The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  I feel at a strange slant to time and place. At breakfast with old-world Derry, I’d been thrown back to the London of Tatler, of Bruton Street, of Vogue House. Derry and I took so many great trips together for shoots, my favorite the series on the Wiltshire set’s stately homes and manors as a way of capturing a look at Camilla Parker Bowles’s house right before the royal wedding. That time now feels a different planet or century, one of small ads in Harpers and Queen for Gloucestershire antique shops, maternity smocks on Beauchamp Place, cookery schools in Belgravia, small farms in Wiltshire with paddock and converted barn. I suddenly thought how I must look to Derry, misleadingly sharp and metropolitan, in my sharp red shoulders and frosted hair that demands three hundred blowouts a year. I confided in him about Bennack and Harper’s Bazaar. “I’d do it,” said Derry in his Gielgudy voice, “like a shot. You know how ghastly Condé Nast is to its editors.”

  Jane Sarkin arrived to pick me up to go see Annie. “Who goes to the Knickerbocker anyway?” Jane screamed as we tore downtown in a Manhattan limo. “He’s a peer,” I said. “His father is Lord Drogheda.” “I knew it had to be somebody weird,” said Jane.

  It’s strange to live between two cultures in my head. When I left Thatcher’s England I had a jaded vision of its future—the widening schism between the classes and the coming of a new, moneyed yahooism, nihilistic and coarse, not meritocratic and aspirational as it is here. I don’t know the names and the faces of the new England to really judge if that’s true. Here I can penetrate into the subtext of what I see, but I don’t know enough about American history or politics yet to be able to contextualize it against the past as I can at home. Here I live in a permanent red-hot present, fascinated, appalled, thrilled, amused, enraged—but never ultimately touched, because in the end I am always a spectator and a foreigner.

  Monday, May 22, 1989

  Bennack called me on Friday and asked me to come back in to Hearst. This time we cut through the social chat and I asked a lot of questions about the kind of freedom I would have editorially were I to do Bazaar, and the kind of budget I would have to operate with. He said it’s true there had always been a bottom-line culture at Hearst, but he intended to break that rule with Harper’s Bazaar. That each editor has a different style; for example, John Mack Carter of Good Housekeeping, who’s always operated with a lavish budget and been very competitive with acquisitions. I said I didn’t want to be all front lawn, an expensive line item myself while presiding over a cramped budget. That if I hoped to attract a team as good as at VF and compete with Condé, the editorial budget would have to allow it. The only thing he didn’t seem to like was my saying I would hire a top fashion editor rather than go to every fashion collection myself. I don’t want to leave G for a week at a time four times a year. I see Anna constantly flying off to the collections and the boredom of that would be torture. Bennack’s unease on the topic made me wonder if his own vision for Bazaar is at odds with mine. I would want to make a fashion director a star in his or her own right as Carmel Snow did with Diana Vreeland. He may have a more Seventh Avenue view of the mag (cf. Sam Spiegel—make sure you are both making the same movie; something to nail down). Still, as we parted, I felt exhilarated and high, thinking of the fun of creating something new again, of bringing back Michael Roberts, who I hear is getting bored again with Tatler, and Marina and co, adding substance and wit to this overpopulated fashion field. I went straight to Janklow’s office to discuss it.

  I have come to view Mort as a genial Lucifer. By which I mean he is the quintessence of capitalism and undiluted worldliness. He would have been irresistible to Jesus when He looked down on a mirage of worldly rewards from the top of the mountain—a tall, self-possessed man with pointed ears and huge black eyes behind intimidating glasses, burning with the righteousness of market value. He sat with his long legs extended as I told my Hearst story and I asked if he thought a note from me to Si, asking him to talk to Mort, was a good idea.

  “I’ve thought about that,” he replied, “and you know? I think it’s a lousy idea.” He said he has breakfast with Si regularly to talk about Random House, and he would just bring it up then. “Or you could just go in and say, ‘Si, for the last three years I’ve been paid well below my market value. I don’t feel you’ve been terribly forthcoming about it so I have sought professional advice.’” I started to laugh at the way Mort said this, shooting his striped cuff with the expensive watch on it. It sounded so wonderful and convincing. But I would never be able to say it and sound like him. I’m too English and too female to blare these confident words at Si as he crouches behind his desk, flushed and astounded. The mere thought of it terrifies me. No. Mort will have to broach it. And if Si says no, then I will know I will go to Harper’s Bazaar.

