by Tina Brown
Sunday, October 25, 1987
Paris, Ritz hotel
Harry and I threw a joint VF and Traveler party at Maxim’s and a dinner afterward at Castel. It was a riotous and stylish evening, which made me feel as glamorous as we pretend to be. After a slow start, the new flamboyant fashion designer Patrick Kelly showed up with a posse of gorgeous African models wearing his short, tight cocktail dresses bedecked with gold buttons. It was so full of beautiful people surging in late, an A-list crowd of intellectual boulevardiers, fashionable artists, and opinionated media types; it was like surfing through the pages of French Vogue.
At the Castel dinner I sat between the old sparring partner photographers Helmut Newton and David Bailey. Helmut can be so deadly. Just when you’re thinking he’s a pussycat he hits you with some old grievance. “It takes a lot of ingenuity to lay out a portrait so the head of the subject disappears straight down the gutter of the magazine,” he told me, swirling his white wine. “Chapeau, my dear!”
After dinner, Helmut pressured us to go back to the Hotel George V with him and June to show us some spreads from his own arthouse mag that might get him banned from every shoot we want to do with him for VF—two obscene penis-in-mouth pictures aided by a hand wearing a pair of black gloves. The rest of the mag is typical Newton, Cabaret-esque decadence with sinister animal sex thrown in. Personally I find these spreads irritating. I think the journalistic work he does for us is so much better and more surprising. Ironic yellow journalism with us is a great departure for Helmut, much more cutting-edge than porn. June is now a bit worried that her name is on it as art director and it will jeopardize her own access. “I mean except for the cock-sucking it just looks like good, clean fun, doesn’t it?” she asked me with a harried look. Good, clean fun is not what I would say about a beau monde woman giving a hand job to a sexually aroused horse, but never mind. Obviously, all Helmut wanted was for us to endorse his conviction, but none of us shared it. “Fuck it!” he exploded. “I’m sixty-seven on Halloween. What am I waiting for? To print cock-sucking when I am dead? To hell with it! I am paying for this myself.” To which there is no answer really.
Tuesday, October 27, 1987
The stock market has crashed! Five hundred million in market cap evaporated from the Dow Jones in one mighty poof, or should I say pouf? It seems incredibly fitting it crashed at the same time as Christian Lacroix’s New York opening! All the Marie Antoinettes who didn’t see it coming. It was inevitable, foreseeable, but no one seems to have foreseen it. The blazing inequity of it all needed to be lanced. In a way it’s a relief. The conversations I have been hearing at Alice Mason’s and the Steinbergs were the decadent discourse of imminent decline even as they seem to be delivered from the glories of the top. What will this do to VF? Must respond with care. We have dined out on the decadence and now must deconstruct the collapse.
Monday, November 2, 1987
As soon as I got in today I was immediately hit with a message to go see Si because “something had come up.” Oh fuck. Has the crash made him decide to close something? Us? But no, didn’t even mention it, it was Interview again. Seems he has another crack at it. And thinks it needs to be taken “upmarket.” I felt a rush of irritation. The market just cratered. Is he really in such a bubble? We are killing ourselves to get the ads. There’s a chill atmosphere in the marketplace till people can see which way the wind is blowing. Brands are not buying. Restaurants are empty. Why take on another magazine that will compete in the same category as VF?
I decided not to respond verbally but with a well-thought-out memo. I told him that a heated-up Interview would slice the VF cake to a life-threatening degree at a time when we face ever more copycat competition. Better just to let it die, as it likely will. I also said what I believe, that Fred has always wanted the class of an attachment to Condé, but his desire to fancy up Interview is exactly the wrong direction. It needs to go young, downmarket for the summer movie crowd. And most important, we need to focus on how we can shore up VF from competitors. I whammed up the memo at eight a.m. before going to a breakfast at the Yale Club with the German publishing magnate Hubert Burda, who had asked George Weidenfeld to get a meeting with me. He seemed extremely pleasant and sane, but his idea is to start a VF kind of magazine in Germany and he wanted to pick my brains with no talk of partnership, just vacuuming my insights. It was like my memo to Si coming true. Everyone copying us, but what do we get out of it?
