The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  Si arrived shortly after I did. He paced around, beaming and chuckling and flushing with delight as the VF contributors in their party getups, each more gorgeous than the last, descended the stairs. (Our Paris editor, the usually nondescript Tatiana de Rosnay, was now a French movie star in a silver-sequined strapless Patrick Kelly gown.)

  Hilariously, the first four guests were Henry and Nancy Kissinger and Dennis Hopper and Jackie Collins: high-low on the hoof. Having expected a typical black-tie seated dinner, they looked dazed and amazed at finding themselves surrounded by gyrating Brazilian showgirls—another last-minute Steve Rubell touch. Si and I stood in the never-ending boldface receiving line, greeting a crocodile: the Norman Mailers, the Calvin Kleins, Lee Radziwill, Alexander Godunov and Jacqueline Bisset, Swifty Lazar, Marietta Tree, Liza Minnelli and Halston (arriving together in a blaze of TV lights), Anna Wintour and David. Behind them came Jerry Zipkin and behind him, Tom and Sheila Wolfe. Lurking next to a potted palm was the gossip scribe Billy Norwich with his notebook, looking exactly as I imagined my fictional character Quentin Wasp would look in The Party Pack, the play I will now never finish. The Times’ elfin paparazzo Bill Cunningham leapt around, snapping his shutter like a maniac and squealing, “It’s the end of the Reagan era! It’s the beginning of the nineties!”

  Whatever it was, it was certainly something. A new kind of social vaudeville, perhaps—part theater, part nightclub, part salon, part saloon. Isabell had been wonderfully right about the underlit pink tablecloths—a foolproof device, he explained, that makes every woman’s complexion look great. And by casting the net wide to include all the young, hot, beautiful people, the models and the downtown crowd, we made jaded venerables like the Tisches and the Kissingers feel rejuvenated by new blood. As for the advertisers—who melted shyly but happily into the palm trees—they had at every turn a beautiful, fashionable, or famous person to gawp at. This would pay off with business in spades.

  As Ian had constantly affirmed to me in the planning stages, in the end it’s all about the crowd—and this one, culled from the multiple worlds VF lives in and covers, was a social classic. Our careful internal guest choreography of staff handlers worked like a charm. It allowed the old guard to feel looked after, which is what you always want from a party, comfort level for everyone, not just the supercool. Jerry Zipkin was thrilled that his was one of the six names with a card reserving a ringside table. “Why me?” he asked.

  “Because I knew you’d bitch and moan and be unbearable if you didn’t get one,” I said with the reckless candor of the night. Zipkin was in seventh heaven, sitting Humpty-Dumpty–like on a banquette, surveying the swirl: the young German socialite Princess von Thurn und Taxis in a tiny minidress, pursued by Jerzy Kosinski; Donald and Ivana Trump; Ron and Claudia Perelman; Kurt Vonnegut and Bianca Jagger. An ecstatic Nick Dunne hollered at me that it was the best issue of Vanity Fair ever, but live! From the corner of my eye I saw Steve and Calvin heading off to the bathroom. Old Studio 54 habits die hard.

  At nine thirty Si and I made our way to the stage. I’d spent my afternoon rehearsing my speech with the speech coach Dorothy Sarnoff. Doug Johnston got up to introduce us and attempted to quiet the room—a lousy assignment, since everyone partied on at peak volume. But when money talks in a New York room, people listen. They shut up for Si, who was back in HG funeral oration mode. “Once in a decade,” he began haltingly, “there’s a [long pause] magazine like Vanity Fair. Once in a decade, there’s an editor like [suspenseful silence] Tina Brown. Now … Vanity Fair fever is [five beats] sweeping America.”

  I felt dreamlike as I advanced toward the podium. This party, we all knew, was not just an anniversary party. It was a victory lap after all the toil and skepticism and bets against us. More than a turnaround. A resurrection.

  As I spoke, I remembered Dorothy Sarnoff’s exhortations. “Eyes sweep the room.” “Don’t rush it.” “Throw it out.” “Have a good time!”

  I thanked all my team, searching them out with my eyes as they watched from their corners and bar perches. I smiled a lot. I got my last bit out with no mishap: “E. B. White once said no one should come to New York to live unless they’re willing to be lucky. I’ve been more than willing, but also unbelievably lucky. Lucky to have such a brilliant team. Lucky to have you all here tonight.

