.

  He told them, “Are you sure you want me to run Columbia? I’m a hooligan. I offend people. I fire people.” And they said, ‘Yes, we need a person like you.’” He told them he was going to cut off Ray Stark’s $1.8 million yearly retainer and they said, “Great, great, get rid of him.”

  “Yes, but why did you do that, David?” I couldn’t help but ask. “Wouldn’t it have been better just to keep him around until you were in a strong position?”

  “I’d have had to take his phone calls every day,” said David. I felt a lot of recognition with everything I felt myself when I was beginning at VF. My Ray Stark firing was Jonathan Lieberson. Like Puttnam, I went bullheaded at the cost wastage of having him around producing nothing, but I made a bad enemy who did a lot of poisoning of the well with the intellectual circles he moved in and they took a long time to woo back. Having political instincts is always underestimated as a requisite for hiring. In fact, calling someone “political” is usually pejorative, implying manipulation and distrust, but many jobs are impossible to succeed at without political skills.

  Stark, a longtime power behind the throne at Columbia, allied with his friend the financier Herbert Allen, who’s on the Coke board and helped to seal Puttnam’s fate. It really is Shakespearian intrigue. “Have you ever looked at his ears?” David asked about Ray. “He’s got funny, pointy ears. When he sat in front of the window all I could think about was his pointy ears.” We talked till two in the morning, and only stopped when Janet opened the door and said there was a flood in the kitchen. The evening ended, Puttnam still talking, with the four of us swabbing the kitchen floor with bath towels.

  Friday, September 25, 1987

  I have just commissioned a profile of Ivana Trump to run at the time Donald’s memoir comes out, so I was amused to walk in the door at Ann Getty’s and be introduced immediately to Trump himself. He was all over me, hoping to charm me into favorable presentation in the mag. So direct and candid that it’s refreshing. At dinner, Ann, as weird and alienated as ever, put herself between Trump and Lewis Lapham, and Lapham was next to me. I had an Italian art dealer on the other side. Ann, for some reason, monopolized Lapham for two courses, leaving me and Trump both stranded, so he leaned over them and started bombarding me with interest. “Tina,” he shouted, “what do you think of the Newsweek cover story on me?” “I haven’t read it,” I told him.

  “You know, Tina, I could have had Time. They wanted me and I saw them, too. But Newsweek scooped them. Who do you think’s better, Tina, Newsweek or Time?”

  “Time,” I said mischievously.

  “You really think so, Tina, you really think so?” His pouty Elvis face folded into a frown of self-castigation. “I guess it sells more,” he said in a tormented tone. “I guess it does.” Then he brightened. “You know how much Fawn Hall gets for a one-night appearance? Twenty-five thousand dollars! I’ve booked her for the night at Trump Tower. She can’t sing. She can’t dance. So what. She’s so hot everyone’s gonna come.”

  My Italian dinner partner and Tina Chow on the other side of him listened with mounting disgust as I bounced it back and forth with Trump over the artichoke and shrimp. “You see this man, Trump,” hissed the Italian on the other side of me. “He is trying to force you to think like him, and I think it’s working.”

  “You know what?” Trump continued shouting across to me. “Went to the opening of the Met last night. Ring Cycle. Plácido Domingo. Five hours. Dinner started at twelve. Beat that. I said to Ivana, what, are you crazy? Never again.”

  “You know,” hissed the Italian at me, “it is easy in America to take a very tiny sum like five hundred thousand dollars and turn it into three hundred million! So easy! But you know what? I don’t want to. Because eet means raping those poor fuckers the American public even more than they are already. You know what ees the difference between the European peasant and the American peasant? The American peasant eats sheet, wears sheet, watches sheet on TV, looks out of his window at sheet! How can we go on raping them and giving them more sheet to buy!” And so it went on.

  Saturday, October 10, 1987

  Gave a VF cocktail party at Le Cirque for Helmut Newton and everyone came, the high-gloss women, the photographers and the weirdos and the retail kings and the high-energy cast of the best goer-outers I could muste
r to make Helmut happy. Alex made a pass-through appearance, which made Helmut feel thoroughly courted, which I want, or Vogue will steal him away.