  All this has been raging on while we’re trying to put out a hot issue of VF. Si has agreed to give us a later-closing satellite capability so deadlines don’t extend so ridiculously long, which has never been an issue for the fashion magazines, but has been agony for news, which is what we now are. He understands the news gene in VF and how it’s the key to its heat. The late close will be expensive and I wonder if Bennack would do the same. I am trying to crash out Marie Brenner’s Michael Milken piece in four days when the edit needs ten, and outbid Time on the Nancy Reagan memoirs. All this talk with Hearst and with Janklow makes me want to extend the range of the magazine, expand its appeal, make it even more international. If Vanity Fair is, as Si keeps saying, powerful, we need to make the power have a wider reach.

  To help my courtship of the Nancy memoirs along, Reinaldo had a dinner for her in his narrow Upper East Side town house. He had one long table set up in his dressing room, under a tented canopy like Henry V’s on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. I could listen to the rise and fall of Zipkin’s wailing cadences all night. “Boat trips? The most glamorous boat trip today is the Circle Line. I mean, if you’d sailed like me on Charles Revson’s boat every summer, you’d know what it was like to be on a real boat! I’m talking grande luxe! I’m talking pistachio ice cream served on a silver tray! And a fleet of limos at every port! That’s what I call being on a boat!”

  Nancy Reagan looked better than I have seen her look in a long while. Dressed in a white Carolina Herrera dress with very sparkling eyes. She got on best talking politics with Harry, who had never met her. I realize she has a deeper grasp of things than we knew at the time. Harry said she was shrewd and knowledgeable, especially on foreign affairs. I got the sense she was thrilled to be in New York. Whatever relief it must be to be out of the White House, she now lives a rich, boring life in California, which must seem terribly limited after the role she has played for so long as Ronnie’s consigliere. No one ever writes about that. How the wives grow, too, beside the man in office. I hope she does in her book, which I am trying to extract sight unseen.

  Sunday, June 4, 1989

  Quogue

  I took Chester, who is staying with us, to the Steinbergs for a barbecue lunch. Saul was at his most exuberant. Bulldozers and cranes had torn up the front drive. In their place, discernible through Battle of the Somme mud, were Blenheim-like parterres, giant fountains. On the ocean side huge earth movements had taken place and there was an enormous concrete hollow on the beach beneath the deck. “What’s that,” I said, “a giant’s armchair?”

  “Who knows?” bellowed Saul proudly. “I have no idea what Gayfryd is creating here. She’s torn up the dune so we can get more of an ocean view. Only trouble is, she forgot about drainage.”

  “What do you care?” I said. “You’re right,” he said. “What do I care?” As we spoke, Gayfryd’s thin ankle and wedge heel were surreptitiously moving a towel back and forth to dry the seeping shallows of the deck. I thought of Caroline Graham’s shrewd observation that certain men love having “impossible” wives. It makes them feel powerful—“Do you know what she’s done now?” “She kept me waiting two hours in Bergdorf,” etc. etc. Saul is in that category. The more bulldozers in the dri
veway, the more mystified he plays it. As we walked into the dining room for lunch we stumbled over two gold Italian mirrors on the floor. “I got them for a hundred dollars each,” she told us, implausibly. Everywhere one turned there were stray indications of acquisition frenzy: swatches of fabric on side tables, a twizzle of thin iron hanging from the ceiling—“a chandelier by this incredible artist you should do a piece about.” In the kitchen no fewer than six people were preparing the hamburger and spaghetti lunch for the four of us plus the dreaded frock meister Arnold Scaasi, who has a house in Quogue, and their friend Danny Hersch, a heavy, genial businessman whom I last saw at their house when he was trying to start a new magazine called Divorce. Two years later he seems to have solved his problem. He arrived with a frisky forty-five-year-old model for Lear’s magazine who had gunmetal hair in a ponytail. “We’re engaged,” he announced.