  “Now, as Harry Benson said to President and Mrs. Reagan when we went to take their cover picture at the White House, ‘Let’s dance!’”

  At this preplotted cue, the lights turned up and the saxophones wailed into a show-stopping rendering of “In the Mood,” with the sixteen saxy blondes rocking out. The VF contributors hit the dance floor to encourage the rest. It was only then, just as the euphoria had begun to subside, that I realized with a sickening jolt that I had omitted Steve and Ian and Robert from my tribute. I’d been so focused on mentioning everyone at the office that my three muses had been left out. I saw the dashed look on Steve’s face, and as soon as the first saxophone set was over I rushed back to the stage, grabbed the mike, and yelled out my thanks to the three masterminds. But by then the room was a hubbub, and I fear I didn’t assuage their disappointment—Steve’s, anyway. Robert didn’t give a damn. (Rooms, not people, are what he cares about. He loses interest as soon as the first guest arrives.) Ian was all right, too. He had already left the party, in his quiet, mysterious way, once he had, as he later told me, “checked that the magic was in place.” Even so, Steve loves to be lauded, and I cursed myself. But I couldn’t agonize for too long when it was all so glorious. I allowed myself to relax at a table and bask a bit with my Harry and the Mailers. Norman sat with his legs akimbo like a macho koala, eyes twinkling with satire as he cased the scene.

  I ended the night congaing with Henry K and Patrick Kelly right behind. It was one thirty a.m. when Rubell, the eternal maître d’, showed us out into the cold night, past the heavies with the walkie-talkies and a few dogged paparazzi waiting for the last guests.

  “Billy Rose would have been happy,” said Steve. “The club can go to sleep again now.” I loved that imagery. The fact it would never be repeated made the magic even more potent.

  As we left, Jerry Zipkin grabbed both my hands and said, “You didn’t steal this success from anybody.” That was a nice thing to say.

  Tuesday, March 8, 1988

  Fade to black. I heard from London that Mark Boxer has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. I was stricken to hear it and wanted to fly immediately to see him. Witty, wonderful Mark! I loved asking him his opinion when he drew for us at Tatler. So contrary, so slyly amusing. He saw it all. He is the Alexander Pope of contemporary London. And no one has ever looked more debonair going out to bat at cricket. Last time I saw him for lunch when he visited NYC he was unusually testy. We had a bit of a rivalrous spar about our respective regimes at Tatler. Perhaps incipient illness was why he was cranky. I think of his refined, droll face and hedgehog hair and weep. I can’t bear to lose a great original like Mark, but the cancer sounds advanced and irreversible.

  Wednesday, March 9, 1988

  I want to record a day when everything went well in my whirling life.

  1.  Beat out the competition to extract Willie Shawcross’s book on the Shah of Iran.

  2.  Got home to receive a call from Swifty. “How does two million dollars sound to you? If you can understand the power dynamics of Hollywood as well as you do in that Puttnam piece, that’s what I can get for a novel by you.”

  3.  Persuaded the terrific Sally Bedell Smith, who’s writing a biography of Bill Paley, to break off and do a big piece about his last days for June (I am told he is dwindling). We struck a deal that if she did this piece, I would still extract the book when publication comes.

  4.  Pulled the missing elements for a dinner at home for Swifty, who’s in town on his way to London, that was proving hard to cast, by snagging Sid Bass and his Iranian seductress Mercedes Kellogg. Apparently Mercedes caught Sid’s attention by throwing a dinner roll
at him during a party in Southampton. Now Sid is so besotted he’s prepared to pay Anne $200 million for his freedom to marry Mercedes. Anyway, on my night for Swifty, they had arranged to have dinner already with the David Nivens and the society financier Freddy Melhado, so I told Mercedes to “just bring them all.” Mercedes laughed her throaty, courtesan’s laugh. “Why not?” she said. That solved all my problems in one fell swoop. Best of all H and I took G to the park, and a Daily News photographer took a snap of Georgie eating a huge ice cream and it was splashed across the front page as a spring sunshine story. A moonstruck day in New York.

