The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  We all stared at our plates. Dr. Ruth Westheimer (her again!) and the playwright and actor Harvey Fierstein got up and began a rasping banter that did not let up for a good forty minutes. Westheimer croaked about condoms and foreplay, Fierstein hurled abuse at the audience. “You think you’ve been asked here to have a good time?? You’ve been asked because you’re RICH. Look at those dresses you’re wearing. They could pay for a room for a boy eating garbage!” (“I could use some garbage myself,” muttered Steve Rubell who, like me, was ravenous.) By ten thirty the auction for a hundred trees was at number eight. It began to dawn on us all that they were going to make us wait to eat till tree number one hundred had been sold. By now Denise Hale was lying back in her chair with a program over her head and Prentis was drumming his fingers and blaspheming. Steve Rubell was giving us a running commentary on other occasions he could remember that matched this one for torture, Reinaldo was eating everyone’s bread roll. Susie Hayes, the lawyer Ed Hayes’s wife, kept looking around in desperation, mouthing that she had a baby to breastfeed at home. Two hours in I stormed off in search of Ronald English, who had got me into this fiasco, furiously accosting waiters and bouncers till I found him. “Ronald, I am mortified,” I hissed. “I’ve got thirty millionaires about to walk out instead of donating money to cure AIDS. They are starving to death and this evening is a fiasco! I am giving you eight minutes to feed us or we are outta here!” Thirty pairs of eyes watched me spinning with rage in the middle of the dance floor in my absurd pouf dress. As I stalked back to my seat they all clapped. The food at last arrived and we fell upon it.

  Steve Rubell, by now in a melancholy mood, talked about the humiliation of meeting your mother in prison pajamas. He shelled out ten thousand for a tree and then donated it back. So did the French nightclub queen Regine, whom Reinaldo had persuaded to cancel a 7:30 p.m. flight to Chicago to be on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Whatever else one might say about them, New Yorkers are generous. Gradually, as the night wore on, a Dunkirk spirit took over, as they all got drunk and we felt we had been through something epic. Jackie Rogers slurred at me, “I haven’t seen Denise Hale for ten years. Wow, whatta piece of work that woman is. Denise Hale is an animal, Tina, an animal.” The auction was now at tree eighty. As I turned to flee with Harry I saw that at the next table were eight men holding hands. They were sitting with eyes closed in prayerful silence. It stopped me in my tracks. What are our spoiled concerns compared to the pain of all their loss?

  1988

  GOLD DUST

  Friday, January 1, 1988

  First day of the New Year and our last at the Elkhorn Ranch in Arizona, where we have had such a fine holiday, disconnected entirely from NYC’s frantic pace. No phone in the cabin. No TV, no shops or places to visit. Meals are all in the big school hall with a roaring fire, huge Christmas tree and stuffed deer and a boar (G’s favorite) gazing down at us from the wall. For Christmas I bought G a fur hat with a bear’s face and fur ears and he looks so adorable in it. He has become obsessed with the clear, silver moon. Every time we set foot outside our cabin to walk to the big hall for supper the night air is riven by George mooing at the moon. MOOOON, he shouts, MOOOOON. He never sees the moon in New York, I realize. This holiday he has seen a real cow, many horses, two huge dogs, and the MOOON.

  I’m entering my fifth year at VF. My New Year’s resolutions are:

  To get pregnant in the spring.

  To strive for temperance, less speed.

  To carve out more time with G.

  To beware of Uncle Si as Mammon posing as a hamster.

  Thursday, January 7, 1988

  The year started with a bang—a gold-mine piece about VF in Advertising Age to mark our fifth anniversary. It showed a chart of our ad growth and great quotes from Doug and me about how we got there. It was a joy to see that graphics box of ascending ad figures. Better still, the anniversary issue we have toiled over with such intensity has come out well. We have Nick Dunne on the Collins sisters’ rivalry (thanks for the tip, Swifty), accompanied by Annie Leibovitz’s bold, brassy pics of the two of them in the back of a limo, plus Gabriel García Márquez in Cuba by Pete Hamill with pics by Helmut, profiles of Patrick Kelly and I. F. Stone, Al Gore on the couch by Gail Sheehy, and a juicy takeout on Clare Boothe Luce by Marie Brenner. It sizzles with bravado on every page.