  Afterward I took a table for fourteen for dinner, having to enlarge it because Bernie Leser invited himself. Helmut said he once opened the door on Bernie in a hotel room in Sydney and he was wearing a hairnet, a character detail he seems to find definitive. I sat next to a wild-card friend of Helmut’s, Robert Evans, the Hollywood producer. What a face. His aviator shades of course added to his sinister aspect, but when he took them off he looked so debauched I recoiled. For all his anecdotal charm, he’s got to be the nearest thing to the devil of anyone I have encountered. I hope I never lose my barometer for good and evil. He went on to talk about Warren Beatty, which made me want to do that piece again if we could just reel the bastard in. According to Evans, Beatty is a health nut. He doesn’t smoke or drink or take drugs and never has. “He has a pussy hair in his cerebellum. He will literally drive five hours for a fuck if he thinks there’s competition for it.” He said Beatty used to climb over his wall at night when Diane Keaton threw him out for having “phone disease.” “He just couldn’t stop talking on the phone.”

  Saturday, October 17, 1987

  Bel-Air hotel, LA

  I’m sitting in my suite at the Bel-Air in Beverly Hills. Tomorrow we’ll give a VF party at Spago to woo Hollywood. If it goes well I want to make a Hollywood party an annual thing because our power base for covers is here. Si might not understand what glamour events can do for business, but I am convinced they work. The advertisers want to be next to stars, and the Hollywood party will be packed with everyone’s business we want. Social gatherings like this not only bring the pages alive, they also make a statement about our convening power. Clients want sizzle as much as they want adjacencies. Pierre Bergé at YSL understands that, but Condé Nast doesn’t. I wrote a long memo to Si, trying to explain why we needed a real events department to do more of this, but he doesn’t see it. I had to twist Doug’s arm to make this one happen on his marketing budget.

  The Bel-Air hotel is my idea of paradise. I love its secretive paths and smell of jasmine. Reminds me of Salto de Agua. We arrived at lunchtime yesterday and I brought G with me.

  Before the VF party there was a seating meeting in the hotel with the team. We assembled to do the table-placing with a wall chart at six p.m. and it was still going on at two a.m. It was an insane task—240 guests, half of whom we didn’t know, in an L-shaped room, with fifty maybes and a power structure so fragile that one false place card would throw the whole thing out of whack. Too late we realized it was a futile idea to try to seat this at all. In the end we assigned each of the team to be a VF table host and built around that. The night began in chaos anyway because the seating frenzy was still going on after the first guests arrived or failed to do so. But the turnout was incredible. Two tables had to wait to be erected till the mob subsided, and since the mob never did, the tables never appeared. This meant we had a bunch of illustrious floaters, one of whom was the head of the LA County Museum. The other hazard we didn’t expect was what turns out to be an absurd Hollywood custom—husbands and wives or people with their dates expecting to be seated together, and moving place cards when they weren’t. At my table I put myself between the “superagent” Mike Ovitz—to romance him for covers—and Ray Stark, with Betsy Bloomingdale, Dick and Lili Zanuck, Liz Smith, Oliver Stone, and Dennis Hopper. However, Oliver’s wife took one look at the table she wasn’t at, made a scene, and insisted Oliver move to hers. Bob Colacello found chaos wreaked by some wannabe called Melissa Prophet who had to move her place card to be next to an equally illustrious nonentity named Craig Baumgarten who was seated somewhere else. Bob, forgetting he was supposed to be a table host, lost his temper and cried, “Well. This is sure not Europe. It’s vulgar, pushy LA!” Then our cover subject, Farrah Fawcett, sent a note to say she had swollen glands.

  “She really does,” said Ovitz, who’s her agent.

  “Then she shoulda gargled and got over here,” snarled Ray Stark. He told me he hadn’t himself tried to seat a dinner since 1963, which was when social manners collapsed. But we battled on. I went to see him the next day to interview him and decided he’s not the pure evil that Puttnam sees. He gave me breakfast seated by the window of his house in Bel Air, with the bronze Henry Moore of a cardinal outside. I realized that’s really what Ray is—the profane cardinal of Hollywood to whom everyone must pay their respects. “Have you noticed Puttnam’s teeth, Tina?” he suddenly asked. “Behind that beard are fangs! Fangs that haven’t been to the dentist lately!” (He and Puttnam should make a werewolf movie.)