I was in a black mood by the time H and I joined Bernie Leser at a Condé Nast table at the annual B’nai B’rith dinner at the Grand Hyatt, this year honoring Ronald Lauder. Bernie, Bob Bernstein, and Si were on the dais in a chorus line of big Israel funders. New York social life is so deeply bizarre at times. To speed things up the chairman suggested after each name we give one clap, which only added to the glum, somber feeling of it all. Mr. Malcolm Forbes. [Clap.] Mr. Henry Grunwald. [Clap.] And so on. It felt like the ominous ceremony before the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. Ronald Lauder’s speech was stem-windingly dull. How does he have the flaming nerve to even contemplate challenging Senator Moynihan’s seat in NYC?
Wednesday, November 4, 1987
A day in the life of New York
Doug Johnston and I have an appointment with Paul Marciano, the marketing wiz behind the Guess Jeans ads. We get to the flashy office on Broadway and find Marciano, a round-faced Israeli teddy bear, in a flap about a hostile piece that just appeared in Forbes, claiming that the Marciano brothers, among other things, have bribed the IRS in their amassing of a $500 million fortune. Everyone is so jittery since the crash. He keeps jabbering and it’s clearly not the moment to progress our pitch for his ad schedule. From there we go to Calvin Klein’s show, a moment of fashion twittering I always enjoy. I sit next to Marina Schiano, whom I have succeeded in nailing as fashion director. She’s going to be a great replacement for André, I think, if one can get past her sparkling malice. She has a slightly crazed air behind the cat’s-eye sunglasses, but there is no doubt she has an impeccable sense of style. On the way out of Calvin’s show I collided with Oscar de la Renta, who said, “I am sorry you are not coming to my show.”
“Oh dear, I hate to miss it,” I said. “When is it?” “Now,” he replied with steely eyes, and I felt, as I always do, Oscar Umbrage. Then it’s on to the Yale Club, where Harry is hosting Juan Luis Cebrián, the Spanish founder of the great newspaper El País. I have always wanted to meet Ceb—he’s such a hero of journalism and of Spanish democracy, rushing out a special issue of the paper during the army’s attempted coup. He’s much more fun than I expected, with an irresponsible laugh and a savvy political glint in his eye. We asked Jon Newhouse to encourage him to launch a new newspaper just like it here. Cebrián is best on the Spanish concept of honor, which he says bedeviled him as a newspaper editor. “My honor is not your honor,” he explains, aspirating the h. “If I say someone is religious and his honor is that he is NOT religious, then I have offended that man’s honor and he must be satisfied.”
I get back to the office in time for an emissary from Dr. Mathilde Krim, who wants me to bring three tables full of rich and fashionable people to a benefit in aid of the Bailey Center Hospice. The two people who came to persuade me were a real estate man named Ronald English and the actor Andre Gregory, who sported a ragged beard because he’s in the middle of rehearsing the role of John the Baptist in Scorsese’s movie The Last Temptation of Christ. Ronald English reeled off all the dreadful AIDS stats and pitiful circumstances. “Of course,” he concluded, “I have a selfish reason to be here. I am gay and have lost many friends and I have tested positive for the AIDS antibody.” It was a melancholy kicker that I must obviously respond to. I thought what a strange world of contrasts I live in because right after these two, Patrick Kelly, the young designer I met in Paris, bowled in for a meeting, with his pale-faced Swedish manager and PA, about who should photograph his gold-button dresses for the March issue.
The evening found me at th
e Whitney Museum, gazing at the latest citrus-green plate paintings by Julian Schnabel, flanked by what the author of VF’s crack-addict memoir last month calls “the wide-eyed dead” of pale, social New York—Steve Rubell, Fred Hughes, et al. I told Steve about my uneasy encounter with Oscar. “Forget about Oscar,” Steve said, grinning. “He will always lay some trip on you like that. That guy gives ice in winter.”
As I tottered off to bed I heard from Wayne, who told me that Shelley Wanger is leaving House & Garden to be editor of Interview. More churn. Seems my memo stalled things long enough to have Fred move ahead on his own. Shelley is intellectually strong, brainy, and has great taste but is way too languid to turn a magazine around, unless Fred is smart enough to balance her with an aggressive journalist, which he wouldn’t think of doing because it’s not at all where he lives or how he thinks. But it’s a loss for Condé because Shelley had a Rolodex of upscale writers, and in the literary world she is adored.
