The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  I feel rattled by the whole thing. Inevitably the manner of Grace’s firing after such long service—thirty-some years at Vogue, seventeen as editor in chief—makes one feel like the disposable help. Surely there could have been a more elegant ascendance created for Grace if he wanted to move her out? It’s lousy for Anna too, to begin a new job like this.

  Retreated to Quogue for a long weekend to soothe nerves … I love the stolen quality of Sunday evenings. The air seems to smell even fresher on a late-afternoon bike ride, a time of peace when all the floating weekend population have left to travel in their nose-to-nose convoy back to the city. G cavorts around on the beach in a T-shirt with bare bottom like a madcap, silvery elf.

  Tuesday, July 12, 1988

  Bernie Leser asked Harry and me out to dinner with Helen Gurley and David Brown at La Grenouille. No sooner had we all sat down than Helen pitched into Bernie about Grace Mirabella’s bum’s rush, having just come from a grim good-bye celebration of Grace thrown by Dawn Mello at Bergdorf’s. “How could Si be such a brute?” wailed Helen, while Bernie swiveled around uneasily in his chair. “Doesn’t he realize how awful he looks?”

  “Unfortunately, no!” blustered Bernie. “I wish I could get through to him on this.” (Get through! One can imagine how Bernie has never stopped telling him he’s done the right thing ever since it happened.) Anyway, in the middle of this sweaty moment, who should walk by but the Bergdorf party—Grace Mirabella with her husband, Dr. Bill Cahan, and Dawn Mello and her escort. Harry shot over and sat with Grace for twenty minutes, which made Bernie even shiftier.

  “Doesn’t Si care?” Helen pushed.

  “He doesn’t have to,” I said recklessly. “No one ever tells you the truth when you are that rich.” I knew that would be relayed by Bernie to Si.

  And sure enough, at nine a.m. Si called and asked me to lunch. Felt a brief panic that I would be slammed for disloyalty but what the hell.

  We settled into Si’s booth at the Four Seasons, preposterously early as always, in an empty restaurant. Then after the usual breakneck first course he said, “Things are going very well at Vanity Fair and I think it’s time for an … an adjustment.”

  “Adjustment?” I asked. Long pause.

  “In your salary,” he said. “Of … of … a hundred thousand dollars.”

  I hid my euphoria and looked vague. “That’s very kind,” I murmured. Clearly he felt he needed to spread snowflakes around after looking so bad to his employees, and I was now the happy recipient.

  “Besides,” he went on. “What about our talk? About, about, editorial director?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That was very flattering. But … you know Alex is at the height of his powers. He’s so brilliant, you should get him to stay as long as you can.”

  He asked me what I thought of The New Yorker.

  I do think of it a lot these days. How candid to be? The more I have pondered the editorial director’s job, the more I have thought reviving The New Yorker could be so much more satisfying, stretching me as an editor, raising my game with new writers. “I could modernize The New Yorker, Si,” I said finally. “If it ever gets to be too much of a drain.” This was a stake through his heart, as I saw his attraction to the idea fight with his resolve not to be seduced into doing it—yet. The two modes existed in his brief expression of panic. After a long silence, he said, “That, that’s good to know.” I was back in my office by one forty-five, feeling happy about the raise and recommitted to Si.

  Saturday, July 23, 1988

  But wait, a summons on Friday to Go Upstairs. Si is sitting at his desk, hurling balls of trash over his shoulder, as he does when he’s looking for something on his desk. “Bimonthly,” he says as I walk in, no warm smile for my sweet thank-you-for-the-raise note he probably perused at four a.m. “Vanity Fair is so hot, why not give people more of it, publish it twenty-four times a year? I’ve got Peter Armour looking at the figures.” Groan. I understood immediately what this was about. Keep her busy until Alex retires. No thanks. I will scotch that one, and anyway I don’t even know if I want Alex’s job, which is such a political minefield. “Very, very interesting,” I said. “Let me mull over what impact that would have on editorial.” He looked at me without expression and threw another paper ball over his shoulder.