  “Oh my God! The champagne,” bellowed Saul. “Sheila, I don’t want you to think we are not prepared for this event. We still go and visit the last two girls he said this to in rehab.”

  “Where did you propose?” Gayfryd said.

  “Exit thirty-one,” Sheila said, “and he never slowed down from ninety miles an hour.”

  “I would have knelt down,” said Hersch, “except that we’d have been a bloody pulp on the expressway.”

  “Pour the best we’ve got, Jose,” Saul told the waiter, and proceeded to tell funny, derogatory stories about Ronald Lauder’s candidacy for mayor of New York.

  “He’s not a bad guy,” said Saul. “Took it nicely when I said I propose to give him no money at all for his campaign.”

  “But I’m going to Jo Carole’s luncheon tomorrow!” Gayfryd wailed. “I’m doing the renovation on our apartment without telling the co-op board and she’s in the next apartment!”

  “Have you bought the ring yet?” Saul asked Sheila.

  “This week,” said Hersch. “It will be done.”

  “Make sure it’s so big that it’s too much of an investment to call off the wedding,” said Gayfryd, still mopping the deck with her right foot. A telling aside, I thought.

  Tuesday, June 6, 1989

  Today Peter Guber, the producer of the movies Rain Man, Batman, and soon The Bonfire of the Vanities, asked me to breakfast. I got to the Regency early and recognized him as the Hollywood guy as soon as he walked in—the sloppy linen suit, ponytail, and all-even tan, definitely not the NYC power-breakfast look. “Tina,” he said after briskly introducing himself and ordering a California healthy fruit plate, “what you have to understand is, Hollywood is ruled by its dick. Men are ruled by their dicks. Mine against yours. Excuse me, I know you’re a woman, but you understand what I’m saying. This business, movies, is all about two things—power and sex. And guess what, they’re the same thing.”

  “I think I’ll have an English muffin with marmalade,” I told the waiter.

  “You’re English!” marveled Guber. “I heard so much about you from everyone in California! People I like, people I hate. I thought you’d be sixty years old and want to break my balls!”

  “That comes later,” I said. (What the fuck did he want?)

  He moved swiftly to Puttnam. “That guy had a real dick problem, I tell you. Had to show it was bigger than Ray Stark’s. Bigger than Ovitz’s.” He tucked into his fruit salad. “You should own your own magazine because you know how to create brands. But you know, when you go out on your own, it’s sweet, because the guy you made all the money for, he’s the guy who’ll want to dance with you again.”

  Speeding back to the office with a Batman badge he gave me pinned to my lapel and still no idea what Guber had wanted to meet me about, I felt how lucky I am to be born in this era and working in New York City. Thirty years ago I would never have had this opportunity. I’d have probably, after Oxford, settled into being a nervy wife, writing stories in the Thames Valley instead of sitting in the Regency hotel over breakfast, hearing about the size of Hollywood’s dick.

  When I got back to the office, Janklow had left a message: “I’ve got breakfast with Si on Thursday. Leave it to me.”

  I had lunch in the Four Seasons with Diane von Furstenberg, who told me Barry Diller would love to give me Fox Studios to run. I had a brief surge of fascination when she said it, but had disqualified the notion by the time I was back in the car. I know nothing about that business and wouldn’t survive six months. And after one week of not being the editor of Vanity Fair I’d be a nonperson. Reputations fade there with stellar speed. Take my new seer Peter Guber’s comment about the director Alan Parker: “He said to me the other day after a row with somebody big, ‘I’m finished in this town.’ I said, ‘Alan, to be finished you have to have been somebody first.’”

  Wednesday, June 7, 1989

  The difference in two days. Today’s breakfast was with a Soviet journalist preparing “some explorations about the US media.” I agreed to meet to get background for a Soviet Union piece and possibly help Gail Sheehy get access to Gorbachev. I wanted to say, “In Moscow, is everything about the size of your dick?”