  Sunday, March 13, 1988

  Ahmet Ertegun was very, very funny at dinner, telling anecdotes about Sam Spiegel, the outsize film mogul who produced Lawrence of Arabia. (Spiegel is such a colorful character; will ask Sarah G, who knows him, to do an oral history, “Voices on Sam.”) Once Sam told him there would be an actress on his boat with them named Bergen. “Candy?” said Ahmet. “Polly?” No to both of these. When they got on the boat there was the “actress,” wearing a miniskirt, high-heeled shoes, and sockettes. “You can go downstairs and freshen up now, Ingrid, darling,” said Sam. Whereupon she turned around and said, “How many more fucking times. My name is Camilla.”

  They all stayed till twelve thirty, with Mercedes laughing huskily at everything that Sid said. He told me they had spent a month in Aspen. Doing what? “Staying up all night beside the fire,” he said. Mercedes is purring with good fortune. A billion dollars and all that sex to boot. Sarah Giles, who also joined us, said that she accepted an offer to go back with them for coffee afterward and saw the apartment in the Carlyle, which she described as a pure love nest. “Lots of Biedermeier and erotic curtains.”

  Thursday, March 17, 1988

  Ray Stark is in a rage about my Puttnam piece. He hated me calling him the “profane cardinal of Hollywood,” but his main fury stems from the fact that I quoted him saying, “Guy McElwaine is not exactly a rocket scientist,” and Guy was his weekend guest at his ranch when VF landed! Herbert Allen is also irate about the way he is portrayed, according to the diplomat and man about town Dick Holbrooke, who lunched with him and Fay Vincent at La Côte Basque last week. Oh well! I don’t regret a line. In fact, it behooves me to bite the balls of the establishment from time to time and sabotage excess coziness. I feel it’s liberated me actually. Before we left I took Harry to an Alice Mason dinner, a bad addiction. Harry refused to come again. I now realize that that heinous dinner of tumescent gray sausage, sauerkraut, and Irish coffee is the only meal one will ever receive at her house. Doesn’t she ever look around and see that every single woman leaves her plate untouched? As always she put me at her table bang opposite her, and between Mike Wallace and Jim Brady. On the other side of Jim was a Lebanese heiress wearing the incongruous dinnertime outfit of an outsize black mink hat with a huge diamond in the center of it. “Is it true,” Mike Wallace asked, “that Arafat dresses up as a woman and fondles little boys?”

  “I think not,” she said. “However, that is his vocation.” “What’s he like really?” I asked. “Candidly?” she replied, her diamond winking fiercely over the tungsten sausage. “As a matter of fact I find him rather sneaky.” I fell about laughing at that, to the puzzlement of everybody else. Sneaky is such a small-bore word.

  I rethink my life for the millionth time. Why do I keep seeking out the very things I deride? Perhaps because I was born to chronicle them.

  Friday, April 22, 1988

  I found Philip Roth a bit of a disappointment at our dinner last night for Helmut Newton. I’ve always found him intriguing in pictures and on the page, but in reality he’s like an accountant, although, granted, his mean, sparkling eyes suggest something more interesting. Norman Mailer also came. I felt he was slightly put out to see Roth in our house. Some literary feud I am too ignorant to remember? Or just two big dogs who need to be kept apart? Norman likes to be the only superstar writer swaggering around. It was a chaotic sprawling buffet, so I ushered Roth and Claire Bloom to a table (she is a high-minded, humorless bore) and Mailer joined us, riffing about whether God was a computer. They circled each other in conversation awkwardly all night. Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager slipped away, surmising, I am sure, that this was not their crowd. Some female producer Michael Cimino brought with him left in a rage when no one knew the movies she had made and I wrongly introduced her as Cimino’s wife. As dinner parties go it was a total flop. Like a bad issue of the mag when I haven’t paid enough attention.

  Highlight of the week was the Tisch-Steinberg candlelit wedding at the Central Synagogue. Saul’s daughter, Laura, was marrying Larry’s nephew Jonathan, and it was as dynastic a coupling in new-money terms as if a Rockefeller married a Whitney or an Alsace hooked up with a Lorraine.