  Monday night we went to dinner with John Brademas, the president of NYU, for Harry’s idol and former Brit home secretary Roy Jenkins, who was in town. Brademas is one of the dullest men in Manhattan and gave a total dud of a toast before he handed the floor to peerless Woy (as Roy pronounces it) Jenkins. As soon as the old orator started to speak I felt a wave of London longing. With no notes he riffed with such elegance, humor, erudition, and glancing self-parody that the room was mesmerized by the sheer casual virtuosity of it all. Afterward Harry and I and Roy and Jennifer (note to self: I want to be like her when I am seventy in brisk, comfortable walking shoes and stern silver hair) caught up over coffee. Roy is still exercised about David Owen’s disastrous leadership of the Social Democratic Party, realizing now that their botched political experiment is the main reason we’ve got Mrs. Thatcher—and will keep her. The SDP’s civility, education, and intellect, and, unfortunately, muddle were no match for Maggie’s focused, primitive flair and it obviously burns Roy up. He so clearly was born to be prime minister. Or believes he was.

  I feel how wildly foreign we Brits really are to Americans and how the gap is widening all the time. They see us as Masterpiece Theatre, to be briefly appreciated before zapping the channel to something more relevant. But who in American politics now can hold the floor like Woy?

  Sunday, January 10, 1988

  Si called me upstairs and said he wants to buy Details. Whenever he comes back from vacation in Vienna he wants to buy something or fire someone, usually both. Ironically Details is now owned by Gary Bogard, and for a change I liked the idea of buying it. He was again assuming I would want to run it as well as VF and perhaps I should stop resisting that.

  I have now been at VF for four years and do feel the call of expansion. I just can’t risk it with G. I can see he is still not like other kids. For six months his only real play is the obsessional attachment to his small white garbage trucks that he runs back and forth across the window ledge. He is still so loving and funny, with his beyond-his-years vocabulary. He can recite long sections of Winnie-the-Pooh word perfect, but we are still looking for the doctor who can tell us what more we can do to bring him into normal play.

  Meanwhile I am toiling to finish my piece on David Puttnam. If only it stays fresh—David is now talking to every damn outlet in sight. Harry helping me as he always used to do. I love working side by side with him again, his deft cuts and additions reminding me how in a class of his own he is as an editor. I can write good sentences, but his sense of structure is so great. He can create narrative pace, factual zingers, and write smooth segues that are somehow in my voice. The magus.

  Much speculation at Condé about Anna’s unveiling of the new House & Garden soon. John Richardson came down to our floor in a rage when he learned she was going to run his Gauguin essay through André Leon Talley’s fashion pics of Azzedine Alaia’s sackcloth dresses on native girls in Bora-Bora. Perhaps she will win him a new audience.

  Monday, January 11, 1988

  At Bob Colacello’s suggestion, I spent the morning with Steve Rubell and his partner, Ian Schrager, planning the party for the fifth anniversary of VF. I want something really special and no one knows more about special than the creators of Studio 54. I know Steve, of course, but had never met his partner, Ian, and wasn’t sure this was the right idea or that the white-powder flamboyance of 54 was the right way to go. Still, Bob persuaded me it couldn’t hurt to consult. We met in the somewhat dingy office at the Century Plaza Hotel, which they are in the throes of renovating. Their idea of “boutique hotels” seems to be working. For the VF fifth, their immediate suggestion was that they open—just for the party—
the defunct Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe club in the basement of the Paramount Hotel in Times Square, a run-down tourist joint they are about to transform with the help of Philippe Starck. The Diamond Horseshoe supper club opened in 1938 and closed in 1951 and hasn’t been used since. I loved this idea, the period revival so excellent for Vanity Fair’s atmosphere and a conjured-up-just-for-one-night supper club had an instantly romantic flavor.

  It’s funny to see the dynamic between the two partners. Steve—with his whipped-cur smile, short attention span, and sudden flashes of flair—is all about the social energy. Ian, brooding, often silent, a bit Bob De Niro–like in appearance, is, I soon came to realize, the aesthetic genius, constantly flipping through art books, seeking visual references.

  “Describe the feel you want,” he said to me.

  “Forties Hollywood,” I replied dreamily. “Limos disgorging, flashbulbs popping.”

  “Yeah, we can do that,” said Steve, drumming his fingers.

  “Cigarette girls in short skirts!” I crooned.

  “Yeah. Got that,” said Ian.

  “Saxophones wailing!” I cried.