  It’s now midnight and I am back from Alice Mason’s dinner. I haven’t been in nine months, but every so often I have to accept, just to take the pulse. It was the usual swirl of social mountaineers and fringe celebrities. The only interesting new face to me was Arthur Carter, owner of The New York Observer, whom I’ve read about and never met. He has rather scary, piercing black eyes in which you can see the whites all the way around, a sure index of megalomania. Unfortunately I wasn’t next to him. Instead I was between the deadly bore John Weitz and some gnomish turnaround tycoon called Fred Adler. He painted such a picture of spiritual anesthesia that I asked him what he did care about.

  “The smell of coffee in the morning,” he said. “The taste of raspberries. Irish oatmeal. Walking in the rain. What the hell!”

  “It’s not a bad list,” I said, warming to him somewhat.

  “The brighter a person is,” he continued, “the less he’s satisfied. No one at this table has any satisfaction. They are all too bright.”

  I looked around the table where Alice Mason, Frances Lear, Carl Spielvogel, and Aileen Mehle were all taking bets on when Peter Kalikow would sell the New York Post. Being smart didn’t seem to be what they had in common. Being rich did, except for Aileen, who so wants to be. Looking down at the sorbets on my zodiac plate, I felt the sterility of Adler’s world. Sex provides the only edge when money is no longer a problem. Every time I looked up, Arthur Carter’s black eyes burned a hole in my profile. “You are the bright shiny talent in this town,” he told me after dessert. “And no one can touch you.” I have started to feel a separation from these judgments and who I actually am. Tomorrow is Janklow’s breakfast with Si. I have a sinking feeling it will not go well.

  Thursday, June 8, 1989

  I am reeling. Reeling.

  At nine o’clock this morning my stock went into play and the price is careening up so fast that it’s hard to think straight.

  Mort met Si for breakfast at the Plaza Athénée hotel, where they often meet to discuss publishing matters. I, meanwhile, roamed up and down Madison Avenue under an umbrella, waiting for ten o’clock to go to Mort’s office and hear the news.

  Mort told me he pitched right in. Said how I had consulted him in some confusion about the offers, how he had gone to see Frank Bennack and “just listened.” Apparently the moment he mentioned Bennack, Si looked stricken.

  He told Mort he wanted to think about how he would respond. It didn’t take long. Mort was back in his office ten minutes before I got there. “You’ll have twenty messages from him when you get back,” Mort said.

  There was just one, “Mr. Newhouse called,” and I found myself very keyed up when I went to his office. But the best decision I ever made was to ask Mort to help me. Why? Because when I walked into Si’s office he was able to put on a mask of paternalism and sureness. Had I approached him directly, I would have seen the disarray of his reaction and it would
have damaged his self-esteem to the point of lasting resentment. As it is, now he could be in control.

  He wore a faux-jocular mien when he came around to my side of the desk. “Well, we have something to talk about!” he said. “I don’t want to have to use Mort Janklow as a middleman.”

  “There was no other way I could bring this up,” I said, resolving to stay very calm and remember how many editors he had unceremoniously bounced out the door when he tired of them.

  “I’ve put some numbers down off the top of my head,” he said. “But they are by no means set in granite.” I did his conversation trick. I said nothing. He continued uneasily and set out a scheme that gave me another salary hike, not matching Bennack’s, but he also said he would forgive his three-hundred-thousand-dollar loan for our apartment. Nice. What I really want is phantom stock in VF but still, this was a great gesture and I wanted immediately to say yes. But Mort had told me on no account to do that, so I still said nothing. Then I replied, “Thank you for that response, Si. I’m going to have to think about it.” He gave another jocular smile but his eyes looked worried. “I want to make it clear that … I don’t want you to leave. I hope you feel that working here has its advantages whether it’s Camelot [as I once described it to him] or Krakatoa! And that Hearst may not have these same advantages.”

  “Well, you know, Si,” I said. “The fact that Hearst is offering me a magazine title that is so ripe for revival is attractive. Bazaar is a sleeping beauty. I read the books about Alexey Brodovitch and Carmel Snow and realized here was a legend waiting to be revamped, and you know that’s what I love to do.”