  Laura is as porcelain as her father is porky. John is debonair and man-about-town-ish despite having inherited the Tisch family ears. It was a flabbergasting display of wealth, a riot of Arnold Scaasi tulle and bouffant skirts and white tie and tails for the men. According to W, the flower bill alone at the reception afterward at the Met came to a million dollars. Each gold-painted magnolia-leaf swag looked as if it was the price of a holiday in the South of France. Gayfryd had carpeted the Met dining room in white mohair and the tablecloths were gold thread. We were at her and Saul’s table. I was between J. Carter Burden and Henry Kravis, which itself seemed symptomatic of the era. Old money ceding fast to new. Burden looked uncomfortable and had an unfortunate haircut that left his shiny, effete face overly exposed. He seems the quintessence of patrician indecision. Kravis, on the other hand, has a look of fierce mistrust that matches his barking, impatient manner. It was fortuitous my dress was designed by his wife, Carolyne Roehm, whose hungry face and anorexic evening shoulders were on the other side of Harry. Her eyes were starey with strain and the quest for perfection. She looked worn down by the French lessons and the piano lessons and the cordon bleu taster menus for every dinner party she hosts. She’s a very, very talented designer, trained by Oscar, but that’s not enough if you are the second Mrs. Kravis. One feels she never gets to collapse in her designer jeans in Connecticut and recuperate from her week competing. She has to go to Florida to shoot with the Kluges. To Mar-a-Lago to a house party of the Trumps. She has to look wonderful, have inventive sex with Kravis, and go to a black-tie dinner every night of the week. No wonder she looks like a zombie. Gayfryd does the same but seems to have more fun.

  The irony that the trophy wives miss is that the husbands much prefer them as mistresses pure and simple, not the taste baronesses they become. I want to read (or write) an essay called “Sex and Decorating.” The more decorating in a Park Avenue apartment, the less sex between the occupants. It’s the Wall Street version of the Joni Evans and Dick Snyder tuna fish salad story all over again. Donald Trump apparently is loudly complaining wherever he can that he’s sick of Ivana talking casino business when he gets home (instead of switching into geisha mode, as the Donald no doubt wants and expects). Gayfryd now sees her career as being chatelaine to Saul, with twenty phone lines to organize the staff. She has to ensure that whenever he wants one, a small coffee cup is delivered to him to drink in one fast gulp as the house factotum waits with the tray. (That’s a status symbol, I have noticed, in Wall Street homes. The man of the house never swirls or lingers over his coffee cup. He knocks it back standing up, while someone waits.) Carolyne Roehm and Ivana Trump are playing the game as hard as their husbands, leaving them only voracious for more. More what? More everything: each course at the Tisch-Steinberg dinner—poached salmon with champagne aspic; trio of veal, lamb, chicken; and orzo with porcini—was interrupted by thirty minutes of wild dancing to the Hank Lane Orchestra. Vartan Gregorian swept me onto his cummerbund with the opener, “Do you enjoy original sin as much as I do?” As he twirled me around the slippery parquet, I kept seeing the pinched face of the Greek finance manager Alecko Papamarkou—once Arianna’s entry-level patron—swirling by, humming “ay ay bamba.” We m
ade our escape as soon as it was polite, with money humming in our ears.

  Friday, April 29, 1988

  H and I have been fantasizing about starting a newspaper. The New York Times is pompous and badly laid out. Have a huge hankering to burst into Si with an amazing newspaper dummy and force and beg him to back it. The New York Independent! We have both been in a heart-racing mood, perhaps because it’s spring, dying to give birth to some red-hot journalism.

  Meanwhile we had the British theater producer Robert Fox and his wife, Natasha Richardson, over for dinner at the apartment. They are here for the opening of Chess on Broadway. A sulfurous row broke out between the playwright Peter Shaffer and the producer Joe Papp, who’s producing a raft of celebrity Shakespeares. (The last was Julius Caesar, with Al Pacino as Mark Antony.) Papp started banging on about his totally fresh viewpoint, and how he’s de-mothballing Shakespeare for Americans. Shaffer, a hilariously waspish old queen, listened to this in silence for about twenty minutes and then could take it no more. His fury erupted when Papp did a caricatural English rendition of Macbeth’s “She should have died hereafter.”

  “Hold it right there!” erupted Shaffer. “Just hold it! I have been listening and suffering to your preposterous bullshit for the last half hour. You’ve clearly never been to a production at the RSC or the National. Didn’t you ever see David Warner’s Henry IV? Jonathan Pryce’s Hamlet? Gielgud’s second Hamlet?”