  “An all-girl band,” said Ian carefully. “We can get Calvin to make the outfits. Blonde wigs. Matching.” He made small notes like an accountant while Steve’s eyes darted around, looking for new stimulus. He reminds me of Mosca, the flesh fly in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, buzzing around feeding on fashionable people—the night porter of Manhattan who knows every secret and caters to any need. On Friday they asked me back and brought in a party designer they insist I work with, Robert Isabell. I disliked him on sight, with his unsmiling smile, pretty face, and slippery attitude to cost, but they said not to worry about cost, they would underwrite the whole thing (incredible news!), and that I must learn to trust them. I do trust Steve and Ian, who know more than anyone alive how to create a night to remember. So we shall see.

  Sunday, January 17, 1988

  The Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards at the Met gave VF this year’s Magazine of the Year Award. I’d expected a low-key event, but it was full-on glitter and elegance. Wore the new black high-necked Patrick Kelly number and had a hair and makeup artist coif and paint me to the nines. Mrs. Reagan presented the lifetime achievement award to Brooke Astor. Calvin Klein received one for his last collection. Malcolm Forbes presented mine for bringing “high style, wit, and grace to photography and prose.” Afterward there was a divine dinner in the Temple of Dendur and we bought a table for the team to celebrate. Halfway through the second course Mrs. Reagan’s security guy came across and said the first lady wanted to see me. So I trotted across to her table, where she was dining with Oscar de la Renta, the Texan billionaire Sid Bass, et al. She looked like a fragile doll. “I want to tell you how much I love your magazine,” she said. “I’ve still got three copies of the cover we did together. It’s my favorite.” I floated back to the table euphoric. I understood that this was a moment in the story to be savored. What people don’t yet know is the impact Vanity Fair’s success has had on other magazines. By reversing the marketing bromides about how “general interest magazines don’t work,” we’ve allowed other outlets to get more imaginative, freed other editors to take risks.

  Friday, February 12, 1988

  G threw himself out of his high chair on a Sunday night and Harry heroically threw himself after him to catch him, and though he saved G, he cut his eye on the edge of the marble table, severing his tear duct. I rushed him to the ER at New York-Presbyterian with a screaming G, feeling so guilty as I know my work absorption has made G feel neglected and that’s why he acted out. While we were sitting there in angst, H clasping his eye, I looked up and saw, of all people, Alex sitting waiting for a doctor, too. It was startling to see him in his Sunday attire. A pair of old jeans and a big gray sweater rather than his customary dark blue suit. He had brought in Genna, his Russian houseman who has AIDS and who had collapsed in the apartment. “My dearest, why are you here?” he cried, and put his arms around me as Genna was wheeled away. I felt such a connection to the real Alex at that moment. The old patrician Russian, taking care of his extended family, the close-knit émigrés, refugees as they still feel they are underneath. I realized for the millionth time how much he means to me.

  H is okay now after his eye was sewn back together but it’s been very upsetting.

  Monday, February 15, 1988

  I am spending many hours at the Rubell, Schrager office.

  Steve is usually hunched with two telephones. Reinaldo has been roped in to help with planning the guest list. He said, “Madonna should come. She’s been on our cover.”

  “Have you ever seen a grateful rock star?” said Steve, cupping one phone away from his mouth.

  “Yeah, look at Cher,” said Ian morosely.

  “Right,” agreed Steve. “Christmas Eve she leaves Morgan’s after a six-week stay and I had to run around tipping all the staff.”

  Ian now has a pile of thirties picture books of Busby Berkeley routines to get the evening’s decor completely right. “The floor,” he suddenly says. “This”—he points at a picture—“is what we do with the floor. This is vinyl paint. Costs nothing.” Sometimes I get confused because he’s simultaneously looking at pictures for inspiration for the new Royalton Hotel they are renovating. “The toilets,” he will suddenly exclaim. “This, this right here, is what we need to do with the fixtures.”

  Wednesday was the launch party for Anna’s new House & Garden (now rechristened HG) at the New York Public Library. The revamp has panache but it’s a bit too kinetic and derivative of Vogue. House & Garden always had a certain mellow savoring of the pleasures of living, banished in the new breakneck pagination. Still, it’s hard to get it right straightaway. It’s more difficult for Anna to be experimental because readers of the old House & Garden loved the magazine, whereas VF’s hated it.