  Tuesday, July 26, 1988

  Mark Boxer died on Wednesday. He was fifty-seven. I can’t shake off the melancholy. He’s the first real friend I have lost. His picture over the Times obit, the quizzical expression under the hedgehog hair, made him seem so very much alive. I think of him on that May day in Chiswick with his two little girls and the gaunt-faced Anna. He bore his six months’ death sentence so elegantly.

  It makes me think about how I, like Anna Ford, married a much older man, who like Mark seems unquenchably alive. My darling HE, love of my life. Georgie is such a fragile, shy little boy, always hanging on a pause with other children. Will he, like Anna’s beautiful little girls, suddenly be bereft? Harry is such a magical father, bringing imagination and gaiety into G’s little world. Without him nothing would be right. Tonight, he went to London to finish sorting out Ponsonby Terrace and go to Mark’s funeral. We held each other so tight when we said good-bye. We are so alike. We both feel the cold fingers of intrusive change that make us want to hold G fast in our loving cocoon.

  I grieve for it all. For Mark. When he was in New York in February we all played a game at dinner, with Harry’s old Sunday Times friends Clive Irving and Ron Hall, who were in town, about what we’d most want to be in a next act.

  “Editor of a newspaper in New York,” said Mark. “No. Not true. I’d like to be”—he gave that rueful whinny—“editor of Vanity Fair!”

  I remember my brief stab of outrage. My job! Watch out for Mark!

  Now, six months later, as I look at his obituary I feel ashamed.

  Sunday, July 31, 1988

  Had a wonderful time sitting next to Steve Rubell at a Reinaldo dinner. He went on about how much he wants to meet a girl and get married, which seems unlikely. Ian Schrager is now dating Carolina Herrera’s receptionist and sharing him clearly threatens poor Steve’s equilibrium. Steve has already lost Calvin Klein to Kelly, so maybe he thinks being gay isn’t an obstacle. “Calvin’s feeling the strain, Tina. That’s why he’s had to go into rehab. He loves her, but it’s pressure.” He told me that Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall are splitting up. Jerry’s gone off with David Ogilvy, imagining it will make Mick jealous. “I once asked her how she stopped Mick playing around,” said Steve. “And she said, ‘I always give Mick a blow job before he goes out.’ And I’m not even her friend!” marveled Steve. “I mean she knows I am going to tell at least three people!”

  (Fashion note: What is the new affectation that makes rich women take their earrings off at dessert? I noticed at Oscar’s and at other dinners in the last few weeks that both Nancy Kissinger and Mercedes Kellogg got their rocks off, as it were, with the arrival of the crème brûlée. Is it a sign that the earrings are so expensive they weigh down the earlobe? Definitely worthy of further study.)

  I have been so glad that Mum and Dad are staying with us. It’s been great cabaret for G and a blessing to me on the weekends, because he never seems to want to go to bed. I had a brain wave for their ruby wedding anniversary. As Christopher and Diana are here, too, I asked the photographer George Lange to come out to Quogue and take a generational shot of the whole family. Christopher in a big hat; his kids, Ben and Owen, in seersucker suits; G looking pensive in his little shorts; Dad jolly in a golf cap; Mum so vivacious in a colored Mexican skirt; me in my favorite red print cotton shirt. It captures all the freshness and spontaneity of a family day at the beach, something for all our scrapbooks, an occasion when my laborious planning seemed to work like a charm.

  Monday, August 22, 1988

  Liz Smith published a scorcher about Anna and all the Si rumors. But ever since she did, the feverish buzz has gone away. It’s as if once printed the season’s rumor
fever was punctured. Perhaps it was just generated by the summer heat, the crazy-polluted steam of the city due to greenhouse gas, the humidity and hospital waste dumped into the ocean. Or just that the shelf-life of unconfirmed sex is never very long. The building has calmed down. Anna can now get on with being editor in chief of Vogue as she always wanted. Basta.

  Gabé has moved upstairs with her to calm the troops and be her Features right hand.