Saturday, November 7, 1987
Si’s sixtieth birthday dinner at the UN Plaza apartment was small and intimate. I was seated next to Bob Gottlieb—haven’t seen him since I first arrived to take over VF. This time he was immensely cordial, and yet I warmed to him no more than before. He spoke mostly of his intense dislike of a man I adore, Brendan Gill at The New Yorker, his intimidation by the “sinister” William Shawn, and also how I as an English person could never understand The New Yorker. He said he had vetoed a travel piece John Updike offered to Harry to run because “it was far too thoughtful for Traveler.” What a preposterous snob! He is so self-admiring and glib and yet I see how he has got so far, especially with Si, who is intellectually insecure himself. There’s no doubt Gottlieb is a skillful text editor from everything I’ve heard but the combination of carefully manufactured “eccentricity” and unassailable self-confidence allows him to be packaged as a “genius.” He’s probably now feeling insecure himself. Since the Kaminsky firing it’s clear that Si goes by the numbers in the end, and the ads at The New Yorker are diving ever lower, despite the initial hype. Harry noticed that Victoria seemed very uneasy with Gottlieb, perhaps worried about more embarrassing musical chairs to come.
Tuesday, November 10, 1987
On the flight back from Detroit, where I went to talk to car advertisers and address a woman’s club of VF subscribers. I went to the ad lunch straight from the airport, and as always with the ad department’s brilliant deployment of me, I was seated between a client we already have and an empty chair. Doug left his pitch speech too late and by the time he started the room was half-empty. A reporter asked me which famous woman was my role model, a question that always leaves me stumped. I know it’s the wrong feminist answer, but most of my role models have been men. They always had the lives I wanted.
Sunday, December 6, 1987
More crash frisson. A quintessential New York evening—the screening of Oliver Stone’s new movie Wall Street. A freezing night. A cinema line around the block churning with A-listers who want to be in on anything with rising buzz. In the line ahead of and behind me, the Mort Janklows, the investment guru Jim Wolfensohn, Mort Zuckerman. Janklow stabbing the air with his Manhattan forefinger, telling whoever would listen that the crime in New York is out of hand—both his cars had had their phones ripped out and cassette decks stolen within a week of each other.
“Who’s screening this?” trilled Linda Janklow, who is always the custodian of how Social Things Should Be Done. “Fox? They need me to tell them how to run a screening!” Julian Schnabel floated like some predatory starfish on the outskirts of the line, looking for a familiar face to cut in behind. This was the heart of the zeitgeist, people! Finally the doors opened and we burst in and fought for seats, past Oliver Stone, wearing a red sweater and beaming his buccaneer’s smile. As soon as the titles came up with the David Byrne soundtrack I was so glad I had fought to get Ken Auletta into the screening to write about it and only wished I’d had Michael Douglas on the next cover. It is going to be such a monster hit: stylish, flashy, gripping but with that box-office edge of wish fulfillment. Gekko is the irresistible villain who everyone in that crowd knows is real. And as the credits went up I heard what we have all expected for so long as the decade nears its close: the sound of the tumbrels rolling for the Ichans, the Trumps, the Gutfreunds, and the horrible heavies of Wall Street. It’s finally not fashionable to be them anymore. They are going down with the last days of the Reagan era. I have just finished reading the new Tom Wolfe masterpiece, The Bonfire of the Vanities. Thanks to his genius, we can all now make open fun of the Masters of the Universe. The new Caryl Churchill play Serious Money about the arbitrage world just opened at the Public. When art converges in this way and the stock market has just crashed, we are witnessing another major mood swing in America. I find it exciting, so much more interesting to cover and critique than the bloat that preceded it. Next Saturday is Donald Trump’s book party at Trump Tower. I see it as the last party of the Reagan era. The gaudy postscript to an era’s boom and crash.