  I was surprised by the venue for the launch party at the library—black tie, placement, formal speeches. Si’s been so leery of hype since the debacle of VF’s launch in 1983 that it’s probably a mistake to have done this for a revamp of H & G. (I was seated between Calvin Klein and the British decorator Nicky Haslam, whom I haven’t seen for years.)

  His speech was a Si classic. He spoke in a slow, halting interior monologue, like Hamlet on the battlements. Bill Blass the next morning told me he half thought Si was going to produce a gun and shoot himself. “The new … House … and Garden … HG … is the product … of … the vision … of … a brilliant … and determined … editor … I am … in awe of her virtuosity.” Then Anna got up and shrewdly threw bouquets at everyone who might be dangerous, like the editor of Spy magazine, Graydon Carter, and Ed Kosner, both seated at her table.

  Wednesday, February 24, 1988

  I’ve commissioned the novelist Joyce Johnson to write a piece about the horrific Hedda Nussbaum case, which has kept me up at night. Joyce is the perfect writer to get into the head of Nussbaum, herself a West Side intellectual in the publishing world.

  Nussbaum was so battered by her lover, a vile lawyer called Joel Steinberg, that she failed to call emergency services when he beat their daughter, Lisa, to death. People see domestic abuse as a lower-class phenomenon. But it happens behind closed doors at every stratum. And women stay silent because of shame. It takes a novelist like Joyce to be able to humanize Nussbaum, who lost her sense of self so completely that she could abandon her own child. That’s hard to empathize with on any level which is why we must do it. Everyone sees Nussbaum as a monster, but she was a victim, too, as Joyce will show.

  Tuesday, March 1, 1988

  Vanity Fair’s fifth anniversary party! What a night! Maybe the best party in Manhattan since Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. It was the hit of hits, a risk that paid off better than we could have even dreamed.

  I knew it from the moment joyful Patrick Kelly blew in from Paris like a fashion circus tumbler, bearing the dress he had been making for me all weekend, a skintight lace top and bla
ck taffeta skirt with his trademark buttons. Sunday all the VF top contributors met at the office to discuss how we would wrangle the guests. Reinaldo Herrera flew in from Mustique and promised to raise the energy by starting a conga line at midnight. Each contributor was assigned to look after, introduce, and shepherd a passel of three VIPs, one or two difficult oldsters and any potential troublemakers who badmouth when feeling neglected. We went over to the Diamond Horseshoe to look at the venue as it was being assembled. This was the moment when, at last, I understood what Ian and Steve meant about Robert Isabell. As we descended the stairs to the club in the basement, we saw a vision in the ecstasy of creation. Robert’s passive-aggressive sullenness had utterly vanished. He was now shimmying up and down ladders like an agile circus performer, palm fronds in his mouth and a staple gun in his hand.

  He had caused the shabby walls of the club to be painted gold. He had decreed that shiny black plastic garbage bags be laid on the floor (a cheaper, slicker solution than vinyl paint). Palm trees had been flown in from Miami and dipped in gold. Everywhere you looked, guys were hammering, painting, and draping at Robert’s barked commands. Fifty small club tables, with pink tablecloths lit from below, glowed in anticipation. In two days Robert had transformed the dusty, shuttered old ballroom into a thrumming homage to the Age of Copacabana, tingling with energy and romance. And the genius of it, the sexiness of it, was that there was nothing Vegas or Trumpy or vulgar about it. The feeling instead was of improvised wit, of stylish theatricality, of glorious, naughty magic. One of the many innovative things about Studio 54, I have recently learned, was the movable theatrical sets and lights. It was Robert who created those replenishing nocturnal fantasies. I will never again do a big event without him.

  By Monday, the day of the party, we were all in a fever. I showed up half an hour early to view the completed mise-en-scène. Down the stairs swiveled and sambaed the turbaned Carmen Miranda cigarette girls. Waiters in white gloves wafted by with trays. Stills from the old Vanity Fair adorned the walls of the foyer, bathed in colored lights. The backdrop to the stage was twenty enormous VF covers, in front of which a choir of sixteen girl saxophone players topped by gold Louise Brooks wigs (delivered up, as promised, by Ian) were blasting out their rehearsal moves. They swayed from side to side in unison, their long, black-stockinged legs flaunted in identical short black Calvin Klein dresses. Bouncers with walkie-talkies and paparazzi already thronged the street outside. Long, black limos with tinted glass were pulling up at the red carpet. Just as I had imagined.