  Swifty Lazar offered to give a dinner for me, which I later realized is a canny L.A. trap to siphon off half the stars from our event for his own VIP gathering with an invitation that sounds more exclusive. But then all was forgiven when I arrived at his house on Friday. I wore my new Carolina Herrera white dress with blue taffeta pouf skirt and immediately felt overdressed. The guests were super-casual Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O’Neal, Joan Collins, Barry Diller, Alexander Godunov and Jackie Bisset, and Candy Bergen. Hard to beat that. The real delights for me were O’Neal and Nicholson. I had always seen O’Neal as a lout, but he’s funny, self-mocking, full of wonderful colorful stories, and so outlandishly good-looking, with dazzling blue eyes and a thick mane of blond hair.

  I realize I was inside the gated Hollywood few outsiders get to see—a distillation of screen glamour, presided over by the bizarre, doll-faced Mary Lazar, who’s so stoned on tranquilizers that her head bobs all the time with a glassy smile. Ryan and Matthau told a rash of deathbed stories. Ryan told one about his own father. And Anjelica exclaimed, “Your father? Blackie? I saw him recently! I am so sorry!” Ryan clapped his hands over his eyes and wailed. “Oh God. I’ve been found out. Okay. He recovered! How did I know someone here would actually know my father?” Matthau said that on his deathbed Freud had said, “Psychiatry is shit.” And Mary Lazar rolled her stoned eyes upward to make her one comment of the evening. “Perhaps he said psychiatry turns you into a shit.” And hovered away in her pencil-slim black and gold pants. Later I caught her popping pills out of a fake Bufferin bottle. Still, if she can produce a dinner like this stoned, maybe she’s functioning somewhere in there. I realized in the middle of all this that the secret of Swifty’s famous humor is that he has none. He just blurts out deals in a raspy voice and wears the ridiculous oversized glasses that make you assume he’s funny. A stunt of self-invention for a tiny bald man. He didn’t look well. He’s deathly pale, like a skull in the desert, under the heavy black frames. His main obsession that night was pulling off the coup of selling Joan Collins’s as-yet-unwritten book, Prime Time, to Century Hutchinson Publishers for a million dollars, and he said it’s making her sister, Jackie, absolutely crazy that she has moved into her writer turf … What a night.

  Sunday, October 18, 1987

  Last week there was more roiling in the corridors of power. Howard Kaminsky is out as president of Random House! I had sensed he was out of favor at Si’s court ever since the Joni Evans announcement that she was leaving S and S and joining Random House, as Howard seemed to have no part in her appointment. It was clearly a snub to him to move someone that senior into some vague new imprint position. Obviously Bob Bernstein, as Random House’s longtime chairman, has been discomfited for a long time with Howard’s obvious intimacy with Si—the dining club they share, their constant socializing, the conduit that kept cutting him out. Plus Alex also felt instinctively that Howard was bad news. He said to me at lunch once that he felt it was “time to plant the poison” about Howard, an unsettling insight into how he works. I knew Howard had lost his hold over Si in the last print order meeting when Si pounced on the piece I was telling them about, a story about an addict’s downward spiral on crack cocaine, and said, “It might make a great book. I’ll send it over to Joni Evans,” when always before h
e said, “I’ll send it over to Howard.” Howard overplayed his closeness to Si. That was his prime mistake. And his delusion, too. Howard’s downfall reinforces the need to maintain some distance from Si, however familial he feels. Keep the mysteries intact and one’s talents in dignified service because, alas, he owns them.

  Executive power is fragile in today’s volatile marketplace, or perhaps it always was. Since Harry was unseated at The Times it’s become more commonplace to be precipitously fired now than it was then, as the wheels turn ever faster. Just one of the stripes you wear if you’re in the game and take risks as a hired gun. It all suggests the need for an entrepreneurial, financial independence so we are not at the mercy of the whims of our masters. I’ve always noted the chilling calculations of Si, how his interest withdraws instantly once usefulness ends. After Bernstein let him go, Howard apparently said he wanted to see Si. Bernstein replied, I am sure with some relish, that of course Si had been a party to the decision. Nonetheless Howard demanded to see Si and apparently Si gave him exactly three minutes. “He was gone,” Howard told me woefully when I ran into him at a party. “Withdrawn as if I wasn’t there.” I know that expression. It’s subterranean, veiled, that look he wears when he’s about to perpetrate an act of pragmatic betrayal.

  Now Howard has an interesting social problem. Whether to go to Si’s sixtieth birthday party on November seventh, which he already accepted. He told me he was going to give Victoria the option, which seemed another blunder to me. He should gracefully recuse himself. Victoria, of course, being more socially sophisticated than Howard, elegantly pressed him and Susan to attend despite “the business.” And with his usual tone-deafness, no doubt he will.