  Friday, August 26, 1988

  Victory! I passed my driving test. I am finally a free woman! After two whole summers and thousands of dollars of lessons! The triumphant instructor, Bruce, was straight out of Glengarry Glen Ross. In the nineteen hours of driving around I got to know him intolerably well: his low opinion of high-tech managements, his Saturdays at Riverhead Raceway, his dissatisfaction with life at Yaphank. “Bye-bye, Brucie,” Georgie used to intone forlornly as the Ford Fiesta nosed off down the drive.

  Sunday, September 25, 1988

  On my way to a Vanity Fair sales meeting in Bermuda. Annie Leibovitz sent over the new pics she has taken of me for Ad Age, which has, thrillingly, named me Editor of the Year. Annie wanted me in a tight red dress—the exact opposite of anything I would ever wear, and for once I decided not to fight it and to discard my usual boring conservative attire. She and Marina Sciano picked out a scarlet thin wool wraparound dress, and banished my trademark goody-goody pearl earrings in favor of huge gold suns with pearls in the middle. Then added black stilettos, red lipstick, and professional makeup that turned me into Lana Turner playing Clare Luce, especially when Annie shot me from an angle that extended my legs by four inches. She’s such a genius. Marina also produced a sea-green jacket and draped it over a black turtleneck, adding a black pencil skirt and three strings of fat Kenny Lane pearls. It made me want to trash all my sedate trouser suits and dress-for-success jackets and va-va-voom to the office every day. Except I’d never do it. True elegance is a real time suck, and flair misfires worse than being dull.

  Editing VF gets to be more and more of a challenge now that we compete with ourselves. I feel the world and the news speeding up and we have to respond so carefully as a monthly has to be ahead of the curve, unless it’s with deep new reporting that offers a distinctive counterview to the hack pack. The speed of news means a lot of last-minute tweaking and reangling headlines, loading up with attitude and injecting new context.

  A slew of stories have had to be recast lately as we go to press:

  A big Michael Milken profile—Jesse Kornbluth’s piece was way too forgiving in the light of the SEC charges. Thank God there was time to reflect on it.

  Mike Tyson suddenly admitted he was manic-depressive, so that perspective had to be darkened up and added to the story about him.

  Murdoch pulled out of the bid for Hachette, which affected that boring-anyway business piece, and on the Dan Quayle saga everything is changing in the political circus every five minutes. New York mag scooped us on our death of Basquiat narrative so we had to repackage ours as if we had a new angle. The world seems to be competing with us on every story as the culture speeds faster and faster. I fear losing our edge. That’s why I need Annie’s glam pictures of me coming soon, announcing to the world I’m not slipping!

  Tuesday, September 27, 1988

  I’m enjoying my Bermuda limbo but am caught in a new emotional split. Harry keeps getting newspaper feelers from London, and I am vestigially haunted by The New Yorker. Alex suddenly threw me this week by asking, “Who could edit The New Yorker?” Alex never asks questions like that for nothing. Every article on Condé Nast lately tosses out my name as a putative replacement for Gottlieb. I can see he’s floundering in the job … My agony is: Should I do it? The more I’ve brooded, the more I see that it could be done and the stakes are enormously high. The only thing that stops me pitching hard for it is, of course, Georgie’s developmental challenges. And postponing another pregnancy. I am thirty-five. I want the agony taken out of my hands. I want Harry to accept a London paper. I want to find I am pregnant. But I am not and I am restless. When you have a small child, two days in a hotel is stunningly rejuvenating even in the theme park–like hotel of a sales retreat. A hot climate and a boat ride were just what I needed. This morning I gave my slide presentation to the sales force titled “Every Page Counts: How VF is Going to Stay Hot in the Coming Year.” I babbled a bunch of bromides and was pretty bad, but this was the home team and they seemed to like it. Tonight a boat transported us all to a pirate’s island. It was a beautiful night with a harvest moon and the muted backwash of reggae unwound me a bit. I liked the editorial director of German Vogue, who came as a guest, a stylish character full of office horror stories about his egomaniacal art director.