Monday, December 7, 1987
Real departure for January issue. Have put Jesse Jackson and his presidential run on the cover with the great piece by Sheehy. Felt the right antidote to a year of glitz on the rocks. There’s probably something in it to offend everybody, which is always promising. Jesse is an inspiration and a pioneer to so many and a symbol of danger to others—the anti-Semitic comments, the probably dodgy money, the womanizing—and yet no one is a more soaring or more galvanizing speaker. Circulation department says it will bomb on the newsstand, but sometimes an overall statement is more important.
Monday, December 14, 1987
A red-letter day! Si called me upstairs to give me a thirty-thousand-dollar raise! “What can I say, Tina. It’s an extraordinary thing you have done. You do it very gracefully, too.” That made me happy. Then he said, “I was surprised when I received the P and L on the November issue to see that, in fact, for the first time since its launch, Vanity Fair made a profit! A hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars, to be exact. A year ahead of schedule.” Ahead of schedule? Now he tells me what his real computations were. Awkwardly he clasped my hand. “Well done.”
I felt as if a huge stone had rolled off my back. Out of the red. For four years I have lived in fear that losing money meant that in an act of Si’s caprice as he sat in some holiday hot spot he would close us, whatever the succès d’estime Vanity Fair had become. There is no such thing as a succès d’estime in America. That’s why it’s a French phrase. There is only success. A hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars’ profit is nothing to write home about, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the $30 million VF lost CNP in its first year. I look back at it now and see all the hard work, the turmoil, the effort to keep clarity as we pushed forward. With a bit of luck ’88 will see us making real money. I felt proud, and grateful to Si, who took a chance on me. We have shared this great adventure.
Saturday, December 19, 1987
And so the year ends with the Night of a Thousand Trees, the AIDS benefit that Andre Gregory and Ronald English reeled me into. We took three tables for VF and then with three weeks to go before Christmas we had to twist, cajole, and blackmail a high-powered group to show up. Obviously knowing something I didn’t, one by one on the day of the event they started to drop out. Sarah Giles and I sat by the phone for three hours, frantically trying to round up faithful seat fillers.
But first, in a fitting sayonara to the year, Donald Trump’s book party for The Art of the Deal. We shared a car to Trump Tower with Barbara Walters, after another holiday bash. Barbara told me she was planning to go home in between and change out of her five-thousand-dollar Galanos cocktail dress into something “more formal with serious jewels because Ivana is sure to be dressed up.” I told her I thought it would be a mob scene and not to bother. Hasn’t she got the memo about the meaning of the crash?
I was right about the mob scene. It looked as if Trump had emptied out every croupier from his casino
s and every gold digger who ever got into spaghetti straps. There was a crowd of squealing celebrity groupies on the sidewalk outside. Inside, the atrium was festooned with poinsettias and red balloons and the escalator glided up and down with cargos of gawking boldfaces. On the ground floor heaving arbitrageurs danced the night away to deafening pop hits. Donald Trump himself looked sleek and starry as a prosperous young seal in his tux and white evening scarf. “Can you believe this party!” he kept exclaiming. “No, seriously, can you believe it? Love your magazine! Beautiful piece on Ivana. Byoodiful!” It was indeed a great piece by Michael Shnayerson. He revealed that Ivana refers to her husband as “the Donald,” which seems to be catching on.
At Ivana’s Christmas lunch last week at the Grand Hyatt for the Ladies Who Count she made a toast exuding a lot of expressive body language, dipping and twisting like a downhill racer on the slalom slope in Gstaad. She threw back her glass and called out, “My goot friend, never minte the vicious rumor mill, my sister-in-law! [Blaine Trump] And my goot friend my mother-in-law, your very good health!”
The Night of a Thousand Trees at first seemed promising. It was held in a cavernous hangar on West Twenty-Third Street, and the inventive designer Christmas trees twinkled brightly. I knew that it was a mistake to ask Denise and Prentis Hale, but it was a mistake I didn’t care about. I could see Prentis’s eyes scouring the scene in the hangar with rising malignance. Cocktails were scheduled for seven thirty, but at nine thirty we still weren’t sitting down for dinner. Then as we finally did so, the auction for the trees was announced. Colleen Dewhurst got up and in a slow, lugubrious voice intoned, “Death is your dinner partner tonight. [She was right in the case of Prentis.] Death is our dinner partner! AIDS is among us every day!”