  T. D. Allman was my editorial guest and he was very funny about the lousy band and a great raconteur about his reporting in Haiti. It’s hard for me to believe that this army of people and the huge sales effort all hinges on me and the ideas our team tosses out and chases in random editorial meetings. It’s amazing how solid our success has become on such improvised foundations. And yet I always feel half-unreal, like the pirate island.

  Tuesday, October 4, 1988

  On my way to Washington for the day to photograph President and Mrs. Reagan for the year-end Hall of Fame. Reinaldo called Nancy R. and persuaded her to do it. Annie’s idea is to have them waving farewell on the cover, so I kicked Arnold Schwarzenegger off. He feels passé anyway. We will use a “Goodbye to All That” cover line for the Reagans, which is a great end-of-year idea. The issue has been madly volatile, with stories flying in and out as news changes them.

  I feel the steadily moving iceberg of The New Yorker looming … it’s hard not to be intrigued. It would be the ultimate journalistic accolade, to be offered the crown jewel of American publishing after only five years in the US. On the other hand, it could be my undoing, as well as torpedo my efforts to be a good mother. I have a vivid recollection of the crazy stress of the first two years of VF before G arrived.

  On Friday, Steve Florio, the president of The New Yorker, took me to lunch and made my heart beat with fear by saying that he’d walked into Si’s office and demanded, “Give me Tina or give me something else to do.” Apparently Si just kept pacing around and around, looking anguished. Florio seems to me hopelessly miscast at The New Yorker. He’s big and boastful with a bonhomous mustache. I doubt he reads the magazine himself and was wildly indiscreet about his impatience with Gottlieb, regaling me with anecdotes of editorial cluelessness that always ended with “Seriously, you can’t make this shit up” (which I mostly felt he had).

  I go back and forth myself about the change. How to make these decisions? As Mike Ovitz told me when we met for a drink this week, “You try to do a life, Tina, in the round.” That made me smile. Doing a life. A new Hollywoodism, I s’pose. Like doing coke.

  Would a revamp of The New Yorker work? It doesn’t have the intellectual heat of The New Republic or The New York Review of Books that it could have, but those mags sell a tiny number of copies. Can an all-type medium like TNY without pictures achieve higher numbers? Are the six-hundred-thousand-odd subscribers only there because they forgot to cancel it? And it’s such a masculine shop, I am told. If they learned the new editor was the lady in the red dress, would they revolt? These are questions I bet Si has not addressed and I don’t know the answer to.

  I commissioned a piece for fall from Tony Schwartz, a writer Marie knows—who was Trump’s co-author—about the new, unmanageable pace of life. I am calling it “Acceleration Syndrome.” Car phones and call waiting and home faxes are making everything so revved up. Tony’s done great interviews with people like Bob Pittman, who intends to purchase a portable phone so he has no dead time walking between appointments, and a USA Today exec who takes a tape recorder for dictation to the pool. Great interview with Don Simpson about his exhaustive magazine reading list he’s devouring while also watching TV. Trump, apparently, picks up every call very quickly but cuts you off midsentence
as soon as his secretary brings a piece of paper announcing someone else. The trick is to call him back three minutes later just as he’s got bored with whoever replaced you. The piece has a great opening spread of Donna Karan in the back of a stretch—her mobile office and beauty salon—in her dark glasses, applying lipstick on the go.

  Sunday, October 16, 1988

  The Reagan shoot was great. So easy this time. I arrived thirty minutes early at the White House to converse with Annie and Marina, who had been shown into a room that led out to the Rose Garden, where they had set up their stuff. Annie was supertense. She had flown all night from Munich, where, ridiculously, we had only just pinned down Tom Wolfe for his Hall of Fame shoot. (The best, as it happens, in the whole Hall of Fame portfolio. I’d come up with the idea of photographing him against a blowup of a page of Bonfire, but Annie had added the brilliant touch of setting fire to the page. The result is Wolfe looking at his most debonair and electric against a blazing manuscript. She is such a wonder.)